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Off-Topic So, I thing came up .. I´m about to be a father

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So, I thing came up .. I´m about to be a father in three weeks :)

I realize this will be a new era in Life with changed priorities and that time and effort will be limited as the newborn will take much of our time.

All that aside. My wife and I have spoken a lot about how important it is to still have the ability to train as its a big interest for both of us.

We have come to a reasonable and mutual agreement that we will have 2-3 Days/week to train about one hour per session.

I have thought about how to make as much of this as possible. Right now I do S&S 5-6 times per week and love it! But will S&S be to little volume done 2-3 Days/week?

My first option I thought would be

Day 1)
squat/bench/weighted pull-ups followed by 100 swings S&S style

Day 2)
squat/bench/weighted pull-ups followed by 100 swings S&S style

If I have the thrid day I do a regular S&S day.



The second option)
Is to follow S&S. I own a 24k and a 32k. Need to buy a 16k for warm-up. The problem is space. I might be able to use our garage, but the floor is concrete and quite dirty as our car goes in and out (quite rainy here). I could probably do this more frequent than 2-3 Days per week since I can do it at home.


I really want to continue training in some way and dont take to long of a break as I feel Amazing right now.
 
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First off, congratulations, it is a very rewarding experience, despite being hard work........

Could you get a carpet cut-off or old rug and place on the garage floor? Another option is jigsaw mats. Looking at Amazon, 4 jigsaw mats covering 16 sq ft costs £10.... That way, can do S&S in the garage whenever you are able to.

Other kettlebell workout options would be the Moving Target Complexes.....

Good luck
 
Congrats on becoming a father! It's going to completely change your life in ways you can't imagine yet :) Coolest thing ever!

Once your child arrives, your priorities in the beginning will be caring for your wife and baby. Trying to keep a regular practice/workout schedule during this time may be impossible. Plus, you'll likely be sleep deprived for a couple weeks. Focus on your family during this time, they're going to need you. Kettlebells can wait.

I became a dad in June (twins) and have been able to practice S&S 3-5 times a week. The key is to be flexible. On rare days I can workout as soon as I come home from work, but most often I have to workout early in the morning (I'm talking 4am to 5am) or at night once the babies are asleep. Neither of those times are preferable, but it's what I have available. Trying to block off certain times each day for working out will likely cause a lot of frustration, because the baby won't care about your schedule. If it's your time to workout but the baby's fussy and mommy's too tired to help, there goes your schedule! And that's just going to leave you frustrated and angry. You'll have to choose between working out or being a good father/husband. Always choose the latter.

A good trick I found is to plan your day around taking care of the wife and baby instead of your own wants/needs, and workout if a space opens up. It usually does. Nearly every time I've tried to plan my day around anything else it blows up in my face.

As for your exercise regimen, I'm not qualified to speak on that, but I can testify that S&S is still possible 3-5 times a week. And I can certainly be of help when it comes to making time for things.

All the best.
 
Congratulations!

Now, at first your first option looks really good to me. A very nice selection of movements that should make you stronger. Two sessions a week with appropriate intensity should enable you to make great progress. A good program for anyone, I'd say, and especially for one stressed for time.

However, even if planning ahead is a wise thing to do, and that planning for the worse is a good idea in general, I wouldn't worry too much and necessarily go for the worst option right away. It may be that you both turn out to have time to train more than you thought.

My wife and I had our first baby a couple of years ago. The time right after the birth was hard, and sleep was a precious commodity. However, after we got through the first troubles and established a routine and got the sleeping in order for the whole family, it turns out that there was time to train and to live even with a baby. It may not necessarily take that long for you, and you may not need to really establish any new routines for a longer time.

But do concentrate on the sleep in the beginning. That should be #1 priority for every one of you.
 
Congratulations on your impending parenthood!

I agree that scheduling training sessions with a newborn is very challenging. You likely WILL have enough time to train, but it will be unpredictable and will probably appear in inconsistently sized chunks. IMO, the best way to think about it is not to try to carve out a few full training sessions a week, but rather to plan your training around short mix and match "modules" that you can plug into random chunks of free time as they appear.

