Fit for motherhood

I was having a lie in the other morning – if 6.45 counts as that – when I picked up my phone and saw a video someone had posted.

It was on a blog called 'Babyfitgym’ and featured a woman with her little boy, who looked a few months old and very cute too.

His mum was in full active gear – leggings and the kind of unforgiving crop top that most of us cease wearing when we’re seven.

She was in the midst of a work out, one she made look ridiculously easy. Though it can’t have been - I have personally performed similar burpees, squats and crunches at a GRIT class recently and ended up crawling out of the place begging for an oxygen tank.

Babyfitgym mum on the other hand, completed them all with her baby either in her arms or below her, giggling and kicking as she merrily picked him up for a bicep curl (see video above for just one example of this wonderwoman in action).

The little boy was unquestionably, having a whale of a time. And she looked amazing - not like a woman who’d had a baby four months ago. Not like a woman who’d had a baby EVER.

So it was with predictable awe and envy that I thought back to my own experience of trying to get back in shape while on maternity leave.

I’d been warned to take things easy, to stick to the exercises on those illustrated photocopies they give out in hospital, the ones that began life in 1983 and have been reproduced so many times you can barely make out the woman’s leg warmers.

But feeling ambitious, decided to buy a Davina DVD to tackle my jelly belly in the comfort of my own home.

It didn’t start well.

My baby son instinctively knew the exact moment when I was about to press play, and decided it was THEN that he wanted a feed/nappy change/almighty cry about nothing in particular. So I’d tend to his needs before trying again. And again. And again.

I was determined to get round to these squats if it was the last thing I did.

Unfortunately, my son turned out not to as amenable as Babyfitgym Baby to watching his mother doing a tuck jump, probably because in our case it made all the light fittings sway and the double glazing vibrate like we were in a hurricane. He did little gurgling at my demented jumping lunges and was so unimpressed with the jacks that he actually burst into tears.

But I suppose if I’d been confronted by a panting, sweating creature ten times my size, I might feel the same.