Fitness, particularly marathon running, has taught award-winning Pilates instructor Zhane Dadson, better known as Coach Zha, a lot about parenting.

“Running has taught me that you can be uncomfortable and still keep going,” she says. “Not every mile feels good. Not every training day feels inspiring. Sometimes you are tired, irritated, questioning the whole thing and you still have to decide what kind of person you want to be in that moment.”

Motherhood, she says, is very similar. “You don’t always get to show up when you feel perfectly rested or perfectly prepared,” she says. “Your kids still need you. Life is still happening.”

Conquering a workout when you’re running on maybe four hours of sleep or bustling through a busy morning routine that involves two kiddos asks for a level of discipline and endurance that you must carry all the way to the finish line. Coach Zha once equated discipline with being able to push through whatever no matter what, but becoming a mom forced her to have more grace with her athletic self. And while movement is obviously a huge part of what Coach Zha offers, her intent is to help women keep the promises they make to themselves.

“I talk a lot about honoring your commitments, but I think people sometimes hear that as push harder. For me it has become almost the opposite. It means learning to trust myself,” she says. “If I say I’m going to do something, I want to believe myself. If I say I need rest, I want to honor that too. If something is no longer working, I want to trust myself enough to pivot instead of staying stuck just because I made the original plan.”

“Sometimes it is about being willing to adapt and keep moving forward,” she says.

Movement has always been one of the ways I understand myself and process life.

When Coach Zha found Pilates circa 2022, she was struggling with postpartum depression. On top of that, the demands of corporate life interfered with the time spent with her newborn baby.

She describes Pilates as a “life-changing” exercise, and she even credits specific movements with being able to deliver her second child in 22 minutes. “Pilates brings me back into my body,” she says. “It makes me slow down enough to notice what I’m doing, how I’m breathing, where I’m holding tension. There’s so much precision and intention in it.”

Pilates made her feel strong again, so she jumped from marketing to wellness and started teaching classes in Philadelphia. “A lot of what I’ve built has happened because women in my community kept showing up,” she says. “They came to the classes, bought the tickets, brought their friends, shared the posts and believed in ideas before they were fully formed.”

Early on, Coach Zha didn’t see many Black women in Pilates studios, but that underrepresentation is what inspired her to launch the Black Girls Pilates Club in 2022. Fast forward four years later, and she continues to create spaces where Black women feel seen and can show up fully as themselves.

“I grew up dancing, so movement has always been one of the ways I understand myself and process life,” she says. “But there was a point where I realized I wasn’t just interested in teaching workouts. I cared about what happened around the workout. The conversations before class, the woman who came in nervous and left feeling proud of herself, the friendships that started because people kept showing up to the same space.”

“I want movement to be the entry point, but I want people to leave with something they can carry into the rest of their life,” she adds.

Wellness is more than physical activity

Coach Zha’s work calls for her to help others reach their goals, so taking care of her own physical and mental health is paramount. Physical movement is actually only a fraction of her wellness routine.

“Wellness is movement, yes, but it’s also time with my kids,” she says. “It’s having people I love around me. It’s being able to rest without feeling guilty. It’s financial stability. It’s laughing. It’s feeling safe. It’s having enough space in my life to hear myself think.”

And the notion that self-care only counts if it’s some huge luxurious experience that involves walking into a spa, where you change into a plush robe? Break up with that idea. “Sometimes caring for yourself is saying no. Sometimes it’s asking your partner to handle bedtime,” Coach Zha says. “Sometimes it’s eating before everyone else for once because you realized you haven’t had a real meal all day. Sometimes it’s going for a 20-minute walk by yourself. Sometimes it’s telling someone that you actually do need help.”

She adds, “Motherhood can make you feel like being a good mom means constantly sacrificing yourself, and I just don’t believe our children need us to disappear in order for them to be loved well. I want my kids to grow up seeing a mother who takes care of herself too.”

Checking in with yourself before you completely crash is so important.

Staying in the moment proves to be one of the greatest blessings of motherhood for Coach Zha. “Kids are constantly pulling you back into the present,” she says. “They don’t care about the email you’re waiting on or the opportunity you’re worried about. They want you to look at the picture they drew or come sit next to them. And sometimes that really is the most important thing happening.”

Coach Zha is a mom, trainer, entrepreneur, and creator. From her standpoint, all of those titles inform each other and don’t need to exist as separate lives. For a long time, she associated taking care of herself with doing more, but she now understands that pouring back into herself means doing less at times — whether it’s running with no pace goal or walking into a Pilates class where she’s not the instructor. She’s even turned down opportunities that sound good on paper.

“Sometimes being in wellness creates this expectation that you should always be motivated, always disciplined, always taking care of yourself perfectly and that’s just not my reality,” she says. “My life is very much about learning how to keep showing up without abandoning myself in the process.”

She also stresses that being able to tell the difference between everyday exhaustion and complete burnout is crucial for mothers. “For me, exhaustion usually feels like I need rest. Burnout feels like I need to escape. There are normal days where I’m tired because I have two children and a business and life is life. But I think it becomes something different when everything starts feeling heavy,” she says. “When the things you normally enjoy feel like obligations. When you start resenting everyone for needing something from you. When even rest doesn’t really feel restorative.”

“Moms are so used to pushing through that we sometimes don’t recognize how depleted we are until we’re already past our limit,” she adds. “That’s why I think checking in with yourself before you completely crash is so important.”

The goal is not perfection

Social media has a way of making motherhood appear seamless. For Coach Zha, it’s not. The seams are, in fact, everywhere.

“A real day might be me teaching Pilates in the morning, taking a meeting in the car, trying to get a workout in, answering emails, creating content, figuring out dinner, getting somebody to soccer, looking for a missing shoe and then realizing at 10 PM that I forgot to send an invoice,” she says. “There are days where I feel like I’m doing an amazing job and there are days where I’m like wait, did anybody actually eat a vegetable today?”

And in case no one tells you, Coach Zha says it’s ok to miss a workout, to reply to that email late, to let laundry sit in the dryer for a few days. “I’ve had to stop expecting myself to perform every role perfectly at the same time,” she says. “Sometimes I’m a really present mom and the business has to wait. Sometimes I have a huge opportunity and I need my family to rally around me. I think the biggest lesson has been accepting that balance is probably not the goal. I’m looking for something closer to harmony.”

She doesn’t have everything figured out, nor does she pretend to. Your kiddos may look at you as superwoman, but you also have permission to be human. “I’m allowed to be tired. I’m allowed to have a bad day. I’m allowed to need support,” she says. “I just try not to let one hard moment convince me that everything is falling apart.”

“The goal isn’t perfection,” she adds. “I just want to build a life that feels good to actually live in, and I want my children to see that they’re allowed to do the same.”

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