Nobody tells you this about going back to exercise after having a baby

Disclaimer: These are my personal reflections on motherhood and fitness. This is not a sponsored or collaborative post.

Before I had Cyrus, I had never set foot inside a community centre. It wasn’t because I had anything against them, I just had no reason to think about them.

I worked, went to the gym, saw friends and got on with adult life without knowing what happened behind those community centre doors. I certainly never imagined I would one day be throwing punches and roundhouse kicks inside one while keeping half an eye on a baby parked at the edge of the room.

Then I became a mum at 40.

My friends were still living according to office hours, lunch breaks and weekends. I was measuring time in feeds, naps and also whether I had managed to drink the coffee I made two hours earlier. Leaving the house had also become a small military operation involving nappies, wipes, spare clothes, bottles and at least one thing I would definitely forget.

I started looking for places to go and people to see. Great Park Community Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne became one of them. At first, I thought returning to exercise might help me feel like the woman I had been before pregnancy, but looking back, that was the wrong target entirely.

I hadn’t expected becoming a mum to feel lonely because I was rarely technically alone. But being accompanied and feeling connected are not quite the same thing.

Pregnancy comes with an awful lot of monitoring. There are appointments, midwives, scans, measurements and people asking how you are feeling. And when you’re an older mum to be, there are even more than usual.

Then you have the baby.

Gradually, much of that scaffolding begins to disappear. Appointments become less frequent. Your partner goes back to work, your friends are at work. The front door closes in the morning and suddenly it is you, a baby and a very long stretch of day ahead. I loved being Cyrus’s mum, but loving your baby does not take away the need for adult company, or give you a reason to put your shoes on and leave the house.

There is also only so much meaningful conversation you can have with someone whose main interests are milk and sleeping at the wrong time.

I hadn’t expected motherhood to feel lonely because Cyrus was there. But being together with a baby and feeling connected to the real world are not quite the same thing. That was when community spaces, almost invisible to me before the baby phase, started to become more important.

Returning to work added another layer. On paper, I was going back to something I enjoyed. In reality, I arrived carrying nappies, bottles, childcare and broken sleep alongside deadlines and meetings. There is an assumption that returning to work means normal service has resumed, but it hasn’t.

You may be sitting at the same desk, drinking from the same mug and talking to the same colleagues, but life outside the office has changed completely. Somewhere in the back of your mind is another running list. Does the baby have enough nappies? Did I pack the bottle? What time is pick-up? Why am I standing in the kitchen and what did I come in here for?

I was back in the workplace, but I was also learning how to be someone’s mum. Those two parts of my life had to coexist, preferably without me leaving either the laptop charger or the baby bag somewhere I shouldn’t.

I missed exercise. I was desperate to change how I looked and I missed the feeling of moving because I wanted to.

Fitness had always been part of my life, particularly combat-style exercise. Give me loud music and an excuse to punch the air and I am usually quite content. Then somebody at work mentioned pop-up Les Mills BODYCOMBAT sessions at Great Park Community Centre which really caught my attention.

A gym membership was not necessarily the easiest option with a baby, especially once childcare entered the equation. A local class in a community setting, however, felt possible.

And “possible” is an underrated word when you are a new mum.

I wasn’t looking for a transformation and I didn’t have a pair of pre-pregnancy jeans hanging on the wardrobe door. I just wanted to move again, to feel strong and remember what it felt like to use my body just because I enjoyed it.

So I packed the baby paraphernalia, put Cyrus in his buggy and went.

At around six weeks postpartum, I approached my first BODYCOMBAT class cautiously.

My enthusiasm had returned considerably faster than my pelvic floor.

I remembered the movements, but my body now wasn’t so sure. Squats, lunges and high knees suddenly felt a bit different in a body still recovering from childbirth. Some movements felt reassuring, but there were others that provided a quick reminder that pregnancy and birth had changed things, and that recovery does not marry up with the timetable in your head. Then there was my audience.

Cyrus sat in his buggy at the side of the room watching me with the expression of a tiny fitness assessor who had serious reservations about my technique. Every so often, I would glance across mid-combination to check he was still content and he would stare back. I can only assume he was impressed. Attempting a combat sequence while monitoring a baby at the same time was an interesting experiment.

This wasn’t the polished version of postpartum fitness, there were no immaculate activewear campaigns, and no miraculous “body back” and also there was no serene baby sleeping through the proceedings. There was my recovering pelvic floor, a buggy and a room full of people getting on with their workout. It was sweaty and very ordinary.

What surprised me was that Great Park Community Centre gave me something beyond fitness.

It gave me somewhere to go.

I quickly realised how important the community centre was to help shape my day. You recognise faces, somebody says hello and you have a conversation that isn’t about whether the baby has slept. You come back the following week and the same people are there.

A class creates structure while familiar faces turn into friendly conversations. Conversations become connections, and slowly, almost without noticing, you begin to feel part of the wider world again. For me, fitness and friendship became intertwined. I wasn’t just rebuilding physical strength, I was rebuilding a routine at a point when much of my old one had disappeared.

That is why we underestimate places like community centres. They may not have glossy changing rooms, banks of expensive equipment or the atmosphere of a boutique fitness studio. They exist within ordinary life, alongside babies, families, older people, exercise classes, coffee mornings and whatever else happens to be going on that Tuesday.

Nobody cared whether motherhood had transformed me into the best version of myself.

I could just turn up and ordinary life was exactly what I needed.

Looking back, I can see that I had absorbed an idea that was familiar to many women after childbirth: that eventually I would “get my body back”. It is a strange expression when you think about it.

Where exactly had it gone?

Mine hadn’t disappeared, it had just carried a baby, given birth and was now recovering from both. It was still very much mine, even if it now reacted in ways I would rather not discuss during a jumping jack.

I didn’t need to retrieve the woman I had been before pregnancy. I needed to get to know the woman I was becoming after it.

Postpartum fitness is still too easily framed around shrinking, toning and returning to a pre-pregnancy shape.  But exercise was giving me something far more valuable than that, It gave me movement, routine, confidence and an hour when I wasn’t just thinking exclusively about bottles, nappies or sleep.

Returning to exercise after childbirth is individual, and six weeks is definitely not a universal starting gun. Recovery deserves patience, and anyone experiencing pain, pelvic floor symptoms or concerns about returning to exercise should seek appropriate professional advice rather than treating a date on the calendar as proof that their body is ready.

For me, the important part was not how quickly I returned.

It was discovering why I wanted to return at all.

Somewhere between the broken sleep, the return to work, the BODYCOMBAT classes and Cyrus watching suspiciously from his buggy, a community centre I had barely noticed before motherhood became part of finding my feet in it.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.