I hear this a lot: I can’t exercise, because I can’t leave the house. I am watching 1 year old, that means I can’t do anything. That is the biggest dumb excuse I have ever heard. You will probably hate me for that, but I don’t care. Because, you as a stay home parent have a lot of time to exercise.

A lot of stay home parents can be pretty out of shape. But there is no reason for it. You can get into a great shape if you really want to. Just realize that and get busy exercising at home.

All you need is a few right tools set up at your house, apartment or backyard if you have it. And I will show you how to do it.

You can actually achieve exceptional fitness level working out at home. I will even show you how to get to the world championship in indoors erg rowing, while being a stay home parent.

Don’t listen to people who tell you, that you need to join a gym to get fit. I know, they have all those fancy machines and variety, but you don’t need that. And you can’t use it anyway, because you have to stay home with your kid while your partner goes to work.

Anyway, wouldn’t that be much nicer to spend the evening with your husband or wife together, or go somewhere you like to go, instead of waiting until she gets home, so you can go to the gym. When you get your workout done at home, you can do whatever you want in the evening knowing that your workout is done for the day.

Your home strength training tools

You will need 2 pairs of dumbbells – one lighter and one heavier. If you are a beginner woman, get 2X5lb dumbbells and 2X10lb dumbbells. If you are a beginner man, get 2X8lb dumbbells and 2X12lb dumbbells. Weight of the dumbbells is very specific for everyone. You know, that you have good weight if after 15-20 repetitions of an exercise you start feeling those muscles getting tired.

Big exercise ball

Exercise mat – not necessary, if you have a soft carpet in your home.

Chin up bar – It has to be in any household, especially with stay home parent. It is easier to do chin ups and pull ups for men than it is for woman. But every woman should strive to improve at doing pull ups and chin ups. I consider chin ups/pull ups as a best single exercise in the world. It employs all big upper body muscles, increases substantially your metabolism and builds lean muscular body.

Exercise band

Cardiovascular exercise at home

I strongly recommend concept 2 rowing machine for your cardiovascular exercise at home. It is light, fold-able, quite, inexpensive, you can put it anywhere, even outside, and you will get a great whole body cardiovascular exercise on it.

I used to race on these rowing machines and a lot of professional athletes are using them to improve their cardiovascular ability.

If you get serious about working out on these machines, and you want to compare yourself to the other rowers in the world that are using them, there is a whole community that keeps track of times on many different distances and levels. The most common is 2000 meter race. I think, the world record is 5:36 min. for men and 6:28 for women. My personal best is 6:17 min.  You can check all the recent records here and compare yourself to your category. It can get quite competitive between people which is great, because it pushes everybody to improve and exercise more. And you never know, you might become very good at it and maybe attend some local or international competition in indoor rowing.

Of course there are many other cardiovascular exercise options for you to do at home: Stationary bikes, little treadmills, elliptical, stair masters and others. They might be little too big for your small apartment, but there are often the smaller varieties of these.

Another one of my favorite cardiovascular exercise optionsat home or in the garden or anywhere you want is rope-jumping. Just a simple 7 X 100 jumps with 3 minute brakes between will give you about 30 minutes of intensive interval cardiovascular work.  

If you rather do your cardiovascular exercise outside I don’t blame you. I think cardiovascular exercise should be done outside. If you are lucky enough and you have a backyard, pull your stationary cardiovascular machine outside and do your cardio there.

But sometimes, it is impossible if you are a stay home parent to do your cardio outside. When your child is still very young 0-2 years, you can use baby-bjorn and you can go for a intensive fast walk, or climb long neighborhood stairway several times. I wouldn’t try to run with that thing, but you can use special stroller that you can push in front of yourself while you run. But don’t do it on a busy street where it can get dangerous.

Now, you are probably wandering, if I forgot your child. What is a baby going to do while you exercise? I know, babies and kids need a lot of attention. And you should give it to them, if you can. Just remember this about your exercise: You don’t need to do your workout without interruptions to have a great workout. Interruptions are very common when you are a stay home parent. And that’s OK. Interruptions are natural and you have to learn how to stay calm when they happen. No, they are not going to ruin your workout.

