Toning together

ST. LOUIS – Somewhere between taking the kids to soccer practice, finishing your big project at work and fixing your family a healthful dinner, you forgot a couple of things. You had no time to actually connect with your spouse and even less time to get in a workout.

It seems we’re always struggling to find enough time to fit in a workout. What better way to do it than to make it part of something special for you and your spouse?

Yes, you can actually multitask your workout and your love life. Working out with your sweetie allows both of you to recharge not just your relationship but also your heart and other muscles.

“You’re a mother, a daughter, a wife, a son or a husband,” says Stacie Mullen, co-founder of Imagine Weight Loss Centers, which combine 29-minute workouts with one-on-one nutrition counseling. “It seems there’s not enough time to be a healthy, fit woman or man.”

But in this way, “family time can be fitness time,” Mullen says.

She says even the smallest amount of time can make a difference.

“You and your partner need time together,” Mullen says. “You would never go a day without kissing your husband goodnight or a day without saying, ‘I love you.’ In the same way, you should never go a day without doing something healthy together, even for just 15 minutes.”

Working out with a partner is also a great way to help you stick to an exercise plan.

“You have someone to report to,” says Heather Epperly, head trainer at the Lodge of Des Peres in St. Louis. “It makes it much harder to skip a workout. You both have to say, ‘I don’t want to go.’ Because more than likely, one of you wants to go on the day the other doesn’t. You encourage each other to stick with it.”

And once you start working out together, you start to see changes in your relationship.

“You feel better about yourself,” Mullen says. “The No. 1 reason women come to me to lose weight is to increase their level of intimacy. They don’t feel confident in their own skin. But once they start working out, that changes.”

Mullen says that for women to lose weight, they must have support. With that in mind, we’ve come up with a list of the 10 best things you and your spouse can do together.

1. Walking: One of the best ways you can communicate with your spouse is through walking together. Sometimes it’s tough getting your spouse to talk about “relationship issues,” but if you give him a task, where he has a goal (getting to an end point), he’s more likely to open up, Epperly says.

“He doesn’t feel trapped,” Mullen says.

2. Assisted stretching: Using a partner to help you get a better stretch offers better flexibility. “Having human touch involved makes things more personal,” says Epperly. See examples of how to do these stretches on the page.

3. Side-by-side treading: Epperly suggests working out on side-by-side treadmills. At the Lodge of Des Peres they call them the husband-and-wife treadmills. “That way one person can go faster than the other,” she says, “so one person isn’t holding another back.”

4. Racquet sports: “Anytime there is a game involved, you heighten the interest (from) the man,” Mullen says. However, Epperly warns about too much competition between couples. An avid racquet sports enthusiast, Epperly used to play her husband left-handed (she’s right-handed). One day, he thought he was ready for her to switch to her dominant hand. They made a friendly wager, and she beat him 10-0. “We never played racquetball again,” she says. “Sometimes if you are both competitive people, someone always ends up getting hurt.”

5. Dancing: “Dancing is one of the most romantic things you and your partner can do,” Mullen says. And it’s a great way to burn calories. Fast dancing can burn up to 200 calories in half an hour.

6. Lovemaking: Let’s face it, you can burn up to 100 calories in a half hour. Plus, studies have shown it to be an instant antidepressant because of the endorphins the body releases.

7. Bike riding or Spinning: In Spinning, you can ride side by side and set your own resistance, so if one partner is fitter than the other, he or she can make the workout tougher. If you have similar fitness levels, try riding outdoors on a trail so you can ride side by side and talk.

8. Boxing: “In every relationship there is frustration,” says Mullen, who suggests shadowboxing or cardio kickboxing as a great way to relieve tension in a relationship. Real boxing (if both are skilled) or hitting a heavy bag can also release stress that builds up in relationships.

9. Ab exercises: “Having great abs makes you feel more comfortable,” Mullen says. “If you have better abs, you feel sexy, and strong core muscles help you in everything you do.”

10. Interval workouts: This works great if you have a piece of cardio equipment and some weights in your home. One person gets on the treadmill (or bike or elliptical) and sprints for two minutes while the other person spends two minutes doing one type of weightlifting move (say biceps curls or lunges). Then you switch, and keep switching as long as you can keep it up (or till the kids start yelling for dinner).