Saying my boy is active is putting it lightly. He’s twelve now and it takes all I’ve got to keep up with him. The only thing that I can really do with him now is watching him play outside or cheer for him from the sidelines.
I can’t run around and chase him, play catch with him, or even practice with him for his various sports. If I could swing a baseball bat or make a pitch without throwing my back out that would be great.
If I could run the bases of a ball diamond or make it to the safety cone endzone we constructed in our backyard without feeling like I was going to pass out my life would be infinitely more enjoyable and I think my son might actually want to spend time with me.
As it stands right now, however, he thinks I’m a bit of a bore. I’m sure he appreciates my eagerness to support him, or at least he will someday. But I want more than that. I want him to remember having fun with me, not just in front of me while I observed from a distance.
The difference between supporting your children and actively participating in their lives is a fine line. They are very similar and equally important, but often get conflated and people don’t end up doing both for their child. I want to be the parent that does it all.
I want to cheer from the crowd and be the one helping him practice in the backyard. I want to help him perfect his fastball, his swing, or anything else he might want from me. I want to show him what it looks like to live a long and healthy life by example.
I don’t want him to have to look any further than his own home for guidance on how to do this. He has his coaches, yes, but I want him to have his parents, too. He shouldn’t have to look outside his family for lessons on how to live well.
It’s not that I don’t know how to do these things either. I definitely do. I spent most of my young adult life playing softball, soccer, and tennis. I loved physical activity, but when I had my son things changed a bit.
I didn’t have the time or the energy I once did to work out or keep myself in shape. I worked to lose the baby weight, but that was about it. Once I was back down to my old shape and size I stopped and turned my focus towards other things that seemed more important at the time. I had so many projects around the house to finish with my husband that it made more sense to put work into that instead of myself.
We wanted to have the perfect home to raise our son in and this meant we needed to remodel the bathroom and the spare bedroom for when he was old enough to move out of the nursery. Without realizing it, I had set myself up for an even more difficult and arduous journey ahead.
Getting the body to be active again when it has been mildly sedentary for quite some time is difficult. Sure, I was actively remodeling the house, but that wasn’t enough to replace the workouts I used to do on a regular basis. I needed to get back into my old habits, but it had already been a few years and I felt like I had forgotten how to motivate myself.
I spoke to my husband about it and he agreed it was time for both of us to start putting some work in on ourselves and our physical health. He had been struggling with his weight, too, and it just made sense that we should start this new journey together.
We started with a gym membership. It was… fine. We used it, but we couldn’t go together. Someone always had to be home with our son or our work schedules didn’t line up, there was always a reason we couldn’t work out together and our motivation suffered for it.
So we decided that we would invest in a home gym. We bought a treadmill, a weight set and bench, and a heavy bag (my husband always had an interest in boxing). We set up everything in our garage and used it nearly every day.
We did this for a couple of months, but I was having a hard time noticing any progress and was feeling a little discouraged. My husband didn’t seem to be struggling as much as I was. When we talked about it he expressed some concerns that he wasn’t really sure what he was doing and that he worried about injuries as he started to increase his workouts and weights.
He had never worked out regularly like I had and didn’t have the experience necessary to do it on his own. I didn’t feel confident in my ability to coach him so we started looking for a personal trainer. Someone to help us push ourselves harder and more effectively. We weren’t sure how it would work having a personal trainer and a home gym, but we figured someone must be out there making house calls.
Turns out the pandemic changed things quite dramatically in the fitness industry. While there were personal trainers still willing to come to our home with the necessary precautions, they charged at least $100 more for their services outside of the gym.
We were on a pretty tight budget now because of the remodeling in the home and our more extravagant purchases for our garage gym, but we weren’t ready to give up on the idea of a personal trainer completely yet.
We did a little more research and eventually came across trainwell. It promised full nutritional and physical training for a fraction of the cost of some of the other services we had been looking at. Best thing about it… We could do everything from the comfort of our home by using our smart devices.
I had an Apple watch already, too, so we were able to take advantage of all the perks and benefits of the app (even though it works without an Apple Watch). It tracked our movements and helped correct our form - so my husband’s concern about injuries was handled.
We met with the trainer daily and discussed our goals and fears so motivation wasn’t an issue either. The workouts were personalized to fit our needs and we were even able to get our son to join in on the fun from time to time.
We’ve been working with trainwell for about a year and I feel more confident than ever that we are setting our son up for a better future. Our son enjoys working out with us! Running in the yard, playing tag, practicing his pitching and batting, we can do all of these things with him now. I know this is the path we need to stay on in order to be engaged in our son’s life.
It’s so exciting to think about our future now, it doesn’t fill me with the same dread and concern it once did. I feel like we could have spent years struggling by ourselves to get into shape with little to nothing to show for it, but with trainwell by our side, we were able to cut that time and struggle in half. I’m not sure where we would be physically if not for this app. I deeply appreciate the second lease on life and I know my son does, too.
The story of trainwell member Jesse T.