Embrace the randomness, on the theory that a little bit of something, done consistently, is not only better than nothing, but adds up to a substantial volume of work over time. Keep it low stress; it shouldn't feel like another burden on your time in a hectic day, but as a little stress-relieving break. Do what you can, when you can, but don't worry that you're not doing more.

KBs work well for this because you can use them at home in very little space. For instance, one module might focus on swings. If you have a few spare minutes, you might do 2-4 sets of 10. Or a module might be goblet squats. Or a module might be a combo -- Dan John has one where you pyramid two arm swings and goblet squats (1 swing, 1 squat/2 swings, 2 squats, etc., up to 5 or more, and then back down to 1). You can organize and mix and match modules in all kinds of ways, but the main idea is just to get in some regular practice and accumulate reps.

Good luck.
 
@Stefan Olsson congrats! I started a similar thread a while back you might want to take a look If you could only train for 10 min, what would you do?

My baby is 7 month old now, and my experience has been very much what @Steve W. said. Additionally, I would say that sleeping and eating patterns are a mess during this period, so I personally would avoid types of training that require very good recovery, such as hypertrophy or maybe heavy powerlifting.

I have been doing S&S (as much as I could). Kettlebells seem to fit very well. My last piece of advice would be to take it easy and dont be too hard on yourself if you miss a few sessions (you will).

Edit: I´m also doing GTG pull ups at the office. GTG at work is a great tool for this period.
 
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Congratulations to @Stefan Olsson and all the other new parents who've chimed in here! I remember those days. (My youngest is in his third year of college now.)

If time allows, my recommendation would be to carve out time early in your day for your S&S swings - warmup quickly, e.g., one set of halos and one set of goblet squats, then 10 minutes for your swings, and you're done. Then schedule other strength training later in the day as your schedule allows.

-S-
 
One other time-saving device - if you're bound and determined to get 100 swings in and don't have 10 minutes, consider using a lighter bell and longer sets, but still something from which you can recover OTM, e.g., if you are swinging a 32 kg for 10's OTM, do a 24 kg for 15's OTM and do 6 sets for a total of 90 swings. It'll take you 6 minutes instead of 10. It's not ideal but it's not terrible, either.

-S-
 
@Stefan Olsson congratulations and welcome to fatherhood. My daughter is almost 7 now and it will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. Regarding training, I train in my garage and do my kettlebell stuff on a 6'X8' carpet. If I need more space, it's easy to roll it and put it aside. The garage is unheated generally, but it has a heater that I will turn on for 10 minutes before I train if it's very cold. The carpet provides enough insulation from the cold concrete, especially if you keep socks on.

Another option that I did not know about when my daughter was born would be a grease the groove approach to grinds and 10-20 minutes of swings/snatches a day.
 
congrats! loads of good suggestions. About to have my second so bricking it a bit as I quite like the minimal sleep I get as it is. I'd definitely take it easy for the first few months and just do what you can to keep your body working and to get out some stress.

Get up's are great training for getting up and down from the floor with a toddler and those car seats that have handles are quite heavy if you are holding them a while, so you might get some loaded carry work in - just don't be tempted to swing them...too hard.
 
JamesR said:
Get up's are great training for getting up and down from the floor with a toddler and those car seats that have handles are quite heavy if you are holding them a while, so you might get some loaded carry work in - just don't be tempted to swing them...too hard.
Click to expand...

I realize this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it's also very true. When my son was an infant, he would only fall asleep if I walked around while carrying him in a sling (that particular model of sling was later recalled as a suffocation hazard, no joke, but is was a lifeSAVER for me). 30 minutes plus of walking around with that sling on was quite a decent upper back workout.

A little later on, one exercise that proved very "sport specific" was the KB hack squat. I would take my son along with me in a backpack child carrier when I walked the dog. When picking up the dog's poop, I couldn't bend forward or my son would take a header out of the carrier. So I had to squat down with an upright torso, exactly like a hack squat.
 
