Episode 8
Revolutionizing Motherhood: Holistic Fitness for Women with Rachel Welch
As a gift to our listeners, Revolution Motherhood is offering 3 months free with the code RMMAMA at https://www.revolutionmotherhood.com
Rachel Welch, founder of Revolution Motherhood, emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to fitness and wellness that specifically addresses the unique physiological changes women experience from prenatal to postnatal stages. She critiques traditional fitness programs for being male-centric and highlights the emotional and physical challenges that new mothers face, particularly during postpartum recovery. Rachel offers practical advice on integrating mindful movements and utilizing tools like soft foam rollers to support healing and rejuvenation. She encourages women to embrace their emotions and prioritize self-education as a means to foster lifelong well-being. The conversation also explores the significance of holding values closely while remaining flexible in expectations, ultimately aiming to empower women throughout their motherhood journey.
Rachel Welch's insights into the intersection of motherhood and wellness challenge conventional fitness paradigms, advocating for a radical rethinking of how women approach their physical health. As the founder of Revolution Motherhood, she addresses the critical gaps in the fitness industry, particularly the overwhelming male-centric methodologies that often leave women feeling unsupported. Through her personal experiences, Rachel illustrates the complexities that arise during pregnancy and postpartum, highlighting the emotional and physical challenges that are frequently ignored. She emphasizes the need for a supportive, holistic framework that respects women's unique physiological experiences and empowers them to take charge of their health and wellness journeys.
The dialogue navigates the emotional landscape of new motherhood, where Rachel provides actionable strategies for integrating physical activity into daily life. She discusses the significance of mindfulness and gentle movement, encouraging mothers to tune into their bodies and respond to their needs. Practical advice, such as using soft foam rollers to relieve tension and reconnect with core muscles, underscores the message that fitness should be a nurturing and adaptive practice rather than a punitive one. Rachel's approach is rooted in compassion and understanding, promoting the idea that self-care is not only vital for physical recovery but also crucial for mental and emotional well-being. By addressing common misconceptions and societal pressures, she aims to redefine how women perceive themselves post-birth and throughout their lives.
Ultimately, Rachel's perspective positions motherhood as a transformative journey that offers profound opportunities for growth and self-discovery. She advocates for a narrative that celebrates the resilience and strength of women, encouraging them to embrace their multifaceted identities. By fostering a community of support and education, Rachel empowers women to rewrite the stories they inherited and to cultivate a life that is vibrant and fulfilling. This episode serves as both a guide and an inspiration for women seeking to navigate the complexities of motherhood while prioritizing their own health and happiness.
Takeaways:
- Rachel Welch emphasizes the need for fitness programs to be tailored specifically to women's unique physiological changes throughout different life stages.
- Traditional fitness methodologies have often overlooked women's specific needs, focusing instead on male-centric paradigms.
- Listening to your body during postpartum recovery is crucial for emotional and physical healing.
- Motherhood presents a significant opportunity for personal growth, impacting emotional resilience and strength.
- Integrating holistic wellness practices can help new moms navigate the complexities of postpartum recovery.
- Mindfulness and gentle movement, such as using a soft foam roller, can support healing and promote well-being.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Revolution Motherhood
Transcript
Hello.
Speaker B:I'm so glad you're here today.
Speaker B:If you don't mind, could you introduce yourself and give a little bit of a backstory?
Rachel Welch:Absolutely.
Rachel Welch:I am Rachel Welch.
Rachel Welch:I am the founder of Revolution Motherhood, which is an industry disrupting fitness and lifestyle methodology for women.
Rachel Welch:Really about educating you about how your body works so that you have the tools and capacity to thrive in your woman's body over every life event and chapter, from prenatal to postnatal perimenopause, and hopefully well into your eighties and nineties.
Speaker B:That's incredible.
Speaker B:That is disruptive.
Speaker B:Like you talked about in our interview, most of what you trained in, as you found out, was very male centric.
Rachel Welch:Yes.
Rachel Welch:The kind of little known secret.
Rachel Welch:And it's been the blind spot of most, I would say, of the fitness industry and instructors, even people who have created all of the pre and postnatal apps and fitness methodology, is that it's coming from a male paradigm.
Rachel Welch:All of the modern day fitness styles and modalities, from yoga to pilates to lifting to even sports training, they were designed by men, for men's bodies, and then superimposed on a woman's body.
