How to Exercise as a Busy Parent When You Have No Time To Spare
Before you have children, it can seem quite reasonable to decide you’ll go to the gym after work or spend Saturday morning exercising. Then family life arrives and suddenly finding an uninterrupted hour for anything that isn’t essential feels like an achievement.
Even as children get older, it doesn’t necessarily become simple. There are school runs, appointments, clubs, meals, washing, work and all the other bits of life that somehow need organising. By the time you finally get a bit of time to yourself, there is every chance that exercise is somewhere below sitting quietly and not having anyone ask you for anything.
That’s why I don’t particularly like advice telling busy parents they simply need to make exercise a priority. Most parents already have plenty of priorities. What they often need is a way of fitting movement around the life they actually have, rather than being told to magically create five spare hours each week.
You don’t need to become one of those people who gets up at 5 am for a workout before everyone else wakes up unless you genuinely want to. There are much less painful ways to become more active.
Why is exercise so difficult to fit in when you’re a parent?
The obvious answer is time, but I think it’s more complicated than simply not having enough hours in the day.
When you have children, your time isn’t entirely your own. You can plan a workout for 6 pm and then discover someone needs collecting, dinner takes longer than expected, or your child has suddenly remembered a school project that’s apparently due tomorrow.
There’s also the mental load of family life. Even when you technically have 30 minutes free, you might be thinking about the washing, shopping, appointments and seventeen other jobs waiting for you.
Then there’s tiredness. If you’ve had broken sleep, worked all day, or spent the afternoon dealing with a spectacular child-related meltdown, someone enthusiastically telling you to do a HIIT workout isn’t likely to get the response they hoped for.
None of that means exercise is impossible. It just means your routine needs more flexibility than somebody whose evenings and weekends are largely their own.
Stop waiting for a completely free hour
I think this is probably the biggest mindset change for fitting exercise around children.
If your definition of a worthwhile workout is an uninterrupted hour, you may spend a very long time waiting for the perfect opportunity.
Exercise can happen in smaller chunks.
A 15-minute walk while your child is at an activity still counts. So does a short home workout before everyone gets up, ten minutes while dinner is cooking or a walk after school.
You can also spread activity throughout the week rather than assuming it needs to happen in formal workouts.
Current UK guidance recommends that adults aim to be active every day and work towards at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week, alongside muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days. Importantly, activity can be accumulated throughout the week rather than needing to happen in one long session.
If you’re currently doing very little, you don’t need to start by achieving the entire recommendation. Start with what you can realistically manage and build from there.
Look for the bits of your week that already involve waiting around
Parents spend an astonishing amount of time waiting.
Waiting outside school. Waiting during football practice. Waiting at swimming lessons. Waiting for somebody to finish an appointment.
Sometimes you genuinely need to stay exactly where you are, but there may be occasions when that waiting time could become walking time.
If your child has an hour-long club and you don’t need to watch, perhaps you could walk for half an hour nearby rather than sitting in the car scrolling through your phone.
I’ve done plenty of sitting around waiting for other people over the years, and it really is one of those little pockets of time that’s easy to overlook.
You don’t have to use every spare moment productively, of course. Sometimes you need the quiet sit in the car! But if you’re struggling to find any time for movement, it’s worth looking at the parts of your week you’re already spending somewhere.
Exercise while your children are doing their activities
This works particularly well as children get older.
If they’re at football training, dance, scouts, swimming or another activity, you might have a regular slot where they’re occupied and you’re nearby.
Instead of treating that as an hour you need to fill, it can become your exercise time.
You could walk, go for a short run, use a nearby gym or simply do something active in the area. It doesn’t have to match whatever your child is doing.
There is something quite satisfying about everyone coming home having done their own activity rather than you spending the entire evening ferrying other people around while getting no time for yourself.
Can you exercise with your children?
Yes, but I wouldn’t pretend this is always as idyllic as family fitness articles make it look.
Exercise with children can be brilliant when it happens naturally. Family walks, cycling, swimming, trips to the park, kicking a football around, dancing or going somewhere that involves lots of walking can all get everyone moving without needing to announce that you’re having a family workout.
Children and young people aged 5–18 are currently advised to average at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day across the week, with a variety of activities that help develop movement skills, muscles and bones.
That doesn’t mean you need to organise 60 minutes of structured exercise for them every day. Walking to places, active play, PE, cycling, sport, dancing and other activities can all contribute.
The bonus is that some of those activities can contribute to your movement too.
A family walk might not feel like a serious workout, but if you’re walking briskly for an hour while everyone complains about how far away the ice-cream shop is, you’re still active.
Don’t make every family activity about fitness
There is a slight danger here too.
If you’re trying to become more active, it’s easy to start measuring every family outing by steps or calories.
You don’t need to do that.
A walk can simply be a walk. A trip somewhere can be enjoyable rather than something you chose because it burns the most calories.
