Fitness in a Chair

Hey, remember when I was getting all shredded and ripped and then I got to go out and buy new clothes because all of a sudden* I was two sizes smaller? Yippee! Hooray! Victory!

And then I got pregnant.

Like, literally the same week I bought the new, smaller jeans, I got that positive pregnancy test. Isn't life just hilarious like that?

Needless to say, those new jeans don't fit anymore. What's really annoying, though, is that neither does anything else. In the flush of victory after my successful slimming down, I ruthlessly purged my clothing (also because I wanted everything for every season to actually fit in my drawers so I wouldn't have to be trekking into the back bedroom to find stored clothing every six months). This means I no longer have any fat pants. And so, nothing fits.

This leaves me with two choices: buy new fat pants, or get rid of the fat on me.

Well. I think we know the right solution to this conundrum.

Easier said than done, however, as the plantar fasciitis that you so helpfully diagnosed for me is as bad as ever. I can't be jumping around on that foot, and jumping around is a pretty major component of a Jillian Michaels workout. I tried a couple of times, and my foot was all, "No. This is not happening. Also: OUCH."

What to do, what to do? To the Internet!

After some very cursory searching for "exercise while foot hurt" or something, I came across this Tae Bo workout by Billy Blanks (remember him?). Done in a chair.

Yup. That's what I said. Exercise in a chair. It's a low-impact workout, and so I was thinking, "Lame. This is barely going to do anything. But it's better than nothing, so what the hell."

So Cubby--the only child awake at the time--got his little chair, I got mine, and we started.

Holy atrophied muscles, y'all. This was hard. Like, I could not keep up. At all. Cubby watched me struggling for awhile, and then asked, "How come you're not doing what they're doing, Mommy?"

I'M TRYING, KID. GIMME A BREAK.

I think a lot of my problem--besides general terrible fitness levels--is that my lower back muscles seem to have gotten particularly weak, so lifting my legs at the angles I needed to while sitting on the chair was really, really hard.

Which means, of course, that I need to keep doing this workout.

My legs are really sore this morning, but my foot isn't any worse. Plus, a "low-impact" workout also translates to "nursing-friendly," because without all the jumping around, less, uh, containment is necessary on top. So I guess I found my new daily (or maybe every other day . . .) dose of misery.

Hooray. I think.

* "All of a sudden" meaning "two months and hours of misery later," so . . . not so sudden.