Rachel Welch:And when I became a mom and discovered that truth, just very personally in my own body, that there was no language, there was no preparation.
Rachel Welch:My oldest daughter's 13 years old, and that was when I really, my eyes were open.
Rachel Welch:And 13 years ago, diastasis recti wasn't even a spoken term, let alone deep core and pelvic floor, nobody was talking about any of that.
Rachel Welch:And so I stumbled into the world of postpartum and going into my own recovery, and suddenly realized I know so much about the human body, about physiology, about fitness, about eastern medicine, and I have no idea what just happened to my body.
Rachel Welch:And that lit the fire inside of me, because we have, I just really saw how much these industries, the industries I was devoted to and a part of, were failing women.
Rachel Welch:And thats when my eyes really opened to the fact that nobody had educated me, nobody had invested their time and energy in understanding a womans functional body, let alone their muscles, and how their muscles function and change and need different kinds of cross training over different life events in different decades.
Rachel Welch:Unique to a woman's body is that we go through maybe six iterations in a lifetime, right?
Rachel Welch:Men's bodies just don't go through that many changes.
Rachel Welch:They go through puberty, they live, and then they get old.
Rachel Welch:I talk about this with my husband, joke about it, but a woman's body is like, we go through puberty we go through our twenties, which is really biologically like height of our childbearing years, but most of us are living our twenties, not getting into having babies yet.
Rachel Welch:We get into preconception and we really start thinking about, what is this going to do to my body?
Rachel Welch:And increasingly, thankfully, women are starting to think about that.
Rachel Welch:There is that conversation occurring, but what is happening now is that there's so much coming at you all the time, and everybody is so sure they have the answers.
Rachel Welch:And oftentimes it's really conflicting information.
Rachel Welch:And it's presented in this should and shouldn't item, black and white sort of idealism about how your body is and is not.
Rachel Welch:And a lot of that messaging now is, it's very compartmentalized.
Rachel Welch:It's like you are prenatal, so you do this, you don't do anything else.
Rachel Welch:You are postpartum, you do this, you do nothing else.
Rachel Welch:And nobody's really talking about the idea that you are in one body over a lifetime, and how do you embody yourself over that lifetime and understand the changes that are occurring to you so we can disrupt those fear cycles, right?
Rachel Welch:We don't need to be afraid of our body.
Rachel Welch:We don't need to be afraid of the changes.
Rachel Welch:If you understand how your body works, you're in the driver's seat to really navigate your healthy, thriving life for the whole arc of it.
Speaker B:It's bizarre how I think about yoga as some feminine thing.
Speaker B:When it is, it's all men who created it.
Speaker B:So that must have completely rocked your world.
Rachel Welch:It did.
Rachel Welch:And it was like, it was confusing because I was in it and I was like, I don't understand why.
Rachel Welch:I don't understand.
Rachel Welch:And also coming at it in those early days of pardon for my first baby, I was a new mom.
Rachel Welch:I'd just given birth, and from the outside, I'm an athlete.
Rachel Welch:From the outside, I looked like the bounce back mom, zipping up my pants and one for a walk.
Rachel Welch:And I was trying to do everything right.
Rachel Welch:I was being told, like, don't move for six weeks.
Rachel Welch:And I was like, oh, okay, I won't move for six weeks.
Rachel Welch:And I still remember what day it was.
Rachel Welch:By day twelve, postpartum, I was desperate to move my body.
Rachel Welch:I was so sore.
Rachel Welch:We all know.
Rachel Welch:Everybody who's given birth knows, like, two weeks in, your shoulders are rocks, you haven't slept, your back is killing you.
Rachel Welch:You have gone through the athleticism of delivering the baby, which is like multi marathons stacked on top of each other, and then you are showing up and momming a newborn, which is so physically demanding, and then to be told you can't do anything for your body.
Rachel Welch:Don't touch your body for six weeks.
Rachel Welch:And my husband actually just asked me the other day, he's like, why is it six weeks?
Rachel Welch:And I had to think about it.
Rachel Welch:I had to stop and think, like, why would they give it a six week time stamp?
Rachel Welch:And I was like, I bet you anything.
Rachel Welch:I have not checked this, but I bet you anything it is because the insurance companies decided that's how many appointments they would pay for.
Rachel Welch:Like, you are, you can go and see your doctor after six weeks because you are generally, women have stopped bleeding at that point.
