Q&A: Tessa Virtue shares how she’s raising an active toddler

During her career as a figure skater, Tessa Virtue captured the hearts of Canadians. (Her gold-medal-winning ice dance with Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics will forever give us goosebumps.) In summer 2024, Virtue welcomed her first child with husband Morgan Rielly, a Toronto Maple Leafs player. 

As the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics approached, we checked in with Virtue to see how she and Rielly are raising McCormick, who’s now an active toddler, and what her own relationship to physical activity is like these days.

What is your son’s favourite game lately?

I’ll admit, there aren’t many days that go by where we don’t have some kind of dance party. His absolute favourite activity right now is the dance freeze game. So we dance, dance, dance like crazy, and then we freeze. Everything stops. And then keep dancing.

And there are different iterations of this. Sometimes we dance like certain animals. Sometimes we’re inspired by different genres of music. But it is so fun to see how he interacts with the world and is really coming to learn about his own body and sense of self in space. 

What are you loving about the toddler phase of your son’s life?

There is so much to love about the toddler stage of development. But I think at the moment, if I had to pick a favourite thing, it would be how fully Mick experiences life. Everything he does, he does with 100% energy and enthusiasm, and it is unfiltered, right? It’s the most pure kind of joy—and also the most pure kind of sadness or frustration. It is all just so deeply felt. Whether he’s greeting you at the door or climbing in a little play area or swinging a mini stick, he does it with his full body. And that kind of all-encompassing nature of that childlike wonder, is really beautiful. 

Have you set up your home in any particular ways to encourage your son’s play? 

There are a couple of ways that we’ve chosen to encourage active play in our household, and these might seem obvious, but one we have to be good role models. Mick needs to see us work, out, stretch, meditate, you name it, and he’s already starting to mimic some of that behaviour and embody the significance and the importance of that. 

And the other one is just access and exposure. We try and put out a variety of different sporting equipment at home and, curiously, we just sort of wait to see what he self-selects and and how he chooses to engage with the different pieces of equipment. And we’re just now getting into the stage where we’re starting to introduce some more loosely organized sports and sports adventures, like soccer and gymnastics, which is also just great social play for him. 

What does an active day look like for you and your family?

As far as physical activity is concerned, every day looks a little bit different now. No longer do I have that regimented structure of an athlete’s life, but I do try and commit to movement of some kind every single day. So it could be a walk outside. It could be Pilates, yoga, strength training. Oftentimes, it’s just me in front of my computer following along with something on YouTube. 

Sometimes it’s in person, if I need the social element of a class, or maybe some one-on-one time with my trainer. 

All that to say, I’ve had to let go of expectations of the perfect way to train and show up for myself in that way and actually embrace just the privilege of being physically active. I used to have this construct that if I wasn’t going to the gym for three or four hours like I would when I was an athlete, it somehow wasn’t worth it. And once I was able to break free from that, I realized that any kind of movement, whether it was five, 10, 15 minutes, or longer, made such a difference in every aspect of my life.