If you had to choose between working harder or working smarter, which would you pick? If you’re a busy, tired, hardly-sleeping parent, we’re betting smarter. There’s good news for you! “Research from my NeuroFit lab shows that short five-minute movement breaks help you stay focused and remember more,” says Dr. Jennifer Heisz, author of Move The Body, Heal The Mind. This means that even though mom-brain is very, very real, little bursts of exercise will help lift that fog. What’s more, Dr. Heisz adds, “During the first 10 minutes of movement there is an increase in oxygenated blood flow to the brain, especially to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which governs our working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control.”
Whether it’s five minutes or thirty, giving yourself easy ways to keep active will have lasting benefits way beyond simply burning calories. We’ve tested a variety of short, simplified workouts geared at busy parents, all of them at or around just 15 minutes long. Read on to get moving.
The NeuroFix Workout
We love this one because although it is high-intensity, it requires no equipment or devices. Do it several times and you'll have a 15-minute (or so) routine you can take anywhere.
Jumping Jacks for 30 seconds
Mountain Climbers for 30 seconds
Skaters for 30 seconds
High Knees for 30 seconds
Repeat
Where to find it: Pre-order Move the Body, Heal the Mind here.
Mom on the Go offers seven, short, thematic yoga practices designed to energize your body. Follow the 28-day program for postpartum recovery including pelvic and core exercises, or just pop in and do a reinvigoration yoga session.
This fat-blasting workout plan is as effective as most longer workout sessions and combines two proven fat-loss techniques— metabolic strength and Tabata training. You'll work every muscle in your body (especially your abs!) in a fraction of the time!
As it turns out, the zillion walks you’ve taken over the pandemic period are good for more than just you. New research from the University of Virginia Health System found that maternal exercise during pregnancy may reduce the child’s risk of developing metabolic disease later in life.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, looked at the effects of exercise on pregnant lab mice. The results showed an increase in exercise in obese pregnant mice could prevent the transmission of some metabolic diseases.
While this study didn’t include human mothers or their children, the researchers believe the exercise-related reduction in metabolic diseases (such as diabetes) in lab mice may extend to people. Zhen Yan, PhD, a top exercise expert at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and study researcher said, “Most of the chronic diseases that we talk about today are known to have a fetal origin. This is to say that the parents’ poor health conditions prior to and during pregnancy have negative consequences to the child, potentially through chemical modification of the genes.”
Yan continued, “We were inspired by our previous mouse research implicating that regular aerobic exercise for an obese mother before and during pregnancy can protect the child from early onset of diabetes. In this study, we asked the questions, what if an obese mother exercises only during pregnancy, and what if the father is obese?”
The researchers fed some of the mice (both mothers and fathers) in their study a high-fat/high-calorie diet prior to mating. The rest of the mice were fed more nutritious mouse fare. Some of the high-fat/high-calorie diet pregnant mother mice had access to a running wheel—and some didn’t.
Children born to the obese sedentary mother and father mice were more likely to develop high blood sugar or other metabolic issues as adults. Of the results, Yan said, “The take-home message is that it is not too late to start to exercise if a mother finds herself pregnant. Regular exercise will not only benefit the pregnancy and labor but also the health of the baby for the long run.”
The researcher continued, “This is more exciting evidence that regular exercise is probably the most promising intervention that will help us deter the pandemic of chronic diseases in the aging world, as it can disrupt the vicious cycle of parents-to-child transmission of diseases.”
Do you feel like you’ve aged overnight since having children? That feeling may not be just in your head. A new study led by Penn State researchers found that the number of times a person gives birth may also affect the body’s aging process.
Researchers examined several different measures that represent how a person’s body is aging and found that people who had few births or many seemed to have aged quicker than those who had given birth three or four times. However, these effects were found only after a person had gone through menopause.
“Our findings suggest that pregnancy and birth may contribute to the changing and dysregulation of several different physiological systems that may affect aging once a person is post-menopause,” said Talia Shirazi, a doctoral candidate in biological anthropology at Penn State. “This is consistent with the metabolic, immunological, and endocrinological changes that occur in the body during pregnancy and lactation, as well as the various disease risks that are associated with pregnancy and reproductive investment more generally.”
Pregnancy and breastfeeding use a large amount of the body’s energy and can affect many of its systems, including immune function, metabolism, and blood pressure, among others. Additionally, people who have given birth are more likely to die from diabetes, kidney disease and hypertension, among other conditions, than those who have not.
The researchers were curious about how the body balances these “costs of reproduction” and whether it affects how the body ages.
