Staying in shape with a newborn...

Hey everyone,

So, my wife is about to give birth to our first child. Based on what I've heard, I'm not expecting to be able to get much climbing in for the first few months. Although a little break is probably a good idea to let persistent injuries heal (damned finger tendons!), I'm worried that I'll lose all of my strength and have to start over when I finally do have time. My biggest concern is forearm strength/endurance, particularly lactic acid endurance...from my past experiences, this goes quickly when you're on an extended break and is really annoying to get back, as it pretty much shuts down your climbing session. I do have a hangboard, so hopefully that will help.

Don't bother, take a year off and enjoy the kid. They don't stay small long and you have the rest of your life to climb. Plus, you will climb better after letting everything heal up and coming back at it with a fresh head.

Congratulations on the upcoming event!

Seems like you're on the right track in just adjusting your training to fit the fact that you're not going to be able to climb much for a bit. Maybe some stuff you'd always meant to focus on but went out climbing instead? Hangboard seems good except for the injuries you mentioned...so maybe just a rest to start, but then you could do some lifting, or core, flexibility or even cardio if you have alpine aspirations. 5 sets of 10 pull ups could be knocked out very quickly, interspersed with daddy duties, over the course of an hour.

Then the whole other angle is going to the gym for a bouldering workout, but no chit-chat, just a little warmup, a 4x4 circuit and go pick up that box of diapers. Do what you can in an hour and get out.

Enjoy baby!

Bonus diaper beta: the diaper itself is the best way to clean things up down there. The wipe just finishes the job. (took me a few months to figure that one out) In case diapers is a new skill set for you!

Or...

Just go climbing. Kids are portable.

"Climbing with an Infant

A couple of my friends recently introduced future rock stars into the world, so with them in mind, Mike and I asked our wives Janelle and Kate to help us draft a few tips on climbing with an infant. Everything written here is twice mother-approved (grandmother, not necessarily :) ). This post assumes mother and father are climbing together with baby, and without a dedicated sitter. Obviously its optimal to have a third adult to help with baby, but we are realists, not optimists. In my experience, if you only climb when you have a third adult, you won’t climb very often. I know there are many other climbing parents reading this, some with far more experience than I have, so if you have any useful tips, please share them! For those of you who don’t have kids (yet?), perhaps this post will take some of the mystery away and reduce any potential apprehensions to climbing parenthood...."

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Yeah, I'm sure the first "climbing" I'll be able to work back in will be bouldering. It's more the time before that that I'm worried about, when I'll be trapped inside for weeks on end and going stir-crazy while simultaneously sleep-deprived. When I do hangboard repeaters, I usually get a good anaerobic burn and work maximum strength, but I don't tend to get "pumped" or work aerobic, so I'm worried that I could still lose lactic acid endurance. Pull ups (on a bar) are no good for this either, as you don't get much of a forearm workout. Maybe I should focus on longer hangs on larger holds?

Circuits are a good idea to target endurance...nice!

Btw I should probably mention that we live in Chicago, so...no outdoor rock until the spring. :( The pics/guide were certainly inspiring, though!

As for the third adult premise, that is our primary strategy. It helps that the Gunks are located right outside of a college town. We advertise for a mommy's helper, meaning I will do all the nasty stuff (diaper changes and dealing with ill tempers) she will basically play with my helmet-wearing children a reasonably safe distance from the climb and any rap routes.

It's way cheaper than an actual babysitter as they aren't really doing too much and can just hand the kid off if things get hairy. You can hire inexperienced college kids because you aren't actually leaving your kid with them. You are right there the whole time, and you get to spend time with your kid that is virtually stress free because you have tons of support and it's outside which is super.

None of our mommy helpers climb, so no one is muscling in on our rope time. This strategy saved our season. Highly recommend.

<edit to remove a bit that repeats the link above and a photo that the link above covers, but seriously, buy one of those little chairs in the link)

Yes, congratulations! Remember, the norm for all of human history was for kids to be with their parent, not parked somewhere. This only changed very, very recently. It's actually harder a bit further on, as said, so take advantage of it! Mine was the other side of the sleep average, though, so he was tough and I was exhausted. Be as flexible with each other as you can! Have fun! Your life is about to be utterly upended! Best, OLD

P.S. I'm old enough to say at least some grannies/great grannies would approve! Nice article, Monomaniac!

Ted Pinson wrote:Yeah, I'm sure the first "climbing" I'll be able to work back in will be bouldering. It's more the time before that that I'm worried about, when I'll be trapped inside for weeks on end and going stir-crazy while simultaneously sleep-deprived. When I do hangboard repeaters, I usually get a good anaerobic burn and work maximum strength, but I don't tend to get "pumped" or work aerobic, so I'm worried that I could still lose lactic acid endurance. Pull ups (on a bar) are no good for this either, as you don't get much of a forearm workout. Maybe I should focus on longer hangs on larger holds? Circuits are a good idea to target endurance...nice! Btw I should probably mention that we live in Chicago, so...no outdoor rock until the spring. :( The pics/guide were certainly inspiring, though!

