How do I train when I have no time?

The problem comes from the mistaken belief that you need to reinvent your lifestyle to fit those extra long hours at the gym. Resolutionists who try to do this often don't think about the extra steps that have to be factored in to make their promise a reality. Spending four evenings a week at the gym likely means they have to let something else go in order to fit into their schedule. Now there's a reason why it didn't work before right. To think that they're miraculously going to cram it all in without compromising other commitments is unrealistic, and it can be very discouraging too. Crossfit crossover. Like every parent, my world changed when I became a father. Suddenly, my time was not mine alone, but also my daughters. I wanted to spend every moment with them. What's not to love about watching a child's miraculous development? I wanted to be with them for every great milestone, the f...

I would spend an hour or so at the gym after work, which is actually a two hour time commitment or more after factoring in the commute and shower time and, of course, conversations around the waterfowl. This wasn't sustainable, because I felt guilty for not being home with my family and I was missing out on important moments. Having spoken about this with my coaching clients, I know that this is common for many people. My life was revolutionized at the age of 30 when I was introduced to the then new exercise concept called CrossFit, which showed me how to achieve and maintain a high level of fitness in very little time. Typical gym workouts include long sessions consistently consisting most of weight training with a little bit of cardio. My typical split during the week would see me spend an hour on my back and chest one day, triceps and biceps next followed by legs. This is what my typi...

The principles of CrossFit allow me to take care of my fitness needs quickly so I can devote adequate time for my other Fs, family, finances, faith and fun. In other words, you can accomplish a lot by doing a little training every day. You just need to make sure that little is well designed, attuned to your goals and power packed. I base all of my programs on these principles, which is why a whole life fitness, power 30 workouts can be completed in just 15 minutes. Might be hard to believe that that's all it takes to get fit, but I find that it is ideal, not only because it's effective, but also because it's sustained. Everybody has 15 minutes. I don't care who you are, what you do, what kind of life you live. I can find 15 minutes in your day for a quick workout. Once you get going, you'll see how making your workout commitment manageable will help you to seamlessly integrate fitness in...

Nothing can be further from the truth. The fact is, we all have busy lives. Only professional athletes can work hours of cardio, strength training and conditioning into their everyday routine because it's their job to do so. You do not have to reinvent your lifestyle in order to accommodate a new fitness program, because that simply isn't sustainable. For example, I remember my good friend John. He was excited about his newly purchased DVD fitness program. He was committed to making it work for him and was sure he could adopt into it the everyday routine. John was married. He works 50 hours a week and has children, along with coaching commitments. John was struggling to maintain his relationship as the only time they saw each other was on weekends and evenings after the kids went to bed. But he was sure that he could fit in an extra 6 to 8 hours a week to the fitness program. And you kno...

So yeah, less is more often. Well, I like it and I know that you have your own little story about that journey to fitness after 40. But I'd love you to touch on that. But, more importantly also, how do you inspire, motivate and, more importantly, educate people that are maybe over that 40? And they don't know or feel? Maybe this is part of the better way to sort of frame this. You know, I know people get to that sort of place in life and they can feel really low, right, like you know, in our 20s, well, we've got metabolism, we've got that youth on our side, right, we often have lots of just natural energy output and it can often offset all that. Well, it's just called alcohol calories, extra food calories, you know, just all the other excess stuff. But then in our 30s we get into sort of family mode and we often put our fitness on the back burner. And it's almost a cliche, I mean, we hea...

...ek to week, day to day, you know, even month to month, looks like and figure out where's their opportunity to start to incorporate more fitness. You know so it's not a matter of having to rewrite everything as much, as it is just to retool a few things to make it work. And what you'll find is, over time, you're gradually going to want to make or take back even some of your time to incorporate more wellness into your lifestyle, because you realize how much it benefits all those other hours in the week there's 168 hours every seven days and we know that we're going to dedicate, say, four to six hours to our well-being and fitness, mental fitness included. Well, I can tell you, those four to six hours are going to make the other 160 or so way better. Okay, Not just for you, but for the people you connect with. Anyways, check out the whole life fitness manifesto. The workout routines are all...

We only got so many inventory spots of time every day, and once they're gone, they're gone. So how do you build up consistency? Here are a few practical tips that I think will be helpful. There's five of them for you today. Number one I've shared before start small. Begin with something manageable. Just 10 to 15 minutes a day of movement with purpose. Whether it's a walk, some bodyweight exercises, quick yoga session, I mean it doesn't matter. Just get moving. 10, preferably 15 minutes, which is 1% of your 24 hours. If you haven't checked out the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto or some of the early episodes of season one, where I narrate the book that I wrote many years ago called the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto. I'd like to invite you to go check it out. I've included the links in the show notes. You to go check it out. I've included the links in the show notes, but it might be a wonderfu...

