(I wrote the following story for The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer; it appeared in both papers on January 31, 2012. It appears here, with links.)

Used to be that neighborhood moms got together for lunch or a game of bridge. Today, they’re increasingly likely to gather for burpies, squats and to work up a good sweat.
The boot camp workout, born a decade ago and initially targeted to hard-core fitness buffs, is moving out of the gym and into local neighborhoods, where it’s finding a growing following among busy moms struggling to juggle work and family, let alone find time for a workout.
The workouts incorporate a variety of intense strength and aerobic exercises jammed into a half hour or hour. Boot camps continue to be one of the nation’s most popular group exercise programs, according to the non-profit American Council on Exercise, ranking with Zumba, TRX suspension training and interval training as 2012’s hottest options.
That boot camps are now coming to your neighbor can only enhance their attraction.
“One of the most commonly cited barriers to working out is that the gym is too far, it’s not convenient,” says Jessica Matthews, an exercise physiologist with ACE. “The workouts are fun, they’re convenient and they have the added social element of catching up with friends, of seeing your neighbors, of being part of something active.”
Fun?
Thirteen women from North Raleigh’s Harrington Grove neighborhood who gathered in 25 degree temperatures for their regular Saturday morning Boot Camp Moms workout a couple weeks back might take issue with that notion.
“My hipbone hurts!” complained one during a bout of figure-eight crunches.
“That’s because you have tiny butts,” shouted instructor Kyle Gill Furlow, attempting to spin the pain.
“Yeah, right.”
“We lie to them all the time,” joked fellow instructor Jennifer Pinder. “We find it motivates them.”
Friends Furlow and Pinder came up with the idea for Boot Camp Moms when both emerged from pregnancy five years ago, Furlow carrying an extra 45 pounds, Pender an excess 80.
“Kyle joined Jenny Craig and I joined Weight Watchers,” says Pinder, “but we knew we needed to exercise, too.”
They got in shape and in the process realized that other moms were in similar condition. Both got certified as group fitness instructors through the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America and hung out their shingle — via fliers placed around the neighborhood and word-of-mouth. The response surprised them.
“We had 22 women at our first session,” says Pinder.
The path for Missy Isom, founder and owner of Moms Evolution in Cornelius, was similar.
Prior to having her first child in 2008, she was a financial adviser by day, a body builder by night.
“But I always wanted to take my love of fitness and turn it into a job,” says Isom.
She, too, got certified through AFAA and initially struck out with Baby Boot Camp, a San Francisco-based franchise operation. But she found the focus was “less on the moms, more on the baby and the social aspect. My true passion,” she says, “was on taking these moms and helping them get fit.”
Which isn’t to say that baby doesn’t play a key role in her workouts. For some of her exercises the baby is integral to the exercise.
“We use the baby as weight,” says Isom. For curls, for overhead presses, for lunges … .
Matthews, the ACE exercise physiologist, says that’s smart for two reasons.
“That movement, that up and down: out of the crib, into the car, how many times do you do that in everyday life?” she says. “Those are very functional movements.”
Further, she says, “In working with people who specialize in new moms, from a psychological standpoint that face-to-face eye contact is important for bonding.”
Isom’s group, which started in 2008 and averages 30 moms at any one time, uses space in a neighborhood fitness studio. Furlow and Pinder, who currently have 40 signed up in their year-and-a-half-old program, meet on the outdoor tennis court of the Harrington Grove neighborhood community club.
On that 25-degree morning, the 13 Boot Camp Moms who braved the cold for an hour-long workout that began and ended with aerobics (jumping-jack-infused sprints, running a circuit course) with strength training wedged in between. For strength training, the women rotated among eight stations, doing TRX, Bosu Ball pushups, snatches, equalizers, rowing, squats with a medicine ball, resistance bands, more squats.
“Your mind is going to give up before your body does,” yelled Furlow, the self-appointed drill sergeant of the duo (Pinder is the cheerleader). “Don’t let it.”
Melissa Diana didn’t let her mind give up, despite being “scared” at the group’s very first session.
“I tried everything,” she says of what Furlow and Pinder threw at her on day one. “I couldn’t do many reps.”
But Diana, who is 33, kept coming back. Within a year, she had lost 80 pounds. More importantly, she’s kept it off and she’s embraced an active lifestyle.
“I went from exercising zero days a week to exercising six days a week,” she says. “I like the group atmosphere. I like that we’re all in the trenches, doing it together.”
Julie Nelson, at 52 one of the group’s advanced moms, echoes the sentiments of several fellow boot campers. “I like that I have much more energy. I like the way I feel.”
That, says Furlow, is what ultimately counts: how you feel, rather than how many dress sizes you drop.
“Strong,” says Furlow, “is the new skinny.”