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Congratulations.

Stefan Olsson said:
We have come to a reasonable and mutual agreement that we will have 2-3 Days/week to train about one hour per session.
Click to expand...

I suspect your plan may not survive first contact! As others have said you will have more immediate priorities.

As for training in the garage - my floor was very dusty concrete but painting it with specialist garage floor paint was quick, not outrageously expensive and really sealed the floor nicely. A rubber mat will then be sufficient for protecting your knees for get-ups.

Stefan Olsson said:
I´m about to be a father in three weeks :)
Click to expand...

One last thing - your baby may not know this! My eldest arrived four weeks early without warning - I suggest having a man bag with appropriate snacks packed and ready to go.
 
Congratulation! @Stefan Olsson
Here is a suggetion: It is actually a double kettlebell program. You could check out Kettlebell Strong by Geoff Neupert.
I got that program myself. The sessions are brief and straight to the point. People have reported all kind of good things about it.
 
Congrats! It can be tough, but as with most things, its a matter of priorities and being flexible in your approach. A few tactics that I found useful, many of which have already been covered:
1) create the ability to train at home. Not possible for all, but even if you just have a pullup bar and a kettlebell or two, it will make it much easier to get some kind of work in.

2) break up training sessions into 'bite sized' pieces. I was doing S&S when my second son came, and thought of it as 3 separable pieces - warm-up/mobility, swings, and get-ups. If I could do them all in one session, great. Many times I couldn't, but I found that I was consistently able to do all three pieces at different times of the same day (warm-up first thing in the am, swings during morning nap, get-ups at night, etc). Maybe its not as ideal, but i found that i adapted and made progress regardless. You can apply same philosophy to many other programs.

3) learn to minimize warm-ups. I used to spend 15-20 mins warming up. Given the unpredictability of how long you may have in a given day to work out, if you can train your body to jump in with a minimal warm-up, you'll be able to prioritize the important parts of your training.

4) do something in the morning to get moving. I did whatever I could to set aside 5 minutes in the am for some OS-type work. Especially with inconsistent sleep, my body felt much better throughout the day when i started with a little activity to get woken up and moving.
 
Congratulations! Moving slightly sideways.......you will have plenty of time and opportunities, more than you think for some fantastic training sessions......on the floor! All that bonding and playing sets you up nicely for some baby get ups, that's not modified get ups but proper ones with your baby. Bonus......they grow and get heavy and they love getting chucked about. Bonus 2, a new training partner. Bonus 3, the best coach you will ever have. My kids are 14 and 20, I did get ups not knowing it was a thing, kind of goat bag get ups, think Dan John calls them. Hug them in close, get up etc. Goblets too, for twins: double baby front squats. As they develop, crawl with them too, loads, absolutely loads of movement training, leg pressing, floor presses, it's all there somehow. You could, I suppose, swing the little things......they'd love it! Then get them to teach you to cartwheel in a couple years from now. Great times ahead.

ah, oops....didn't realise the get up with yer baby was already offered. 100 swings for me.
 
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Congratulations!! Life's about to get a whole lot more interesting. There's been quite a few good bits of advice already put out there, so instead I just throw more reading material at you ;).

Here's a thread I started when my son was 9 months old, and I think it has quite a bit of good info:
Training as a Parent

You could skim through my training log; my son was born less than a month after I started it:
Matt's Log

Another good one to look at is @Geoff Chafe's log. He's a good example of how someone who is very strong and very serious about staying that way approaches the combined challenges of training and parenthood.
https://www.strongfirst.com/community/threads/fat-dads-gym.8898/page-10
 
you know how the airlines say to put your own oxygen mask on first, then your children's? Well, staying in good shape yourself is taking good care of your dependents...they're not mutually exclusive.
Also, it's good modeling for your kids to see you active as a normal part of the day. Makes it natural for them. Good luck with parenting! Everything somehow works out....
 
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