TED! You have a 6-8 pound weight program arriving! They looovvveee what daddies can do! 50,000 reps!! Yay! More! Do it again, daddy! More! More! More!

Congrats on your first child! My son was born almost two years ago, but my wife is way overprotective of him so that I haven't had the chance to take him hiking yet, let alone climbing. After my son was born, I tried to get back into rock climbing by going to the gym once a week. I quickly found that climbing once a week wasn't nearly enough to maintain strength/endurance. The best thing I did (at Monomaniac's recommendation) was to buy a hangboard and train on it after my son goes to sleep. It helped me maintain and even improve my finger strength. Although not ideal, you can also do endurance workout on a hangboard. Just keep the load very low and move your hands from hold to hold to simulate climbing. I would do that for 30 mins at a time and get a very different "pump" from actual climbing. Of course this doesn't give you any movement practice, and it's mind numbing-ly boring. But when you can't go climbing or even to a gym, you work with whatever tool is at your disposal. I think my hangboard workout has helped me to go from pumping out on 5.9s in the gym to climbing 5.11s a year later, when I can only train once a week in the gym, and maybe climb outside one day on the weekend when the weather is good.

As a new mother, this post caught my eye. Sorry, but you might be screwed here. Kids (newborns especially) are full-on and there's really not much me-time to go around. Do everything you can to facilitate the well-being of your child and wife, and focus on your climbing later on once things calm down. Clean the house, take the kid for a walk so your wife can sleep (or exercise), cook dinner, THEN go climbing if you have time. Climbing isn't going anywhere, but your healthy relationships might go somewhere if you don't nurture them during this difficult time!. +1 for hangboard.

I think the biggest question I have right now is does your wife climb as that will be a major factor in where climbing comes on the priority list after the baby.

Our son is ~20 months right now and my wife and I have both done pretty well managing to climb with him. The first few months were actually the BEST time to climb with a child based on our experience so far. He pretty much napped all the time and my wife would take breaks from climbing occasionally to feed him. We were climbing indoors and outside regularly two weeks after he was born. You might be greatly limited at where you can climb outside as a lot of crags aren't baby friendly and we tried to get to the gym at non peak times.

Once they start crawling everything changes. Roped climbing became almost impossible unless we had a third so we started doing more bouldering or climbing with other people and switching off who was watching the baby. Right now we have a group of climbing friends that also have babies and climbing with them works pretty well as two adults can usually watch several kids.

Doing things in general is more difficult once you have a baby, but I think the important thing is to plan your day around it. If you don't have a rough plan (keep it realistic) at the start of the day you're never going to get anything done.

Couldn't you do something like toss the baby back and forth with your wife to keep up your forearms strong? Note: I have no children and enjoy babies in small doses (I am OUT on the diapering part! Tried that a few times while baby sitting my half sisters and dry heaved through the operation) so take my parenting suggestions with a grain of salt ;) If I ever have a kid I'll make a nice outside pen they can stay in until they are toilet trained. Oh, and congratulations :)

aikibujin wrote:Congrats on your first child! My son was born almost two years ago, but my wife is way overprotective of him so that I haven't had the chance to take him hiking yet, let alone climbing.

I apologize in advance for the thread sidetrack - but please, do not let your wife win every battle on this one. I grew up believing I had two insanely overprotective parents, and only years later as an adult did I learn that I had one insanely overprotective parent, and one extremely reasonable parent that just went along with it cause it was easier not to rock the boat. As a result, I did not start any of the activities that are now most important to me until I was an adult, and I still sometimes wish I hadn't missed all those years of enjoyment. Worse still, now that my dad is too old to enjoy many of those activities, I am very sad about having lost a decade or two of time that we could've spent enjoying adventures together. And, ultimately, my mom was not able to keep me away from anything I wanted to do, just delay it for a while and/or ensure I was not learning it from family (this applies to things like climbing, skiing, and camping as well as all that other teenage stuff)

I'm not saying don't respect your wife's wishes, but find a balance between your two styles, and remember that your baby is a person who will grow up some day and you won't be able to change the childhood that you gave them - I hope your kid grows up with lots of memories of hiking and climbing and adventuring with his/her family.

For the OP: youtube.com/watch?v=QVEB4W0…

Haha, wow...big range of answers. Amanda - that's what I'm expecting for a while, which is why I'm assuming even going to the gym will be out and I'm looking for quick, targeted things I can do at home (mostly revolving around a hangboard). This is after the first few weeks where I probably won't be doing much at all.

Lady - frenchies with baby Bjorn? Haha.
Aiki - that sounds like a good idea for endurance...I assume you didn't do that for 30 min straight, though...how long would you aim to stay on at a time?

