When it comes to your body and your fitness, it’s not just about how your body looks – it’s more about how your body feels and functions.
Getting my body to move more fluidly and having stability, power, and stamina definitely helps me as a surfer when I get thrashed around in the ocean, but it also helps me in the daily physical grind of motherhood and life.
Over the years, my trainer Dustin has come up with an awesome approach to my fitness that has totally revamped the way I work out. Our major focus is posture, which helps me overcome a lot of balance and symmetry issues by focusing on key principles like a strong upper body and core, better stability, agility, strength, and endurance. I’ve spent a lot of time continually realigning my spine through various methods as well.
One of the things I enjoy the most about training with Dustin is that all you really need is you and some motivation, not a ton of equipment. Instead of grabbing the weights when working out I use my own body weight as resistance. Study after study shows that body weight exercises are a quick and effective way to improve your balance, flexibility, and strength – which is basically everything I need for surf life and mom life. (I do grab some weight as well, but I’m just showing that you don’t need anything fancy to get moving!)
Here is a simple and effective exercise I want to share with you today. You can find a lot more exercises (and recipes) in the book Dustin and I worked on together, Body & Soul.
Hopping Wallabies Exercise
- Get in a low squat position and reach your arms out in front of you for balance.
- Rising up on your toes, do little jumps forward, making sure to keep your knees aligned with your hips.
- Hold your stomach in and pull your shoulders back as you jump.
- Hop as high as you can while staying in control and landing with your feet in the same position as you started.
- Repeat for 10 jumps.
