Training and kids and training with kids

As you all probably know, our family consist of me and Thomas, five dogs and two kids. Two lovely, sensitive, lively and energetic boys aged nine and five. Naturally we wish they learn to enjoy the healthy and sporty lifestyle. We want them to learn to love some kind of exercising; it doesn't need to be running or skiing or any other of the sports we do or anything goal-orientated, but we want them to find their own way of staying active.

Heia Norge! And Finland too!

The current hobbies for the boys are more cultural than sporty. L, 9 years, plays piano and sings in Cantores Minores, a world famous boy choir, and has choir rehearsal three times a week in Helsinki, 32 km away from our home. Both hobbies take so much of his free time that there just isn't time for any regular sport hobby, despite how much we and L himself would like him to have one. He loves especially skiing, cycling and handball, so we try to be able to cycle and ski with him as much as possible. Tiny-A, 5 years, goes to a music school once a week and would like to start with dance lessons next fall. REAL street dance lesson, not any kids' dance, this is very important! He LOVES dancing, running, jumping on a trampoline, doing all kinds of stunt tricks and cycling, and would like to do these all day long. He is also really competitive and not the best when it comes to dealing with losing, so you can imagine what happens when he wants to compete in everything with his four years older big brother. And this happens like fifty-nine times per day. 😬

As boys' music lessons and rehearsals take three to four evenings of our week and in addition to those there are all the concerts during the weekends, it is pretty often when we have to be a little bit creative to get all the training fitted into our calendar. I have ran numerous runs in the central park of Helsinki with a dog or two or three while L has been taking his singing lesson. I have trained verbal cues and mat training at a football field during his piano lesson. We have done socializing with puppies in Helsinki city center with some metro and tram rides and shopping mall visits during an orchestra rehearsal of st Matthew Passion. We have picked up A from kindergarten 10 km away from home so that Thomas drives to the kindergarten by car and I run there with some of the dogs, and then I take the car and continue with A to his music school and Thomas runs home with other dogs. And not to even mention all those cross-trainer, yoga and strength training sessions at our training room after boys have gone to bed.

Don't need to train alone even at the late evening yoga-session!

But absolutely the most we like to train together. If we are training during the daytime when boys are still awake they most likely want to join us. It's really great that both of them are nowadays cycling so fast (thanks to the fact that A was able to change into 20 inch kids bike with gears, no jogger trolley to bring with us anymore) that we can run our shorter tempo runs (up to 10 km) and warm ups for intervals while they cycle. When we are running intervals (hills or short intervals, up to 500 meters) boys normally run their own "interval training" with shorter distance and at their own speed. And sometimes they just want to sit by the road and cheer to us while we pass them. Strength training is boys' absolute favorite, then they join us almost every time. Naturally they don't do anything with weights but they learn to do some simple exercises using their own body weight. Or they just goof around with dogs' balance balls. Doesn't really matter, they are being active anyway.

One of our favorite sports to do together is swimming. When we go to the swimming hall or to the lake during the summer, we normally swim and play for a while together and then one of us adults swims his own swimming training and then we change, so that both of us get to swim at least half an hour on our own. And the we finish up with some more time together. We also love to take long walks in the forest so that we have plenty of time to climb up all the rocks and hills we possibly can and play kuuro-gömman, as A calls hide-and-seek. We would love to do some more climbing together and are really looking forward to all the climbing centers to open soon. One of us actually eve more than others...

So what's my message? Active lifestyle and training is possible also during the busy family life. Yes, it won't always be optimal or how you would like your training to be, but the most important thing is to do something. Scheduling, flexibility and compromising is necessary, but worth it. It actually helps you to go out and take the run or whatever kind of training you want to do when it says so in your family's weekly schedule or your own calendar.

I hope that our effort to introduce training and being active as a lifestyle would be something that kids would grow into and it would be a natural part of their life also in adulthood. But at the same time we want them to see those days when we feel too tired for a run and choose to take a long walk in the forest instead. Or change strength training to some yoga. It is really important to be able to tell apart the days when you just feel lazy regarding the training and taking the run anyway would help you to feel better, and when it's necessary to have an extra day with just a long walk. We want them to be able to be compassionate towards themselves and listen to their bodies, and not to do the training "because I have to." Training should always be something you do for yourself, to feel good. It's not something you have to perform to yourself or to others or to look good on social media. Good training doesn't mean biggest muscles or longest runs, it is about taking care of your body and mind.

Being active has been scientifically proven to help people in so many ways when it comes to physical and mental health, so I really feel it is important to keep that as a priority. When it comes to training yourself I feel like it is totally ok to be a bit selfish here (often hard for us mums, I know) and that will in the long run pay off for the whole family. If it helps, think what kind of example you want to show to your kids. Take care of yourself, you are worth it!

Control, control, control

We are sharing our household with five dogs. That can feel like a lot of dogs, I can tell you that, and neither me nor Thomas is very good with tolerating chaos. In order to live a nice life with five active dogs without things turning into turmoil, control is the key thing.

Waiting for your turn

Everything is under control. We really needed that hole right there.

Don't get me wrong, our dogs fool around a lot. Army carries things around in her mouth inside the house and in the garden (the weirder treasure she finds, the better), the dogs play with each other and Amo still tends to bite and hang on my woolen socks growling when ever I'm wearing them. We love to watch our dogs goof around and we have so many good laughs with them. But the key things are that we never allow them to go "over-the-top" and that they have been taught to want to listen to us no matter what. This basically means that it requires only one of us to verbally control our dogs, all of them, at the same time.

Who wins?

How do we make it work then? We have some basic rules which stand in all situations. These rules are something we start to build up the moment the puppy comes home and the work continues throughout the dog's life. First rule, the base for everything else, is that our dogs listen to our recall command in every situation. It doesn't matter if the one being called is playing with a friend or running after a ball, we want our recalls to be so effective that our dogs want to listen no matter what. Our job is to make sure that they never fail with this one, so that their motivation to listen stays high and they don't realize that not-listening is even possible. And this is where we need to be the experts on our own dogs! Working recalls is one of my favorite subjects and I promise to write more about this later on!

"You called?"

Second rule is that our dogs are not allowed to go through any doors or gates that are opened without permission. Same rule applies also to our garden; dogs are not allowed to go out from our gates without our permission. Even if they are with us, if we go through an open gate and keep walking, dogs are expected to stay inside. Third one is that our dogs are not allowed to chase anything. Not birds, not rabbits and not our boys when they are playing (except if the boys ask the dogs to run with them). Naturally our dogs run after each other when they are playing together but neither then they are allowed to bring each other too high up. This means no barking (especially hard for Hipi!), no snapping (Amo struggles with this one) and no benefiting of your bigger size and tackling others (Aaarmyyyy....). Fourth rule actually includes three different commands which all are about "leave it" and calming down and make our life much easier. First one is that the dogs need to stop whatever they are doing when told to (playing, digging, barking etc.). Also"go away" and "lay down" are used quite a bit.

"We know! No chasing a kitty-cat!"

"We left it! In many pieces!"

When all the above mentioned works, life is pretty easy. But none of this comes for free. We have worked countless hours to make things work, and this work actually never ends. We of course still reward our dogs when they are doing good so that their motivation to listen to us would stay as high as it currently is. We always bring some treats (and toys) with us when we are going outside the house with the dogs, and we always try to do short training sessions with them in different places, with different distractions. There's always room for improvement and there's always weak spots to work with, but in the end, what could be more motivating than improving your relationship with your dog and then succeeding together?

Having a break during a horse race