Health and wellness blog - Form Fit

Helping Moms Get Unstuck

9/27/2021

Holistic health coach Melissa Rohlfs is a wife and mother to two children who has experienced her own sense of overwhelm and now works to help moms become calm, confident and healthy in their motherhood journey.

In todays era of homeschooling, quarantining, mask debates and more she has noticed many mothers having more anxiety as their children return to school coupled with a sense of relief that life is returning to normal. As a way to manage this sense of overwhelm and anxiety Melissa suggests that moms block out 10 minutes a day in their calendar to take a break and decompress and get their emotions in check. Many times doing a “brain dump” and getting all of our thoughts out of our head can help us stay focused and centered.

Another suggestion Melissa has is to be prepared to say no. Before responding with an automatic yes to all favors asked of you, ask to have some time to think about it and look at your schedule. Tell the person asking for your time that you will get back to them within 24 hours and if it doesn’t fit in your schedule time wise, or you feel like you’re already committed to too many things, it’s absolutely ok to say no.

Often overlooked, Melissa believes eating properly and following a healthy lifestyle also helps moms keep their anxiety in check. Binging on sugar, simple carbs and alcohol can have significant impacts on a woman's health and emotions. There is generally an underlying reason why moms are using food and alcohol to relax or feel happy. She suggests asking yourself the hard questions of why or what am I looking for in this experience? Most often it’s not the sugar rush but some deeper level of discontent.

If you are struggling with feeling stuck and eating unhealthy, I would love for you to join us. Practice healthier living, with meal plans, exercise, and tons of other information to support you on your health journey as a busy mom.

FREE Trial Week

Go for a walk

9/24/2021

Walking is one of the most important things you should be doing and I would recommend it should be a goal of yours to walk every single day. You don't have to walk five miles each day but you should be trying to hit a couple of miles each and every day.

Why?

It helps you with your mental health.
you don't have to think to much about it while doing it
it is freeing to be able to go out for a walk and it's also free
helps lower blood sugar
helps strengthen your posterior chain
boosts immune function
boosts energy
eases joint pain

Every single one of you can go out and do it, there is no right way or wrong way, so to speak, on how to go out and move. There's no judgment involved. It's just you going out hitting the pavement or the grass or the sand, whatever it is, and taking one step forward over and over again.

The other reason I recommend you walk everyday is because it will get you outside and in nature, which is imperative for your health and well being (see blog below).

Now, I could leave it at just that. But I want you to take it a step further. Because a lot of us when we go for a walk, we tend to fall; we have become this society where we are rounded shoulders looking down at the ground while we walk and we are therefore falling forward.

So I want you to instead make sure you're not looking at a phone or something as you're walking, I want you to try to lift up those shoulders and open that chest up. And if I think about having you standing taller when you walk, one thing I want you to think about is if you place your hand on your chest, like your collarbone area, and you just think about bringing that collarbone up towards that hand, rather than pulling the shoulders back to help you stand up straight. So that's going to help your rib cage get better alignment with the pelvis naturally without tugging and pulling on anything. So that would be the first thing that I would recommend you do while you're going for the walk.

The second thing I want you to focus on is pushing off with your big toe when you walk. So whether you are in shoes or out of shoes, depending on where you are walking, that would be my other focus. Many people have gotten into like I had mentioned this falling forward so they're not using their backside muscles to help them move. So we want to start bringing awareness back to our glutes and our hamstrings so that they are working as we move. It also helps with your balance, proprioception and your pelvic floor when you work on that push off with that big toe.

So the next time you go for a walk, I want you to first think about standing taller bringing your chest towards your hand and then walking pressing off with the big toe. And if you have any questions in regards to this, I do have a free guide that will help you to sit taller, stand taller and move better throughout your day so that you are utilizing the muscles that are there to work for you. Rather than using gravity to pull you along.

I also offer a free guide to help you with your posture and how you can start to ensure you are sitting and standing well while also burning more calories.

Grab the FREE guide

Other blogs you may enjoy:

hanging is not just for kids

9/22/2021

Hanging is a very important movement pattern for us as humans. Our shoulders are designed to move in many different directions, they are a very mobile joint, yet, most of the time in our everyday life, they are down at our sides. And we are surprised when they become injured when we start to push heavy things over our heads, like shoulder presses and picking up our children and bringing them up to our hip or something; yet most of us haven't been doing these movements and now we think we can with 10-15 pound weights!

