Preparing for Fatherhood, Part 3: Getting physically fit to handle baby care

In this “Preparing for Fatherhood” series I’m taking my own advice from my book, A Man’s Guide to Newborn Babies, to prepare for the arrival of my second child. Part 3’s all about getting physically fit to handle the rigors of new fatherhood.

No one talks about how much physical work it takes when there’s a newborn baby in the house.

Lifting baby. Putting down baby. Running around the house getting chores done. Helping a recovering wife get up off the nursing chair. Going solo for grocery runs.

As the partner of a recovering new mom, a new dad needs to do literally everything for a few weeks (with the exception of breast feeding, of course). It’s a short sprint, but man, you gotta get in shape for this.

And since I’m 4 weeks away from the birth of my second child, I gotta get in shape for this. So, this is what I’ve been personally doing preparing for fatherhood: to get me physically ready for the rigors of baby care.

Evaluate fitness goals

Before starting any exercise regime, it is a great idea to figure out what’s the goal.

Stronger? Lighter? Able to run 5k?

Goals have to be three things:

1. Realistic.
2. Quantifiable.
3. Useful.

For myself, I have two goals:

I want to weigh 175 lbs by the time of the birth (I’m 185 lbs now).

I want to improve my cardiovascular fitness to the point where I can do 45 minutes on a cardio machine without feeling like I’m dying.

The reason for the weight loss is to simply have less weight to lug around while I’m helping out around the house. Try lugging 10 lbs of anything strapped around your waist all day. It’s tough, right? I’d rather be a little lighter while doing all the heavy lifting of baby care and running the household for a few weeks.

I want to improve my cardio for much the same reason: so that I can move better and need less rest. I have a fair bit of experience with getting fit, and I know that if I can do 45 minutes of cardio I’ll be fit enough for this baby thing.

Your fitness goals are probably different. You might want to get stronger so that lifting diaper boxes, putting the stroller in the car, or picking up the baby 50 times a day gets easier.

Develop an exercise program

Likewise to goals themselves, an exercise program has to be realistic, quantifiable, and useful to meeting goals.

Say I want to get my cardio workouts up to 45 minutes on the elliptical on Hill mode. Say I want to ramp up to that within 2 weeks. I’ve committed to at least 4 workouts per week, starting at 25 minutes per workout, and adding 5 minutes every other workout. Bam. In 2 weeks I’m at my goal.

For the short sprint leading up to the birth, I plan on temporarily eliminating my weight lifting routine. I normally lift weights a couple of times a week, but since my goals are more related to cardio fitness and weight loss, I’ll drop the weightlifting for a short while.

All that cardio should help me towards my other goal: weight loss.

Develop a diet program

Changing my diet is the other component to get down to 175 lbs. Since I’m at 185 lbs now, I need to drop 10 lbs in 5 weeks.

I’ve got two levers that I can pull to lose that 10 lbs.

The first lever is to go on a low carb diet for a week. Having tried low carb diets in the past, I know that in a week I can lose 5 lbs of water by cutting out most carbs in my diet. Yes, I know: it’s just water. Just remember that my goal is to drop weight of any kind so that I can move around the house more easily. So, I’ll do my low-carb week 3 weeks prior to my wife’s due date. Fun times ahead with avocados and bacon.

The other lever is keeping a calorie deficit. I also know that a weekly calorie deficit of 3500 calories will lose me a pound per week. So, leading up to the birth, I just need to eliminate 500 calories per day from my diet.

For my height and weight, I calculated my daily calorie needs using this handy calculator (www.lifespanfitness.com), and came up with 2810 calories per day. So, I need to take in no more than 2310 calories per day.

I hate counting calories. So I just use an approximate system to calculate calories:

• Belly’s barely satisfied but not at all full: 500 calories
• Belly’s really full to the point where I don’t want any more food: 1000 calories

And I can judge any point in between.

I also eat pretty much the exact same breakfast of 1 egg and a half and avocado every day, which has around 200 calories.

So, the aim is to stay under 2310 calories using these rules. Here’s a couple of example meals:

Day 1:
Breakfast: Standard egg and avocado, 200 calories.
Lunch: Salad and sandwich, 750 calories.
Dinner: Delicious Korean home-cooked meal, 750 calories.

Day 2:

Breakfast: Standard egg and avocado, 200 calories.
Lunch: Caribbean roti, 1000 calories.
Dinner: Small bowl of Korean stew, 500 calories.

Even though the totals look like only 1700 calories, I would assume the estimate is biased low, because I really like to eat!

Find a reward mechanism to keep going

I’ve found it useful to bribe myself to hit the gym.

One way of tricking myself to do cardio is to deliberately addict myself to a TV show. The rule heretofore is to not watch my show unless I’m pounding away on the machines. That way I’ve got my brain hauling my lazy-ass to the gym to watch TV—and burn 400+ calories while I’m at it.

Another way I bribe myself is by imagining how great I feel after a tough workout. The after-gym high is real. I am able to envision this feeling more easily if I hit the gym every day, because I’m still feeling a bit of that high from the previous day’s work-out.

There’s also bribing myself to eat properly. I allow myself a couple of cheat meals each week. It’s a lot easier to diet when you know you’ve got a burger or whatever every few days.

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Preparing for fatherhood means getting physically fit for the rigors of newborn baby care–it’s no joke! It’s important to prepare for the physically demanding work that lies ahead.

Train hard, fight easy.

If you want to find out more things you could be doing to prepare yourself to have a newborn baby in your life, check out my book A Man’s Guide to Newborn Babies, available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.