How to Train Around a Full Time Job and Kids

Most advice about finding time to train is written for people with a lot of it. Train five or six days a week. Meal prep on Sunday. Get eight hours of sleep. Useful, unless you have a job that runs late and children who need you the moment you walk through the door.

I train around a full time job and a family myself, so here is what actually holds up.

Stop trying to find an hour

Most people wait for a clear hour to appear. It rarely does, and waiting is how six months disappear. Two properly structured sessions a week, done consistently for a year, beats a perfect five day plan you sustain for three weeks.

Decide the minimum you can genuinely commit to on your worst week, then build the plan around that number. Anything extra becomes a bonus rather than a failure.

That number is usually smaller than people expect. When someone tells me they can commit to four sessions, I ask what happens in the week the nursery rings at eleven in the morning. The honest answer is two. So we build for two, and a third session is profit. It sounds like lowering the bar. It is the only version that survives a year.

Anchor training to something fixed

Willpower is a terrible scheduler. Attach your sessions to things that already happen at the same time each week. Before work on the days you are not doing the school run. Straight after drop off. The evening your partner is home early.

A session with a fixed slot and someone expecting you gets done. A session you will fit in somewhere does not.

For the parents I coach, the slots that survive contact with real life are usually one of a small handful. Look at your week and see which of these you already have.

• Early morning before the house wakes up. Nothing can move it, because nothing else is happening yet. It is unglamorous and it works.
• Straight after drop off. You are already dressed, already out, and the alternative is going home and getting sucked into email.
• A fixed lunchtime slot. Blocked in your work calendar like any other meeting, not left as a gap you hope stays clear.
• The one predictable evening. The night your partner is reliably home, or the night the kids are at a club and you have an hour to yourself anyway.

Pick two, write them in the diary for the next twelve weeks, and treat them as fixed. Which slots are realistic is one of the first things we work through on a consultation, and you can see how coaching works before you book anything.

Protect the session, flex everything else

When the week goes wrong, and it will, the instinct is to cancel training because it feels like the most optional thing in the diary. Try the opposite. Keep the session and shorten it. Twenty focused minutes keeps the habit alive. Skipping entirely is what starts the slide.

The reason this matters is not the twenty minutes of training. It is that you did not break the pattern. Cancel one week and the second is easier to cancel, and by the third you are negotiating about starting again next month. Turning up badly beats not turning up.

So write a short fallback session in advance, while you are calm, and keep it somewhere you can find it when the week goes wrong. Something like this:

• Five minutes of easy warm up, whatever you have space for
• One squat or lunge movement, three sets
• One push and one pull, three sets each, back to back to save time
• Stop. No finisher, no extras, no guilt

Train hard enough to be worth the time

If you only have two or three sessions, they cannot be gentle. Compound movements, proper effort, and progression you can actually measure. This is where a coach earns their money for busy people, because there is no room for wasted sets.

In practice that means most of your time goes on a few movements that give you the most back: a squat pattern, a hinge, a push, a pull, and some loaded carrying. It means the last couple of reps being genuinely difficult. And it means writing down what you lifted, so next week has a target. Two sessions with progression beats four spent wandering between machines.

What a two day week actually looks like

People find this easier when they can see it, so here is the shape of a typical two session week for someone with about forty five minutes each time.

• Day one. Goblet squat or leg press, then a chest press, then a row. Three or four sets of each, finishing with something for the core and a short walk.
• Day two. Romanian deadlift or hip thrust, then a shoulder press, then a lat pulldown or assisted pull up. Same structure, different pattern.
• Between sessions. Walking, and one very short mobility routine on the days you feel stiff.

That is it. Not exciting to read, remarkably effective to do. Both days train the whole body, so if one session is lost to a sick child you have not missed anything for the week. That is a deliberate design choice for parents, not a compromise.

Get the food basics right, ignore the rest

You do not need a meal plan. You need enough protein, sensible portions, and a default order at the places you actually eat. That is most of it. Complicated nutrition is the first thing to collapse in a busy household.

The households that manage this well are not cooking separate meals. They eat the same dinner as the children, with a bit more protein and a bit less of the beige on the adult plate. Cooking two meals every night is a system that fails by February.

• Have three or four dinners you can make without thinking, on rotation
• Keep something quick and high protein in the fridge for the nights nobody has energy
• Decide your usual coffee shop and pub order once, then stop deciding it every time
• Eat breakfast, even a small one, if skipping it means you demolish the kitchen at four in the afternoon

The evening problem

For most working parents, the day is fine until about eight in the evening. Then the kids are down, the day catches up with you, and the sofa and the snacks do most of the damage. What helps is deciding what the evening looks like in advance, rather than deciding it when you are tired. A slightly bigger dinner. A cut off time for work email. Going to bed twenty minutes earlier than feels natural, because tomorrow's session depends on that more than on tonight's willpower.

Stop treating it as selfish

This is the one I hear most from parents, and it deserves a straight answer. Three hours a week is under two percent of your time. What your family gets back is someone with more energy, better mood, and a much better chance of still being strong and mobile in thirty years.

That is not time taken away from them. It is one of the more useful things you can do for them.

What this looks like in practice

• Two or three fixed sessions a week, booked like meetings
• A plan written for those days specifically, not a six day split cut down
• A short fallback session for the weeks that fall apart
• Progress measured over months rather than judged week to week

The mistakes I see most often

• Starting with the perfect plan. Five days, new diet, alarm set for half five. It lasts about eleven days.
• Treating a missed week as a failure. A missed week is a missed week. The plan is measured in months.
• Training on autopilot. The same weights for a year is maintenance, and it will feel like wasted time because it mostly is.
• Doing it all alone. Not because you cannot, but because nobody is expecting you on Tuesday, and that turns out to matter more than most people admit.

A few questions I get asked

Is two sessions a week really enough? For getting meaningfully stronger and changing how you look and feel, yes, provided the sessions are well built and you keep going. Two done for a year beats four done for a month, every time.

What if I have not trained in ten years? That is most people who contact me. We start with an assessment, work out what your body is happy to do right now, and build from there. If you have a medical condition or you are on medication, have a word with your GP first, and tell me about it so the plan respects it.

Is early morning better than evening? The one you will actually do is better. Mornings are harder to start and harder to cancel. Evenings are easier to start and much easier to lose. Pick based on your household, not on what someone posted online.

Where do you train people? One to one from a private setup in Cuckfield, which is about five minutes from Haywards Heath and ten from Balcombe. You can read a bit more about how I work if you want the background first.

If you are a parent in Cuckfield, Haywards Heath or Balcombe and this sounds like your life, that is exactly who I coach. Book a free consultation and we will work out what would genuinely fit your week.