What Fatherhood Has Taught Me About Fitness & Life (And What It Can Teach You)
Staying Fit When Everything Is Working Against You
In the spirit of Father’s Day, I wrote and finished this post yesterday. I tried to get it out, but I spent the afternoon with my actual father and grandfather while also spending quality time with my son being a father, so today will have to suffice.
Have no fear, I’m not turning into a fatherhood guru writer… yet, these are some deep life lessons that can help anyone, parent or not, improve their success in their fitness endeavors… and life itself.
I’ve been writing this post for about a year now, in a sense, as I pick up new tricks and lessons learned entering one of the more demanding periods of our lives for most people.
When I first talked about how we were expecting my first child, almost immediately all I heard were snide comments like “Just wait until he’s born and see how your fitness progress goals end up”, “ just wait until you learn how hard it is, you’ll have a dad bod too”, “just wait until you’re tired and see how motivated you are” (I think they forget what life in Army Special Operations entails lol), and all these other poor comments, which many were just thinly veiled wishes that I failed so they could feel better about themselves…
If we back up even further, I used to get comments about how I didn’t know jack shit because I was some kid without any real responsibilities, so, of course, “it’s easy to be in shape” and how I just don’t get it because I didn’t have kids so I shouldn’t give advice.
Well, I’m here now and let me tell you…
It’s all a terrible fucking excuse—if anything, becoming a father has made my resilience, motivation, and thus my results even better.
There is a special drive you get (if you’re wired correctly) when you see your child: Knowing you set the biggest example for them and largely influence how they end up themselves… you should want to be the very best you can. That way they can become the best they can be.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are moments that suck when you’re sleep deprived, stressed, and barely holding together by a string, BUT that’s where you decide if you’re going to listen to the inner-bitch we all have in our head telling us to quit, OR if you buckle up and do whatever the fuck it takes to make it happen.
That brings me to my first big takeaway:
1. You Don’t Need Perfect Conditions To Make Things Happen
Often in the fitness world, we get caught up in this idea of chasing optimization and how to create the conditions to get the most desirable results we can, some even to the extreme of majoring in the minor.
It’s easy to fall into the thinking trap that you need the perfect 7-9 hours of sleep, you need to feel good and motivated, need plenty of time, or you need all of these things to stick with and make progress with your fitness regimen.
Even I, someone who has experienced the extremes of being in an Army Special Operations Unit and what that entails (the worst conditions i.e. no sleep, no food) can fall into this trap if I let myself.
I believe this is rooted in a type of all-or-nothing thinking/fixation on “if I’m not doing it the most optimal way, it’s not worth doing” or I can’t get results from it. The reality is this type of thinking is dead wrong.
While yes it is much easier and you will be setting yourself up for more success by creating these “perfect” conditions. In the absence of these conditions, you can still make it happen. Rather, I would say at least half of the muscle tissue on my body was put on there during times when conditions were far from ideal.
What truly matters at the end of the day is that you are doing the best with what you’ve got, you’re showing up every day, and you’re doing whatever it takes to get it done.
Will your progress be as good as it might have been? No. But, the alternative is not only not making progress but regressing. Humans are funny in the fact that no matter how illogical and dumb it is, many times we will let ourselves regress rather than let ourselves make progress at a slow rate. So while I had definitely learned these lessons in my Army career, being a new father has exponentially reinforced this lesson.
The secret is, who you truly are is what you do when the conditions aren’t good or just flat-out bad. Motivation can be fickle and it can come and go, but if you’re the type of person who can make it happen regardless of how bad the conditions might be, you will not only be successful in the gym, but this will also transfer to every other aspect of your life.
So in short, doing the hard right will always be better than the easy wrong.
2. Maintaining Fitness Takes a lot Less Than You Think If You Do the Right Things
Tying into the point above, when conditions are less than optimal, sometimes to make things happen we need to switch up our approach. We do this to avoid the ultimate negative goal which is regressing and ending up in a worse spot than we are in now.
I would be a liar if I told you in the first month or two of being a father that I was crushing the gym 5 days a week and hitting all my macros perfectly every day.
At times, getting into the gym even 2-3x a week was about all I could do. Now, to be honest, I truthfully could’ve done more, but that’s neither here nor there. The reality is it would only occasionally be a couple of times a week. That said, even reducing what I was doing that much—which is over half—I was still able to not only maintain but even make progress while this was happening.
Not to beat a dead horse and be the “Back in ‘NAM, when I was in the Army” guy, but there were also plenty of times back then when I was in a similar situation. What I have learned to be undoubtedly true is that as long as you can get at least one day, one gym session per muscle group, and a few high-quality hard sets, that alone is enough to maintain.
You would actually be amazed at just how little it takes to make progress. In part, this is why I encourage people to experiment with just how little they need to do in the gym to make progress—you might find you’re doing too much and by doing less you improve your recovery which improves your ability to grow muscle.
