Some say happiness comes from making a career of doing what you love. If that’s the case, Lake Highlands resident Rachel Van’t Slot should be one of our area’s happiest people.
She’s recently combined two of the things she loves most — fitness and motherhood — into a new business by making a workout video for moms and their babies.
It started when Van’t Slot, a fitness professional formerly with
“I gained 50 pounds with the pregnancy, and with the lack of sleep and demands of being a new mom, my energy had never been lower,” she says. “I was desperate to start feeling like I was more in control of my body.”
That’s when she realized she didn’t have to wait for time alone to exercise. She could do it not only around Maxine, but with her.
“I noticed that by playing with my daughter, I could turn it into a form of exercise. I started by doing push-ups over her, then began using her as resistance in doing squats and other exercises as she got a little older. Maxine loved it, and I started feeling better.”
In March of last year, the Dallas Morning News ran a story about Van’t Slot’s mom-and-baby workouts.
“A lot of people noticed that,” she says. “It had a huge, overwhelming response. People thought it was a great idea.”
Realizing the demand for a workout of that type, Maxine and her husband, Fred, decided to make an mom/baby exercise video. Neither had done anything like it before, but luckily, they had an in: Maxine’s brother is a director and producer in
Van’t Slot wrote the script and developed exercises for the video based on weekly focus groups held with local moms and babies. She also hired consultants to make certain the exercises were safe.
And after buying 25 pregnancy and postpartum videos to see what was already available, she quickly realized that just knowing about fitness wasn’t all there was to making a good exercise video. She hired a local media trainer with the Coaching Company to learn about camera work and how to add polish to her presentation.
“They were a tremendous help,” she says.
She also recruited several locals to help. Lake Highlands resident Rosie Manousos stepped in as make-up artist. And neighborhood resident Mary Thomson and her son, Ryan, are one of three sets of moms and babies in the video.
Van’t Slot shows no false modesty in her goals for the video.
“Honestly, I think it will revolutionize the quality in the way exercise videos are made,” she says. “We used digital film, and it’s just beautiful.
“I also want it to inspire mothers to continue to take better care of themselves. Some women end up losing themselves because they have so many demands on them.”
And if the video takes off, the Van’t Slots plan to continue with their new endeavor.
“We have a big vision,” she says. “Our goal is to make fitness a family affair, and it starts with parents being role models.”
