Those of us who have children have to work every day on figuring out how to balance taking care of the little ones and training. Since when my daughter is with me it’s just the two of us, I had to do some mental gymnastics to maintain my training while she is around. I have found some solutions to create extra training time.
The first and obvious choice is to train while your child is at daycare, school or after care. I am pretty sure many of you have the same first response to this as I do: you realize we have jobs, right? True! I do, too. However, I was able to fit in some training into regular work days – I go for my shorter swims and run intervals during lunch break. Obvious limitation: you have to have place to do it and shower after. When I had a gym in my office building, I would do strength training at lunch. I strongly recommend this one for everybody though – it frees up a lot of time!
Idea number two: can you bike or run to the office? Building your workout into your commute is amazing! And like with the lunch time training, I would strongly recommend it to everybody. It’s good for you and good for the environment.
But this is not what I wanted to focus on this week. I wanted to talk about taking care of your child while you are working out.
Tool #1: at home training equipment
Your kid probably can take care of themselves around the house safely for a bit or at least they sleep more than you do. So while they are playing in their room, watching tv or are sleeping, you can work out at home:
These guys tend to be loud, but I can’t think of a better way to fit in cardio when you are stuck at home!
We can’t always be doing cardio though, can we? Home is actually perfect for stretching and strength training. All you need is a yoga mat and maybe some resistance band! I love doing it when my daughter watches tv (or when I want to watch tv). My mini-me actually picked up that habit from me recently!
These ideas work when your kid can take care of themselves though and are indoor. It’s way more fun when you can have your kid join you for training. Depending on their age, approach has to change.
Babies are relatively easy to manage. You can always run with them in a running stroller:
Unfortunately, swimming is trickier. Some gyms and pools have some sort of childcare and that’s wonderful! You can drop off your little one and get your workout done. They do have to be big enough for that though. Once they are bigger, you can take them for your open water swims though:
Dragging your kid around has one serious advantage: on race day, when you don’t have your little bundle of joy in tow, swimming/ biking/ running seems so much easier and you go that much faster!
Hopefully, as your little one gets bigger, you can incorporate them in training as training partners rather than (usually bored) weights increasing effectiveness of your training. One of the best thing you can do to improve your chances of getting a good workout is teaching them how to ride a bike. I am still going through this with my little one and it’s awesome. First of all: isn’t just teaching them a great intervals training???
My daughter hated biking with training wheels, so I missed out on being able to take her with me when she was younger. But now, she is a proud cyclist, so our weekends are starting to look like:
She loves speed! I think that’s what finally sealed the deal on riding a bike – now she can go FAST! For now, she is still working on her technique, so I can keep up easily. I have a feeling though that pretty soon, we will progress to:
Our kids provide us with some other opportunities for training. I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of parents looking like they will die of boredom while their children are taking swim lessons, have soccer practice or learn how to ice skate. Those are the exact same people who complain later that they don’t have time for anything in life. I’m going to skip the obvious answer that they could at least read a book instead of mindlessly poking at their phones. There may be a good way to use time for your training though.
Probably the place I see bored parents the most are during swim lessons and swim team practices. My pool has multiple lanes and some are always open for ‘regular’ people to swim (although it may get crowded). At first, people looked at me as if I was strange, but over time, they got used to my and my daughter doing this:
I actually heard from some instructors that when it comes to the little ones, they prefer if the parents aren’t there staring at the lesson. It’s not about doing something wrong. Just a lot of children will look at the parents a lot and check with them if something is ok rather than following instructions. There are also kids who act scared and their parents enable that behavior. Not productive to anybody!
There are also soccer (and such) practices:
This works also when your kids are at gymnastics, dance or other karate. Those classes will be indoors, but who said you can’t go run around the building? A nearby park? A friend of mine who used to coach his son’s soccer team said he hated when the parents would hang out at practice and watch them. It’s not even about the bored ones, who are bad enough. This also brings a lot of helicopter parents, who behave like their kids are going to the olympics and want to review every singe thing that happened during practice. That’s definitely not healthy for anybody involved…
We all have lives outside our training and that’s ok. The trick is figuring out how to fit it all into a day. It’s not easy, but definitely give some thought to bringing your kids along for the journey. Who knows, maybe them watching you train will encourage them to start one of their own?