Dad (or Mom) Cardio for the "I'm Too Busy" Crowd
Just walk bro.
Whenever people say, “I’m too busy to exercise,” they usually mean they don’t make it a priority.
It’s like someone saying they can’t afford to subscribe to a Substack, but then you look at their bar tabs.
No one likes to admit that time management is a reflection of your values. However, when you have kids you add beautiful chaos in your life, especially as you add on additional ones. You have to be more flexible. Here’s how I do it.
First of all, I do not sacrifice sleep.
Sleep is where your brain cleans up the gunk that causes dementia. I’m not cutting into sleep unless absolutely necessary. That does not make me “unmotivated.”
Early birds have psyop’ed people into believing that getting up early is a sign of discipline. No. Their physiological clocks (this is a real thing, look it up) have them up earlier naturally. Maybe not 4 a.m. gang. But they’d be up at 6 a.m. or so. Where as I would prefer to stay up until 2 or 3 a.m. (Can’t do that with kids anymore, so I’m more of a normie who gets up at a reasonable time and is in bed around 10:30 p.m., ideally asleep by 11. Sometimes up until midnight tho.)
I am a night owl. My dream schedule in college was:
Work from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., then class until 9 p.m., lift, espresso and philosophical debates with friends, bedtime at 2 or 3 a.m.
Wake up at 9 or 10 a.m. Drive off to work.
Here’s what is hilarious about being a night owl.
“Oh, you slept in until 10 a.m.”
No. I slept my 7 or 8 hours. Same as people who get up early.
They will not accept that. Even If you sleep the same amount of time as an early bird, you’re LAZY if you SLEEP IN.
If you like to be up early, good for you. Do that. But it’s not some huge achievement to have been born with a different biological clock.
Give up on OPTIMAL.
I am not training for peak performance. I would tweak my methods quite a bit if so. For example my walks aren’t really into Zone 2 much. Even brisk ones. I could wear a weighted vest (sometimes I carry my baby on a Baby Bjorn).
The game plan is to keep moving and get in what I can, without exhausting myself and then being a short-temptered father.
I sincerely believe that a lot of men exercise so much and with so much intensity because they hate their wives and kids.
When you push yourself hard, it does take a physiological toll. You’re adding stress to your body and mind.
Do you want to be the mean dad or the present and patient dad?
Depends on how much you enjoy having kids.
Fitness Twitter / social media is hilarious. Recreational people who exercise as a hobby get angry that people exercise differently than they do.
Unless you’re training for Ironman Kona or an actual powerlifting or bodybuilding contest, fussing over whether an hour of walking and getting some hills is in “superior” to whatever some guy on social media told you to do, is silly.
If you’re as elite as you think you are, you’re doing structured training for a specific event. Otherwise you do this as a hobby and way to stay healthy for yourself and your family / kids.
Blocks of time and how to use them.
Take today as a fresh example. My oldest is at the home school pod. My wife wanted me to grab the middle child while she took the baby on a necessary errand.
I walked with the kid, got her some ice cream, walked back to the park, and then did some hill sprints while kicking the tennis ball for the dog.
She wanted to sit down at the bench. I’d keep my eyes on her while running up a hill, then jogging down, then repeating.
Also had a dog to kick a tennis ball too. Poor guy has been inside for two weeks due to the flooding.
Got about an hour in.
Now was it TECHNICALLY exercise? I don’t know, man, and don’t really care. Neither should you.
Just get your steps in bros.
If you get in fewer than 8,500 steps in daily, your body may not make gains (if you’re natty) from training. This is known as anabolic resistance. Read about anabolic resistance here.
That’s why I wasn’t stressing out over whether my hour ago at lunch “counted.” It did. Maybe I didn’t active mTor, ampk, or other mitochondrial enzymes. But I got some steps in.
My 7-10 Day Split.
This is highly influenced by Peter Attia’s Centenarian Olympics mental model as well as the best available information from Alan Couzens and Steve Seiler and that “endurance crowd.”
Day 1. Upper body lifting. If time, a Zone 1-2 walk / slow slow slow jog.
Day 2. Zone 1-2 walk / slow jog / Peloton.
