Jennipher Walters gets it. She knows that you’re overworked, that you’re stressed, that you have no time.

“My mum is a retired teacher, so it’s a profession that’s very near and dear to my heart,” she explains. “Teaching is such a giving profession. You have to have so much patience. You have to be ‘on’ all day.”

Walters, the co-founder and CEO of fitness website Fit Bottomed Girls (fitbottomedgirls.com), realises it’s hard for teachers to find even a few minutes to exercise. But she also understands how damaging it is both to your health and your state of mind if you do no exercise at all.

“If you’re stressed, you might feel almost like you’re vibrating in your skin,” she explains. “That’s because when we’re stressed, our bodies pump out a number of hormones, including adrenaline. This gives us a rush of energy - think of walking up on a bear, then being able to run away very fast. The problem is, our current stressors mostly no longer require physical energy, so the adrenaline pumps and you just feel kind of wired.

“A great way to use that stress energy is to power through a workout, which can leave you feeling less jittery. Plus, when you exercise, your body produces feel-good endorphins, so it’s basically a reset button for your mood. After a hit of endorphins, you’ll want to go out and do things, not just sit on the couch all night. And exercise will help you sleep better, too.

“So teachers need to fit in some exercise - it will give them a chance to rejuvenate so they’re better able to do their job.”

Exercise will give teachers a chance to rejuvenate so they’re better able to do their job

Easier said than done, teachers would say. After all, there’s the huge teaching workload to get through and then you have to add on family commitments, chores, obligations and maybe some sleep once in a while. Our survey found that 90 per cent of teachers cannot stay as fit as they would like to because of their job.

But Walters firmly believes it is possible for teachers to squeeze exercise into already-busy schedules - and she is well qualified to demonstrate how: fitting her own training around being a mum and running a phenomenally successful fitness brand that has become known for a more accessible, realistic approach to keeping fit.

Indeed, Walters’ mission is to make exercise fun and achievable, to get away from the usual fitness obsession with body shapes or numbers on the scales, and to make a workout something that anyone - of any age, shape or size - can do. When she launched Fit Bottomed Girls with her business partner Erin Whitehead in 2008, their aim was “to be like the fit friends you always wished you had.”

Walters’ mission comes from not having had a positive relationship with her body in her early 20s - under-eating, over-exercising and obsessing over the number on her scales. When she got engaged to her now husband, she had an epiphany.

“I had this kind of ‘Aha!’ moment when I was planning my wedding - ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want the one thing I’m thinking about the day I walk down the aisle to be do my arms look fat in this pose?’ That was not how I was going to start the rest of my life,” she explains. So she went to a dietitian to unpick her poor eating habits and took a gentler approach to her exercise - fewer OTT workouts and more yoga.

It was this body-positive ethos she wanted to make the focus of Fit Bottomed Girls.

“Back then there were very few, if any, mainstream magazines saying, ‘You’re more than the number on the scales,’ and, ‘You can’t hate yourself healthy,’” she explains.

‘Move your butt’

At the time, Walters was working at the same magazine publishing company as Whitehead and together they decided to launch their own website to plug what they thought was a gap in the market. They were on the money - after the first month, the site was getting more than 1,000 page views a day.

Since then, the business has exploded with numerous iterations of the Fit Bottomed Girls brand. This year sees a new chapter as Whitehead has left the business to pursue other things, but Walters and their other partner (since 2015) Kristen Seymour have lots of exciting plans in the pipeline - from potential new site launches to retreats.

They now get about 250,000-350,000 page views a month and, while their audience is predominantly women - from millennials to baby boomers - Walters notes that they also have plenty of male readers, dubbed “fit bottomed dudes”.

So how does a frazzled teacher - male or female - join the fit bottomed posse?

“Fit bottoms come in all shapes and sizes. If you move your butt, it’s fit. End of story,” she stresses.