Rachel Welch:If it was a vaginal birth.
Rachel Welch:Cesarean is a little different.
Rachel Welch:You get more checkups.
Rachel Welch:But appropriately, with cesarean, you actually don't start moving.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:Until you can actually stand up and walk around again.
Rachel Welch:That's surgical recovery from a vaginal birth recovery.
Rachel Welch:It's like, generally women have stopped bleeding around six weeks.
Rachel Welch:They're like, okay, you get one checkup appointment, one follow up.
Rachel Welch:So we're gonna say it's at six weeks.
Rachel Welch:So before your doctor looks at you, don't do anything.
Rachel Welch:And I'm like, okay.
Rachel Welch:There's a difference between going out and going for a run four weeks after you give birth versus making your achy muscles feel better and helping your body seal and acclimate and reduce the stress and tension that comes with those early weeks of postpartum.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:Those are really two different messages.
Rachel Welch:And one is really fear based and restrictive and full of do's and don'ts, and one is listening to your body.
Rachel Welch:How do you feel?
Rachel Welch:Do you feel like you need to move because your body hurts?
Rachel Welch:Let's put you on a soft foam roller and roll out your neck and roll out your butt and make your feet feel good on a little squishy ball.
Rachel Welch:And let's do some breath work and start to just bring your central body back into life because you just gave birth and it is completely checked out.
Rachel Welch:It was like, just start breathing down there and start re embodying the space that has been massively transformed because you just delivered a baby.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:And through those acts, we're doing two things.
Rachel Welch:We're starting to embody ourselves.
Rachel Welch:We're getting to know ourselves in those early days.
Rachel Welch:There's so much emotional, psychological transformation occurring as well, and hormonal transformation.
Rachel Welch:And all of that is commingling on a physical landscape.
Rachel Welch:So if we can use our body as the gateway to beginning to incorporate all of these different facets of motherhood that are cracked open when you give birth.
Rachel Welch:At the same time that you are supporting your body's organic and natural healing.
Rachel Welch:We're building confidence in women.
Rachel Welch:We're teaching them everything's okay.
Rachel Welch:We're teaching them to come back to their bodies for those check in reality moments, like, you're going to be bombarded with information, you're going to be bombarded with advice for your entire rest of your life.
Rachel Welch:Right?
Rachel Welch:Do.
Rachel Welch:And don't do this with the baby for the rest of your life.
Rachel Welch:You're going to be getting those messages all the time, and you're going to need.
Rachel Welch:I call it, like, litmus testing.
Rachel Welch:You're going to need to be able to Litmus test that information and find out what's right for you, what resonates for you, what is correct for you and your family.
Rachel Welch:And that happens because you know yourself, and you know yourself because your body is the gateway to that knowing.
Speaker B:And if you had a traumatic childbirth experience, it seems like it could be even more important somehow to immediately checking in with yourself through the gate of healing physically.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:We all go through the unexpected in our childbirths.
Rachel Welch:Right?
Rachel Welch:And I say this to be NATO moms all the time hold your values closely and your expectations lightly.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:So creating a plan, and then we get into childbirth, and I.
Rachel Welch:All of the unexpected is going to occur, and so you're prepared, and then you go into it, and you go with what is.
Rachel Welch:And sometimes it is really traumatic, both from the medical perspective of what they've done to you without consent, a lot of times.
Rachel Welch:And equally, the act of childbirth is big.
Rachel Welch:You're holding life, and, like, saving mom's life, saving babies lives can be traumatic if things are going south quickly, which they do.
Rachel Welch:And there's already an enormous amount of our own family of origin stories and history that come up for us as moms.
Rachel Welch:When we're holding our newborn and we're looking at, oh, my God, now I'm doing it.
Rachel Welch:All of our own garbage comes up.
Rachel Welch:We have our hormonal changes that are just like, we're crying and we're laughing at the same time for weeks.
Rachel Welch:We're exhausted.
Rachel Welch:Our entire beings have been cracked open by this little person that now owns us, heart and soul.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:And then on top of that, to experience really hard truths that might have gone down while you were delivering, um, and starting to process that it doesn't happen in one day.
Rachel Welch:Like, it's.
Rachel Welch:It is a process.
Rachel Welch:It's called processing for a reason.
Rachel Welch:It takes time.
Rachel Welch:And in the act of your body healing.
