If your life is anything like mine, it's hard to workout with a baby around. At home I can barely bend over to pick up a toy without having a baby try to mount my back like I'm a horse... Babywearing fitness to the rescue! It's convenient and pretty fun to wear that baby while you move your body. Babies love movement and they love to be with you, so get in some "sling exercise" together!

Here are some babywearing exercise tips and tutorials I've collected for you!

Some Tips:

1. Wear baby high and tight: just like the booty you hope to tone, babies should be high and tight on our bodies so we can move as one unit together. No matter what carrier or carrying position you use, baby should not be slumping in the carrier and should have a clear airway. You can workout with baby on your front or back; the position you choose should compliment your routine (so maybe don't carry on the front if you plan on planking). Personally, I like a nice high ruck for exercise. It works best with my center of gravity and the single pass over baby, open sides, and no chest pass allow for air flow over both our bodies. For front carries, Kangaroo follows the same single pass/open sides benefits as a ruck. A simpler Front Wrap Cross Carry, either with a base or a short wrap tied at shoulder or under bum, will be quite comfortable for movement as well.
2. Posture, posture, posture. Make sure you're not overcompensating for your changed center of gravity. Keep your shoulders and rib cage aligned over your hips and make sure your pelvis isn't tucked under. Stand up straight and pretend there's a string extending up from the crown of your head and that a puppet master is pulling you up: eyes forward with chin slightly down, shoulders back and away from the ears, nicely curved spine, untucked relaxed pelvis.
3. Breathe and hydrate. Our bodies love oxygen: it helps our muscles to contract more easily and keeps us from overheating. Take in a deep breath as you start a move and as you release the move, make a long exhale. Break for sips of water often; big gulps of water can sometimes lead to an upset tummy but sips are easier to handle (and let us take more breaks, yay!).
4. Pay attention to your body's cues. Especially if you are less than 3 months postpartum, make sure your core muscles and pelvic floor have recovered from pregnancy and birth (not sure? Read up more about Diastasis Recti, check yourself for it, and visit a pelvic floor specialist for a pro check.) Even if you're not working out with your newborn, monitor your body for pelvic pressure, being light-headed, overheating, pain, or any other signs of discomfort. Also, be aware of your balance. Keep a chair or railing nearby for help when you need it.
5. Check in with baby. Baby may seem like a passive participant in this activity, but they're still subject to overheating and over-stimulation and they should still be monitored. Make sure baby's head is supported if you're bending over in a front carry and be sure not to lean back if you're back-carrying. Communicate with your baby during your workout as you would while normally wearing: talk about what you're doing, touch your baby, and have fun together!

Before we get to the tutorials, let me also take this space to say that exercise should make us feel good about ourselves being healthy and strong. If you are a postpartum woman reading this, know that I do not suppose pushing yourself too far because you feel like you have to "lose the baby weight." Please focus on being healthy and strong for yourself and your family over feeling like you need to conform to a misaligned societal ideal. With that said, let's get moving!

Some Tutorials:
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What kind of exercising do you want to do? There are several different modalities to practice with a baby in tow. Here's what I think are the best babywearing tutorials on YouTube for babywearing yoga, strength training, dance, and cardio.

Babywearing Yoga

• How amazing is this breastfeeding yogi?? This video isn't a tutorial BUT it is too amazing not to share here. #goals right? From Ms. Wright's Way on YouTube:

Here's to health and happiness with our babies!

This post was not sponsored by a company or group.

What to consider when crafting your babywearing bundling strategy...

It's cold outside. Like, super duper cold. Yet life doesn't slow down and babywearing out of shear necessity continues. So how do you do it?

The first advice many smart babywearing educators will give is to dress yourself and your child in layers. Layers keep in the warmth and allow us to control the temperature by removing layers when we get too hot (it is possible to overheat so watch for that!). A woven wrap is a fantastic layer to add to your bundling repertoire, but where does it fall in the hierarchy of layers - toward the inside or the outside? The answer is found by considering several factors.

1. How likely are you to let baby down? A baby who is walking and curious about the snow and able to get down is going to need direct access to the outside of your layer sandwich, where a baby who does not have the option to get down could be lightly bundled and wrapped first, then be bundled fully.
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2. How cold is it? Up where I am in the Pacific Northwest it usually stays above freezing so typically wrap over my layers because I don't need that extra protection. Sometimes it is particularly windy, though, so I will layer up, wrap, and then throw on a big sweatshirt or my husband's jacket as an added layer of cold protection. If you live in an area where it is consistently below freezing in the winter, it could be wise to invest in a babywearing coat or large coat to throw over you.

