I will present two recent experiments that utilize the bosonic motional modes in a trapped-ion system, expanding the available degrees of freedom on trapped-ion simulators. These motional modes are typically only used as an intermediary resource for entangling operations, but recent work has focused on using motional modes for more efficient quantum simulation. One use case is thermal state preparation. This process generally involves coupling the system of interest to a bath of ancilla qubits, leading to a large resource overhead. By replacing these ancillae with motional modes, one can greatly reduce the qubit count needed for state preparation. We use this approach to variationally prepare thermal states of a SU(2) and SU(3) lattice gauge theory at finite densities. A second use case is simulation of spin-boson Hamiltonians. Typically this is done by mapping the bosons onto a finite number of qubits, leading to truncation errors, high qubit overhead, and large gate depth. We bypass these problems by directly mapping the bosons onto the motional modes. As a proof of concept, we experimentally simulate nonequilibrium dynamics of a 1+1D Yukawa model and measure fermion- and boson-occupation-state probabilities. We find excellent agreement with theory, even at high boson occupations.