“We think there’s something going on, some sort of trade-off, between aging and reproduction,” Shirazi said. “This makes sense from an evolutionary biology point of view, because if you’re spending energy in pregnancy and breastfeeding, you probably don’t have as much energy to allocate towards things like physiological maintenance and defense.”
For the study, the researchers used data on 4418 participants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Data included information about reproductive health including the number of live births and whether they had gone through menopause or not. They measured biological aging in several ways based on nine biomarkers designed to assess metabolic health, kidney and liver function, anemia and red blood cell disorders, immune function and inflammation.
“We wanted to look at measures that would help capture the age and functioning of the body’s major organ systems, instead of looking at aging at the cellular level,” said Waylon Hastings, postdoctoral researcher at Penn State. “When we think about pregnancy, we don’t think about changes to individual cells but instead about how the immune system or metabolism changes, for example.”
The researchers found a “U-shaped relationship” between the number of live births and accelerated biological aging. Those reporting zero or few live births, or reporting many live births, had markers of quicker biological aging than those who reported three or four live births. This was true even when controlling for chronological age, lifestyle and other health related and demographic factors.
Shirazi said that because the data was taken at one point in time, it’s not currently possible to know what caused these associations. But she said one possible explanation for the findings recently published in Scientific Reports is the presence, or lack, of ovarian hormones in post-menopausal people.
“Previous research has found that generally, ovarian hormones are protective against some cellular level processes that might accelerate aging,” Shirazi said. “So it’s possible that in pre-menopausal women the effect of hormones are buffering the potential negative effect of pregnancy and reproduction on biological age acceleration. And then perhaps when the hormones are gone, the effects can show themselves.”
Hastings said the study also suggests that additional research can be done to understand the processes that may be involved in the connection between aging and having children, as well as how these processes work over time.
“This transition into menopause, and female reproductive health in general, is very much under researched and not as well understood as it should be at this time,” Hastings said. “So if we can see that there are these changes in aging as a function of reproduction and menopause, and we don’t have a great explanation for why, then that’s a sign we should investigate this more.”
The study published in Science Advances was looking to measure the maximum human energy expenditure and found that endurance athletes competing in long-distance events like Tour de France and Iron Man generally peak at an energy expenditure level of 2.5 BMR. In other words the burn calories at an average rate of 2.5 times their resting metabolic rate. What researchers found surprising about this is the fact that pregnant women expend nearly the same amount of energy, with an average of 2.2 BMR, according to CTVNews.
What the study ultimately proved was the limit of what is possible for humans and being pregnant is pretty close to reaching that limit, Herman Pontzer, study co-author and associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University explained to CTVNews.
“I think we all have the potential—but how do we reach it? With pregnancy your body takes over and you have no control over it,” he said. “Every mother who has gone through a pregnancy has experienced that effort themselves.”
The study, which used mice as models of the body’s behavior, looked at the effects of physical activity on obese and non-obese mothers. More specifically, the researchers explored how obesity and exercises affected placental function during pregnancy and the birth size of the infant mice.
Two groups of pregnant mice were fed different diets—one high-fat and one low-fat. The two groups were divided again, making a total of four groups. Subgroups (two for each of the main groups) were split into mice that exercised and mice that didn’t exercise.
What did the researchers find? Exercise during pregnancy improved placental function and reduced the risk of larger babies at birth. Even though this specific study used mice, the results may also apply to humans. According to senior study author, Professor Min Du, “Understanding how maternal exercise might help prevent offspring from becoming obese or developing metabolic diseases will help us best guide mothers so they can ensure their babies are as healthy as possible.”
You might FEEL like you’re running yourself into an early grave, but new research from Simon Fraser University in BC suggests that moms that have multiple children have healthier DNA. The study conducted surveyed 75 women from two rural communities in Guatemala. Their telomere lengths were measured through cheek and saliva swabs taken twice 13 years apart. What the heck are telomeres, you may ask? Well, a telomere is a repeating DNA sequence (for example, TTAGGG) at the end of our chromosomes. As we age, and our cells divide, the ends of our telemeres shorten.
The research suggested that women who had multiple children showed a slower pace of telomere shortening, which increases longevity. The study leader Pablo Nepomnaschy, a health sciences professor from Simon Fraser, has a theory: “the slower pace of telomere shortening found in the study participants who have more children may be attributed to the dramatic increase in estrogen, a hormone produced during pregnancy. Estrogen functions as a potent antioxidant that protects cells against telomere shortening.”
Professor Nepomnaschy also suggests that a supportive environment, meaning encouragement and assistance from family members and friends, may contribute to the moms longevity. “Greater support leads to an increase in the amount of metabolic energy that can be allocated to tissue maintenance, thereby slowing down the process of aging.”
All that to say: go make more babies (apparently).