However, when we’re talking about bare minimums to maintain, what I would say suffices is something like 2 Full-Body Workouts a week or an Upper and a Lower Workout, or a Push day, a Pull day, and a Leg day Workout, but as you can see here, everything is being hit at least once a week.
The literature itself supports the fact that one time a week frequency per muscle is enough to make progress.
I only say 2 full-body days because it would be harder to get as much volume per muscle as we could in an Upper and a Lower, or a Push day, a Pull day, and a Leg day Workout just because you need to work so many more muscle groups in a single Full-Body workout, and if you have to limit your time that much, I’m going to guess you probably don’t have the time to spend 2 hours in the gym to do so.
That said, it probably could work, but I would not be comfortable mentally if that’s all I did (only one Full-Body Workout a week).
A key consideration here is if you’re going to reduce your training this much, it is probably a good idea to eat closer to maintenance calories or slightly above so that you’re not putting yourself in a state where muscle loss does become possible (in a deficit) while also doing this reduction in training.
3. Your Habits Influence Everyone Around You
So, again, if I tried to tell you I was absolutely perfect and the paragon of health and fitness at all times during the first few months of being a father, I would be telling you all a bold-faced lie.
There were definitely moments where I let laziness keep me out of the gym and chose to eat my stress rather than stick with my ideal diet. While we are all human and this will happen, if you make it a habit you likely won’t just be hurting yourself, but also influencing your spouse, other kids, family, and even friends to make poor decisions with you.
There were a few times when I would decide that I didn’t feel like going to the gym, and even though my wife wanted to go, I made it okay and influenced her not to go. Same with diet, she would have a perfect diet going for the day, and I would inadvertently sabotage it because I wanted to Uber Eats a bunch of food because I was being weak and feeling sorry for myself.
Again, not to say this is a horrible thing that can NEVER happen, but unfortunately for us, this wasn’t the case. I can see where unchecked, this could lead you and everyone around you to some bad habits that can take a lot of time to reverse. For some people, especially those who are newer to this—and the lifestyle is not yet ingrained into the fibers of your being—this could knock you off the lifestyle for a very long time. For some, potentially, forever…
Especially as a man, as a father, it is even more important for you to stay strong when you feel like being weak because, at the end of the day, it’s not just you that you could be hurting.
4. Let’s Revisit Lifestyle Design
To this day, of all of my posts and of all the concepts I talk about, lifestyle design is one of, if not, the most important aspects of successfully developing health and fitness as a lifestyle and a habit.
Being a new father reinforced just how true my sentiment toward lifestyle design is. While you can get away with just winging it for a while… the failures that I mention, nearly all of them come back to the point that my lifestyle design was out of whack.
It is so crucial to set up your day where the things you NEED TO DO are structured in a way where they have a sort of flow, a continuity where it feels almost as if everything is working for you rather than against you to give you momentum from task-to-task throughout the day.
One of the first, simple things I did was change what time I go to the gym. I had to play with this a few times to see what worked best because it would always feel like a part of my day when there was a lot of friction.
What ended up working best for me was doing the opposite of what works better for most people (morning time). I have a little more flexibility in my schedule because I don’t have a job to report to, so I found that going around 7 PM worked perfectly. It fit around dinner and bath time which is a time that I’m basically useless because my wife has always taken care of those—so, it ended up working very well with the rest of my schedule nicely.
This would be around the same time I would finish working. It’s almost as if I needed that time to let me wind down my brain, get back home, and then enjoy the evenings with my son. This is when he would be in one of his more playful moods before he went to bed. This all matters because the big point of friction was that I hated to be away when he was awake and playing and having fun, or when I needed to be around to help out.
Even though these are little things, the ebb and flow of my energy and mind frame made this exponentially easier. Other things I would play around with were things like going to parks for our family morning walks, and other activities where I could get things done to make progress. While still being able to give all my energy and attention to my son before I would have to get work done for the day.
5. “Just Wait Until” (Trust Yourself and Don’t Let Other People’s Negativity Influence You)
An unfortunate reality is most people won’t be or think like you, considering you’re finding yourself here reading this which means you’re obviously invested in doing whatever it takes to become the best version of yourself you can be. Most people will have a very negative or a limited belief mindset when it comes to, not just parenting, but life in general.
Bitter people are quick to “let you know” all the negative things that can happen and “all that” because it helps them feel better about themselves and their shortcomings.
When we first found out we were having our son—while many of the comments were overwhelmingly positive—we were immediately stormed with a bunch of comments, saying things along the lines of “just wait until ‘XYZ’ and you’ll see how hard it is to stay fit” or even some downright negative stuff about how “when you become a parent, your life is over” or how bad some of the aspects of parenting can be.
Instinctively, I knew that I would overcome any of these challenges and that I would enjoy being a parent regardless of how seemingly “inconvenient” they might seem because I always knew my gratitude for just having my son would far overcompensate any of those negative feelings. You should not listen to people who try to limit what you can accomplish and paint a bunch of negative pictures.