And unfortunately, what happens is for many of us, once we hurt ourselves, we think it's the workout that we've done, or we start to question that we've pushed ourselves too hard. But really, it's not the workout design, that's usually the problem, the problem is more about the lack of movement in your own body. So if you are not moving your arms over your head, often, then please don't go out and start lifting heavy weights over your head. It's just it's they're not ready for it.

Instead take some time to prepare yourself.

One way you can do this, is by putting yourself into a position where your arms are over your head and load that position. You can do this by practicing hanging from a bar. We have a pull up bar in our house, and we use it for our children and for ourselves. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I can't do one single pull up, my upper body strength is not there. So what I use it for instead is just for hanging from, it helps to open up my shoulders, it helps to kind of reset my positioning from being in that rounded forward posture most of the day.

It helps to reset everything, it opens up the shoulder complex, and stretches the muscles in our chest. This is truly one of the best things that you can do for your shoulders. If you deal with impingement, if you deal with mid back rounded shoulder or you've got this forward head posture, that's another thing that just getting into that hanging position can help.

So either grab the kids and head to a park or buy a pull up bar through Amazon and begin using it now. Also make sure your kids are practicing it, as most of them will be able to hold themselves up from a young age, and the adage is true, if you don't use it you lose it. So give them an opportunity to be one up in life by starting them out early with this.

If you are dealing with aches and pains from life as a mom than I would encourage you to grab my FREE E-book on the 3 steps to fix your posture along with 5 quick exercises you can do daily to help you start to feel better.

Grab the free E-book

Are you feeling overwhelm?

9/20/2021

Many moms feel overwhelmed today. We’re raising kids while juggling careers, volunteer commitments, aging parents, kids sports and activities and of course most recently, a pandemic.

Gina Fontaine is a mother of two, a personal trainer and author of the book You are a Supermom. After living through several difficult moments in her family she began recording her thoughts and from there her book came to life. Her advice and tips for moms who are feeling overwhelmed help them to reclaim their superpower.

Gina has 5 myths she covers in her book that she believes need to be debunked. Her number 2 myth is that moms are master multi-taskers. There’s no doubt that moms are great at multitasking but research has shown the brain can only focus on one meaningful task at a time. Long term, multi-tasking puts us in a chronic fight or flight feeling. It’s better to make lists and focus on each task individually.

Another tip Gina has to moms is to learn that taking care of themselves and keeping themselves calm will help calm the swirl around them. She encourages moms to know that it’s okay to put themselves first and to fill their cup so they have more to give to others.

Listen in to Ep. 20 on Raising Healthy Humans to hear more from Gina and her tips and tricks to combat overwhelm. Don’t forget her book You are a Supermom is out and available now.

Make Breathing a Part of your Daily Routine

9/17/2021

Let's practice breathing with stacking a habit.

So pick something that you do decide on something that you do every morning. And you're going to stack it with breathing. I believe I've mentioned this once before, I like to have coffee in the morning. So if you're a coffee drinker or a tea drinker, while that coffee is brewing or that water is heating up, you can use that time to focus on your breathing. And if you're not a coffee or tea drinker, then maybe you find maybe there's something else some other ritual that you practice in the morning, something else you do in the morning during that time, and I'm thinking two to three minutes, maybe just to practice your breathing.

Many of us breathe a little bit higher in our chest, our shoulders tend to rise up, we don't do this deep breathing, to expand the rib cage like it is supposed to do. And if you're not one of those, then you might be a belly breather, maybe you've done yoga or something. And you have practiced deeper breathing, which takes it all the way into the belly. But yet again, you're not expanding that ribcage, especially into the back. So you're creating a lot of tension back there.

So what we're going to practice is we are going to practice breathing through this 360 position of our rib cage. So I always like to say imagine your rib cage is like a jellyfish. And when that jellyfish is moving through the ocean, how is it opening, its opening in that 360 fashion, everything's opening up and then closing together. That's what we want our rib cage to do. I want you to place your hands around your rib cage. And then I want you to relax your shoulders. And I'm not gripping my ribs or anything. I've just got my hands relaxed around my ribs, and my shoulders are relaxed as well. So they're not up near my ears. And I want you to breathe in and just see initially, what happens with your rib cage.

