Babywearing exercise: Body Moving with your toddler.

A guest post by Kelli Roschak, creator the The Babywearing Workout, Mama’s Little Personal Trainer.

Most of you probably already know a lot of the benefits of babywearing for both Mama (or other wearer) and Baby.

If you’re like me, you probably wear your baby/toddler a lot of the time, which makes it easy to incorporate exercise into your daily routine. Just wearing them while you are doing the dishes or folding the laundry will give your core a good strength building workout. While your at it why not throw in a few squats and leg lifts here and there. Going up and down the stairs, if you’ve got them, a few times a day will also burn off more of those extra calories than you would if you weren’t wearing your little one. Taking a walk to to the park while wearing your baby or toddler is a much more intense workout for your body than if you were simply rolling them along in a stroller.

 

Now that Kayla is a toddler, she’s truly become a fan of moving her body…not just running around like most children do. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night, there are many requests to do the “DD” (DVD) or “Yo-iee Ga Ga (Yoga). When I put one of these on, she jumps right up, drags my yoga mat into place, and starts doing many of the moves. She loves it! And so do I. It’s such a joy to see her using her body and figuring out how it all works. Each day it seems like she miraculously has a new move down pat. But I’m sure her little brain was working on it all night long, which is why we might be losing a little more sleep lately.

Many of the mamas that are using The Babywearing Workout have told me that their toddlers love to do it right along side of them. Even pointing to the DVD player, TV or Computer and requesting Mama get to work and start doing her “Mama Bop.” And so we are creating Mama’s “Little” Personal Trainers….for now. In the long run they will be their own little personal trainers with an ingrained love of moving their bodies.

In addition to all of the other amazing benefits of babywearing, this is teaching our children an invaluable lesson about healthy living. They’re learning, by example and participation, that incorporating exercises into their daily routines can be easy and fun at the same time. Learning this kind of a lesson long before they are even crawling, is one way to help keep them from joining the staggering and heartbreaking statistics of childhood obesity that we are struggling to fight here in the USA. What better way to help ensure that our next generation will understand the deep and lasting benefits of an active lifestyle that they may not outlive their own parents than by babywearing and remaining active ourselves?

What kind of exercises or “Body Moving” does your little one like to do?