Rachel Welch:And in the act of tending to yourself and paying attention to yourself, there is a natural processing that can occur.
Rachel Welch:Feeling can come out.
Rachel Welch:You can cry when you need to cry, and it doesn't get bottled up and turn into, like, massive anxiety, massive postpartum depression.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:Those are real conditions that, thankfully, the world is starting to talk about more and pay attention to.
Rachel Welch:They all of those very real conditions are a conglomerate of different aspects of self.
Rachel Welch:One of the major ones is your physical body.
Rachel Welch:And while there are chemical changes where you know that I never judge anybody's level of intervention needed when it comes to their emotional, psychological health, same with their physical health.
Rachel Welch:They get surgery or don't like.
Rachel Welch:I never judge any of that.
Rachel Welch:What you are left with, though, are facets of yourself that need to be reintegrated and healed and knit together and created as a whole again.
Rachel Welch:And almost every aspect of your health will be improved because you're moving your body every day.
Speaker B:So you talk about how motherhood is potentially one of the biggest opportunities for growth in a woman's life.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:So on two fronts.
Rachel Welch:One is, I'll start from my personal experience, one which was when I became a mother for the first time, and I'm holding my baby and I'm looking at her.
Rachel Welch:It was like all of these hindbrain aspects of who I was and who I imagined I was were suddenly alive.
Rachel Welch:I was like, oh, this is who I am.
Rachel Welch:Like, this is what I am.
Rachel Welch:It's just like it was who I was lit up.
Rachel Welch:And all of these qualities of courage and love and resilience and strength and softness were really born in me at the same time that I became a mom.
Rachel Welch:And I think that some version of what I just described is true.
Rachel Welch:For every woman you become a mom, there is a massive self awakening.
Rachel Welch:And if that can be held and embodied with a lot of space and a lot of compassion and a lot of love, you are able to bring those aspects of yourself that previously had been maybe a little bit asleep, a little bit over here on the right side, like in the blind spot, but you're aware of it, bringing all of that to the forefront and letting it feed your purpose on this planet in this lifetime.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:There is incredible force and strength in a mom really unique to the animal of the mother.
Rachel Welch:And I.
Rachel Welch:If you can see the transformation that has occurred in your body and the kind of the slate getting wiped clean that is your physical body, very few people get their body driven to zero and get an opportunity to rebuild it from the ground up.
Rachel Welch:So that's what childbirth does.
Rachel Welch:You grow, you deliver, you're injured, you've got stuff going on, and you're going to rebuild this magnificent body from the ground up, from the inside out of.
Rachel Welch:And in the act of doing that, you are simultaneously supporting and seeding and bringing to life, like cultivating and incubating all those parts of motherhood and self that were born when you became a mom as well.
Rachel Welch:You get really embodied, and it's an incredibly magical kind of formula that all of the strength of your ability to multitask, your ability to, like, anticipate needs, your ability to run on really little sleep for a long time, your ability to do so much is not turned into, like, an overwhelming self depleting, like, fork in the road.
Rachel Welch:This is my path to decline physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Rachel Welch:My job is done.
Rachel Welch:My body's done.
Rachel Welch:I'm going to become a shrumpy old mom, right?
Rachel Welch:That's one version of things that one societal story we've all lived into.
Rachel Welch:The other one is like a new road.
Rachel Welch:It's a new story, it's a new narrative.
Rachel Welch:And that is one where motherhood is the opportunity of your lifetime to live in your body better than you ever have before.
Rachel Welch:Because you are mature, you're disciplined, you have the ability to pay attention to detail in yourself that you previously were unequal to.
Rachel Welch:It is in that act of paying attention to yourself in detail that you are disciplining your mom mind, which goes crazy.
Rachel Welch:We all know the crazy mom mind, right?
Rachel Welch:You're disciplining your attention and your thinking, and you're understanding how your body works in a way that is going to support you staying active and thriving, really, until your last breath.
Rachel Welch:Right?
Rachel Welch:And that's my goal for all women, is that not getting through motherhood, doing okay, working out, we're okay.
Rachel Welch:Little injuries start to happen, and then we run up into the wall of our late forties and fifties, and the transformations that occur with perimenopause and menopause become that next fork in the road where we lose bone mass.
Rachel Welch:We're unable to work out because our muscle mass is deteriorating, our hormones are changing, and we're feeling like we're insane again.
