When Elaine Gillespie was just 10 days postpartum with her first daughter, her father died of cancer. The loss came after the death of her mother from the same disease a few years earlier. Gillespie, who had been working as an estate agent at the time, describes the experience as “a real turning point” in her life.
Watching her parents navigate serious illness and then becoming a mother put into perspective the importance of staying fit and healthy and maintaining an exercise routine.
“It’s had an impact on how I train myself... if something were to happen to me, how would I navigate an illness? I’d love to know that my body was well enough to cope,” she says.
Although the new mother was keen to get back into fitness, Gillespie tells Irish Times Women’s Podcast host Róisín Ingle that those days and weeks postpartum were when she “really started to struggle”.
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“Everything felt a little bit difficult. I felt very unsupported in terms of training.”
Noticing a lack of accessible, safe and effective fitness guidance for women at this stage in their lives, Gillespie was inspired to leave her career in property and become a qualified pre- and postnatal coach. She later founded Sound Mamas, which offers mother-and-baby fitness classes in Kildare.
“Sound Mamas was born on my own frustration of being a female trying to train, especially postpartum,” she says.
She says in that window after giving birth that “nobody knows what to do with you” in terms of training. She also noticed a lack of spaces where women could socialise, train and balance being a new mother. Gillespie found that the best solution was to set up her own group classes.
“I actually don’t do any one-to-one personal training any more because I was finding, if I’d ask you how you were in the depth of being postnatal, more often than not, all I got was tears, and we didn’t actually get to train very much because it’s so emotional.” She says, however, that if a person so affected trains in a class environment, they are encouraged by other mothers going through the same thing.
“You see 10 other people coming in the door and they’re all struggling. No one’s walked in the door calm with a baby and trying to train.
“Everyone comes in a bit frazzled. It’s the only way I can describe it,” she says.
“I think if you see somebody else kind of struggling, you’re like: ‘Oh. I haven’t done anything wrong here. It’s just we’re all finding this quite difficult.”
In this wide-ranging conversation, Gillespie also shares her tips for starting a beginner-friendly weight-training routine, and the best ways to get over gym intimidation. She also explains why lifting weights is crucial for women as they reach middle age, and how it can make the small tasks – such as bending down to pick something up – much easier in later life.
You can listen back to this episode in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
