When I had one kid, once she started sleeping through the night fairly regularly, I woke up at 5am a few days a week to exercise before work. With two kids, that seems harder to do. Every time I set an early alarm, at least one kid either has trouble sleeping through the night or wakes up very early, making an early workout difficult or impossible.
My own personal options seem to be to either wake up even earlier and accept the fact that I’m going to be very tired, or try to stay up later and exercise after the kids go to bed (usually around 8:30pm, with any luck…).
So, to the dads that find time to exercise, when do you do it?
I do mostly walking and sneak that in throughout my work day in the office, I’m regularly hitting 10k steps daily that way, though I’m a bit lacking on any other exercises (upper-body or strength training or anything else really). After I drop kids off for school, I’ve got about 30min free time before work starts, so I go for a 20 min walk and run up about 18 flights of stairs, then repeat again for lunch time and just go on random walks throughout the day. It’s 4pm right now and I’m already sitting at +10k steps before I’ve even left the building for the day.
The problem I have is replicating this routine at home or just starting up any other routine at home. At work, I’ve got the habit set, I just don’t even think about it, it’s just automatic, but at home with kids and distractions, it’s hard to get anything started, as I’m constantly getting pulled in two or three different directions everytime I walk in the door.