Fitness for new fathers: how I dealt with my dadbod

I wasn’t totally unprepared therefore and even planned out my ‘realistic’ two-week paternity exercise routine as follows:

• Daily dog walks

• 5-minute morning yoga routine

• Twice a week run or cycle

• Once a week gym

My actual routine looked more like this:

• Get off sofa to pay dog walker

• Get off sofa to pay takeaway delivery man

• Scrape meconium off everything

• Spend 10 minutes mastering the perfect nappy

• Immediately remove dirty nappy

• Cry each hour, on the hour, every day

• Watch every Star Wars movie in chronological order, get confused with the stupid naming system and start again in reverse

• Adopt the eating habits of Kevin McCallister from Home Alone

• Manage one jog two days before going back to work…and sprain my calf so badly ten minutes in I had to get a bus home

In one particularly sleepless moment of delirium I even considered using the weight differential between the dog and the baby for drop-set bench presses.

Having realised that much of the well-meaning advice I’d delivered to clients over the years was ambitious at best, useless at worst, I went searching for guidance for myself. Whilst there are numerous articles and books for women about ante and post-natal exercise, and understandably so given the gender fitness gap, I could barely find any advice for new dads to help take care of themselves. So now I’m five months in, I’ve analysed everything I did wrong, spoken to many fathers and produced these five practical tips I wish someone had told me before I became a Dad:

Get fit first

In my quest to become a dad I was at my physical peak around the time of conception. I eschewed caffeine and alcohol for a year, took cold showers, lifted weights and ate a hormone happy diet. Once my job was done, I begun to take the sympathy pregnancy notion a little too literally. But you need to be in peak physical shape to be a dad. There’s a reason they use sleep deprivation in the military; it’s brutal. The fitter you are, the easier you’ll cope with the first few months. The latest research also suggests that muscle memory really does exist, and our bodies demonstrate a genetic memory of previous muscle growth, making it easier to redevelop lost gains once the baby is here.

Plan your meals

Use a food delivery service, order in or ask for help from family and friends. I’ll be forever grateful to our Bangladeshi neighbours who, despite having four children of their own, brought us daily homemade meals for a fortnight. Do whatever is most convenient for your family, but the main thing is to have an eating plan. I often ended up having the delicious calorie-controlled lunch I’d made at midnight, which was inevitably followed by coffee, which was followed by ice cream. This summer’s heat wave didn't help, and the Rowntree’s board can thank me personally for their record sales of fruit pastel lollies. My solution has been an 8-hour eating window between 11am and 7pm, which the latest research suggests may be an effective fat loss method that preserves muscle mass.

Don’t stress about the gym, just stay active

Whilst exercise is a good way to improve health and change your physique, it’s a lousy way to burn calories and it’s probably unlikely you’ll do anything meaningful unless you have a very understanding spouse or a home gym. The majority of your calorie expenditure is accounted for by your basal metabolic rate (the number of calories required for your body to function at rest). So being generally active is the most effective way to increase your daily calorie expenditure, especially at times of high stress. If I’d committed to a 30 minute walk a day, rather than my overambitious exercise plan, I’d not only have mitigated much of the extra calorie intake, I’d have been less inclined to keep visiting the fridge and probably felt a lot better too. 

If you simply must lift weights, use that extra dadbod ballast

After trying and failing to get to the gym in the first few months, I decide to change tact and strip my strength training back to basics. I’m a big fan of callisthenics. You don’t need any specialist equipment, can do it anywhere and I like the philosophical purity of basic movement patterns. Instead of trying to complete a specific workout, I gave myself daily volume targets for one of three exercises, push ups (100), pull ups (50) or Bulgarian split squats (200) and then chipped away at these any opportunity I could (when baby was feeding, tummy time etc). ‘Greasing the groove’ like this I found I comfortably managed each target over 8-10 short sets a day. Remarkably, after a month of this approach, when I did finally get back in the gym, my strength and endurance were only marginally down, despite several months away from a dumbbell.

If it’s practical, cycle your commute

I’m not here to convert anyone but I now understand the middle-aged lycra fetish of the Dad-crowd. Instead of spending a fortune on public transport or fuel, I clock up 20 miles a day on my bike, get to and from work 10 minutes quicker and I fit in an extra hour’s cardio simply by going to work.

I have accepted life will probably never be quite as conducive to exercise again as a father, but over the last month I have now found a routine which works for me and I’m starting to look and feel capable in the gym again.

My final advice is simple. Don’t panic as exercise drops down the priority list in the few months of new fatherhood and certainly don’t be embarrassed about your Dadbod. I want to get back in shape to be fit and healthy for my family but for now, every time I give my belly a little pat, it’s simply a happy reminder that I’m no longer the most important person in my life.