Avoiding the Excuses – Train When You Can!

Avoiding the Excuses – Train When You Can!

We did some family ‘training’ today.

We’re not one of those freaky families, pushing our kids to join in with everything we do, but today was a great opportunity for us all to do something we enjoyed and get a workout in at the same time!

Last year, I wrote an article titled ‘are your weekends making you fat?‘ It was based around the idea that often our weekends are a combination of excess food and a lack of movement.

When you consider a weekend (Friday night, Saturday and Sunday) makes up 33% of the week, it’s more than enough time to undo all of your good work during the rest of the week.

It’s about removing the excuses and training when you can.

Our family life is busy – I’m out of the house around 60 hours per week and Rachel works as a physiotherapist. I can train easily – working in Personal Training means I spend my life in a gym! For her, it’s not so easy. If I’m out of the house we don’t have baby sitting on hand, so Rach can only train when I’m free to look after the kids. It could be an excuse, but we work around it.

Today we took the kids and did a conditioning session on the indoor football pitches in the gym!

Isaac (our eldest) was especially happy as he loves playing football and this workout was going to be on the astroturf football pitch! We took a football along with us so he could play to his hearts content! Jago (the bubba) was entertained with his toys, but in truth he seemed more interested in what was going on with us!

Our warm up was a 10 minute game of football with Isaac – weirdly functional actually! Plenty of direction-change, gradual increase in intensity and it certainly raised the heart rate!

From there, we went into prowler pushes. Jago was a happy spectator, but Isaac wanted to be a passenger. Weighing 25kg he was an ideal additional weight, making the workout harder.

10 sets (500m) of this was a killer…

When we were done with the prowler, we moved onto a Kettlebell and push up superset. Again, Isaac fancied being a participant and got involved when I found a 2kg kettlebell! (Before anyone goes on about kids and weight training, he was being supervised by me, plus resistance exercise has been proven safe for children.)

We finished off with some abdominal work and more football, which was a lot tougher than the game we used for the warm up!

As we were leaving, Isaac protested and wanted to stay to do some more exercise and play more football! He loved being there (but he’s no stranger to the gym, he’s had a couple of football-themed birthday parties there and has pestered me to take him to play football!)

The point of this post isn’t to give fitness advice, it’s more to show that there are ways you can train, even if it’s slightly unconventional. You could…

• Do a workout at home
• Cycle to work
• Go to the gym on your lunch break at work.
• Or even take your kids to the gym with you!

Instead of making excuses as to why you can’t train, why not look at opportunities where you CAN fit a session in!

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