28 Oct Are you an ‘active’ dad, or a dad who just goes to the gym?
October 28th, 2026
I love an initial consultation, whether it’s a full-on Health and Nutrition Audit or simply a good old-fashioned chat, asking the right questions, fishing for where improvements can be made.
There are a fair few recurring themes that come up in these conversations; one is summed up by this short sentence that I have been known to utter:
“Going to the gym doesn’t automatically make you an active person.”
This is often met with raised eyebrows, so let me explain a ‘typical’ example by recounting a call from last month (I’ll call him Dave). ‘Dave’ had been training hard three times a week, every week. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, without fail. This is great, something many are nowhere near achieving, and is a solid foundation on which to build.
BUT… if you follow Dave through the rest of the week, it’s a seated breakfast at the table. A seated commute, followed by at least seven hours sat at a desk, lunch included. A seated commute home. Dinner, sat down, followed by some chilling, sat on the sofa. Add it all up and Dave and many desk-based dads are easily sitting for 50-plus hours a week.
Three hours of training. Fifty-plus hours in a chair. Which one do you think is winning?
Exercise isn’t the same as activity
Exercise is planned, structured and deliberate: the gym session, the run, the resistance-band workout in the living room.
General physical activity is everything else… and makes an absolutely massive contribution to your health and overall well-being. Walking to the station, taking the stairs, carrying shopping, kicking a ball about in the garden, standing up to take a call. (This everyday movement is known as NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis). Walking, carrying shopping and pottering around all burn energy, and those little bits add up.)
Exercise is fantastic. It’s how you build strength and fitness. But there are 168 hours in a week, and training takes up perhaps three of them. The other 165 are where your body spends most of its life… and takes its cue from.
The gym isn’t a ‘I get to do f-all other movement all day’ card
There is a trap. We train hard, feel virtuous, and then quietly decide we’ve ‘done our bit’. (I used to have a client who’d train like a Trojan three times per week and then smash a massive fully fried breakfast as a reward every time) The remaining hours can become a licence to eat whatever, and move not-a-lot.
Your gym sessions are doing you plenty of good. But that doesn’t mean the rest of your day doesn’t matter. No-one expects an occasional salad to completely ‘cancel out’ evenings and weekends full of takeaways, so it’s important to not to look at your sessions in the same way.
How to move more when you sit at a desk all day
The good news is that there are opportunities everywhere to nudge up that movement, and not a scrap of Lycra is required:
- Walking meetings, or standing for phone calls (pacing is allowed!)
- Stairs instead of the lift/escalators
- Getting off the bus a stop early
- The school run on foot, or by scooter (carrying the scooter absolutely counts)
- Playing with the kids rather than refereeing from the sofa
- Carrying: shopping, bags, and the child who ‘can’t walk any further’
- Standing for part of the working day
None of these will make you sweat, and all of them add up.
Don’t obsess over a magical step count
I know someone will ask, so no, you don’t need 10,000 steps. That number started life as a catchy slogan for a Japanese pedometer in the 1960s, not as the result of careful science. What the research does suggest is that more movement tends to be better than less, and the biggest gains come from going from very little to a bit more.
So forget the quest for a magic number and look at the direction of travel. Are you moving more than last week? Away from a sedentary lifestyle? Good. That’s the goal.
‘Movement snacks’
The idea that movement has to arrive in one big, sweaty, calendar-blocking chunk stops too many folks from getting started with something small and effective. Think in ‘small bites’ instead.
A ‘movement snack’ is a short burst of two to ten minutes, scattered through the day. A walk round the block after lunch. Ten squats while the kettle boils. A stroll to the furthest toilet in the building (everyone has one). They need no planning, no kit, and no shower.
It’s not just about calories
Yes, moving more burns more energy. But that’s only half the story.
Have you ever noticed how much sharper you feel after a ten-minute walk… compared to how you feel after four hours glued to a chair? Regular movement helps with energy, mood and focus, and gives your back and hips a break from being folded into a seat all day. It’s one of the simplest ways I know to feel less tired, and most dads I speak to are perpetually tired.
So, going back to the original question, which are you? You don’t need to overhaul your day to move from ‘dad who ‘just’ goes to the gym’ to ‘active dad’. Just identify three opportunities to add five to ten minutes of movement.
Maybe it’s a lunchtime walk, the school run on foot, and a stroll after dinner. Write them down. Do them for a week. Then ask yourself how you feel.
Stop thinking of movement as something that only happens while wearing gym clothes.
Your training makes you stronger and fitter. Your everyday movement keeps you well, energised and capable in between. You need both. This is exactly the approach I take with the Lean Dad Project: helping busy dads build realistic training, nutrition and movement habits that fit around work and family life, rather than expecting everything else to fit around their fitness plan.
If you’d like a hand getting started, grab one of my free movement guides, or let’s figure out the system that works for you.
Ayo Williams