Thanks again for all of the well-wishes and congratulations...I am very excited to meet my future belay partner. ;)

Don't expect to get out a lot for some time.

Get a hangboard-

Run to maintain overall fitness and keep the weight off. You can get a great run in w/ 45 minutes. You and mom and trade off baby duty for intense 45 workouts to keep your sanity.

Actually- when i fell in love with a runner, and started climbing less, but hangboarding a bit more- at least for the first 6 months i climbed just as well if not better than ever. I probably dropped 3-4 lbs from all the running, and endurance seemed to improve, i could calm my heart rate on routes better.

If you want to try to get to the gym or crag- find other new dad's/moms to climb with. non- kid folks don't understand the time constraints and while they high five and chat w/ their buddies or show up 15 minutes late, you are losing out on routes.

germsauce wrote: You can get a great run in w/ 45 minutes.

If you're ok with abject suffering you can do it in about 15: run a mile to warm up and then do 1-minute all-out sprints alternating with 1-minute walk. Great on a treadmill as well, as the pain distracts you from how boring treadmills can be. Sprint intervals are a totally valid way to do it, and supposedly there's some evidence that they're better for weight loss, if that's a priority.

will ar wrote:I think the biggest question I have right now is does your wife climb as that will be a major factor in where climbing comes on the priority list after the baby. Our son is ~20 months right now and my wife and I have both done pretty well managing to climb with him. The first few months were actually the BEST time to climb with a child based on our experience so far. He pretty much napped all the time and my wife would take breaks from climbing occasionally to feed him. We were climbing indoors and outside regularly two weeks after he was born. You might be greatly limited at where you can climb outside as a lot of crags aren't baby friendly and we tried to get to the gym at non peak times. Once they start crawling everything changes. Roped climbing became almost impossible unless we had a third so we started doing more bouldering or climbing with other people and switching off who was watching the baby. Right now we have a group of climbing friends that also have babies and climbing with them works pretty well as two adults can usually watch several kids. Doing things in general is more difficult once you have a baby, but I think the important thing is to plan your day around it. If you don't have a rough plan (keep it realistic) at the start of the day you're never going to get anything done.

Will is correct. Once the child is mobile unless you have a third or a baby sitter you cannot just bring your child along and climb. I focused a lot more on bouldering as a result and my wife focused on running. The images projected via adorable photos and videos are to say the least misleading, especially for getting serious climbing done. And if your child finds climbing uninteresting as she ages that adds a new level of complications. Good luck!

Ted Pinson wrote:Lady - frenchies with baby Bjorn? Haha. Aiki - that sounds like a good idea for endurance...I assume you didn't do that for 30 min straight, though...how long would you aim to stay on at a time?

I was actually going to suggest doing hangboard workouts with the baby strapped to you in a Baby Bjorn... only half-jokingly. It gives your wife a little alone time to unwind, and the baby grows so fast in the first year you have a gradual increase in your weighted hangboard work out to get you strong. Bonus point if you can do one-arm dead hangs while bottle feeding with the other hand! How come I didn't think of it sooner?!

As horrifying as it sounds, sometimes I do stay on my hangboard for 30 mins straight. It all depends on what I’m working on. As I mentioned, when my son was about six months old I tried to get back to climbing and was barely able to make it to the gym once a week. So I essentially did most of my workout on the hangboard: base endurance, strength, and power endurance. For base endurance, I stood on a step positioned behind my hangboard and just moved my hands from hold to hold with very little load, and I would do it for 30 mins at a time after I’ve warmed up (essentially ARCing). Obviously this is not as effective as actually ARCing on a climbing wall, but the idea is to simulate ARCing on long route as much as you can with the tool you have. The real challenge is not get bored out of your mind. I listened to audio books while I did this. For finger strength I did 10-sec deadhangs with the max amount of weight I can handle, with long period of rest in between hangs. For power endurance, I did repeater workouts with less added weight with fairly short rest period between sets. Are these the most effective ways to train strength and power endurance? Probably not. But since I can’t make it to the gym often, the alternative is no training at all which would be even worse. Of course these focus entirely on finger strength and forearm endurance, if you have other areas of weakness you may have to find other methods to work on these. I still try to go to a climbing gym when I can for technique and movement practice, and get back into the mental game with leading.

Pause the climbing, welcome to adulthood.

DKheat wrote:Don't bother, take a year off and enjoy the kid. They don't stay small long and you have the rest of your life to climb. Plus, you will climb better after letting everything heal up and coming back at it with a fresh head.

This strikes me as overly pessimistic. If you can't find 30 minutes twice a week to hang board and an hour or two at the gym as well, then you are doing something wrong.

Your wife's priorities may be different. Doesn't sound like she's a climber. But make sure your wife gets her share of free time too, if you treasure that relationship.

Babies sleep most of the time anyway.