Rachel Welch:That's where motherhood, that moment is like, such a preparatory opportunity, not just for your physical longevity, but for your mental, emotional longevity.
Speaker B:You just keep blowing my mind.
Speaker B:We are not taught this.
Rachel Welch:No, we're not.
Rachel Welch:And that's.
Rachel Welch:I have, and that's so much of where I come from, is I'm in the task of educating and community building so that we can keep educating each other.
Rachel Welch:Because what we're rewriting and redesigning, especially in Revolution motherhood and in this mission, is we're redesigning the narrative that women are living by, that expectations about what our lives can and cannot be that are not our own.
Rachel Welch:We've inherited them from generations before us, from society's imprints on us now.
Rachel Welch:And tightening our awareness and questioning that is really essential.
Rachel Welch:I've been working more and more with some brand new moms.
Rachel Welch:They're like some moms in their twenties, and my daughters are 13 and eight now, so I'm not in my twenties anymore.
Rachel Welch:And for me to hang out with a 23 year old new mom and start asking her about her body and she's, I'm fine.
Rachel Welch:I'm fine.
Rachel Welch:I'm really.
Rachel Welch:I'm just fine.
Rachel Welch:I guess my back hurts a little bit.
Rachel Welch:Like, we're just indoctrinated into overriding our body messages to coping.
Rachel Welch:Unless it's a screaming situation in the body where we need medical intervention.
Rachel Welch:But if there's nothing that, like, an outside force can do for us, we don't even talk about it.
Rachel Welch:We don't even look at it.
Rachel Welch:We just override it and keep going.
Rachel Welch:And it just takes five minutes of me asking, show me how you're breathing.
Rachel Welch:Show me.
Rachel Welch:Let me see how your core is turning on.
Rachel Welch:I did this a couple weeks ago.
Rachel Welch:A mom gave birth to her second baby.
Rachel Welch:She's like 25.
Rachel Welch:I'm on a zoom with her, and I'm looking at her belly, and she's like, I don't know.
Rachel Welch:It's just not.
Rachel Welch:It doesn't feel like it's coming in.
Rachel Welch:And I'm like, it's not.
Rachel Welch:I was like, let's just change the way you're breathing.
Rachel Welch:There's, like, subtle little differences of how we engage our muscles, how we engage with our body.
Rachel Welch:It's not just go back to the gym.
Rachel Welch:It's you need to turn certain muscles on.
Rachel Welch:But if you don't even know to ask that question, the possibility is lost.
Rachel Welch:Like, you don't know what you don't know.
Rachel Welch:And that's what I'm running into with women is, like, especially newer moms right now.
Rachel Welch:They're getting all of this social media information about, pay attention to your pelvic floor.
Rachel Welch:You have to rehabilitate first after you give birth.
Rachel Welch:Then you can work out again.
Rachel Welch:All of those are appropriate messages, but how and who do you go to?
Rachel Welch:And the bottom line is, I want you to go to whoever lights you up.
Rachel Welch:You have a favorite yoga teacher.
Rachel Welch:Go get into that yoga class and light up.
Rachel Welch:But I want you to know what you're doing so that you can do that, so that you can enjoy the activities of your life that bring you joy, whether that's chasing your kids around on the playground or being a travel and everything in between, that you can really enjoy the physicality of your life.
Rachel Welch:And so for me, right now, it's really like lighting the megaphone and saying to women, nobody taught you how to work out.
Rachel Welch:I guarantee that nobody taught you what your muscles do, what their original function is like, why they lay in the places they lay in your body, the changes that occur to your body when you become pregnant and become a mom.
Rachel Welch:You lose your pec muscles.
Rachel Welch:Your boobs hijack your pec.
Rachel Welch:Equally early motherhood hijacks your back muscles, which are the other half of your pecs.
Rachel Welch:So you are constantly in a crunched over position like this, which is pressing down on your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor.
Rachel Welch:So it's not about just, let's get into the pelvic floor.
Rachel Welch:It's about how do we build the system as an integrated body that can move and live and be free and be whole.
Rachel Welch:So that takes some muscle isolation, it takes some mental education, meaning we're going to teach your brain to turn on the correct muscles we're thinking about.
Rachel Welch:And then once we get that track work laid, we strengthen, and once it's strengthened, we integrate it.
Rachel Welch:And so I give moms like, mindfulness homework all the time.
Rachel Welch:How are you bending over the crib?
