It’s tempting when we feel we’re at capacity to simply reduce the load.
If we’re feeling overwhelmed with cooking dinner every night, we look for quicker, easier options or outsourcing to someone else.
If we’re feeling overloaded at work, we cut back on our tasks, reduce our hours or say no to a new project.
The same thing happens physically.
If lifting a specific weight feels too heavy, or walking/running up a steep hill causes us to pause and catch our breath, we reduce the load. We go for the lighter weight, or we slow down the pace.
But what happens if it’s our day to day tasks that push us to the limits of our capacity?
For the women I see, being pushed to their physical capacity might look like:
- dancing or jumping around with their kids and experiencing bladder leakage
- wearing their baby in a carrier for an hour and ending up with an achey upper back or shoulders
- standing up out of a low chair or getting up and down off the floor and feeling knee pain or back pain
When the day to day activities we need to do are already stretching us to 80%+ of our capacity, it can feel frustrating and leave us a bit deflated.
We might scramble to look for ways to reduce our load:
- stop dancing or jumping and avoid all other impact activities
- stop wearing our baby in the carrier and use the pram more
- just stop sitting in low chairs or getting onto the floor
But what about instead of (or as well as) reducing the load, we focused on increasing our capacity?
For the dancing mama, this might mean being selective with their moves for a while AND starting a pelvic floor strengthening program (tailored by a PF physio of course)
For the baby-wearing mama, this might mean making sure the baby carrier is fitted well AND increasing strength around the shoulders and back.
For the woman struggling to get up and down, this might mean finding a strategy that helps them to complete the task AND building mobility in the hips, balance and strength in the legs.
I’d love to know, where have you been reducing the load but feel you could actually benefit from an increase in capacity? (Physical, emotional or mental! you know I love it all )