Motivation Monday: Add Some Resistance

Calling all readers! It's time for a motivation pick-me-up. This week, we're talking exercise.

Life is just busy, right? Add one, two, three kids...oh yeah, now that's busy. So, I totally understand making time to workout is challenging in our crazy lives. But since current research suggests regular exercise promotes health and lowers risk of disease, it seems to me like it's crazier NOT to exercise.

There are two major types of exercise: aerobic (like jogging and swimming) and anaerobic (like weight lifting). I've noticed that many people I talk to stick with aerobic exercises like jogging, biking, swimming, dancing, etc and rarely (if at all) perform strength training exercises (especially us ladies). There's this crazy myth that weight lifting makes women bulky. SO not true. Sure, lifting weights will put on some muscle, but since we don't have as much Testosterone as men, we don't have to worry about bulking up.

This chick is lifting some serious weight and she doesn't look too bulky to me....

Image from http://soon2befit.tumblr.com/page/117

If you need more convincing, here's a quick peak at some of the major healthy benefits of strength training:

• Improves bone density
• Increases metabolism
• Improves quality of life by allowing you to perform basic activities (like housework, laundry, gardening, etc) more easily.
• Prevents loss of lean muscle mass overtime, which is common as we age. Oftentimes, the lost muscle is replaced with fat. To slow/prevent this process, add resistance training to your routine for about 30 minutes two to three times per week.

Thankfully, there's no need for a fancy gym membership or purchasing expensive equipment. Body weight workouts like push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges and sit-ups are excellent exercises to start with, especially if you don't regularly weight lift. I recently found this great website called MomWOD (stands for Mom workout of the day), which provides weekly templates for home workouts that are quick and actually quite challenging.

What works for me? Well, with a toddler at home working out is a team effort. My husband and I take turns working out every other evening from about 7:30-8:30pm. We typically weight train for 30 minutes and finish with 20-30 minutes of cardio.

This week, try to find what works for you and add some resistance training to your routine!