Mom 75: Real Fitness For Chaotic Seasons

The New Year avalanche of challenges and “perfect morning routines” can feel brutal when you’re sleep-deprived, healing, and parenting on a hair trigger. We take a kinder path for pregnant and postpartum athletes and active moms: small, repeatable wins that respect your season while still building real momentum.

I share the mindset shifts that changed everything for me and for the moms I treat: why the 60-minute rule is a myth, how to turn exercise snacks into a powerful training tool, and simple ways to stack habits onto the rhythms you already have. You’ll learn zero-equipment Tabata ideas, mobility flows you can do on the floor next to your baby, and clever strategies for moving with your kids—stroller walks as resisted walking, park bench strength, and kid-friendly videos that turn chaos into connection.

We also protect the brain. Five minutes before bed to downshift beats doom-scrolling every time, so we explore practical boundaries for social media and quick mindfulness swaps that improve sleep and patience the next day. Throughout, we keep comparison in check and honor the reality of seasons: training with little kids won’t be optimal, but it can be consistent, confidence-building, and enough to move you forward.

If you’re ready to trade all-or-nothing for steady progress, try the “Mom 75” approach: two five-minute checkmarks—one for body, one for mind—most days. Then add more when life allows. Subscribe for more evidence-informed guidance, share this with a mom who needs a gentle reset, and tell us: what’s your five-minute win this week?

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Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