Day 3. Leg day.
Day 4. Zone 1-2 walk / slow jog / Peloton.
Day 5. VO2 max intervals.
Day 6. Off.
Day 7. Long walk / ride (3+ hours ideally, but family comes first).
Throw in balance and core stuff whenever possible.
Training philosophy: Everything is easy, even lifting (don’t crash and burn), except when it’s very hard. Joe Friel says do 3 easy days (an off day counts) and one very hard day.
Hard days are way harder than when I trained “hard” all the time.
VO2 max days are pretty horrible. It’s the “leg day of cardio.”
Yes, walking counts as exercise.
In 26 Marathons (great book even if you don’t care about running, as I surely don’t), Meb Keflezighi explained that as he got over 35, he switched from a weekly training split to a 10 day one.
You can’t get as many hard workouts in during a 7 day period as you get older.
Sometimes I push that VO2 max day out, as it does take it out of me. I am tired the next day and even a little cranky due to the stress it puts on the central nervous system.
I actually like my kids and don’t want to bark at them because I wanted to “train harder.” I literally only exercise for my kids and wife and organize my life around being around longer.
The main objective is to hit 2-3 lifting in a week to ten days, with 1 hard interval session (really hard), and then brisk walks or zone 2 rides on the Peloton the rest of the time.
Examples of Dad Workouts.
Baby needs a nap. I load up the stroller with a carrier in case he wakes up and wants held. Walk 2-3 hours in zone 1-2.
Take kids to park. They play while I walk laps up and down a field. (This is pretty boring, not gonna lie.)
Philosophy is: Just get your steps in, bro.
Lift twice a week for 45 to 90 minutes, depending on time. Everyone can find the time to do this.
Every 7 to 10 days, the kids end up being with their grandma. When I have a huge block of time, I go walk for as long as possible, or do a long walk and then come back and either ride hard intervals or do more Zone 1 / 2 on the bike.
Intervals are always brutal. You can knock those out. If you do them right, you don’t want or need more than 30 minutes of “working time.” The rest is warm-up and cool down.
If you can afford to, get an airbike.
I use a Peloton and like it a lot. But it’s expensive and the subscription is absurd.
Airbikes are great to have at home. You can stash them in a corner.
“But is it working?”
The people asking this question believe that the Liver King was all natty and didn’t color his hair or use Botox.
As someone who has been off TRT for over 2.5 years (irrelevant to you as to why I did that, so don’t bother asking), training this way has meant:
No injuries for two years.
Lowered resting heart rate.
Never more than a 5 days of missed workouts, unless extremely sick. (Which if you have kids is gonna happen.)
Feel great, breathing better.
If I back on the sauce, people would be squeezing my arms.
Yes, making “gains.”
It takes 0 motivation for me to get out to exercise, because most of the time it’s only a walk. If I’m feeling run down, then a walk doesn’t take a tax out of me. If I’m feeling better, then walk longer. (But keep the heart rate lower than 135 beats per minute.)
My focus when walking is duration not heart rate.
Keep the heart pulsing at a steady rate for as long as possible.
So, yeah, this structure is working.
Some good resources / Books.
Fast After 50.
Get Serious.
Outlive.
Alan Couzens newsletter.
Brady Holmer newsletter.
Just hire a coach, bro.
I enjoy spending (wasting?) hundreds of hours in rabbit holes.
Unless you get to read and write for a living, then please do not do this.
Hire a qualified coach to explain all this stuff I wrote, and design programs for you.
There are so many good ones. Marc Lobliner, Skip LaCour, Alexander Cortes, Any Man Fitness. They can refer you out to other people.
No! I don’t get a kickback if you sign with them. But if you’ve read all the way down here, that’s a lot of time. You could pick up a second job and use less than a few hours of wages to HIRE A COACH.
Invaluable resource, thank you!
Chronemics is how we perceive, study, and interpret 'messages' of time, including sleep preferences, and how (and why) people do things differently. Just like the common belief that extroverts make better leaders than introverts (incorrect), there is also the belief that morning people are simply better when it's really a matter of biological time orientation and biorhythms.