Its not one hour three times a week. Its getting your gym clothes together, going to the gym, doing an hour of something, getting home, showering, and then doing the rest of your stuff. And its hard to work out after dinner and/or right before bed, so it has to be in that window right after work, which directly conflicts with some prime time hours in your day. Want to stay late at work to finish that project? Guess the gym will have to wait. Meet buddies for a beer after work? Can't, have to work out. But that's not a big deal if you're single. You can get takeout at nine, or go to the gym whenever you want, set your own schedule and look as good as possible, which is important, because you're going out meeting girls, and there's a reward for looking like a gym rat. And even after you get married, you're both kind of rooting for each other to keep looking good, and you support each other in your workouts.
But when you're married and have kids, things change all over again. Need to pick the kids up at day care? You better pick them up on time or they charge you a dollar a minute. And then once you have the kids, there's things like watching the kids and feeding the kids. Of course, after a few years, the kids can kind of watch themselves, but if you have more than one kid, the clock starts all over again. Which is why a lot of people start waking up early to go to the gym, but that's a hard habit to get into, and your willpower is at its lowest when you first wake up. Its so easy to hit the snooze button or tell yourself you'll go tomorrow. But if you can overcome these seemingly small but very real hurdles, you and your wife can both work out consistently - just not at the same time. Which means that every hours you're on the treadmill or lifting weights is an hour that she hs to wtch the kids because of your "hobby". Which means if you have a real hobby, she's going to expect you to spend more time with the kids because she had to watch them extra while she was working out. And wives are like hourly contractors, they seem to remember that hour and a half that they watched the kids on Tuesday and bill you for three hours. But don't worry, while you're watching the kids over the weekend, they'll give you some light chores that you can do before the serious honeydews like fixing the leaky sink or mowing the lawn. And now your leisure time is cut up so much. worse thn just three hours a week, and you get annoyed with your wife and the constant obligations that make up parenthood. And those only get bigger, when the kids have soccer practice or oboe lessons or play dates. So you start to squeeze in fun whenever you can, because its getting squozen out of the rest of your nights and weekends, so you start dicking around on the internet at work, or joining a fantasy football league, and you find out that you don't get fired right away for screwing off at work. But you don't get promoted, either. And then the wife starts to get on you for not making more money.
And at that point, you start choosing between being a highly efficient robot at work, working out and superdadding and not having any time for your hobbies, or you can be a slouchy dad, slouchy at work, not really getting promoted, just floating along, but at least you're working out.
Or you can skip the gym, put your time in at work, be a good father, and not be a boring robot.
So #### you, single guys and annoying robots and most of all you newly married naive little pricks who think you know how life really works and picture having kids as being slightly more complex than getting a puppy. You're on my turf here, the turf of the married dad who sometimes doesn't have time to work out, and posts on internet forums during the day, and plays fantasy football and likes to watch some during the week. And we don't take kindly to the muscleheaded judgemental horse#### of you nine to fivers.