Rachel Welch:How are you pushing the stroller?
Rachel Welch:How are you breastfeeding?
Rachel Welch:How are you bottle feeding?
Rachel Welch:What are the positions you're in?
Rachel Welch:Let's give you some subtle adjustment so that you're moving in rehabilitative directions rather than reinforcing compensation patterns that are creating pain in your body.
Speaker B:I have twinsd.
Rachel Welch:And how old are they?
Speaker B:17 months.
Speaker B:I had a c section.
Speaker B:I'm just giving you all the information.
Speaker B:They were premature, that's all I'll say.
Rachel Welch:Yeah, yeah, you get it.
Speaker B:Probably just front.
Speaker B:I do, but I have lower back pain.
Speaker B:And I've been just saying, oh, it's cause I haven't reengaged my fore yet because the c section.
Speaker B:And I just keep saying that to myself instead of really, really actually figuring out how to because I don't know.
Speaker B:I don't know.
Rachel Welch:Yeah, it's like I'm in pain, but I don't know if it's something I could change or if I get in there and I try to change it, I might find something bigger than I can handle.
Rachel Welch:That's another one that I get a lot.
Rachel Welch:It's genuinely scary to take the lid off the can of worms of your body and be like, all right, I'm going to get really real with this and find out what's going on.
Rachel Welch:And that means you're going to feel the stuff physically and emotionally and mentally, that needs your attention.
Rachel Welch:And it can get messy, and it can get inconvenient for a minute.
Rachel Welch:But also what I tell everybody, and I have to tell myself this all the time.
Rachel Welch:Feelings are not the wheels coming off.
Rachel Welch:The wheels coming off are when you try not to feel.
Rachel Welch:And that's when the wheels fall off of your life.
Rachel Welch:That's not the human condition, and it's not what we were designed to be.
Rachel Welch:And there's nothing more coupled of emotional and physical than motherhood.
Rachel Welch:Like, you need to feel your feelings and just let them out.
Rachel Welch:I tell people all the time, like, I cry every time I get on my mat, even just for a second.
Rachel Welch:I'm just like.
Rachel Welch:I feel a wave of sadness and it comes into me and I'm just like, God damn, that was a hard week.
Rachel Welch:And I just needed to cry for a second because it was really stressful.
Rachel Welch:And I got through it and I held it together.
Rachel Welch:There's nothing wrong.
Rachel Welch:There's nothing that needs to be processed.
Rachel Welch:That was just a really stressful week, and I need to cry for a second because it was really hard.
Rachel Welch:And damn it, I'm glad it's over.
Rachel Welch:And now here we go.
Rachel Welch:Now we're picking it up and going forward.
Speaker B:That's so healthy.
Rachel Welch:Yeah, it's just.
Rachel Welch:Okay, that was hard.
Rachel Welch:I just need to cry for a second, and then I need to laugh, and then I'm going to look at my kids and I'm going to remember all this stuff that's awesome about my life.
Rachel Welch:And because I'm sad doesn't mean I don't appreciate it.
Rachel Welch:It means I'm human.
Rachel Welch:As mom, you're no longer just one thing.
Rachel Welch:Like, you're everything all the time.
Speaker B:Oh, my God.
Speaker B:I feel like that's like the thesis statement of my life and.
Speaker B:Yeah, like everything that we've been talking about.
Speaker B:That's beautiful.
Rachel Welch:Yeah, I used to joke, actually, I don't say this very often anymore because most people don't really get it, but I'll say it here.
Rachel Welch:The yoga.
Rachel Welch:Sorry.
Rachel Welch:I was a yoga teacher before shiatsu and yoga were my first modalities.
Rachel Welch:And in the yoga or in the hindu pantheon, all of their deities.
Rachel Welch:I think every woman, like, every goddess representation has way more than two arms and often more than one head.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:But it's like, when I became a mom, women's like, I get it.
Rachel Welch:Yes.
Rachel Welch:Women have ten arms.
Rachel Welch:We grow ten arms.
Rachel Welch:Yes.
Rachel Welch:And nobody else done that anyway.
Rachel Welch:That's always been, like, this joke and private joke in my head.
Rachel Welch:I'm like, yes, I am.
Rachel Welch:Like, I've got the ten mom arms, and I'm doing it.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:I love that.
Speaker B:If you had to draw the image of a mother, that it's a yoga goddess.
Rachel Welch:Right?
