Adventures in Exercising: Family Yoga

For our Perfect Madness Balance month of January I have decided to focus on exercise.  I don’t want to engage in the resolutions of old, but instead I want to change my entire approach to physical fitness.  I want to discard the days of body punishing and box ticking.  I want to indulge in exercise.  I want it to be a gift I give myself.

In order for this mind shift to occur, I need to first find exercises I take pleasure in doing, so each week I will try a new form of exercise and report back my experiences, including a rating from 1-5, with 5 being the best experience possible.

This Week: Family Yoga

My husband and I have long been avid “stop, drop, and yoga-ers”, taking our mats with us on most trips we take, or using a soft sand beach as our studio.  But late last year we were delivered a beautiful baby boy, and let me tell you, having a baby is a real game changer.  In the most wonderful of ways, becoming a family, changes everything, even the way you exercise.  Finding a solid hour when both my husband and I are home, energetic enough, and the baby is asleep, to have a yoga session is pretty impossible.  But where there is a will there is a way.

What is it:

I am sure we have all heard of Mommy and Me yoga, a gentle form of yoga you can participate in with your baby.  Family yoga on the other hand, is our own creation, and in simple terms it’s tag teaming Mommy and Me yoga.  We discovered this form of yoga by accident when we tried to share the Mommy and Me yoga experience, and naturally started doing familiar yoga poses and exercises during our breaks without the little munchkin.

Benefits:

• Exercise for the whole family
• Fun for the whole family
• The incomparable mind and body reconnection only regular yoga practice provides
• Time to connect with your baby or child while also investing in your own fitness
• Aiding in your child’s development and fitness
• Even more relaxing and a release than regular yoga sessions because of the singing and dancing components

Drawbacks:

• Only works if you have children, or you borrow some, a niece or nephew works just as good as your own offspring
• Can be difficult to co-ordinate everyone’s moods and schedules
• Does not feel quite as good as a body work out for Mommy/Daddy as grown-up yoga
• Have to be comfortable being goofy and childish

Rating:

2/5. This is a rather low rating overall, but more so because it is not an exercise I would engage in everyday, rather than it not being enjoyable.  We love our yoga sessions with our little man, but the difficulty in catching us all in the right mood or time of day, makes it logistically difficult to have sessions regularly.  In addition, you don’t feel that nice slight fatigue or muscle exertion you would with other forms of exercise.  Therefore, I have concluded that family yoga is a fantastic once a week/ bimonthly form of exercise.

Stay tuned

Next week I am going on a geo-caching adventure!

Main photo by DD.