I think children pick up a surprising amount from how adults talk about food, weight and exercise. I’d much rather movement be presented as something we do because it can be enjoyable and because our bodies are designed to move than something we need to do to compensate for dinner.
That’s something my own attitude towards exercise has changed a lot on over the years.
Home workouts can be incredibly useful for parents
One of the hardest things about exercising when you have children can be leaving the house.
Even if the gym is only 15 minutes away, the workout suddenly involves travelling there, exercising, travelling back and perhaps arranging childcare as well.
Home exercise removes a lot of that.
You can do something while younger children are asleep, when older children are occupied or whenever you’ve got a small window in the day.
You also don’t need a dedicated gym room. I’ve written separately about how to exercise at home when you have very little space, because plenty of us don’t have the spare room shown in home-workout videos.
And if you’re not sure what to actually do once you’ve found ten or fifteen minutes, my easy exercise routine for beginners is designed to work at home without loads of equipment.
What if your children interrupt every workout?
They probably will sometimes. That’s one reason I’d avoid routines where being interrupted after 20 minutes means the entire session has somehow been ruined.
Choose workouts you can pause or exercises that work in a circuit so you can stop and come back. If you managed ten minutes before somebody needed you, those ten minutes still happened.
I think this is where letting go of perfection becomes incredibly important. Family life doesn’t always provide neat uninterrupted blocks of time.
If you wait until nobody is ever going to interrupt you, you may be waiting until they leave home.
You don’t have to exercise while they’re asleep
This is another piece of parenting fitness advice I’m not especially keen on. Yes, exercising during naps or before your children wake up can work brilliantly if that suits you.
But if your baby finally goes to sleep and you’re completely exhausted, you are allowed to sit down. Sleep and rest matter too.
Likewise, if getting up at 5.30 am to exercise means you’re chronically sleep-deprived, I’m not convinced that automatically counts as looking after your health. Exercise should fit around your wellbeing rather than become another demand you impose on yourself.
Share the parenting time where you can
If there are two adults sharing parenting responsibilities, it’s worth having an actual conversation about time for exercise rather than hoping it somehow appears.
Perhaps one of you gets an hour on Tuesday while the other handles bedtime, and you swap on Thursday.
That doesn’t mean both of you need to use your time for exercise. The important bit is recognising that time to look after yourself shouldn’t automatically belong to whoever has the least parenting responsibility by default.
I also think this is where exercise advice can accidentally become rather sexist. Women in particular are often told they need to make time for themselves without anybody asking who is going to take over the things they’re currently doing during that time.
Sometimes the solution isn’t becoming better at squeezing exercise into impossible gaps. It’s redistributing the responsibilities.
Use your lunch break if evenings never work
If you work and your evenings are chaotic, lunchtime may actually be your best chance. You don’t necessarily need to get sweaty enough to require a complete shower and outfit change. A brisk walk can be enough.
Even 15 or 20 minutes gets you away from your desk, gives you some movement and means exercise isn’t competing with dinner, clubs, homework and bedtime later.
If you work from home, this can be especially easy to overlook because it’s tempting to use lunch to catch up on jobs.
Sometimes leaving the house for twenty minutes is much better for me than spending another twenty minutes looking at a screen.
Build movement into things you’re already doing
This is perhaps less exciting than planning a workout, but it’s much easier to fit into family life.
Walk shorter journeys when practical. Take the stairs. Go for a walk while your child rides their bike. Park slightly further away. Walk around while you’re on the phone.
None of those alone is going to transform your fitness overnight, but they contribute to your overall activity. And they have one major advantage: you don’t need to find another hour in your diary.
For busy parents, that can make them far more sustainable than an ambitious formal workout schedule.
What if your children aren’t interested in being active?
You don’t need to turn exercise into a battle. Children have preferences just like adults do. One might love football while another would rather have their toenails removed than participate in a team sport. Activity doesn’t have to mean competitive sport.
Walking, cycling, swimming, dancing, playgrounds, skating, climbing and active games can all count towards movement. Current UK guidance specifically recognises many different types of activity for children and young people rather than prescribing one particular sport.
The best option is probably something they actually enjoy enough to keep doing. That sounds remarkably similar to my advice for adults!
Let children see you being active without making a big speech about it
You don’t necessarily need to announce that you’re setting a healthy example. Simply letting children see that movement is a normal part of life can be enough.
You go for a walk. You do some exercises at home. You choose to swim because you enjoy it. You talk about becoming stronger or improving your fitness rather than constantly talking about burning calories.
I think that’s a much nicer message than children hearing exercise discussed primarily as something adults do because they dislike their bodies.
You don’t have to pretend you adore every workout either. They can also see that sometimes you don’t particularly fancy doing something but feel better for having done it.
That’s real life.
What about exercising with a baby or toddler?
This stage brings its own challenges because younger children require so much supervision. Walking can be one of the easiest activities because you can often take a baby in a pram or buggy, depending on their age and what is suitable for them. Parent-and-baby exercise classes may also appeal if you enjoy the social side.