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:I mean, what I would say about when it comes to talking about pain, talking about getting into your body, not all of the unknowns that are represented in the act of starting to do something about your body, one really normal and common that women don't often even think about doing something for their bodies until a couple years postpartum.
Rachel Welch:It's not the norm that women are like, four weeks postpartum, bam, I'm back in it.
Rachel Welch:That is one small subset.
Rachel Welch:But the norm is a couple years later, especially the twin.
Rachel Welch:Like, you are in it.
Rachel Welch:And it's not until you can actually some semblance of a schedule, some semblance of a reliable routine, some sense of, I have this day in, day out that you can even contemplate yourself, and that's normal.
Rachel Welch:And I think that a lot of times women beat themselves up for waiting two or three or five years and then suddenly being like, I missed the window.
Rachel Welch:I'm not newly postpartum anymore.
Rachel Welch:And, oh, hell no.
Rachel Welch:You've been working really hard, and now you have a little tiny bit of bandwidth, and you're putting it on yourself.
Rachel Welch:Like, high five, let's get it done.
Rachel Welch:It's a drops in the bucket, actually, of life.
Rachel Welch:Yeah, yeah.
Rachel Welch:And it goes by in a flash, and all of a sudden, you look up and you're like, oh, my God, me?
Rachel Welch:I was there, too.
Rachel Welch:I had my first, and I would stay at home with her, and I was like, it was.
Rachel Welch:My body was one thing, but my mental stimulation was what I started paying attention to at two years.
Rachel Welch:I was like, oh, my brain.
Rachel Welch:My adult brain.
Rachel Welch:What am I going to do with that now?
Rachel Welch:I'm no longer playing itsy bitsy spider on the floor.
Rachel Welch:Every day.
Rachel Welch:I need a little bit of adult time.
Speaker B:I'm getting ahead to continue being an adult.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:Like, we are starting to have more autonomy between baby, a mommy, and now how am I going to cultivate this new these new interests and cultivate my curiosity and continue to grow myself because I have a lot of life left, hopefully.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Rachel Welch:So, for you, I would say with your low back pain, the soft foam roller will be your best friend, which is.
Rachel Welch:I'll just plug revolution motherhood here for a tiny second, because it is really disruptive information.
Rachel Welch:It's a disruptive method that when you give birth and you're told, like, work out, it's not accurate because you need to cross train your body in a brand new way and cross train, and it is true for the rest of your life, you are doing a physical job that is athletic on an already compromised body.
Rachel Welch:As a new mom, that's why you hurt so much.
Rachel Welch:That's why your body's tight all the time.
Rachel Welch:So it's not just, oh, go to the gym and work out.
Rachel Welch:You need ways to alleviate the stress intention.
Rachel Welch:And that's where the soft foam roller comes in.
Rachel Welch:Because I use that, I call it ironing out your body, and I can get into all the anatomy of what it actually is doing, but I'll just call it that for now.
Rachel Welch:We're going to iron out your body so that we can gain access to muscles that we actually need to strengthen and turn off all the crazy, overcompensating muscles, like your shoulders.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:You don't have a chance of getting into your core if your back is tight and not moving.
Rachel Welch:You're going to be fighting like, an unwitting tug of war within your body.
Rachel Welch:So we use a soft foam roller and iron you out.
Rachel Welch:And it's also one of those things that at the very beginning, when you're scared to get into your body or not sure, sitting on the roller makes you feel good.
Rachel Welch:And it's this immediate moment, you're like, oh, this is what it feels like to be relaxed.
Rachel Welch:You start to remember, oh, when my nervous system isn't on high alert, oh, when it doesn't hurt to bend over and stand up again.
Rachel Welch:And then all of a sudden, you realize, oh, there are things I can do for myself that are going to really make every day easier, better, and worse than in my life.
Rachel Welch:And from there, from ironing you out, then I educate you, and I get your deep core turned on your transverse abdominals, and I teach you how your deep core relates to your pelvic floor, to the chest muscles.
Rachel Welch:I just talked about being hijacked.
Rachel Welch:I teach you how your deep core feels when it's turned on, what it feels like when you've lost it.
Rachel Welch:And I teach you how to strength train it.
Rachel Welch:And then once we have that established stability center, then we get into the external muscles of, like, your six pack, your butt, your thighs, and we just.
Rachel Welch:We can go to town.
Rachel Welch:And it's great, and it's progressive.
