When you go on maternity leave, everyone really drums home the importance of getting out of the house and seeing people.
“Make sure you’re getting out,” said my mother.
“Are you getting out of the house much?” queried the health visitor.
And YES actually I totally was! Me and the Little Man had a great routine going, where we went for a nice walk every day between 2 – 3pm. That was on the days where we didn’t have other plans like meeting friends at a cafe or going to the children’s centre.
Then, along came coronavirus and blam! No more going out. We did try going for our government-permitted exercise walk once, headed away from town where we thought the roads would be quiet. It was nice, but people were not reliably maintaining the two-metre rule for social distancing, and it wasn’t really anyone’s fault as the pavements are narrow and the hedges overgrown, making it even narrower. As I have a bunch of health issues including reasonably bad asthma (which gets bad during hayfever season… Great timing this year!) and Little Man is not even three months old, we decided that walking is probably not a sensible form of daily exercise at the moment.
So instead, we’ve started doing a daily yoga practice after my lovely husband finishes work for the day. I’ve always enjoyed yoga but never done it regularly, and my husband is a late convert. My sister qualified as a yoga instructor last year (follow her on Instagram @sorchakra) and we did a family yoga session on Easter Sunday with my mum, dad and husband. It was so much fun, and we were hoping to do a repeat this year, but with coronavirus it’s not to be. However, we are really enjoying our daily practice and I’ve already noticed improvements in my flexibility. Plus, the mindful aspects of yoga are beneficial when you’re stuck inside during quarantine, which is enough to stress out even the most chilled amongst us.
We’re using free online videos by Yoga With Adriene, who is probably the most popular yogi on YouTube. There’s a huge variety of different videos of different lengths and with different focuses (e.g. yoga for back pain, yoga for weight loss etc) so we can keep it fresh and not get bored. If you’re struggling to get your exercise in during quarantine, I highly recommend her videos.
My other apocalypse workout tip is the Fitness Marshall, also on YouTube but definitely more of a guilty pleasure…
