I was able to get Dustin Maher from Fat Loss Tips For Women on the phone and pick his brain on the topic of fat loss, specifically for busy moms. After 50 minutes of great tips and strategies, I knew I had to share this immediately!
Listen or read why crunches are a bad idea after giving birth and the one exercise you can almost anywhere (without any knowing) to regain strength and control of your midsection. Read on or scroll down and listen in:
ANTHONY: I’ve got a great interview today Dustin Maher from www.FatLossTipsForWomen.com. How are you doing Dustin?
DUSTIN: Doing good, thanks for having me.
ANTHONY: No problem. All right so I want to start off first with just some simple information about yourself. Just so everybody knows who you are and what your focus is. So if you could just tell everybody about yourself.
DUSTIN: I live in Madison, Wisconsin, I graduated form the University of Wisconsin in 2006 with a degree in kinesiology. I’ve been training since about 2003 and I started out working with core training and really studying that and how to get a 6 pack and all that you know teenage and college guys always want. But I progressed more into training women and more specifically into moms. So for the last two years now I’ve really found a great niche of training stay at home moms mostly and some corporate women as well, but a lot of them are stay at home moms that take care of their kids and come in and see me. I’ve transitioned from one on one training to small group training and then larger groups, and also boot camps. I run a fit fun boot camps we call them. In the summer which is short here in Madison we run outdoor ones at the parks and when it gets cold out we go inside. I’ve also created a class called Mommatone fitness. And that’s where I work with most of the moms in a larger group between 8-15 moms usually get together for that. So that’s a little bit about myself. I’m 25 years old and ACE certified personal trainer.
ANTHONY: So interesting that you said that you started out and went exclusively to work with stay at home moms and working moms which also important. Why did you go that route specifically? Why not dads or –
DUSTIN: Right. Yeah because my background was with athletes and I’ve been an athlete my whole life but the passion for helping moms came from my childhood. My mom was a stay at home mom and I’m the oldest of four siblings and kind of just looking back I realized that she just put all of her kids in front of her own needs and spent all of her time taking care of us and fortunately she taught some good healthy eating habits. So she wasn’t an unhealthy mom by any means but she just didn’t take time for herself to exercise, and also she didn’t have a lot of other mom friends that she could really interact with and connect with on a deeper level than just fitness wise. So when I graduated college I knew that’s what I wanted to do and there’s such a need for it with women and especially moms to put themselves first because when they do, they’re going to be better parents, better wives, and just better in the workplace, more productive to when they feel good about themselves that’ll translate into all the areas of their life. I find it to be very rewarding and I find that I’m able to give back to all that hard work and selflessness that my mom has shown to me.
ANTHONY: That’s true, it’s also you know, women are the ones that are having the babies so their bodies are automatically changed so to give them back that body is very important and I like that story with your mom. But let’s talk about the pregnancy that mothers go through. So what are some of the challenges that you see when moms are trying to get their pre-body back? What are their biggest challenges in getting back to that weight before the pregnancy? Because we know that the weight just doesn’t come off when the baby comes out.
DUSTIN: Right, exactly. Well the biggest thing I’ve found is literally their whole body changes when they have their first kid. The hips get wider and the chest gets bigger for a while and then it deflates and then the stomach is stretched out and it doesn’t always come back right away and I see a lot of issues with the butt and thigh area and then definitely the abdomen are the two biggest areas that women have the most trouble getting back from. For a lot of women maybe they didn’t exercise, or if they did exercise maybe they didn’t do too much during the pregnancy. So they’ve had six to eight to nine months of inactivity. So that can be a daunting task to get back into after delivering a child. Also pelvic floor issues are a big problem incontinence and bladder issues that come with that with the stretching of the pelvic floor as the baby gets bigger in the uterus. So those are the biggest challenges that moms have to face
ANTHONY: I’ve heard a few people talk about the whole pelvic floor and how you really need to strengthen that area, one of the first things you really need to recuperate after the pregnancy. So going off of that, is there anything specific that you think that the moms should do after giving birth with exercise? What are some things they should focus on?
DUSTIN: Well first I want to focus on what they should not do and this is probably one of the biggest things I see new moms doing wrong. They want their stomach to go back to normal so desperately and they mistakenly think that doing endless amounts of core work, more specifically crunches is the way to solve that problem. So they’ll be doing a few hundred crunches every day thinking that’s going to get their flat stomach back but actually that can make it worse and a problem that can occur is called rectus diasesis. This means that the abdomen wall has been stretched which it should stretch obviously during pregnancy but after pregnancy if you’re continually doing exercises like crunches that’s going to encourage that abdominal cavity to stretch out and split even larger.
So a great test you can do if you’ve given birth before is to lay on your back and slightly crunch up with your legs bent 90 degrees with your feet on the floor and put two fingers right on the middle part of the abdomen right above the belly button. If you have more than a 1.5 – 2 inch gap – if you can stick your fingers past that, you have a moderate to severe rectus diasisis. And I had one woman she had I could put about four fingers in between her stomach and she did crunches for probably 8-9 months after her third child and at that point she was going to probably have to have surgery on it because I don’t think there’s any amount of things we could do to bring it back in but that’s an extreme case. But you’ll see a lot of them with 1.5-2 fingers and as long as you do the right thing within 4-6 months generally you’ll be able to come back to normal.
So one thing is you do not want to do crunches because that’ll encourage the split even more. So you want to focus on strengthening the transverse abdominal muscles which are the deep abdominal muscles and if you’ve taken yoga or pilates you’ve probably heard about those. But one of my favorite techniques is called the vacuum. What you do for this exercise is you exhale all the air out of your lungs. So you breathe out, get rid of all air, and then you pull your belly button in toward your spine so you try to create this concavity within the abdomen and you hold that position for maybe 5-10 seconds. Then catch your breath and try and do it again. And that is going to encourage those transversals to fire and to squeeze and pull that abdomen, pulling it back in. That’s one of the things you should be doing. Of course kegals are important to do for the pelvic floor for strengthening.
Planks are a great exercise where you’re basically on your forearms or on your hands in a push up position and you’re holding that position with your back nice and flat and again drawing the belly button in. Other than that, back extensions that kind of exercise is good right after giving birth but again, lay off of crunches for at least 4-6 weeks, but for many moms it might take 3-4 months before that abdomen has only a finger or a finger and a half separation instead of 2-3 fingers. Now if your stomach has come back really well after pregnancy, crunches will be fine to do but if you do have that space, which is vertically between the abdomen right above the belly button, you want to be careful. Some women it takes 3, 4, 5 up to 6 months to really recover and to be able to do a crunch without it splitting apart.
~ Thats just the beginning. I want to make sure you have enough time read through without taking up too much of your time. Theres more to come so stay tuned.