New Year Pressure Meets Pregnancy

Postpartum Reality And Expectations

The Morning Routine Myth

Reclaiming Self‑Care In Small Ways

Body And Mind Self‑Care Pairing

Ditch Extreme Challenges

The 60‑Minute Workout Myth

Exercise Snacks Explained

Tabata And No‑Equipment Options

Habit Stacking With Kids’ Routines

Move With Your Kids

Navigating Exhaustion And Guilt

Five Minutes Before Bed For Calm

Seasons Of Motherhood Mindset

Redefine Success And Adapt

Close And Listener Prompt

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas Podcast. My name is Christina Frubbett. I'm a public school physical therapist, a researcher in exercise and pregnancy, and a mom of two who have competed in CrossFit, powerlifting, or weightlifting, pregnant, postpartum, or both. In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise. Whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete, we want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females going into this motherhood journey. We're going to talk about fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. While I am a pelvic floor physical therapist, I am not your pelvic floor physical therapist, and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice. All right, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together. And I can't wait to get started. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Christina Brevit here. And with it being 2026, and you're probably being absolutely inundated with challenges and new year, new me, and all of these other initiatives and new guides and challenges for the new year. I wanted to come and be that mom friend that is going to kind of set some expectations if you are in the thick of it. When you have little kids, like you're in your first couple years postpartum, or you are pregnant with a second, or you are in your first pregnancy, it can be so difficult in a lot of ways. Number one is if you are pregnant, a lot of these challenges are around body composition and you may be coming into it with the mindset of, I'm just gonna get bigger. Um, maybe you're not, but oftentimes we can be kind of conflicting with that thought around the new year when you're in this phase of life. And then particularly I want to talk to my postpartum moms who are in this area where even our best-laid plans go out the window. And you are in this phase of life where your time just really isn't your own. What I want to get out of this episode for you all is really tangible ways for us not really to only set expectations, but to figure out how to engage in self-care in a way that feels approachable when you're in such a chaotic season of life. I love all of the reels that are basically kind of shitting on that we have the same 24 hours in a day. And I'm gonna talk about it with a with a story. So my kids are four and six. I am getting out of the thick of it a little bit where my kids, I'm not don't have any kids in diapers anymore. My kids are a little bit more independent, they sometimes play together, and I have a little bit more breathing room. My daughter, however, is an early riser since she was born. I blame my husband because he is definitely an early riser. She was up, honest to goodness, from six months on at 5 a.m. Maybe 5 30 if she was sleeping in. And she was like this for years. Now she's six and a half, turning seven in April. She will sleep in a little bit more to like six, six thirty. But that was not our reality for a really long time. Oftentimes when people are talking about having the perfect morning routine and blah, blah, blah, they're assuming one, that I had slept through the night, which I had many years where I didn't, and two, that you didn't have a little one that was gonna be up with you. If only they knew, right? When I set my alarm a little bit earlier, inevitably, my dog wants to get up with me, my dog wakes up my little, and my little is there with me. And so now I'm parenting and not having this zen moment where I just get to do things on my own. Now that is not everybody's kid, right? Some kids are getting up at seven, and so you can use that early hour or they do sleep through the night earlier than mine did. But when you're scrolling through social media, it can feel deflating when the experience or what the person is saying is just do this. And oftentimes they're saying it so confidently as if it's so easy to do. When in reality, there's so much variability to a person's experience. And if you're in the thick of being postpartum, I need you to mute all of those social media accounts because they're not really going to be talking to you right now. They may be talking to you in five years from now, but they are not talking to you right now. And so I want to be talking to those postpartum moms who are in this phase of life where they feel like their self-care is on the back burner. And I want you to take some time while you're listening to this episode to reflect on how do we put that self-care to the front a little bit. Why? Because we can't pour from an empty cup. It can seem so overwhelming at times as a mom who is in the thick of her postpartum journey, recovering herself, littles who are very demanding. It doesn't have to be ours. You can wish that it was and grieve that it isn't while still recognizing that doing five or 10 minutes of self-care time, whatever that looks like to you, um, can be super helpful. What I advocate for and I talk to my patients about a lot is something that is self-care for the body and something that is self-care for the mind. Self-care for the body, we will talk about some different options if you are in the thick of it and the idea of getting out to a gym is not financially feasible, socially, environmentally feasible, whatever. Um, and then the what is gonna be good for the mind can be reading, right? I read a lot of fiction books over the last couple of years, fantasy, romantic, not give it to me, you know, like all those types of things. Um, or it can be something like mindfulness and and yoga is kind of moving your body with intention. And so, kind of coming into our postpartum New Year's challenge, number one is going to be removing all of those expectations and recognizing that right now is probably not the time for the most extreme version of a New Year's resolution, right? That's why I talked last week about uh intentions. 75 hard is not for you right now, mom. Like it is just not for you. You know, those two workouts a day, 75 or 45 minutes each time, one of them has to be outside. Like, that's not for you. Even soft 75. No. If you are in the thick of it, putting that extra stress on a body that is already really stressed out, it doesn't have to be your year for that, right? But we can do mom 75, where we take 75 days to take five minutes to do some movement of our body. And if we get more, that's great. But our check mark, because we love the gold stars, I love a good gold star, is five minutes. And if we get 30, then I am gonna have a lot of gratitude for it. So when we are thinking about our workouts, right, in 2026, as a mom in the thick of it, what I want you to release is the idea that if your workout gets cut short or your workout is an X number of minutes, that it is not worth it. Or and that you can't do it, or you shouldn't do anything, or why bother? This is a really important mindset shift. It was one that was really hard for me when I was in the thick of my postpartum journey, right? We think that I'm gonna have a 60-minute nap time. You start exercising, your kid wakes up, all of a sudden, that 60-minute workout became a 20-minute workout, and we think that we failed that workout or we didn't do enough. That is not true. Anything is better. We don't know, like our body is just happy that you moved it, and you try again the next day, or you try and get another 20-minute stint in later on in the day. I I will always give you permission to grieve what used to be a very easy way to move your body and something that you took a lot of pleasure in, that movement. And I'm gonna gently nudge you to try and and do that shift, knowing that it is a season and that that season will change and it will get easier when you're not in this really highly demanding season of motherhood. And so that's where we introduce the exercise snack. And I love them. When I am counseling new moms in the postpartum