Working out with babies requires sacrifice from the entire family

[redeemedsinner]

I’ve always been an early 630am gym workout guy for over 10 years……then I had a child

You can’t tell an infant to stay quiet in bed so daddy can get a solid night of sleep to go to the gym in the AM. If you want to go to the gym your spouse will have to sacrifice her sleep when the baby wakes up in the middle of the night just so you can sleep uninterrupted. If you want to go to the gym during the day your spouse has to agree to watch the baby and hold down the household so you can pump iron.

It’s not easy as “make time dont find the time, make it a priority” when your #1 priority is the well being of your child and family. Being a single guy with a 9-5, it was easy for me to make it to the gym early in AM before work because nobody else had to sacrifice to allow me to workout.

These days I typically workout at 530am before the baby wakes up at 7am. Sometimes like last week i was able to make it to the gym 5 days because he slept through the night. This week i haven’t made it to the gym because the baby has woken up in the night. This week Ive been doing more home workouts with dumbbells to still get a workout in even if its not as intense as if I was at the gym.

I just hate the meat heads on social media that preach “we all have the same 24hrs”

 

[gtorre]

@redeemedsinner Alan Thrall made a really good video on this, if you're interested. He's a guy for whom training is his entire profession and livelihood, and even he found training hard to slot in. Ultimately he had to abandom the conventional "im driving to the gym and be back in 3 hours" route and just get in bits of exercise here and there when suits. So a couple sets of lunges while walking the pram, goblet squats after bedtime, that kind of thing.

Edit: here's the video:

 

[catholiclutheran]

@gtorre I've reached a similar conclusion. I bought dumbbells and other equipment for my office. I tried going to the gym having a child and realized it was impractical. I try to squeeze in a little time for a workout (almost) every M-F. You have to accept you can't give it the amount of time you could before. If you get a few sets in to failure for every muscle per week, you make progress. Albeit, not as much as if you had more time but at least you are not decaying.

 

[rev7verse9to12]

@catholiclutheran Here's a pro tip: neglect the office job, and prioritize your family and gainz /s

 

[catholiclutheran]

@rev7verse9to12 Ha, I wish... gotta bring home the bacon

 

[frozenn]

@catholiclutheran What’s the use of bacon if it doesn’t go toward gains

 

[catholiclutheran]

@frozenn True

 

[melodybeth]

@rev7verse9to12 How is your family going to afford a house and healthcare?

 

[aranyi_zsolt]

@catholiclutheran I used a device called an Isochain at work and got pretty good gains. Just posted a longer comment about it in this thread. It's not going to do everything a gym can do but I think it covers a lot of basic movements/progressions pretty well; the biggest gap just using the device would be no core/ab-specific training.

 

[hopeisalive]

@redeemedsinner I was fine with the lack of sleep. It was the getting sick every other week that killed me.

 

[dragonfly34]

@hopeisalive Amen to this.

 

[marysmit]

@hopeisalive Waves while recovering from freaking MONO of all things.

 

[user_1400]

@hopeisalive Fuck me, my wee man is 15 months now and I swear ive been sick more this last 8 months or so since hes been at daycare 2 days a week than I have in the last 10 years

 

[redcyc]

@user_1400 That’s because daycare is a cesspool of diseases. Every kids is some kind of sick and it gets shared around.

 

[999escape]

@hopeisalive I have a mate dealing with exactly this with a newishborn kid, it seems brutal! Great effort to still make the time to dedicate to making yourself fitter and stronger for you, or even better, for the people in your life! Think of the difference it will make for your kid to have somebody that can throw them around and play about when they’re 40 or 50 years old… you get the point. But it’s Herculean to balance everything. As a dude without kids with a busy life, I’m amazed that people can manage it with kids on top of everything!

 

[practicingchristianity]

@hopeisalive Yup, my 9 month old brought something home from daycare and I’ve been down since last Friday. I wear a whoop and had 3 straight days of 1% recovery which was wild to see.

 

[jessephilz]

@hopeisalive Absolutely. I spent 3 months straight sick this past winter. I’ve still got a lingering cough. The gains have not been gaining.

 

[venutianpunk]

@redeemedsinner I just wanted to say thank you for this post. I feel like the parent not pursuing their hobbies (let's be honest, usually it's the mom), is seen to be bad at prioritizing their time. They're actually simply prioritizing everyone else, with no one returning the favor.

 

[agraciousframe]

@venutianpunk And I want to say thank you for this comment. I have been getting up at 5 am to workout, sometimes my kid can smell me and wakes up to join me. I don't want to send him to my sleeping husband since I'm up anyway. It's better now that he's 4, I can still kind of work out, but it's not great. So I signed up for an out of the house gym class on Tues evenings which works because I leave and go do it. But my husband is not great at multitasking so I come home to a kitchen in chaos that he's going to "clean up later". He will eventually do that, but the problem is I want to make my late supper and prep my lunch for the next day in this chaos kitchen, so I just end up cleaning it. That part frustrates me because I would have proactively cleaned it as I cooked and not had so much chaos to undo, but I can't really be mad at my husband when I took off right before dinner time. Anyway all this to say, it's not as easy as just going to work out.

 

[venutianpunk]

@agraciousframe I feel you. I'm the mom and my daughter is six. I have gotten back to working out consistently this year, and it's come with having to just tell my husband and kid I'm not going to be home right after work because I need to take care of myself. I need to have 45 minutes where I'm being "selfish", which is what it's so often seen as when we do take that time for ourselves.

It's not selfish. It's not bad for your family. It is a need.