What I tell my clients is to prioritize their schedule. Of course your family comes first. You get training in when you can. You might have to decrease your volume a bit during the first few months of your newborn but as long as you are maintaining you will be fine. During those busy times, set realistic goals to achieve. If you choose goals that are out of reach, you will just lets yourself down. You must talk to your "significant other" and let him or her know that exercise is crucial in your life and you both will have to compromise so you can get it in. Do not stress out when you miss a training session. Just get it in the next day. During busy times, you must plan and schedule your day precisely so you can get your training in. Remember, rest and recovery are just as important as the training. Proper nutrition is extremely crucial as it will give you stabilized energy levels, so you can keep going all day long. (work, working out, family time, all the daily needs, it adds up!)

The best advice I could offer is to be prepared. When my wife was pregnant and during the first couple months of our now 2 year old being around, my bike was on the trainer and my shoes were by the door. Always ready on a moments notice.

As was said, communication is key, and plans are good. But more often than not the best time to workout is not when you planned or agreed, it's just that time that suddenly appears and you need to be ready to seize the moment.

Unfortunately, these moments are going to come at 4:30 am more often than you'd like. But hey, you're awake anyway.

The baby will figure that out for you ;-)

Seriously - you and your wife should be prepared to mobilize when the baby is asleep. For her that may mean hit the skids and nap and for you it may mean heading out the door to squeeze in whatever you can. Or maybe you two will swap and take turns being the one to run out and train when you can. Depends on your child care sharing strategy.

Like someone said above, I dont think you'll ever go back to square one. Your brain remembers what it feels like to be fit, so its easier to get back to where you were originally.

As far as muscles and cardio-vascular fitness go, I could believe 4 months would be enough to detrain most people, or at least give a very severe drop in fitness.

I can't find the reference, but I have seen a journal that talked about elite athletes in particular, saying how surprised scientists were of how quick VO2 max dropped. Muscle size decreased over months however (4-6 i think).

It should be noted thats this study was conducted using highly trained people who went from high volume, to absolutley nothing. Meaning no walks, no football, just coach potato.

I don't think you'll lose a tonne over 4 months.

Mark.

Good posts. Biologically, you replace most of the cells in your body every 100 days, so if you did absolutely nothing for that period of time, I would think you would be close to completely de-trained.

Most people that don't workout for several months aren't lying in bed or sprawled out on the couch 24 hours a day. They probably are doing some walking around and otherwise doing more for their muscles than they realize.

If you're really pinched for time and want to maintain for a few months, you can follow this one workout per day schedule:

Mon swim
Tue Bike
Wed Run
Thu swim
Fri bike
Sat run

Juggle workouts as necessary.

I think you recover the gains much faster the second, third time around than when you hadn't exercised in the first place.

It was very difficult for me to reach the level of fitness from the state of being a couch potato. But once I was there, dropped the weight, got the cardiovascular fitness, the subsequent breaks I took that dropped me in fitness levels were easy and quick to recover from. You might lose the fitness quickly but you get it back quickly.