At home, you might manage a short workout while your child plays safely nearby or sleeps, but I wouldn’t set yourself the goal of following a perfect 45-minute routine around a toddler whose life’s ambition is apparently preventing you completing anything uninterrupted.
Toddlers and pre-school children need plenty of opportunities for active play themselves. Current NHS guidance recommends toddlers aged 1–2 are active for at least 180 minutes spread throughout the day, while children aged 3–4 should also have at least 180 minutes, including at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity.
Again, that’s movement and play across the whole day, not three hours of formal exercise.
What if you’re a parent with a disabled child or caring responsibilities?
This is something generic “busy mum workout” articles rarely acknowledge.
Not every parent can simply leave the house for a run or hand childcare over for an hour. If your child has additional needs, medical appointments, disturbed sleep or requires significant supervision and care, your available time and energy may look completely different.
In that situation, I wouldn’t compare your exercise routine with somebody else’s. A short home workout, wheelchair-accessible exercise, seated movement or brief walks might be what fits into your life right now.
There will also be periods when caring responsibilities are so intense that formal exercise simply isn’t high on the list. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed at healthy living. As a mum to a young man with additional needs who is 20 now but still needs me a lot, I know this all too well.
Health advice needs to recognise that people have different lives, not assume everyone can rearrange their diary if they just want it enough.
Stop feeling guilty when you spend time on yourself
I think parental guilt can make exercise surprisingly complicated.
You might feel guilty leaving your children to go to the gym, guilty spending money on yourself or guilty that you’re doing something while there are jobs at home waiting.
But you don’t have to earn every bit of time you spend on yourself by finishing everything else first.
Everything else will never be completely finished.
Having some time for exercise, hobbies, seeing friends or simply being alone doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you a person whose needs didn’t disappear the moment you became a parent.
I also think this is why exercise needs to be something you choose rather than another obligation. If you hate the gym, don’t use your precious hour of child-free time doing something that makes you miserable just because you think you should.
How much exercise should busy parents aim for?
Parents have the same general physical-activity recommendations as other adults.
Current UK guidance for adults recommends being active every day, aiming for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or an equivalent combination. Adults should also include strengthening activities on at least two days each week and break up long periods of sitting.
Those are useful public-health targets, but I don’t think somebody doing almost no activity should look at 150 minutes and decide anything less isn’t worth doing.
Start below the target if that’s where you are.
Five minutes can become ten. One walk can become two. A short home workout can become something you do regularly.
Guidelines are a destination to work towards, not a minimum entrance requirement for movement to count.
A realistic exercise week for a busy parent
If you want an example, a very ordinary week could look something like this.
You might take a 20-minute walk at lunchtime on Tuesday, do a 15-minute home strength routine on Thursday, walk while your child is at a weekend activity and have a longer family walk on Sunday.
None of that looks especially impressive written on a fitness influencer’s schedule. But it is movement fitted into real life. Once you’re doing something consistently, you can build on it. Perhaps you increase one of the walks, add another short strength session or choose a more vigorous activity you enjoy.
I’d much rather see somebody doing a modest routine for the next three years than attempting an enormous one for the next three weeks.
What if you start and then stop again?
Welcome to being human. School holidays happen. Children get ill. You get ill. Work becomes ridiculous. Family life changes. If your exercise routine disappears for a few weeks, you haven’t ruined anything.
Just restart at a level that feels manageable now. I’ve written a whole article about how to stick to exercise when you always give up, but one of the biggest lessons in it is that consistency isn’t really about never stopping. It’s about becoming better at starting again.
You don’t need to become one of “those parents who exercise”
That was actually the angle of the old version of this article: how to become one of those parents who somehow manages to exercise regularly.
I look at it a bit differently now.
You don’t need to become someone else’s version of an active parent. You don’t need five workouts a week, a Peloton in the spare room or children who happily join you for wholesome family runs every Sunday morning.
You need something that fits your family.
Perhaps that’s walking while someone is at football. Maybe it’s fifteen minutes in your living room twice a week or swimming on the one evening someone else can handle everything at home.
As your children and circumstances change, your exercise routine probably will too.
That’s okay.
Being a parent means there will always be somebody or something competing for your time. Looking after yourself doesn’t require you to pretend those demands don’t exist.
It just means occasionally making a little room for yourself among them.
Sources and further reading
- NHS – Physical activity guidelines for adults aged 19–64 — current advice on aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity.
- UK Chief Medical Officers’ physical activity guidelines — current UK recommendations across age groups.
- NHS – Physical activity guidelines for children and young people — recommendations for ages 5–18, including adaptations for disabled children and young people.
- NHS – Physical activity guidelines for children under five — current activity recommendations for babies, toddlers and pre-school children.
A note about exercise: This article contains general information rather than individual medical advice. If you have a medical condition, are returning to exercise after pregnancy or childbirth, have an injury, or are unsure which activity is suitable for you, seek individual advice from an appropriate healthcare professional.
