In my first pregnancy I gained 28kg weight and had an abdominal muscle separation of 8cm. In my 2nd pregnancy I gained a bit less, 17kg. I lost most of the pregnancy weight, but just could not get rid of those last 6kg. No doubt, my body looked and felt a lot different after having the kids, than it did before. Well, a lot of people kept saying “oh, that is just the way it is, once you have children, it all changes, you just have the body of a mother now”. I lived in this belief for a while, I was happy being a mother, but unhappy looking into the mirror or even worse, going shopping for clothes. Nothing quite fit.

In order to loose weight after every pregnancy I bought myself a gym membership, paid a little fortune each month, but did not make it to the gym most of the times for various reasons. Either I was too sleep deprived to even put on some gym clothes, or I did not have someone to look after the kids in this time. Breastfeeding and sport did not fit well together either for me, as my full milk breasts were just too uncomfortable to do much exercise with them.

One day I was surfing through the internet and on one of those social networking websites I came across an advertisement for “weight loss through vibration training”. The vibration training machine shown in the advertisement looked just like an exercise machine my father brought home half a year earlier when nobody was quite sure what it was for as he lost the instructions. I was so excited when I found out that this machine can do a lot more than circulate your blood in your feet

I went back on the internet and researched all sorts of vibration training exercises and even made them up myself. When I started my pregnancy weight loss exercises on my vibration machine, it felt a bit weired as your body needs to get used to the strong vibrations. It feels a bit like a thousand ants in your feet But that goes away pretty quickly.

I found that the most effective way to train on the vibration machine is to bring your body in a certain position, tense the muscle you want to work on and hold that tension for a certain time. That’s all you do. Please, don’t get me wrong, it is quite intense to hold that tension, you will go to your limit. To start with, 10 seconds might be already enough per muscle. But session by session you will improve that.

So one session is about 10 to 15 minutes long and I do all sorts of vibration training exercises like:

standing on the plate with knees bend and thighs and buttocks tensed, or sitting on the plate in a sit-up position with your abs tensed. It is amazing, how my abdominal muscles have recovered from the pregnancy using my vibration training machine. Recently I started to use a stretch band for my bottom muscles, which works fantastic.

In my next post I will write more detailed vibration training exercises for pregnancy weight loss

As I am a tennis instructor (I did not teach for a while because I was far to busy with bringing up the kids) I recently started to make a little tennis class for my 4 year old daughter and her 2 best friends. She was very excited to go to go to “real tennis training” and even more excited that her friends could come too and share the fun. My 2 year old son is participating too, but mainly on the side line collecting balls, but of course with his own raquet

Obviously at this age the ultimate goal should be that the the kids enjoy their tennis class and are not pressured to perform perfect skills. So it is very important to find the right mix of fun games and skill developing to keep the kids interested. I start my toddler tennis lesson with a quick warm up routine with different runnig styles followed by a “run and collect ball” competition.

The next challenge is to toss a ball and catch it again. It sounds so easy, but for a 3 to 4 year old this is a big coordination challange. Most of the times the toddlers and kids find it easier to bounce the ball on the court and catch it then. For the next exercise we grab the tennis raquets and try to balance the ball on it. Some kids will still need both hands to master this task successfully and some of them can even run through a track without loosing the ball. At this point I sometimes get out some balloons, which is extremely popular. Every child can now try to toss the balloon with the raquet as well as trying to hit it over the net. We even play doubles over the net with the balloon, so the kids develop a feeling for the ultimate goal of tennis.

Here is a very interesting article about how to teach tennis to young children.

Good luck and have fun!!