You’ll use this functional fitness move pretty much every day.
I’m playing with my baby on the floor and all of a sudden he’s decided he’s hungry. The challenge: Get the two of us from the rug to the nursing chair before my son’s whimper turns into a full blown howl. Also, bring my phone along so I can track my feeding session.
Holding my baby and my phone leaves exactly zero hands to help with hoisting myself off the floor, but it’s okay. Without thinking about it, I put my legs in a straddle position, then bend one leg in front of me and one leg behind me into a 90-90 stretch. Next, I take a deep inhale and as I exhale, engage my core and lift myself up into kneeling from that 90-90 stretch. From there, it’s easy to transition into basically a lunge, and up to standing. Ta-da!
Sound complicated? When I first learned this move, called the “ground get up,” figuring out where to place my limbs and in what order confounded me. I was also pregnant, so my brain was already fuzzy, and I had the built in extra resistance challenge of my baby bump.
But practicing it over and over again as my belly grew bigger and bigger helped me gain both strength and muscle memory. By the time my son came along, I realized I was doing ground get ups when I needed them without even thinking about it.
The ability to subconsciously apply something from my prenatal training into my postnatal life made me excitedly text my trainer and friend who taught it to me, health coach and certified personal trainer Azul Corajoria, CPT. She said she was proud “but not surprised,” because the move is what she calls an “active daily living” exercise, which is a kind of functional fitness she wanted to teach me so I could use it in my everyday life.
“[Ground get ups] are a functional strength-training movement that teaches you how to get up and down from the ground in a safe way,” Corajoria says. “You want to get active daily living exercises so ingrained that by the time that you’re a [parent] and you’re thinking about a million different things, this is one less thing that you have to think about.”
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