Success in life, as most if not all of you requires a mindset like we talked about in the first point of doing whatever it takes to accomplish our goals and not rolling over when we face challenges but embracing them and figuring out a way to overcome them.
If you are confident in yourself in other areas of your life and generally competent, you should trust yourself, in your own beliefs and judgment, and do things the way you think is best regardless of what negative people say.
Now this does not imply hubris or arrogance in the sense of not seeking more knowledge and advice, not at all, that would be a horrible idea. Rather, this means don’t let others who aren’t where you want to be or otherwise have a lower “frame of thought” influence you because it can be easy to do so when you’re approaching new chapters of life you’ve never experienced before… it can feel like they might know something you don’t.
The other day I had this tweet about how life is not binary or zero-sum. With enough will, intelligent planning (lifestyle design) and not to be cliche… a positive mental attitude, you can achieve and be successful in all of the important areas of your life.
Something as natural and common as having kids should not hamper your ability to do so. Rather, the newfound sense of responsibility and purpose should drive you even more to accomplish these things—to not only give your children the opportunities and resources for a good life but also to lead by example so that you can help them become great/successful in their lives as well.
6. No One Ever Said Greatness Would Be Easy
That brings us perfectly to our last point—tying all of this together, a common complaint I hear all day on social media is how some of this stuff is just so unrealistic or hard or the average person can’t do “this” or “that”. To be quite frank, that’s kind of the point. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that they won’t do it. If being successful and becoming a great person were easy and everyone did it, then it wouldn’t be special now, would it?
It’s all possible, yes, but make no mistake, it is not easy and it will require you to be uncomfortable—it will require some sacrifice, and it will require more effort than most are willing to give. Most people don’t want to become great, they don’t want to become the best versions of themselves, they want to be comfortable. They do not want the challenges that come with the territory.
So while yes, the idea of being jacked/very fit, a great parent, financially well-off, well-read, well-traveled, and otherwise successful/great (however you define it) is “unrealistic” to those not willing to do the above… if you are willing, it can be your reality. Worst case, you fall short of whatever this means to you—at least you know you actually tried and I highly, highly doubt you will be in a worse spot than if you didn’t.
So I leave you with this, becoming the best version of yourself—becoming regarded as an overall great person—is going to be really fucking hard at times, it’s meant to be that way. You can do it, lesser people than you reading this have done it.
So yes, it is hard, it is unrealistic, and quite frankly it can feel almost impossible at times → you should embrace this because the alternative is a bunch of “what if’s” and question marks at the end of the day that might eat you alive.
Not to mention, what kind of person do you want to be for your children? What kind of example do you want to set for your children?
Putting It All Together
Conditions will never be “perfect”. Sometimes you’re going to need to pull yourself up & off the ground and make shit happen, but that’s just life. We will face unforeseen challenges, and how we let those challenges affect us, defines us.
You do not need to be a father or a parent for this to apply to you. These are universal truths of life and laws of success. Fatherhood has specifically reinforced these, plus many more, truths and laws for me, so that’s the reason I named this post “What Fatherhood Has Taught Me…”
For those of you reading this who do have kids and find yourself maybe failing in some of these different areas, first off I want to say it’s okay, you’re not a bad parent or person. I myself am not perfect, or “holier than thou” and don’t intend to come off that way.
I just had an earlier kick start in all of this from my life experiences and having been in the gym since a teenager, but with that said, I want to see you do better and understand that we do everything for our kids. This is an example you can set that will translate into a better life for them because they will almost certainly follow your example and pick up many of these traits.
If you don’t have kids yet, well, this will set you and your future family up for great success if one day you choose to start a family. You will be able to enjoy some of the luxuries I personally had by having practiced these principles before I had my son, you’ll even likely be better off when you do decide to because some of this advice I didn’t have prior to having mine.
Until next time, keep after it and do whatever it takes!
#WAGMI
Your friend,
- BowTiedOx
DISCLAIMER
This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Please consult a medical professional before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol. These are opinions from a Cartoon Ox.
Coaching: Will be available here when it launches, you can pre-reserve a potential spot with your email on the site
Consultation Calls: You can book a 1 Hour call with me here to go over all of your health and fitness, mindset, or fitness coaching/business questions
Digital Logbook: Is available here for those who want to track their lifts on their phone and have access to my programs preloaded (currently PPL & Density, working on all + more)
Great post, Ox. Amazing shift happens mentally when you go from “only focused on myself, supporting myself, accountable to myself” to “other people are relying on me, I need to be better for the sake of others.” Counterintuitive in some aspects. Lots of guys think it’ll be the end of all things good when you get into a serious relationship, get married, have kids, and so on. But I’ve seen the exact opposite. The truly elite, high performers are not only happier and more fulfilled, but their success ascends to new heights they couldn’t previously have imagined. Keep inspiring, brother.
Awesome post Ox. Thank you.