Strength, energy and patience? Yes please

If you’re a regular gym-goer, workout DVD Queen or runner, you’ll know how different you feel if you go a few days without the burn.

Maybe (like me) before you had kids, fitness was a big part of your life and you’ve struggled to get it onto your mountainous to-do list since becoming mummy.

If this sounds like you, I’d eat my gym kit if you said you didn’t miss the feeling of being fit.

You might’ve never really been interested in exercise, or never got round to starting a regime…which may seem ever more improbable now the sprogs are running around.

Whatever your fitness/lack of it past and however fit/desperately unfit you might feel, introducing some regular fitness into your crazy and beautiful mummy life would give you some things every single mummy I’ve ever met would love.

We all need more energy, right?

We all wish we were more patient.

We all wish we felt able to do more than slump in a pathetic heap and vegetate the minute after we’ve put the babies to bed.

Exercise – even a small amount – can give you all of this and much more.

We’ve all heard it said a squillion times, I know. But if there’s one thing that has the potential to transform your days and weeks, it’s a bit of regular fitness.

I’m not suggesting you need to work out for a whole hour every day. If you did, the benefits you’d see would be enormous. But let’s face it…for loads of us that just ain’t gonna happen.

The truth is that even if all you’re able to commit is 10 or 20 minutes a day, you’re onto a winner.

If you make the most of the time you have – no matter how little time that is – by challenging yourself physically and pushing yourself to keep going at a really high intensity for just another few seconds each day, you’ll soon start to notice a pretty huge difference.

And then the ripple effect will start.

You’ll start to wake up earlier. (Or, you might still wake up at the same ungodly time that your antisocial darlings dictate, but you might not feel as sick and your eyes might not feel as glued shut.)

You’ll start to feel less sluggish as you put the toys away for the thirty-fifth time.

You’ll notice you’ve got more energy to make the most of what’s left of the evening when you pick the kids up after you’ve finished work.

More importantly though, because you’ll feel all these things, you’ll have a longer rope when one of your little ones decides they want to pursue a career in hairdressing and their sibling is their first client, when the sofas have been oh-so-thoughtfully artistically enhanced or when a lump of play-dough has been wedged into a plug socket.

I’m not saying you won’t still immediately reach for a huge glass of vino the second they pass out at the end of the day, but at least you’ll have the energy to pour a second glass.

That’s gotta be worth getting fit for, right?