Thank you to Another Mother Runner for profiling 9 Kid Fitness today! For those of you new to our site, Welcome! Thanks for visiting!
Another Mother Runner is the companion site to the book Run Like A Mother, and is an awesome source for all things running and mothering…and actually these mother runners are quite funny too! They show us how to gracefully (and sometimes not so gracefully) fit it all in.
For my 9 Kid Fitness readers, check it out!
Did you ever think about the fact that about 40% of the time that we are walking around, we are on one foot? Balance is crucial, regardless of how athletic you are. Just think about what happens as we get older, and our balance is not as good as it once was. We begin to take shorter strides to compensate for our lack of balance. Hence, one reason for the shuffle that we sometimes see in elderly people. The balance is not as good and therefore stability is off. It isn’t too hard to see why balance is such a crucial component for fitness, too. [Read more…]
Yesterday morning I decided I needed some kind of group exercise. I wasn’t up for working out alone and I didn’t want to run two days in a row. I knew I couldn’t do too much arm work with my bad shoulder. There is a small group that meets at 6 a.m. to do P90X at a neighborhood gym, and I figured that was a good option. I got there a little late (not that surprising) and they were already into the warm-up. There are usually about five or six people who show up, but yesterday it was me and three men. By the time I grabbed a mat and started to join in on the warm-up, I heard Tony Horton say this was the “mother of all P90X workouts”, Plyometrics. Oh, great. [Read more…]
I am presently dealing with a strange shoulder injury. I say strange because it sort of came out of nowhere. I began to feel it a few months back but not necessarily after a workout or anything. It hurt when I would reach back to say, buckle my seatbelt or something. It didn’t hurt all the time, either. Some weeks would be pain-free and others I would feel it all the time. It didn’t become consistent until about four weeks ago…right before I started to ramp up my push-ups. Of course, the push-ups didn’t help matters! [Read more…]
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.”-The Velveteen Rabbit
I think one of the hardest parts about being a mother is that we are real… and so are our children. Parenting is a continual act of living in reality…even if we would much rather just live in a world where our children didn’t get hurt, didn’t make mistakes, didn’t have to suffer. I remember when my first four or five children were little. My oldest was no more than 10. Sometimes it felt like I was the mother duck and they were my little ducklings; if I looked behind me, they were all following…my little brood. I’m sure I thought this was real, and it was. But it was also only temporary. As my first few children embarked on the teen years, the “real” was not so easy. When I looked behind me I didn’t always have the same view. What I saw was the older ones venturing off in different directions and I couldn’t as easily herd them back. I started to lose that control that I must have believed I would always have. It hurt a little, and my fur got a little tattered. [Read more…]
It would be nice if spot reduction worked, but it doesn’t. While most of us know this, sometimes we can’t resist the temptation to believe it does. Stronger abs is your goal? Abdominal work is the way to go. A smaller waist? Work on the diet and overall fitness. Is it your bottom half you’re frustrated with? Doing 50 lunges everyday won’t “spot reduce” your thighs. A combination of regular cardio, strength training and nutritional changes is the only tried and true answer. Not spot reduction.
An article I recently read pointed out that if spot reduction worked, professional tennis players would have one arm that was smaller than the other. It would make sense that the circumference of the dominant arm would be less if this logic were correct. We know the facts do not support this (the dominant arm may be a little stronger, though). Why then do we often fall for the myth that says that if we do more elliptical, we will have a smaller bottom half? [Read more…]
Sometimes I find myself believing that to eat healthy with a large family means to spend more money. As one who shops at Aldi and Super Wal-Mart whenever I can, I know that it can be tempting to buy 29 cent Mac and Cheese, a cheap version of Stouffers lasagna, or some Little Debbie snacks, and to walk out of the store proud of how little I spent. However, I also know that to eat healthy you have to think about good choices and then “shop healthy” too. There have been times when I have walked past the out-of-season fruit because it is too expensive, only to buy Oreo cookies or Ritz Crackers for almost the same price. My kids don’t help matters in this regard. Although I can shop and fill the fridge with groceries, if there are no “real snacks” to fill up the cabinet, we “have nothing to eat!” [Read more…]
16 kids! That is how many children my sisters’ Susan, Elizabeth, and I have all together. When we get together, like we did last week when Elizabeth came to Charlotte to visit from California, it is nonstop fun for all of the cousins.
Athletics are a big part of all of our lives. Between the three families, we have quite a few sports covered…swimming, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and cross country to name a few. There is always some event to watch, and last week it was my nephew’s AAU basketball game…very exciting! But the real excitement was on my sister Susan’s driveway, where a different kind of intense basketball took place… the cousin rivalry variety! It was Thomas, David, and Ben versus Adam, Charlie and Peter, and it was a thrillling nail-biter that came down to the wire. [Read more…]
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