So what did you notice? Did you notice one side, maybe the ribs in the front expanded more, maybe you didn't feel that at all It may be what you felt was your shoulders rising up to the ears. If you are breathing higher up into your shoulders, you are in a sympathetic state. So this is going to mean you're more anxious, you may deal with high blood pressure, you may deal with heart palpitations, you need to really focus on this because we need to bring it back down into the parasympathetic state so that you can start calming yourself down. The other thing is our diaphragm and our pelvic floor work in conjunction with one another creating a pressure system. If that is off due to posture and breathing, then we can have pelvic floor prolapse, we can deal with incontinence, we can have diastasis recti, we can have acid reflux issues, and low back pain. So it is important for us to make sure that we are practicing our breathing and getting it back into this more parasympathetic state where we're able to breathe more deeply into a 360 breathing pattern.

So once you have taken a deep breath in and you felt where your rib cage, you know where your ribs have moved, I want you to try to redirect. So this time you can breathe in and when you breathe in, we're going to try to get our back ribs to move into our thumbs. And if you don't have your hands wrapped around your ribs, what you can also do is you can lean back in your chair wherever you are, and I want you to try to press your back into that chair when you take a deep breath in. So you can do that now. And you should feel a slight expansion when you do that, and that's a good thing. So we want to start working on breathing deeper into our system. We want to try to breathe deeper into our back to help with that, trying to get back into that 360 breathing pattern. The other thing that you want to work on is craving movement through the sides of your rib cage as well. Again, this is a lot of focus, there are some exercises that you can do.

If you want to dive deeper into breathing and or our programs on your core, try a week of our Membership FREE.

Free Trial Week

Other blog posts you may enjoy:

Helping families to ease stress and anxiety

9/16/2021

Dr. Alyssa Runyon believes that in order for people to heal from chronic pain and chronic stress they must move from a near constant state of fright or flight to a parasympathetic state. A parasympathetic state is a persons rest and digest or recover state after a stressful event. In todays world, we are constantly “on” which means our sympathetic system is in overdrive and our body doesn’t get the rest and recovery it needs to heal from pain and stress.

After a stressful event that raises your cortisol level it takes the body approximately 20 minutes to recover from the event. One way to help your body recover is through proper breathing techniques. Utilizing proper breathing patterns such as extended exhalations is one of the most potent and powerful ways for your body to recalibrate your nervous system.

Other ways Dr. Runyon suggests you try for resetting your parasympathic state is by:

splashing water on your face
rubbing your ears
slow down your eating
take a laugh break.

These techniques also work with children.
Dr. Runyon has amazing tips and techniques in my podcast Helping Families to Ease Stress and Anxiety-Ep 14. Tune in to hear our entire conversation over at Raising Health Human

Grab our Meal Plan to help with Anxiety

How to get better at pushups

9/3/2021

Whether you are working on taking your pushup from your knees to your toes or you are wanting to be able to do even more pushups. These tips will help you to become stronger with your pushup and will provide you with different variations for your pushups which will in turn help you to become stronger.

kids in the kitchen

6/16/2021

kids in the kitchen

Having your children help in the kitchen is one of the best ways for them to become adventures eaters. The more they are surrounded by different foods and interacting with them through the cooking process the more likely they are to actually try the foods being set down in front of them at the dinner table, and this can be started at a very young age. It is also a great way for them to work on skills that are needed in life.

Here are some ideas to help you to get your children involved in the kitchen.

Toddler- get a Learning Tower so they can join you at the counter and help pour pre-measured ingredients into mixing bowls. Don't want to spend the money on a Learning Tower, set them at your dining room table with a bowl filled with some spices and have them mix them, it's always fun to have them smell each of them before they put them into the bowl and even allowing them to taste them if they are curious. Let them snap the ends off of green beans and asparagus as this is always a fun thing for them at this age. Even pulling the silk off of corn can be done at this age. Let them also put the finishing touches on the food by sprinkling a little bit of salt and pepper on everything before it goes into the oven or onto the cook top.

Ages 4-8 - This is a great age for them to begin learning how to whisk and stir batters. have them practice cutting up fruit and vegetables with a small pairing knife (my daughter always loved chopping the tops off of the strawberries), tearing the lettuce to go into the salad and tossing all of the ingredients together, setting the table, clearing the table, and learning how to unload the dishwasher.