period, when I am, you know, thinking through my own journey, what they require is a lot lower. And so when I have a mom with a fried nervous system who is really having a tough time fitting an exercise, and you are berating yourself that it's something else that you're not doing, and you're filling yourself with guilt and shame and you know, really having a negative self-talk. When we can do an exercise snack that doesn't require any time um equipment and very little time, and you can do it with your kiddo in the room, it can be super helpful. What is an exercise snack? It is a higher intensity burst of movement that is usually between two and 10 minutes. One of my favorite things to prescribe is a bodyweight tabata. So tabata is eight rounds, 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest. So it's three minutes and 50 seconds from start to finish. You start with a squat and you go. So you do 20 minutes of squats, 10 seconds of rest. Repeat eight times, and your legs will probably be humming by the end. And then bonus points. If baby comes and needs you, then baby's in your arms, and now you have an extra weight, and baby just made it a little bit harder. Um, you can do that with strength stuff. You can do it aerobic, where you can do high knees for that three minutes and 50 seconds. It can be mobility, so you're on the floor playing, but you're also moving your hips side to side. It is an easier way for you to get some movement into your body and bonus points if you have it stack them, right? Where there is a certain part of your day, maybe it's you put baby on the floor after they get up from their second nap. And then that's when you do when you put them down, knowing that that's probably gonna be when you can get a minute or two. Um, that's when you are able to uh get that little bit of movement in. My next, so number one is get rid of the 60-minute myth. Introduce exercise snacks. And then the thing that has helped with the consistency for me when I was in the thick of it, and then I talked to a lot of moms about is trying to, it's great when you are able to work out without your kids and have kind of uninterrupted I get zen time for me. Um, but then also trying to work out with your kids. So if you are in the thick of it and you know, structured exercise is just not gonna do it. There are kids' versions of YouTube videos like Danny Go, Cosmic Yoga are programs on YouTube that are movement forward. My kids love them. I do them or I did them. They're a little bit older now, but they used to love them. I do them with them. And that allowed me to get a little bit of movement in when I otherwise wouldn't. If you can get with your babies and be at the park and then try and do some exercise with the park equipment, that's another great way of doing it with your kids. Um, using them and the carrier as resistance if you're doing resisted walking, like really stroller walking is resisted walking. Um, and have that as an idea about how to get a little bit more movement into your day. I remember when, you know, my kids were littler that there was always this belief of all of the things that you were gonna do once your kid was sleeping, right? And it's like clean the kitchen and you know, clean, do laundry and full laundry and do this and then do that. And then there were so many nights where that list became nothing because I was just exhausted and I couldn't will myself to care if the laundry was done or whatever. And that's kind of just the reality of being uh a new mom, where sometimes you do have the energy and everything looks great and you can do it, and sometimes you defer it to the next day, or sometimes you have the best of intentions, and then your kid is screaming, they're supposed to be done at seven, and they're still screaming at 9:30, and then you were gonna work out then, and then now you're stressing even more because you're like, I was supposed to exercise and now I'm missing another day, and I would just get into horrible loops sometimes. And I just had to change that perspective. Where when I did a little bit of working out with my kids, if I didn't get the movement, don't get me wrong, I would still be really annoyed about it. Go to sleep. Um, but um, I at least knew that I had a little bit of movement in my day, and so it it removed a little bit more of the guilt for me. As we're kind of going in and trying to incorporate more self-care. When I was talking last week, I was talking about the mindfulness piece. What can you do for five minutes before bed to bring your nervous system down? One of the things that I've been working really hard on is that I am not scrolling on social media right before bed. It is bad at the best of times. Right now, it is even worse. Like our world is on fire and it does not help me. I I went through this exercise for a couple of weeks where I audited my behavior, where I would do an activity, and then once I finished, I would check in with myself and say, How do I feel? And every time I was doom scrolling on some sort of social media account, I would close the app and say, I feel worse than I did before. And, you know, it took me probably about a hundred reps of feeling saying consistently, I feel worse after doing this, to start putting in stronger boundaries. But you can do that five. What can you do for five minutes before bed that's gonna set you up better for the next day? Whether that's deep breathing, for me it's been mindfulness, but I think that expectation, right? We're not doing 75 hard, we're doing five minute stints, one for the body, one for the brain, um, before bed, that for the brain is really helpful and and really needed. When we're thinking about going being in the thick of it and it being the new year, the other thing that I want you all to think about is trying to let go of this comparison and performance guilt that we all have, right? When we are thinking about this phase, um, one thing that has really helped me, and it's interesting because I'm starting to get out of this season is the idea that we are in different seasons of our life, and there are beautiful things and really hard things about every season that you are in. When you are in the little baby season, you are experiencing this world of joy of watching them learn all of these new things and just them being so dependent on you, and it's so incredible to just watch them grow. But it's also so hard because they are so dependent on you to feed them and to, you know, help them walk and they're not sleeping well and they're not regulating their emotions well. And then you go into like the the toddler stage, and then now you go into the little kids stage where they're starting to pick up things from their school environments and all these types of like there's just so many really beautiful and really hard things. Um, but when we are in the thick of it and you're in that New Year's resolution kind of moment in your life, just know that when you're in the thick of it and that is a season of life you are in, when you redefine what counts and lose some of the rigidity of it, it can be extremely helpful and make you feel like you're in more of a successful mindset and then you have a better successful week. Because training with little kids, the reality is it's not optimal, it's never gonna be optimal. You adapt to training with kids, and then as soon as you feel like you got it all figured out, they change it. And so when you're thinking about um how to kind of get a little bit of movement in in that new year, I hope some of that reframe of mindset helped. Let me know what is one small habit that you can do this week that is going to respect where you are in this phase of life, but is also going to be this self-care moment for you that is going to enable you to feel more centered for the week to come. All right, that is all I have for you today. Let me know if you have any things that you want me to touch on. I have a couple of new papers that have come out in the last little bit that I think are really helpful. I want, I'm thinking about doing like a segment on like research breakdown. Just like every six months or so, a couple of papers that have come out just to say like this is what's new and coming. Um, let me know if you would find that helpful. Otherwise, have a really wonderful week, everyone, and I will see you all next time.