How did I come to devote my work to helping moms? It’s hard to imagine, but 5 short years ago pregnancy and motherhood were not on my immediate radar. I didn’t have my two beautiful children yet. My first passion was fitness.
I have been training in the gym for over 20 years… I played many different sports, swam for 10 years… but, my ‘thing’ has always been the weight room.
In fact, when I was 14 I asked my mom to pay for my gym membership, and she thought it was a waste of money. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so, I used my allowance to pay for it. The thing is that my monthly allowance wasn’t enough to pay for the membership, so I had to save for a month and a half in order to be able to go to the gym for a month… at the time there was no direct debit (This is literally going back 21 years)… so, I could only come and pay for my membership every other month.
Before My Pregnancy
I competed in bodybuilding competitions at the highest level and even won the Olympia (the World Cup of bodybuilding) in the bikini division in 2012.
I competed for 6-7 years and I never coached anyone for competitions, because … honestly… I wasn’t passionate about coaching competitors. I had the knowledge, I had the experience and I had the clientele if I wanted to… But, I enjoyed being a competitor, not coaching people for competition.
After My Pregnancy
Fast forward to 2015. I found out I was pregnant with my son and so I started looking for information on how to train when expecting and how to carry on with my training after giving birth. There was very little information and they were all so conflicting… and, that’s when I decided to take a course in Pre and Postnatal training. I was already a personal trainer, but I wanted to really understand the specific needs of pre and postnatal women for 2 reasons:
- Because I was pregnant and I wanted to make sure that what I was doing was safe
- Because I knew that people on social media would ask me what I was doing, and I felt like it was my moral responsibility as someone who has a fairly large following to provide my followers with correct and safe guidance
At the time I lived in Northern Ireland, and all the courses I came across were online and I wanted an in-person course. I finally found one in England, so I packed my bags and went to England to do the course.
The more I evolved in this new role as a mom and pre and postnatal coach, the more passionate I became about helping moms, and the more I started to see how moms are extremely under-served, under-informed, and over-scammed when it comes to diet and fitness.
More Learning
Once I became a mom, I started to pay attention and realized that most of the BS the fitness industry tries to sell normally targets the vulnerability of new moms who are not very confident in their new bodies and will do whatever they can to ‘’get their bodies back’’. (An expression I can’t stand….keep on reading to find out why)
That’s when I really decided to take more and more courses to learn and understand the physiology of the women’s body during and after pregnancy, so I could serve and guide them in a more body-positive way….minus the BS and all the confusing information.
I never liked the ‘’get your body back’’ message because our bodies have been there the whole time…they were there making amazing lil people.
The other thing I noticed after I had my children was that most programs for moms don’t really talk about the mental importance of exercising after you have a child.
Postpartum Is Forever
In my case, I felt like exercising gave me a sense of self…made me feel like myself again. We all know how easy it is to get lost in your new role of motherhood. It wasn’t about ‘’getting my body back’’, it was about creating my new self. It really bothers me to see these messages that make moms feel like they aren’t “good enough”. And, every time I spoke with moms I noticed 99% of them felt the same way about exercising. It validated my calling— to serve moms.
I am SO incredibly passionate about working with moms, I understand their struggles, I know how challenging this mommying business can be…and, I want these women’s voice to be heard, I want to guide them to not ‘’get their bodies back’’, but to love the ones they have…. Without the BS, and with accurate and up to date information. THAT is why I devoted myself to helping my fellow moms!
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