The Bare Minimum Workout for Busy Parents

What your body really needs this week — with Anna Maltby.

Hi everyone, and sorry for the short and unexpected hiatus! It was my birthday last week, and my best friend surprised me with a trip to New York City for two nights and ….. well, my writing schedule took a bit of a hit as a result. We had such a blast though. We went to a bunch of our old NYU haunts (the ones that still exist, anyway! sob), ate delicious meals, and (of course) sang karaoke.

Now it’s Thanksgiving week, which means that many of you are probably wrangling small children, traveling, cooking — in other words, doing things that are taxing your body. So I’m psyched to be doing something a little different this week: I’m sharing a short video workout designed specifically for Now What readers by the wonderful and brilliant Anna Maltby. It’s a workout you can do in as little as six minutes with nothing more than a floor to lie on — heck, you can even do it in your pajamas — and it focuses on back, core, and glute strength, as well as scapular stability and thoracic rotation, all of which support the back and posture.

If you don’t know Anna, she is a health journalist, certified personal trainer, and mat Pilates instructor, and she writes the fantastic anti-diet fitness newsletter How to Move, which I adore. I’ve known Anna for years; she’s highly knowledgeable and whip smart, so I was thrilled when she agreed to do a short Q&A with me, too. Among other things, I asked her to bust some exercise myths that fuel unnecessary stress and guilt in busy parents.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and her workout — maybe you can squeeze it in before the kids wake up or during a cooking break this week. May it give you a few minutes of peace!

Anna, we used to work together all the time when you were an editor. Can you talk a bit about why you made the transition to the work you’re doing today, and what you’ve learned about parents’ bodies (especially moms’ bodies) that’s been illuminating for you?

I miss so many things about my old life as a magazine editor — the collaboration, the constant supply of free sunscreen and cupcakes from publicists, wearing clothes that aren’t leggings, working with wonderful writers like you! But the industry has changed a ton, and the turmoil really started to get to me: I’ve had so many magazine jobs, and it felt like no matter where I was working, a day would come when we’d all be rounded up into a conference room (or Zoom call) and find out something terrible was happening to the publication.

I became a certified personal trainer 10 years ago for a job as a fitness editor at a magazine, and around the time I took a buyout from my last staff job back in 2021, I was completing my training as a mat Pilates instructor. I was so burned out (both from the chaos of the industry and from a year of pandemic parenting a baby and a toddler) that I wondered if, instead of job hunting, I could make my way as a freelancer and actually teach Pilates and train clients. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since! It’s a mix of training/teaching, editorial consulting for brands (places like Nike and Hinge Health), freelance writing, mostly for The New York Times, and since last summer, writing my newsletter. I do everything through an evidence-based, highly function-focused (I call it “body neutral” but it basically means non-aesthetics–focused) lens, and I have some specialty training in the perinatal period and the pelvic floor.

I love this work a lot, and I’m also really grateful that being self-employed gives me more flexibility to show up for my kids and spend time on activism. I’m super involved in our school’s PTA and mutual aid work, for one thing. I never really saw myself as a PTA mom, and now I both see how problematic our cultural eyerolling about “PTA moms” is — this excellent piece is REQUIRED READING on that front — and understand that PTA work at schools that aren’t wealthy and majority white has so little to do with galas and craft fairs and so much to do with community building, mutual aid, and advocacy around immigration, housing, and things like, ahem, SNAP benefits. And I have been running a fundraiser project called Pilates for Abortion Funds for three years now: It’s a monthly Zoom mat class for which the admission cost is a donation to an abortion fund, and we’ve raised more than $45,000 all told.

In my work as a trainer, I’ve been lucky enough to work with quite a few moms (including throughout the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences), and I think what’s been most illuminating is that — as cliche as it might sound — our bodies are all so different! (I’m not even talking about appearance, although this obviously applies there too.) I really try to focus on the individual in front of me, and I’m often surprised by what their strengths and limitations are. You can tell certain things by looking at someone’s posture, for example, but you don’t necessarily know how they’re going to move until they start doing it. We all have our own movement experience, history with trauma and injury, lifestyle factors, genetics, etc. And when it comes to pregnancy and postpartum, the same is true: Everyone is so, so different. I think it’s safe to say that staying active can help make a pregnancy more comfortable and potentially make postpartum recovery easier, but I’ve had clients that I fear are going to have a long recovery road because of certain issues they’ve had during pregnancy, and then they’re perfectly fine postpartum. And of course there are folks I think are going to have a total breeze of a time, and then they end up struggling more than I expect. It’s helpful to me as a mom with a body too: I can remind myself that just because someone else can move or lift a certain way doesn’t mean I’m supposed to. I have my own body and my own journey, and that’s just how it works! We’re all different. (Honestly, as a trainer, this is a super fun element of my work: My clients really keep me guessing and learning. It’s never boring!)

