You promised yourself you'd go to the gym.

Maybe you went a few times.

Then what happened?

Life got busy, or you got sick, and you fell off the wagon.

And it took weeks or months to start again.

You've probably repeated this more times than you care to admit.

I know, because that used to be me.

And after 15+ years of trying, I finally worked out why.

Here's the part of the gym nobody admits they hate:

• Packing the bag
• The commute
• Changing
• Waiting for the machine
• The shower after
• The journey home

It's what turns a 45-minute workout into a two-hour block.

That friction is what makes training feel impossible once you have kids and a full-time job.

Why this keeps repeating

You're juggling work, family, chores, obligations.

You're not undisciplined. You're overwhelmed.

The problem is the assumptions underneath every attempt.

• That you need to go somewhere else to train
• That the workout has to be long to matter
• That your nutrition has to be perfect

But I've gradually learned they're all false.

I was obese at 29, hating the mirror, dealing with knee and back pain for years.

And now I'm in the best shape of my life at 39.

I had to go through A LOT to make that journey, and I hope you'll solve it faster and more painless than I did.

One thread runs through everything below: every habit here is designed for your worst day, not your best.

That's the whole trick.

Design for the good week and the plan dies the first time life goes sideways. Design for the bad week and it survives both.

Habit 1: Train where you already are

If your workout requires a bag, a drive, a change of clothes, a wait for equipment, a shower and another journey home, it only survives while your life is calm and nothing unexpected happens.

Which doesn't sound like real life, does it?

No kid gets ill. You don't get injured. Your wife never goes through a hard time. Work is never stressful.

The moment any one of those lands, the two-hour version is the first thing sacrificed.

And then you hate yourself for failing again.

So build a workout that survives a chaotic life.

Here's where I'd start.

30 burpees a day.

They can be done anywhere. They take under ten minutes. And it sounds far too small to matter.

But your body doesn't grade on ambition. It grades on repetition.

Ten months of "too small" and you're unrecognisable.

That's exactly what I did 744 days ago, and it changed everything.

Some places I’ve done them:

• A hotel bed in Istanbul.

• A stairwell between floors.

• A handicap bathroom at work.

• A cabin floor on a cruise ship.

• A bus station near my apartment.

• A hill outside my mother’s house.

And most often of all: my living room floor, frequently with my five-year-old daughter hanging off my back.

The streak didn’t survive because I’m disciplined. It survived because I stopped requiring a good place to train.

Once the daily burpees are automatic (once it's harder not to do them than to do them) buy a kettlebell.

Pick three simple movements. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Do as many rounds as you can before it rings.

I do this in the morning before my daughter wakes up, in my boxer shorts, before the shower I was going to take anyway. Done before the day starts.

No gym. No commute. No bag.

It makes me feel literally invincible. Like I'm Batman. And that's not a shabby way to start the day.

Habit 2: Lower the intensity instead of skipping

Most of us carry an assumption that a workout only counts if it's intense, 45 minutes long, and done in a gym.

That assumption is what turns a bad day into a missed day, and a missed day into a missed month.

So here's the move.

When you can't do the session, you don't skip it. You shrink it.

When I have a cold I still do the kettlebell work, I just set the timer to 15 minutes instead of 30 and drop the intensity.

Same with the burpees. On a high-fever day I'll do them on my knees, heel raises instead of jumps, spread across the day in small batches.

That's the floor: the smallest version that still counts, decided in advance so you're never negotiating it while ill.

Keeping the habit matters more than the quality of any single session.

Anyone can beat a personal best on a good day. The question is whether he keeps going when he's sick, injured, or stressed out of his mind.

That's what the habit has to survive, and it has to be built that way from day one, not bolted on when you're already failing.

Habit 3: Cook once, serve it two ways

Here's what actually kills a father's diet.

Not willpower but arithmetic.

You cook your food. Then you cook their food. Two meals, twice the time, twice the cleanup, on a Tuesday when you got home at six and someone has homework.

So by Thursday you're eating what they're eating, because it's already on the stove.

Rigid diets work fine for a single 25-year-old who can eat identical chicken and rice for eleven weeks.

You don't have that life. If your diet collapses the moment you share a table with a five-year-old, it was built wrong from the start.

One meal. Two plates.

Same protein, same vegetables, cooked once. The difference is the starch.

Yours gets dialled to your goal: small or none if you're cutting, normal if you're maintaining.

Theirs gets dialled up, because they're growing, they're burning it, and it's the easiest sell at the table.

Air-fried parmesan chicken, broccoli, feta. That's my plate.

Hers is the same chicken with rice or boiled potatoes, and she might pick around the feta. Fine. She ate the chicken.

