Fitness and Parenting

All Child-Play and No Workouts Make Dad an Unfit Boy

Below is an excerpt for a great article in the NYTimes, which explores how becoming a parent can affect a person's workouts and fitness routines. Click here for the whole article.

THEY count among their ranks former marathoners and Ironmen, beached surfers and scuba divers. They lay off red meat and trans fats. They stay current on annual physicals and take their medications as prescribed.

And yet, this group of the once-fit finds itself at risk of becoming unhealthy and stacking on the pounds, because of one threat to their physical fitness: children.

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Too many Americans have an all-or-nothing mentality toward fitness, said Dr. Harvey B. Simon, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. If they can’t find a 45-minute window to bike, they don’t substitute by strapping on a BabyBjörn and taking a stroll.

“There is a very common misconception, one that is shared by physicians as well as by the public, that exercise requires a set amount of time and a formal program,” said Dr. Simon, who has two grown daughters. “I’m fond of saying that the aerobic exercise movement inspired the few and discouraged the many.”

Heart-healthy exercise can take many forms (gardening, car washing, stair climbing) and needn’t be done in continuous chunks to be beneficial, said Dr. Simon, the author of “The No Sweat Exercise Plan.”

Having three and a half hours of exercise to lose puts the study’s participants well above the norm, said Janet Fulton, an epidemiologist in the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control. After all, three-quarters of Americans don’t meet the minimum requirement of two and a half hours a week, she said.

Still, cutting back on exercise as a new parent has hidden costs. “Reducing their activity in this critical period of time is probably not going to help their adjustment in terms of a new person in their house,” Dr. Fulton said. “The long-term stuff, the chronic-disease risk reduction, is great, but immediately, they’re not getting the mental-health benefit.”

For those parents who can’t stomach exercise, however, their children serve as a bulletproof cop-out. When single or childless people say they have no time to exercise, it can ring hollow. But a mother of three? Watch those heads nod in sympathy.

Reluctant exercisers use parenthood as “an excuse to not do it at all,” said Dana Wood, a mother and the health and beauty director for Cookie, a parenting magazine.