...ting. Combine different exercises like sprints, burpees, even jump, squats and push-ups All great movements. Great way to get a full body HIIT while also getting a huge cardiovascular uptick. Number three recovery. Don't forget the importance of rest and recovery. Hit is intense, so your body needs time to heal and recover. Grow stronger. Those are the three tips right. Start slow, mix it up and make sure you give yourself enough time to recover between those sessions. For more resources, check out the American Council on Exercise, ace. I've got one of my certifications through them. Amazing resource as well. Crossfitcom another great resource If you haven't a good subscription. If you're ever going to subscribe to something, it's well worth the money is the Crossfit journal. I freaking love the thing. It's all been digitized now. But, uh, great resources and wonderful uh information. Um...

The most common reason men give me for not training is time. It is also the one I have the least patience with, and not because I think they are lying. FIG. 01 Sixty seconds of hard work, three times a week. The single most common reason men give me for not training is time. It is also the one I have the least patience with, and not because I think they are lying. They are not lying. They genuinely believe that if they cannot get to a gym for an hour, five or six days a week, there is no point starting. That belief is wrong, it is expensive, and the fitness industry built it on purpose. Less than you think, and the study that established it is worth knowing about in detail. In 2016 a team at McMaster University led by Jenna Gillen and Martin Gibala took 27 sedentary men and split them into three groups for twelve weeks. One group did 45 minutes of continuous moderate cycling, three times...

for someone with more time than you have. The men who hold onto progress are the ones whose plan survives a bad week, a work trip and a sick kid. Consistency at 70 percent beats perfection you abandon in week three. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. The least exercise that actually does something, and the part everyone leaves out. You have done it five times. It is not discipline, and the fix is unglamorous. Seven years ago I went looking for four dads over 40 to test an idea. What it became, and what it refuses to promise.

In June 2019 I published a post looking for four dads over 40 to beta-test an idea. Seven years later that idea is the whole of my working life. This is the full version: where it came from, what it actually involves, and the promises it refuses to make. FIG. 01 The work is small and repeated. That is the whole trick. Every man in this work arrived the same way. Successful at his job, good at being a dad, present at the things that matter, and quietly falling apart in the one area nobody could see from the outside. He had usually tried to fix it a few times. A gym membership in January. A diet that lasted until the first work trip. A burst of running that ended when his knee or his calendar gave out. Each attempt confirmed the same story: I know what to do, I just cannot make it stick. That story is wrong, and the DadBody project exists to prove it. He does not lack knowledge. He lacks a...

Training is one third of it. The framework is thirty minutes a day split between movement, stillness and reading, held inside a small cohort with real accountability. The body changes because the days change. What is a dad bod, and is the project about getting rid of one? The dad bod is a body shaped by a decade of putting everything else first, and it gets treated as a joke or a life sentence. It is neither. The project is not about chasing the body you had at 25. It is about rebuilding the energy, strength and self-respect to be useful for the next forty years. The original 2019 #DadBodyProject post is archived here unedited . The framework it describes is written up on the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto page. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. The post that started all of this. Republished unedited. The real timeline, and every number from a sixty-day c...

...ol is the thing your doctor is watching, volume still matters and you need the walking as well. Two more caveats I am not going to bury. Those studies were done in sedentary but healthy men. All-out sprinting is a genuinely high-intensity stimulus, and if you are over 40, carrying extra weight, and have not done anything hard in five years, the intelligent order is a conversation with your doctor, then eight weeks of easier work, then intervals. Not intervals on Monday because you read an article on Sunday. And these were cycling protocols. A stationary bike is very hard to hurt yourself on. All-out sprinting on your feet, on a road, at 47, with a decade of sitting behind you, is how men tear calves and Achilles tendons. Here is the whole thing. It fits in about three hours, and most of it is not in a gym. This is the non-negotiable one and it is first for a reason. I make the full case...

and cooldown, also three times a week. A third did nothing. That is 60 seconds of hard work per session against 45 minutes of steady work. Five times less total exercise time. After twelve weeks, both training groups had improved their peak oxygen uptake and their insulin sensitivity by similar amounts. Not identically, but similar enough that the researchers put it in the title of the paper. I have been coaching for close to thirty years and that result still reorganises how I think about a man's week. It means the honest answer to "I only have fifteen minutes" is not "then it will not work." It is "then use the fifteen minutes." Here is where most articles quoting that study stop, and where I have stopped in the past, which I regret. Sprint interval training is not equivalent to endurance training across the board. It matches it on cardiorespiratory fitness and glucose control. It does...