Ages 9-12 - Great age for them to start becoming more involved with helping in the kitchen and starting to cook basic meals independently. There are many subscription services that send a box each month to kids that include recipes and a fun kitchen utensil, we love Kidstir for this. You can also have them find recipes in cookbooks or online they want to try. Once they pick it out have them write out the ingredients they need from the store. Once you have everything be on the sidelines ready to assist as needed.

Ages 12+ - they should be able to independently make easy meals for themselves including making a sandwich, eggs, pasta, and macaroni and cheese. Have them help make the side dishes or even give them a night to be head chef! As they get older and more comfortable then the recipes can become more complex.

The key is to make it fun, don't act as if it is a chore for them to do or you will automatically get push back from them. We have found that watching cooking/baking competitions help our children to get into the kitchen more. My children love doing competitions in the summer where they each make a dessert, we have the grandparents over for dinner, and then we all judge which one was the best. Now that they are older we have started to place each one in charge of dinner one night a week; this is fun for them as they are in complete control with what is being served, the preparation of the meal, and then the adults do the clean up.

Have you gotten your children in the kitchen?

Join us over in our Form Fit Mom Community on Facebook for more fun ways to help your children get involved in a healthy life.

Join our Free Community

Children & Exercise

5/25/2021

Children have been greatly impacted by 2020 with one of the biggest problems being their sedentary lifestyle. In a world where they already were sitting more, 2020 put almost a complete stop to movement for our children. The Journal of Nutrition and Physical Activity mentions that only 4.8 of children (5-11) and 0.6 of youth (12-17) were meeting the daily guidelines for daily activity.

They found that the children who were able to get their daily activity in were the ones with parents encouraging them to get outside and play, were getting out and moving with them, or those that had a dog to take out for walks.

Getting out and encouraging your children to move more is one of the greatest things we can do to help raise children that will be healthy and happy. Don't worry about them exercising, just have them get outside and play. The more you can get your children moving it will help to improve blood flow to the organs, especially the brain. More blood flow allows our bodies to make its own internal medicine (called Nitric Oxide) which will help to decrease inflammation. The faster your blood flows through the vessels the more it stimulates them to produce nitric oxide which are the nutrients for the organs.

So how can we get our children to move more?

Allow your house to have more movement spaces for them. Hang a pull up bar in a doorway so that everyone can practice hanging on it when they walk through the door, to help get more movement in while at home.
Get outside yourself and your kids will usually follow suit. Play for a bit with them and then allow them to continue to play on their own.
If they are interested in using weights, feel free to let them use them for fun, but be cautious about having them lift heavier weights prior to Puberty as they need to have proper testosterone levels to help with proper recovery.
Make sure they are moving through different modalities to keep from having overuse injuries occur especially for those that play sports. It's great that they are playing sports but have them practice other sports for fun so that they are moving their bodies in different ways as well.

Ideas for movement in your home:

Go for family walks or bike rides
Create obstacle courses in our outside the house
Floor is lava or dance parties
Hide and Seek
Water balloon tag

Grab our Healthy Family Guide

Other Blog posts you may enjoy:

Ideas for your Morning Routine

5/11/2021

Meditate or Practice Visualization-I like to use the Insight Timer App and will listen to a 5-15 minute guided meditation or visualization to start my day.
Prayer-You can chose to pray yourself or I have recently found the Holy Bible App to be a great one as it provides me with a verse each day, a video of a priest to explain the scripture in his/her own way, a separate blog post/reading, and then a prayer.
Read-if you are in a business or working towards Self-Improvement there are numerous books that I could recommend or just take 10-15 minutes to read a book of your choosing.
Journaling-I personally don't like to journal but have found the 5 minute morning journal to be a good one for gratitude or writing down your 10 dreams each and every day which I heard about through Rachel Hollis.
Breathe-Take 5 minutes while your coffee is brewing to practice deeper breathing like 360 breathing or you can do this during your meditation as well
Workout or Stretch-Get the blood flowing with a quick 5 minute workout or this stretch below

If you are looking for ways to live a healthier life and like the idea of working out in just 5 minutes a day, than try out our 5 day Fast Fit program where we will provide you with a quick daily tip to help you start taking control of your health, and a 5 minute workout you can add to your busy day. Just click the blue link to join the FREE 5 day challenge.

Join the FREE Challenge

Other blog posts you may enjoy:

owner:

Courtney is a Mom and movement specialist, who wants to help you move more while raising healthy humans.

Grab our FREE e-book for the 3 steps to fix your posture

Categories