Keep it to around three ingredients. Not because three is magic, but because a meal you can cook while exhausted is a meal you'll actually cook.

The test for anything you're unsure about:

Whole food in, factory product out.

If the label reads like a chemistry set (stabilisers, emulsifiers, thickeners, flavourings) leave it. Added sugar or seed oils high on the ingredient list are the same signal.

That's the whole rule. No counting, no tracking, no app. Fill the plate with food that had one ingredient before it reached you and the junk has nowhere to hide.

Your kids absorb the same standard without a single conversation about it, which is the second dividend nobody talks about.

Habit 4: Decide your order before you're hungry

Eating well is far easier when you buy whole ingredients and cook them yourself. But that isn't always real life with a family.

So decide in advance what's acceptable when you eat out, before you're sitting down and starving and looking at a menu.

The restaurant rule

Restaurant portions are built large, and a big starchy side can push you well past what you need even when the meat and vegetables are honest. Chicken, rice and butter can run past 1,000 calories without looking like much.

One rule handles it:

Eat all the protein. Eat all the vegetables. Match the starch to your goal. Sauce on the side, or skip it.

Cutting? Half the starch. Building? Eat it all, you need it.

The sauce is usually where the sugar and seed oils hide.

Go-to orders

Poké bowl. Meat or fish, extra vegetables, small rice base. Sauce on the side or none. One of the cleanest fast options that exists.

Grill house or steakhouse. Meat or fish, vegetables, baked or boiled potato. Ask, don't assume — the default side is usually fries cooked in seed oil. Swap for baked, mashed, sweet potato, or extra vegetables.

Kebab and skewer places (Turkish, Greek, Persian, Lebanese). Grilled meat or fish, salad, olive oil. Expect far more rice than you'd serve at home.

Japanese. Sashimi, grilled fish, edamame. Rice as a side, not the base.

Mexican, as a bowl rather than a burrito. Meat, beans, salsa, guacamole. Hold the tortilla. Caveat: the rice and beans are usually cooked in seed oils and the meat is often marinated with sugar. Better than most, but not clean.

The pattern generalises. Grilled protein, vegetables, starch matched to your goal, sauce on the side.

And one meal a week where none of this applies

Family life is full of food you don't control. Birthday parties. Grandma's house. The Friday pizza that's been a tradition since before you cared about any of this.

So build it in. One feast meal a week. Anything goes, dessert included.

Not a cheat. Not a failure. A scheduled part of the plan.

Too full for the dessert? Save it for another day. Want a big one? Fine, just know it'll slow a cut slightly, and decide that up front rather than bite by bite.

The feast isn't a flaw in the system. It's why the system survives.

A way of eating you can hold for thirty years beats a perfect one you quit in three weeks, and your kids get a father who eats well and still eats cake at their birthday.

Habit 5: Train where they can see you

The first four handle the logistics. This one handles the part where you stop caring.

Because there will be months where nothing visible happens.

The mirror doesn't move. The scale doesn't move.

And a man training for a slightly better reflection quits somewhere in there.

I do the kettlebell work before she's awake, because that's when the apartment is quiet and I can actually load it properly. That session is for me.

But the burpees often happen in the living room. So do the pull-ups and chin-ups, on the bar in the doorway, usually with an audience.

That's the split that matters. Some of your training can be private. At least one part of it has to be visible, daily, at a time when they're awake and underfoot.

Because a gym is invisible to a child. It looks exactly like leaving for work.

"Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you." — Robert Fulghum

For the first decade of your child's life, your household is nearly their entire world. You're not the biggest influence on it. You are it.

And whatever they watch you do repeatedly gets filed permanently under normal.

It would be convenient to tell them to eat their broccoli without eating it yourself.

But as you know, it doesn't work like that.

What you do carries ten times the weight of what you say.

Which sounds like another obligation.

But it's the opposite.

All it requires is that you pursue your own ideal in the open, where they can see it.

Plenty of men say they'd die for their family.

Would you get in shape for them?

The pattern underneath all five

Look back at what these actually have in common.

The no-commute workout survives a chaotic week. Lowering the intensity survives a fever. Cook once, serve it two ways survives an exhausted Tuesday. A pre-decided order survives a menu and an empty stomach.

And training where they can see you gives meaning to the months when nothing visible is happening.

None of it is built for your best day. All of it is built for your worst.

That's the only reason it's still running 744 days late in my case, and it's the only reason it'll still be running when you have a bad month next spring.

You don't need more discipline than you have.

You need a version small enough that you stop needing any.

See you next week.

Warmly,

Bjorn