If you move your butt, it’s fit. End of story

The secret to getting moving is making it a habit, she says: “It becomes part of your life, like putting on your seatbelt. You don’t hum and haw, ‘Should I put on my seatbelt today?’ That’s where you want to be with exercise.”

The first step, she suggests, is carving out time for it - without worrying too much about what it is.“Pick something you enjoy - walking or yoga, say - then set a goal to do it three times a week. Once you’ve formed the habit, you can decide what you want to do next - do you want to up the intensity? Do you have time to do something else?”

Floundering for inspiration? Walters has shared a simple 10-minute, high-intensity workout that you can try at home to kick-start your routine (see below).

“It’s a full-body workout that builds strength and fitness. It’s short but a great place to start. For people who find it hard to find time for exercise, I would generally recommend doing it in the morning because it gets it out of the way,” she says. This way, if you get stuck marking into the night, your exercise plan doesn’t suffer.

If there are times when 10 minutes’ exercise is all you can manage, “it’s always better than nothing,” she stresses. But then you have to “bust your ass” doing the workout, she says.

“You might want to write down how many reps of each exercise you’re doing, and try to beat yourself next time. Because if you really want to see some changes in your body composition or fitness levels, you’re going to have to get uncomfortable.”

Ideally though, the workout would be a first building block to a more active lifestyle. Walters advises that in the long run, you should aim for 30 minutes or so of exercise most days. (The NHS guideline is a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, plus two or more strength sessions) .

However, she suggests that your daily exercise quota can be split into small chunks if that makes it easier to fit in - especially for time-poor parents.

Take things slowly

“In the evening, could you go for a 15-minute walk? Could you play in your yard with your kids? Could you, when you pick up toys, do a full squat? If you’re cleaning, can you lunge with the vacuum? There are lots of little ways to get your heart rate up,” she reveals.

Walters advises against going too far the other way: don’t be tempted to triple up on her intensive 10-minute workout, or hammer through it every day, as too many full-throttle workouts are not a kind combination with a high-stress lifestyle, she says.

“Both stress and high-intensity workouts raise levels of the hormone cortisol,” she explains. “You don’t want cortisol levels raised all the time, as this can cause inability to sleep, reduced immune function, digestion issues and weight gain. So you don’t want to do back-to-back hardcore stuff every day. Your body needs a chance to recover.”

Hence, she advises adding in gentler activities like yoga or kicking a ball with the kids. She suggests reserving the 10-minute workout for one session every other day.

The “start small, then build” approach is better than going hell for leather out of the starting blocks, she believes. “If you’re someone who tries to go all in and then doesn’t keep up with it, it reinforces negative patterns,” she says. “You start to believe that you don’t have willpower, you can’t change your life. When you try again, you probably go even more extreme because you feel, ‘I’ve really got to make a change this time.’ And the cycle repeats. Actually, you’ve got to back the whole train up, approach it with self-love, celebrate small successes, then build on them.”

If you’re someone who tries to go all in and then doesn’t keep up with it, it reinforces negative patterns

Another secret to getting on the healthy bandwagon is moving in the right circles, she says. “We talk about this idea of, ‘What’s your normal?’ It’s really hard to change if being healthy is not ‘normal’ - if no one around you is healthy, then you’re doing something out of the box,” she says.

“It helps to have one friend or family member where you can be like, ‘Yeah this is just what we do. We run. We walk. We make healthy decisions.’ Perhaps that’s another teacher you could eat healthy lunches with. Or someone you can team up with to form an exercise habit - checking in with each other regularly.” Once you hit your stride, you may begin to see your body change but, perhaps even more importantly, your mindset may shift, too.

And for teachers, this may be where a real benefit comes…

“Exercise is excellent at improving self-confidence. It becomes less about what you look like and more about what you can do. After a tough workout, I’m like, ‘What else can I do?’ If I can do that, everything else seems more achievable.”

Jessica Powell is a freelance writer