Mother/Baby Boot Camp

[SpecialP]

My son is a personal trainer and has been training a lot more new mothers recently. He had an idea to get an exercise class going where mothers do some light exercise (mainly Pilates style) using their new babies as extra weight for strength training.
The exercise will help build up the muscles that have suffered through pregnancy and help keep your posture correct and allow you to lift your baby up and down with out causing discomfort. It will also encourage interaction between mother and baby.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If he does it, can you suggest he bans tight sportswear, competitive weight loss stories and 'done' hair and makeup? These are all the things that have put me off going to post birth exercise classes!

I know exactly what you mean. I will certainly suggest this to him.
Should there be a punishment for breach of these specific rules or should they just be outcast immediatly?

Hi, I would just suggest checking out the competition carefully - when I had first DC there was one mum & baby exercise class in our area that I knew of and by time of 2nd DC two years later, there were at least 4 outfits, all operating classes on more than one day (outside classes though with buggies etc, would yours be inside?). That's in addition to all the baby yoga classes etc (the ones I tried included yoga for both the babies and mums, so a similar component to what your son might be thinking of?)

Think would need the option to make the baby an integral part of the class or not, e.g. provide handweights as alternative etc - as if I had arrived at a class with a sleeping baby there is no way I would want to wake him, would want to enjoy the time to myself. Think there is also quite a short window that the classes could be taken - we were advised not to start until post 6-week checkup (later if C-section), and then as soon as baby starts crawling, it would all get a bit chaotic I think if plan is for baby to be 'free' for the entire session - good fun but not very much exercise done!

Wishing him good luck with his venture.

could i swap for a smaller baby and build up to my heavy weight dd?

I think a mother/toddler/preschooler or child class would be good. You wouldn't have the insurance issues as you would with postnatal classes (I'd expect but don't know really). It could be things like running around with your kids, kicking a ball, jumping around/ mini obstacle course etc. he could send the mums around the oval to run a lap and get the kids kicking balls or something so everyone is still getting a workout. My boot camp instructor did this once when I had to bring my children to adult bootcamp once and it was so much fun. Really good to actually do something with my children that wasn't just focused on them, but all of us.