Don't have time to get in shape?

Before my son was born I trained four or five times a week, ninety minutes to two hours a session, and loved it.

Then he arrived, and he didn't sleep. Not the ordinary kind of not sleeping. The ten to twenty times a night kind, with continuous screaming, for months. My old routine of up at five, eat, gym, commute, desk by half eight went out of the window entirely.

I didn't train at all for about a month. I lost definition, lost strength, felt like I was losing mass, and started to feel genuinely low about it.

Why I couldn't just let it go

• I wanted to keep the strength, muscle and bone density you lose as you age if you stop
• I wanted to be in prime condition for my kids, for as long as possible
• I didn't want to become a burden to my wife and kids later because I let myself go now
• I wanted to be the dad who takes them hiking and climbing and teaches them to lift, not the one watching from a chair

You don't need more time. You need to stop wasting the time you have.

The fear was that if I couldn't make it work around a demanding job and a brutal home life, I would give up on training altogether and settle for the dad bod like everyone else.

So I got creative and rebuilt the whole approach around twenty minutes. I was hoping to roughly maintain what I had.

What actually happened was that I kept progressing, on a fraction of the time. That made no sense to me, so I went and read the research. It turns out almost everyone is wasting most of the time they spend in a gym: too many workouts, too many exercises per muscle group, too many sets.