Before you start exercising, realize, that it is not going to be done without interruptions and that interruptions are fine. The home workout is always interrupted and that’s OK.

It will look something like this: You will start warming up on your rowing machine and probably you’ll have to interrupt your warm up, because your kids need something. That’s fine, just go give them what they need. And as soon as you come back, follow your warm up where you left of.

The same  will happen, when you’ll be doing sets with weights. The goal is to complete a set. And than you can do whatever you need to do. Right after you finish that task, you’ll come back to your station, which is probably few yards away from your kids and do another set. Do 20 push ups, give little Johny his toy, tell him you’ll be right back and do another 20 push ups, and so on until you finish the whole workout.

Same with cardiovascular exercise. Set your time, start rowing, when interruption comes, deal with it, come back and start where you left of.

I am probably explaining this too simplistic. I know, it gets always more complicated, than it seams. But the most important think for your success in staying home and staying fit is to focus on finishing your daily plan. If you can finish it without interruptions, great. If you can finish it with 37 interruptions, perfect. Just finish it! that’s the main thing to focus on.

Here is a simple example of a home week of training for stay home parent:

Strength training:

Mondays and Thursdays:

Warm up 10 minutes on your rowing machine or by rope-jumping.

As on the picture, 3 circles of:

Push ups – maximum repetitions

Pull ups – maximum repetitions

Standing shoulder press – 20 repetitions

Squat jumps – 20 repetitions

Hamstring curl with ball – 20 repetitions

If you can’t perform regular push up, do modified push ups with your knees on the floor – see picture below  

If you can’t perform pull up, use band, put it on top of behind the door and do rows – see picture below.

If you are a beginner, instead of squat jumps, do regular squats.

Cardiovascular exercise:

Wednesdays and Fridays:

Long less intensive cardiovascular training lasting  30 – 60 minutes in heart rate target zone of 70 – 90% of your maximum heart rate.

Saturdays and Tuesdays :

Cardiovascular interval training. You can jump- rope – 5X50, 5X100, 5X150, depending on your level.

Shortcuts don’t work most of the time. Especially if you are trying to achieve something worth while, something that’s somehow hard to achieve. This applies to to your health, loosing weight, becoming stronger, faster or fitter more than anything else.

Stamina is utterly important. And stamina is only possible if it’s managed well.

People think all they need to do is endure 3 or 5 more intense exercise sessions and their fitness dreams will come true.

They are stupidly wrong.

Being good at anything, getting in great shape or achieving anything is like windsurfing – the definition of being good at it is being able to make it look easy. But it never is easy. It takes lot’s of practice, lot’s of hours in always changing environment and dealing with it. That’s what people conveniently forget.

If I were just starting my quest for better shape, health, fitness, weight loss or anything, I wouldn’t try to do a lot in the gym for long time. I would try to do something far simpler.

I would find that extra half hour or 45 minutes every day, that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make it exercise productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magical, life transforming things happen eventually.

Sure, that means less surfing Internet, going out and hanging out in coffee shops, less time watching TV, saying no to other people more often or whatever.

Day 1.

Whole body resistance (weight) workout

Day 2.

Cardiovascular (endurance) workout

Shorter and more intensive – 30 – 45 Minutes in heart rate of 70 – 80 % of your maximum heart rate.

Day 3.

Cardiovascular (endurance) workout

Longer and less intensive – 45 – 60 minutes in heart rate of 60 – 70 % of  your maximum heart rate.

Day 4.

Whole body resistance (weight) workout

Day 5.

Cardiovascular (endurance) workout

Longer and less intensive – 45 – 60 Minutes in heart rate of 60 – 70 % of  your maximum heart rate.

Day 6.

Interval workout

Day 7.

Day off 

To find out how to calculate your heart rate zone, click here.

Warm-up prepares the body for what it is about to come – more intensive activity.

Warm-up is an activity that raises the total body temperature, as well as the temperature of the muscles, to prepare the body for vigorous exercise. It is part of the foundation of successful exercise session. Getting fully warmed up, mentally and physically, is a key aspect of attaining a training intensity required to achieve great results.

