When you have a newborn baby, there aren’t many activities that really appeal.
You can sign up for baby massage sessions at your local church hall, and you can take your baby out for walks in the park, but apart from that, it’s mostly shopping trips and coffee mornings with new mums.
Perfect! I hear you say. True, a bit of shopping while your newborn slumbers can be fun, but it’s hardly going to exercise much more than your credit card. And coffee mornings are everyone’s cup of tea (pardon the pun): it takes confidence to breeze into a group of chatting mums and make new friends.
Hurrah, then, for Pushy Mothers. No, not a gaggle of yummy mummies discussing French lessons for pre-schoolers, but a growing number of fitness groups, where new mothers gather together and do a few simple, safe exercises to help build body strength and aid recovery from the birth experience.
The great thing is, you take your baby with you!
Although not every parent wants to jog with their buggy, most of us know that pushing one of those huge chariots that newborns need is a good exercise in itself. Pushy Mothers’ fitness sessions take that idea further, and have developed exercises for cardio, toning muscles through resistance training, building core stability and pelvic floor muscle strength.
Safe and welcoming
Because you are there with your buggy and baby, you don’t feel quite so alone meeting new people. Plus you’re all their for a reason, so there’s no pressure to make 10 friends in one morning – just enjoy the exercise and do your own thing afterwards!
Judy DiFiore and Rachel Berg, who have set up the training groups, are trained in this field, and their one-hour buggy workout has been passed as safe by the Guild of Pregnancy and Postnatal Exercise Instructors. They make sure that everyone who joins has their doctor’s approval.
Joining Pushy Mothers
If you want to get a taste of what they do, you can check out the brief video on the Pushy Mothers website.
If you’re interested, you can go along for a one-off taster session, for £5. After that, there’s a joining fee of £15 and each session you want to go to costs £5 a time.
They make sure there are never more than 16 people in a session, so you get the right attention from the instructor.
There are more and more groups starting all the time. At the moment, London and Surrey have a few groups going strong, with places in Essex, Kent and Tyne & Wear starting soon, and one in York beginning on November 23 2006.