* * *

More info

• Boot Camp Moms meets Mondays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 7:30 a.m. at the Harrington Grove Clubhouse in North Raleigh. Cost is $8 per class, 10 classes for $50 through Feb. 1. More info at Bootcampmoms@gmail.com or here.
• Moms Evolution meets Mondays at 9:30 a.m. and Fridays at 10:30 a.m. at KadiFit in Cornelius. Cost is $8 per class, $50 a month, or $40 a month for a six-month commitment. More info at MomsEvolution.com.
• Another option for mom/baby workouts is Stroller Strides, a franchise that operates nationwide with several offerings throughout North Carolina. For more information go here.
• If you don’t live near one of the above options, the American Council on Exercise offers two free parent-oriented workouts you can do at home. Postural Workout for Parents “is designed to help people who have postural imbalances resulting from carrying unbalanced loads (e.g., children, a heavy shoulder or computer bag) for extended periods on a regular basis.” Total-body Conditioning Workout for Parents “is designed to improve muscular endurance and strength through exercises that focus on the correct execution of the five primary movement patterns (bend-and-lift, single-leg, pushing, pulling, and rotational movements) in all three planes of motion.”

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Yesterday, I was scheduled to do an 8-mile training run on single-track trail. I also had a boatload of work to do. But the night before, I’d done the math: 8 miles on trail, that’s about 1 hour and 20 minutes at my current pace. Add in 20 minutes of travel time to and from the trailhead and I was looking at an hour and 40 minutes (OK, an hour 50 when you throw in stretching and the fact it probably takes longer than 10 minutes to get to Umstead). I factored that into my workload, got up an hour early and got to work.  I can make this happen, I thought.

Then I looked out the front window and what I saw sent a shiver.

What I saw was the top photo. It sent a shiver because only Saturday I had spent six hours raking the front and back yards. Six hours bent over a non-ergonomically correct rake making nature’s leafy mess go away. Now, just two days later, it was back twofold. At the rate the leaves appeared to be

giving up the ship, there could easily be a foot by day’s end. And with rain in the forecast for Wednesday, the act of raking could, literally, become a Herculean task.  I grabbed my work gloves and rake. So much for my run.

I’m not here to kvetch, however, about the occasional downside of home ownership. Rather, I use yesterday as an example of why you need to be flexible with your workouts. Yes, in a perfect world where the leaves fall only on my strength training days, yesterday would have been ideal for running. But I still got a good workout out of the deal.

I ended up raking vigorously for one hour and eight minutes. When I’d finished (see second photo), my body — my whole body — was complementing me on a good workout. Barbara Ainsworth, an exercise epidemiologist at San Diego State University quoted on the AARP website, says raking helps build upper body strength as well as strength in your core,

your stomach and back muscles. (For the record, according to the Self.com calorie calculator, I burned 382.97 calories. According to the Runnersworld.com calorie calculator, I would have burned 1,000 calories on my 8-mile run.) Plus, there was no sooty carbon footprint attached to my yardwork and I had a spotless front yard to boot.

Or I did. Then I went out this morning to get the paper (see Photo Exhibit C).

Looks like I won’t be running today, either.

* * *

Postscript: I decided to run anyway, did 8.2 miles on the trail at Umstead, was grabbed by numerous roots and rocks hiding beneath the leaf litter, finished in a slow but study 1 hour and 28 minutes. I returned home and found this (Exhibit D) waiting for me.

Argh.

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Something other than hiking that will build your strength, build your cardio, I answered. I ran through a litany of options, from riding a bike, to taking a yoga class to lifting weights. But I missed some obvious ones. Like work in the yard. Two things reminded me of that option.

First, a new study out of Kingston, Ontario’s Queen’s University reiterating that all kinds of activity provide good cardiorespiratory fitness, from simply taking the stairs at work, to vacuuming your rumpus room, to weeding your garden.

In the study, “inactive, abdominally obese men and women” were assessed for IPA (“incidental physical activity”), LPA (“light physical activity”) and MPA (“moderate physical activity”) for their CRF (“cardiorespiratory fitness”). I could sedate you with the footnotes, formulas and numbers in the thousandths reported in of the study; rather, suffice it to say simply that “both duration and intensity of IPA were positively associated with CRF among inactive, abdominally obese adults.” Even more simply said: People who become more active in their day-to-day lives — by mopping the floor, by mowing the lawn, by cleaning the attic — improved their cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF).

I was further reminded of the benefits of IPA cross-training when I worked in the yard for five hours on Sunday. I still ache in places that don’t get touched on a hike.

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Bike to work: It’s good for your heart

Remember when people didn’t have gym memberships, didn’t run 5Ks, didn’t sweat to the oldies — and not because they hadn’t been recorded yet? This would have been back when we walked to the factory where they had physically demanding jobs. When we were more concerned about how many $ our clothes cost, not how many Xs came before the L.

Turns out folks back then didn’t need the gym because they had physically demanding jobs, according to a study from the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Lab at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. Their findings are believed to be the first to show that a physically active job — and walking or riding your bike to get there — do as much for a healthy heart as boot camp at the gym three times a week. The study looked at 28,000 Finnish men and 29,874 Finnish women over an average 18-year period.