3. Are you wrapping indoors or outside? If you're wrapping outside and quickly running indoors, wrapping over your gear might be the fastest and most convinient plan for you. Think about your disembarking routine; for us it's get baby out, jacket on baby, wrap out, baby up, go! Maybe you'd rather wrap then bundle, or bundle and wait until you get inside to wrap. Check out my tips for wrapping on the go, including a fun video on saving long wraps from getting sludgy "parking lot tails."

4. What materials are you wearing? If your jacket, or your baby's jacket, is slick, wrapping over it might be a more slidey experience. The opposite would be true is you're wrapping against fleece. Also if you have a particularly puffy jacket or a cushy load of layers, you may need more length to wrap over all that extra padding.

5. If you wrap over all your layers, make sure baby is covered. Especially if the air temperature is below freezing, all of baby's exposed skin except for the face should be covered. Use leg warmers to cover any gaps between baby's pants and their socks. Keep booties or an extra layer of socks over those little toes. Hats are a must for warm ears, especially ones that tie under the chin so they can't take them off while in a back carry! And a scarf can go a long way - wear one on your neck and it fills in the gap between you and baby to help keep their face and neck warm. Just make sure that airway is clear!

No matter how you choose to winter wrap, be sure you always have baby's exposed skin covered in below freezing conditions while always keeping baby's airway open regardless of air temperature. Dress in layers with baby in one more layer than you and watch for overheating cues: overly fussy, red skin, covered skin is hot to the touch (especially back of arms or neck). Happy wrapping!

This week I wore my baby in the same wrap every day. Normally I'm using my Facebook and Instagram pages to show off all the wraps tied in all the carries so I can show you all that is possible in the woven wrap world. Don't you know, it's all part of my evil plan to get everyone to recognize how amazing woven wraps are? Muhahaha!

This week, though, I thought I'd take a small break from variety with the #oneanddone theme. These are some reasons why:

1. ​Consumerism is a big issue in the babywearing world, and also in the "regular" world too. Often the newest and latest things get put ahead of what really matters in this whole babywearing gig: being close to our babies (and having two free hands!). #oneanddone week allows me to pause on the hype of new and focus on my love of the act of wrapping and being wrapped to my baby. (Edited to add the following from a Facebook post): modern babywearing is really columbusing of cultures who did not lose their babywearing traditions... So many cultures don't have a "resurgence" of babywearing because they never lost their traditions as American and Anglo Europeans did, who then had to "borrow" from other cultures to fill in the gaps and move forward. There's no denying that all cultures wore their babies at some point in history, but not all cultures abandoned and forgot their traditions. It's amazing to learn how modern babywearing fits in history and how modern things like consumerism have influenced the practices of today.
2. Confession: I have a LOT of baby carriers. Babywearing is my go-to parenting tool for my littlest, it is a huge hobby of mine, it is my volunteer work, and it is my job as a babywearing educator. Because of those things it makes sense for me to have a lot of baby carriers. I teach with them and I show caregivers that there are a variety of looks and feels when it comes to wraps, just like any other baby carrier. Wraps are not all created equal and explaining that diversity to others is one of my favorite parts of this work. That said, I don't personally NEED all the carriers, and if I wasn't an educator or extreme hobbiest I probably could just use one wrap and be done (okay I'd really want two, a base size and a shortie, but I digress). If I was just carrying this one baby around casually then #oneanddone could be my every week and that'd be totally fine, not affecting my productivity in any way.
3. Challenge, accepted. I love a good challenge, and we haven't done a carry challenge in awhile so why not push myself in a similar but different way? I most recently saw this type of challenge in the Base Love group on facebook (an excellent group focused on body positivity in the wrapping community). I wanted to try to use one wrap all week yet keep myself (and my audience!) interested. I stuck with many of my favorite carries early in the week (Ruck tied in front and Front Wrap Cross Carry variations) but started to branch out to stuff like Ellevill Jordan's later on. I also used a base-1 size wrap which is definitely my least used size and the one that makes me check my list of carries the most often so I can refresh my brain on what to do with it. And that's the point of a challenge right? To break out of the comfort zone!

This gallery of images contains the carries I tied for #oneanddone. Click the image to be taken to a video tutorial for that carry. Here's a full list of what I tied, and you can check out more base-1 carries and more on our Tutorials page:

• Front Wrap Cross Carry tied at shoulder and tied under bum (long tails, usually base-2 carries or shorter)
• Half Front Wrap Cross Carry
• Half Jordan's Back Carry (Wrapping Rachel's version, again with long tails as it's usually a base-2 carry or shorter)
• Twisted Ellevill Jordan's
• Christina's Ruckless
• Secure High Back Carry
• Double Hammock tied at shoulder
• Double Hammock with a candy cane chest belt

Try out your own #oneanddone and tell me in the comments how it goes! [Images all feature me, a white woman with dark hair, wearing by white baby boy in an orange and off white geometric pattern wrap Tekhni Meandros Clementine. All carries are base-1 size or shorter.]