Thirty minutes a day. That is two percent of it. Fifteen minutes of movement, five of stillness, ten of reading something that makes you better. I wrote this down in February 2016, turned it into a book, and have not changed the shape of it since, because the size is what makes it work. FIG. 01 Two percent of the day, every day. Most fitness plans fail at the negotiation stage. An hour a day is a real argument against a career, a marriage, and kids, and it is an argument you will lose the first week everything goes wrong. So the plan has to be small enough that a man cannot argue with it. Thirty minutes is that size. It survives the worst week of your year. It survives travel, sick kids, and a quarter you are behind on. And because it survives, it compounds. The men I coach do not get fit in thirty-minute sessions. They get fit by not stopping, and thirty minutes is what not stopping loo...

hard part is deciding you are worth two percent of your own day. Most men have not decided that yet. That decision is the actual product, and it is the reason the group is small and the application is real. What started as four dads in a beta test now runs as structured cohorts with a real program behind them. MERGE60 is sixty measured days for the man who is ready to be coached hard. DadBody 28 is the twenty-eight-day starting point for the man who needs to prove the habit to himself first. Both run the same framework. Both end with the same question: what does day 61 look like, and who is holding you to it. The name DadBody still makes some men wince, and I kept it anyway, because the wince is honest. You know exactly what it means. The only question that matters is what you do about it. What is the DadBody project? A coaching practice for men over 40, mostly fathers, built around thir...

...ead hang in seconds, and average hours of sleep. Six numbers, ten minutes. You cannot argue with them in week seven and they will keep you honest in week two when nothing looks different. Then pick the smallest week you will actually repeat. Three sessions, a protein target, a step target, and a bedtime. Repeat it for sixty days. Retest. That is the whole method, and it is boring on purpose. How long does it take to get back in shape? Most men who train three to four times a week feel different within two weeks, feel stronger within four to six weeks, and start to look different somewhere between weeks eight and twelve. Sixty days of honest consistency is enough to change your baseline. It is not enough to finish the job. How long does it take if you have not trained in years? Longer to look different, faster to feel different. When you are starting from nothing, sleep, energy and mood u...

...included. The beta it advertises is long closed. It is here as a dated record of where this began. FIG. 01 Where the project started. IF you are a dad over the age of 40, then read on. If not, no worries, feel free to share this message with someone that may fit the profile. I'm looking for 4 more dads to beta-test a program that I've developed over the past 3 years. The #DadBodyProject. As a dad, husband, brother, friend and community leader, I know all too well how challenging it can be to try to fit it all in. As men, we're often pulled by careers, family, community, and our own dreams and ambitions. That's life. And it's beautiful. And yet. We often have a tendency to put our health and wellbeing, our self-care, on the back-burner of life. Not just the physical, but the emotional, psychological, and spiritual parts that make us who we are. We focus much of our energy on the external...

at a time, and oblique twists. The adage use it or lose it rings all the truer as we age. Start implementing functional fitness into your lifestyle today to ensure a capable, pain-free future. Written in 2017, and it is the earliest piece in this archive that argues for healthspan over lifespan. That argument is now the whole premise of the coaching. The specific home programs named in the original have been left out because two of them no longer exist. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. Most men over forty who feel exhausted are not sleep deprived. What is actually going on. What held up from my 2016 column, and the part I oversold. The real timeline, and every number from a sixty-day cohort of twenty-three men.

They also train less, and when they do train they go harder than their recovery can absorb, which makes them more tired, which makes them eat later still. You do not need cortisol to explain that. You need to interrupt the loop. I am not going to give you nine tips. Nine tips is what I wrote in 2020 and it was not useful, because a man in energy-saving mode does not have capacity for nine new behaviours. He has capacity for about one and a half. So here is the order, and the order matters more than the list. This is the highest-leverage thing on the page and the one men skip because they think it is a body composition intervention. A recent network meta-analysis of exercise treatments for adults with anxiety disorders found resistance training produced a standardised mean difference of minus 0.79 with moderate certainty of evidence. For context, third-wave cognitive therapies in the same...

I am Dai Manuel. I have coached in this city for close to thirty years, and for most of that time I was not a very good personal trainer. Good at the training, bad at the business of it, and the reason for that is the reason men over 40 come to me now. FIG. 01 Dai Manuel, Vancouver. If you searched for a fitness coach in Vancouver, you have probably already tried the usual route. A trainer, three sessions a week, a good first month, and then life happened and the whole thing quietly unravelled. That is not a character flaw. It is a design flaw. Three hours a week with a trainer means 165 hours a week without one. The gap is where every result is decided, and it is the gap the entire personal training model politely ignores, because its revenue depends on you needing it again next year. I coach men over 40, mostly dads, mostly men who are successful at everything except this. The framewor...

hear about it first. DadBody 28 is the shorter option if you would rather not wait. Still not answered? Read every question or message me directly and you get me, not an assistant. One hundred fifty episodes on movement, stillness, reading, nutrition, mindset and recovery. Search the transcripts or listen from the archive. Browse episodes Start here: the whole library Apply for one of twelve 0 of 12 places filled Every result above is a real man who will tell you about it himself. Named with permission, and shortened at their request. Read: how long it really takes to get back in shape

a test of how fit you already are. Tell me honestly where you are starting from. Can I do DadBody 28 from outside Vancouver? Yes. It runs online, with coaching scheduled Vancouver time. Still not answered? Read every question or message me directly and you get me, not an assistant. Apply for one of thirty 0 of 30 places filled