Warm-up protects against injury by improving flexibility of the muscles.

Here are some of the benefits you achieve with warm up:

• An increase in muscle blood flow

• An increase in the sensitivity of nerve receptors

• Faster moving oxygen from hemoglobin

• An increase in the speed of nerve impulse transmissions

Warm up guidelines:

In general the warm-up activity should last approximately 5 – 15 minutes, long enough for you to break out in a sweat.

It needs to be done with gradual increase of intensity – from 40% to 60% of maximal intensity.

You should choose activity mechanically similar to the primary conditioning activity and intensity should be well below that of the primary activity.

Examples of warm up activities:

• Stationary cycling – start with cycling against little or no resistance and gradually increase it

• Sprinting – jogging and graduated pace in running intervals

• Elliptical – Start with little resistance and gradually increase it

• Lap swimming – begin with slow crawl and gradually increase arm stroke, do some more intensive short intervals 1 – 2 laps

• Stationary exercise devices like rowing machine, stair masters, treadmills – begin with 40 – 60% of intended conditioning workload or speed and slowly increase

• Weight training – gradually warm up with all body activities like rowing machines or elliptical; treadmill is fine, but take some light dumbbells and move your hands too

Here are the main keys to exceptional abdominal development:

• Keep repetitions between 10 and 30

• Eliminate exercises that tend to emphasize the development of the hip flexors

• Work out from large to small (lower abdomen, than right, left outer abdomen and than upper abdomen)

• Maintain constant tension on the muscles

• Emphasize quality of movement not quantity of movement

• Attack the abdominals from variety of angles using a variety of movements

• Train your abdominals 3 to 4 times a week

• Reduce caloric intake and increase energy expenditure to reduce body fat levels.

Other important facts about abdominal muscles:

Abdominal exercises do not “spot reduce” fat from the waist.

By eating wisely and exercising properly, it is possible to increase your lean muscle mass while decreasing your body fat %.

The abdomen is comprised of four muscles:

• internal obliques

• external obliques

• transversus abdominis

• rectus abdominis

The abdominals can be divided into four major chambers:

• the lower

• the right outer

• the left outer

• the upper

The rectus abdominis is the largest of the muscle groups that comprise the abdomen, so train the rectus abdomens first, more specifically, the lower chamber of the rectus abdominis.

As you train these lower chamber, both side chambers and the upper chamber are also receiving some work.

If you were to train the upper chamber first, your lower abdomen would not become completely exhausted because the smaller upper chamber would fatigue before the larger chamber.

You should train your abdominals:

1. lower chamber first
2. the right/left outer chambers second
3. upper chamber third

Naturally, the upper chamber won’t require much extra work because these chamber receives a great deal of work during the other abdominal movements.

For all body weight training per session: 50 – 60 minutes is a right time.

Don’t forget, that you have to:

• Warm up for at least 7 min before workout

• Stretch for 5 min after warm up

• Cool down for at least 2 minutes at the end of the workout

If you are pressed for time, you can do a primary weight training session at the gym, and finish at home (push ups, abdominal exercises).

The key is to perform quality session and to perform the exercises with serious effort.

The exact time it takes your muscles to fully recover from a weight training session will depend on your genetics, sex, age, and level of fitness. In general men recover more quickly than women, and young people recover more quickly than people 35 an over.

You usually need 3 to 4 days for muscle group to recover after high intensity weight training, and 2 to 3 days to recover after moderate and light weight training sessions.

I think, that 4 days is too long of a recovery time for exercised muscle group even if it’s worked out very intensively.

There should be at least 1 day, but not more than 3 days between workouts that stress the same muscle group or groups.

Examples of  scheduled weight training sessions:

All body weight training per session # 1: Mondays and Thursdays

All body weight training per session # 2:

Tuesdays – high intensity

Thursday – low intensity

Sunday – high intensity

Split routine:

Monday – upper body

Tuesday – lower body

Thursday – upper body

Friday – lower body