Hell on earth exists: the first time exercising after your delivery
You think you've pretty much had it all after a storm of contractions. Not at all. Just go to a pilates class at a barre.
I'm enthusiastically standing in the changing room with a friend. My sports leggings from before the pregnancy still fit, it's a miracle, so I'm looking forward to it. But that excitement disappears immediately when I see sweaty, attractive, and especially super-slim girls bouncing out of the gym. In a crop top. Uh. Where is their belly? I suddenly feel very flabby and motherly. Definitely not a size 36. I'm wearing a loose shirt where you can't see anything. Since when are crop tops generally accepted for group workouts? I mean: I get it, if I had such a waist, I would buy fourteen revealing bikinis and sit on a different beach every day and take pictures of it. Instead of all those slim girls motivating me to energetically get to work, it makes me a bit sad. Because my belly won't be that tight again after a twin pregnancy, unfortunately.
Okay, enough sulking, just start with workout number one. At the back of the room, please. It scares me a bit that the instructor has an official headset with a professional earpiece like Britney. She wants me to hang on a ballet barre and lift my legs in the air eight hundred times. And because she has so many muscles, I definitely don't dare to say ‘no’. And then I have to lie on my stomach and ‘swim’. With weights. Faster. Planks, squats, jumping. Throwing a ball in the air and flying through the room with a burpee. My god. Hell on earth exists and it's not that nine centimeters of dilation. It's exercising in a stupid class with only fit people who can't remember if they've lost three or four kilos recently. They haven't just spent weeks in a hospital and are making fifteen bottles of warm milk every morning and cleaning baby bottoms. For heaven's sake. I really want to do something for my body, but come on, these exercises are inhumane. I feel nauseous. There's no oxygen here. My friend is laughing. I've only been at it for seventeen minutes. There's no escaping hell.. Honestly? Not everything goes the same after giving birth 1-2-3. As a woman, you've really changed. Not just your feelings, but also your body. Last year, I had a fitness level that could have allowed me to run the Dam to Dam in record time, I didn't do it, are you crazy, but I could have, now I can barely bike out of the street. It doesn't help that you never sleep anymore. It's a bit of an adjustment. Just like so many adjustments come with suddenly.
having to take care of someone. Oh, one meager consolation: they still love me, size 34 or especially not size 34. And there I was, eight weeks after that disaster of a birth, with scars and stretch marks, with flab and belly skin, in those leggings from before the pregnancy. They still fit. It's the little things, right? two children woman exercising tired.