While you can’t do a lot about your job — it either demands physical activity or it doesn’t — you can do something about getting to and from work. And that would be a good move, especially for women: While there was little association between heart failure and commuting for men, women who walked or biked 30 minutes or more to their jobs reduced their risk of heart failure by 20 percent.

More about the study here.

5 percent of us exercise daily

Hopefully, that last item inspired you to walk or bike to work in order to get your daily dose of exercise, because another bit of research, the American Time Use Survey, found that only 5 percent of us had participated in “vigorous physical activity” within the previous 24 hours. What were we doing? 95.6 percent of us were eating and drinking and 80.12 percent of us were watching television or a movie. 80,000 people aged 20 and up took the time to stop eating and watching TV to participate in the survey.

More here.

Yet those who do, thrive

From Mid Sweden University and the Karolinska Institute comes word that exercising regularly really does pay off, especially when it comes to “oxygen-uptake capacity.” And as we’re all aware, if you don’t have the capacity to uptake oxygen, your lifestyle options are limited.

This study focused on seniors as old as 90 who were active skiers (in the case of the Scandanvians studied, that would be the vigorous sport of cross-country skiing). Of the senior guys studied, the ability to take in and utilize oxygen was twice as great for the skiers than the non-skiers (basically, those 95.6 percent who spend their time eating and drinking and the 80.1 percent who watch movies). In fact, the older active skiers compared to guys 40 to 50 years younger who did not exercise. Muscle tissue samples for the active older skiers also were similar to the group half their age.

“The findings show that humans have a great potential to maintain a high level of physical work capacity and thereby better quality of life even at advanced ages,” says Per Tesch, professor of sports science at Mid Sweden.

More here.

(For additional evidence that staying active as you age is smart, check this New York Times article about how exercises to improve balance can have a huge impact on our lives as we age. And if you don’t think balance is an issue, consider this telling line from the story: “Unintentional falls among those 65 and older are responsible for more than 18,000 deaths and nearly 450,000 hospitalizations annually in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.”)

Perhaps the best reason to exercise (yawn)

Finally, a study from the Sleep Disorders Center at Northwestern Medicine has unveiled a new prescription for insomnia: Exercise.

The study was small — 23 sedentary adults, mostly women 55 and older who had trouble falling asleep at night. (Women tend to suffer from insomnia more than men.) The women were split into two groups: one that continued not working out, one that worked out several times a week at about 75 percent of their maximum heart rate. After 16 weeks the exercising group saw their Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index scores drop an overage of 4.8 percent.

Sominex? Zumba!

Read more here.

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First fare. My first ride, fittingly was Sig Hutchinson, Mr. Mass Transit in the Triangle. Sig, who in addition to being a huge bike advocate is secretary of the Triangle Transit Authority, was crossing Fayetteville Street on his way to a meeting. “I have to be to a meeting in five minutes he said.” I got him there in plenty of time (his meeting was on the opposite side of Fayetteville Street) and managed to catch up on the latest developments in Triangle mass transit. (Story short: The climate is better for mass transit in the Triangle than it’s ever been.)

Love birds. I thought the best part of this job would be getting to ride a bike all day. I was wrong. The best part is the people you meet, people such as Vic and Ginger. I picked Vic and Ginger up on Fayetteville Street, near the courthouse. They were in town from Tampa and had heard about a vintage clothing store that Ginger thought was just off Dawson Street. Turned out to be Father & Son,  run by Friend of GGNC Brian Ownby. On the way over I learned that Vic impersonated the likes of Elvis and Michael Jackson, that Ginger was originally from Gastonia, and that they were crazy in love. After a two-hour shopping spree, I swung back by and took them to the train station. They were a delight; I should have tipped them.

Today’s dilemma. In my day job here at GGNC, I encourage folks to be as active as possible. That includes taking a walk over lunch — especially on the first 70-plus day of the year. So there I was, pedaling through downtown trying to talk people out of walking and riding in my rickshaw.

My shortcoming as a rickshaw driver. No one was more smitten by today’s weather than me: I just wanting to ride, ride, ride. People would wave to me, I’d wave back. Then it occurred to me: Maybe they’re waving because they want a ride. Need to work on that.

Friendliest city in the U.S. I’ve lived here 18 years and I’m still in awe of what a universally friendly place this is. I was reminded of that yet again today by the folks who, understandably, preferred to walk, yet were unfailingly nice and polite in declining a ride.  Made me realize I wouldn’t last an hour doing this in most any other city.

Catching up. Great day for catching up with the old crew from The News & Observer, which is a block off Fayetteville Street and was my employer for 17 years. Thad Ogburn, Joe Neff, Josh Shaffer, John Rottet — good to hear they’re all doing well. (And always entertaining to hear what’s going on behind the gray walls of Raleigh’s gray lady.)

On pedaling a 175-pound bike for six straight hours. It is a lot of fun. It’ll also wear you out (especially when you’re loaded with 300-or-so pounds of people). I forecast an early bedtime this evening.

Like now.

Top photo: These gals were lots of fun.

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