One of the key aims of my work is to use science to reduce pressure on parents and the guilt they are inclined to feel. What is an exercise myth (or set of myths) that you like to bust that often fuels unnecessary stress or guilt?

There’s plenty of pseudoscience out there about exercise that we could debunk (like weighted vests, LOL), but I think the big thing for parents and exercise is not necessarily the weird wacky optimization nonsense, it’s just TIME. We know we need to exercise — if we are women over the age of, I don’t know, 30, we know we need to be strength training to prepare for our future perimenopause journey — but we are so, so busy and it feels impossible to find the time to exercise “enough.” And we definitely feel guilty and stressed about that! I understand the value of things like the guidelines from the American Heart Association and CDC about getting 150 minutes of moderate exercise plus two strength training sessions in per week, but frankly, that’s a ton of time if you’re someone with caregiving responsibilities, a job, a commute, a home to take care of, etc. Or take the 10,000 steps thing (which has sort of been debunked, actually) — it would take most people an hour and a half or two hours of walking to get to 10,000 steps! Who has the time? I felt really proud of myself the other day for making time for a 40-minute walk at lunch, and then I immediately felt sort of bummed and guilty when I looked at my phone’s step count and saw that I’d only gotten about 6,000 steps. So silly: That’s a really great amount of steps, and way more than I would have gotten without the walk.

I do like to encourage parents to prioritize exercise to the extent that they can, because it can support everything else we need to do: Exercise helps us sleep better. It helps us manage stress. It helps reduce aches and pains. It helps give us energy. We need all of that stuff so much to help us deal with life. And in fact, sometimes exercising even when you don’t actually think you have the energy for it can create a positive feedback loop: We find energy we didn’t realize we had. We sleep better that night. We feel better the next day and have the energy to exercise again. (With a caveat that this may not be the case if you’re someone with a chronic illness and need to take special care with your energy levels.) After that not-10,000-step walk the other day, I got so much focused work done. I even got a great idea for a newsletter story and basically wrote the whole thing by recording a voice memo to myself on my phone, while walking.

If you aren’t in a season where you can get anywhere close to 150 minutes or thousands of steps, it’s okay! You haven’t failed. Do what you can, even if it’s just a truly tiny amount of exercise. A five-minute workout is still a workout. I like to encourage people to think about the long game: Maybe you aren’t able to hit your movement goals right now, but if you can do the bare minimum just to keep yourself moving a little, just to feel a tiny bit better in your body, and just to maintain the habit, you’re doing great. And it’ll be a lot easier to add on if and when a season arrives that allows for more movement.

Can you talk a bit about the exercises you’ve chosen today and what muscles or parts of the body they support — and why these are so important to take care of?

I send a workout video to my newsletter subscribers every week, and usually it’s focused on strength training: We have a monthly strength workout that’s meant to be repeated and used with a progressive overload approach (aka gradually increasing the amount of weight, the challenge level of the exercises, etc.); I also send split-training workouts sometimes that help you dial in to specific body areas or movement patterns; sometimes there’s a cardio and conditioning workout; and of course plenty of Pilates and mobility workouts designed to support your strength training and keep you feeling really good. But as we approach the holidays — and sick season! — I’m often thinking about, again, that concept of the “bare minimum.” Not just for my subscribers and clients but for myself, too! We might not have time for a big workout, or we might be traveling and away from our usual gear, so what’s the absolute least we can do to take care of ourselves and hopefully feel decent in our bodies during this stressful time?

So this workout is what I call a “bare minimum workout”: If I’m totally swamped or away from home, I will pull these exercises out and do one to three sets, just to get the kinks out, check in with my mind-body connection, and feel okay if not great. A big motivator for my own exercise routine is that I deal with super annoying back pain if I’m not active, so these moves focus on back strength, core strength, scapular stability, glute strength, and thoracic rotation: all things that really help support our posture and make our backs feel as good as possible. (It’s very similar to this workout I ran last winter, except I swapped in a new exercise in lieu of Russian twists, which I always get complaints about from people with tricky hip flexors!)

One thing I love about this sequence is that it requires basically NOTHING other than a floor you feel comfortable lying on, although you could absolutely do this on a bed if you don’t have a mat and the floor is dirty. You don’t even need to change your clothes — pajamas, jeans, a dress, whatever you have on is fine.

And truly, do as little or as much of this video as works for the amount of time and energy you have. Do one round and you’ll be moving for about 6 minutes. If you do the whole thing it’ll take about 20 minutes (plus an optional little feel-good stretch at the end). Remember: This isn’t about optimization or about worrying about some lofty amount of time — it’s about giving your body a little time and attention so you can get after all the other stuff you need to do.

I hope it feels great!

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