Rachel Welch:I never leave you in PT.
Rachel Welch:Like, you need to be strong.
Rachel Welch:So we.
Rachel Welch:We go three phases.
Rachel Welch:Like, phase one, I'm educating you, and I'm building you week over week through your body.
Rachel Welch:Phase two, I'm kicking your ass.
Rachel Welch:Phase three is your cross training boutique fitness home with yoga flows and HIIT and ab shred and full blown everything.
Rachel Welch:So.
Rachel Welch:And there's.
Rachel Welch:So there's always a place to live, right?
Rachel Welch:And there's never a, like, timeframe.
Rachel Welch:It's like, phase one's eight weeks, phase two's eight weeks.
Rachel Welch:And in almost every video, I'm like, maybe who knows how long phase one is going to be for you?
Rachel Welch:Go on to phase two and you're like, actually, I really missed those videos.
Rachel Welch:In phase one, I'm going to go back.
Rachel Welch:It's like, women's lives are not linear.
Rachel Welch:And I think the expectation that our fitness is linear is really a mind fact for us.
Rachel Welch:We have got to be able to establish the fact that we are circular beings.
Rachel Welch:And so it's never just, I did this check.
Rachel Welch:I'm moving forward.
Rachel Welch:I'm living it.
Rachel Welch:I'm a living, breathing being.
Rachel Welch:And it means I am going to cross chain myself and love myself and tend to my body in a really intelligent, loving, fun way that gets me endorphin hide.
Rachel Welch:It also teaches me how to relax and let go of a hard day.
Rachel Welch:And it does everything in between.
Speaker B:I love that.
Speaker B:I love that we're not linear.
Speaker B:Look at how we orgasm.
Speaker B:You might as well just say it.
Rachel Welch:Yes.
Speaker B:So we're different from Mendez in that way and in so many ways.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Rachel Welch:I actually just wrote a blog post on this.
Rachel Welch:I don't know if it's live yet, but I just wrote a blog post on this about the linear dad brain and the circular mom brain.
Rachel Welch:And I was like.
Rachel Welch:And as I was writing it, I was like, actually, if I could just distill down to the very basic differences between men and women is that men are linear and women are circular.
Rachel Welch:That's it.
Rachel Welch:In every facet of our lives, both the way we think, the way we feel, the way our bodies work.
Rachel Welch:And I was like, if we could all, I've been married 16 years, and my husband and I can all play with these aspects of ourselves rather than fight about them.
Rachel Welch:We can get to that place where it's like, oh, his superpower is to do a task and he, like, doesn't deviate.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:He won't see the laundry, he won't see the dishes in the sink.
Rachel Welch:He won't even realize that dinner needs to be being prepped because I told him, I asked him to do something and he's doing it.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Rachel Welch:Totally different than the way we operate, where we are holding, like, 50 balls, we're thinking about the knees, we're anticipating dinner, we're watching the clock, we're folding the laundry as we walk over to put something else away.
Rachel Welch:That's just this, like, nature of the bees.
Rachel Welch:And yet each task we're doing is a little bit diluted because we're not.
Rachel Welch:We're holding so many.
Rachel Welch:Right.
Speaker B:Doing what you are good at, or even what you enjoy more, is the way to go.
Rachel Welch:Yeah.
Speaker B:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Rachel Welch:Thank you so much.
Rachel Welch:It's been really lovely to talk to you.
Rachel Welch:And just, like, on a personal note, I know you're getting a code to the app, to the R app.
Rachel Welch:Please let me know.
Rachel Welch:I'm happy to send you an essential kit.
Rachel Welch:Get your roar and get your back feeling better.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Rachel Welch:Yes, totally, totally, totally.
Rachel Welch:And I think all your listeners get a discount code.
Rachel Welch:I think it's three months free.
Rachel Welch:Come on over.
Rachel Welch:And it really is step and pushing play and hearing words and contemplating that you can do something to make your life happier.
Rachel Welch:The biggest challenge is just getting over your thoughts and doing it.
Rachel Welch:And then the habit of pressing pray like you get excited to do it.
Rachel Welch:You're like, oh, I'm just going to go do that ten minute video.
Rachel Welch:It feels so good, but it really is about that first step of just, like, getting over your head and just being like, I'm just going to do it.
Rachel Welch:I know it's good for me.
Rachel Welch:I'm just going to do it.
