How often to you bring your little ones to the playground? And how often does it interfere with your fitness goals? Although it might be a change from your normal workout routine, the playground offers plenty of equipment to create a quick, muscle-burning HIIT routine all while your kids run free.

Now that Avery is walking like a champ kind of good, I plan on taking her to playgrounds and activity centers a lot in the near and distant future. Last Sunday, Going Mom gave me free time as she played with Avery at home, so I took advantage of the nice weather (70 degrees and sunny!!) and went for a walk……with my 20lb weight vest.

My foot injury from a few months ago has come back because I started running and jumping on it before it healed all the way, so walking is the most I can do. I’ve been going back and forth on buying an indoor water rower like this one, but keep talking myself out of it. Not sure why since I’ve talked about it for years, but my wife is getting extremely tired of listening to me talk about it and says she’s about to just buy it herself.

Guess that would be hard to refuse. Think I should just “row” with it and buy the thing?

Back to the playground. On my lonesome walk with a 20lb vest and Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast playing, I ventured to a desolate playground at a nearby elementary school and figured I’d “play” a little to test things out for future Avery.

With my 20lb vest still on, I ended up doing this HIIT routine….

5 rounds of:

– Monkey Bar Chin-Ups x 5

– Parallel Bar Dips x 10

– Squats x 15

Rest 30 – 45 seconds between rounds.

And there you go, it took about 15 minutes to complete this full body workout.

I know I was alone and having a kid would make this a bit more challenging, but there’s always a way, and I’ll figure it out soon enough. Besides playgrounds, since the weather will turn bad again, I can’t wait to go to a trampoline park or indoor bounce house and play around with Avery there. Hopefully this darn foot is better soon……for the second time.

There are plenty of exercises you can do on playground equipment, and as the time passes, I will try more and share them with you here. The weight vest is optional, but as a stay-at-home dad, I’m probably already a minority to all of the at-home moms, so why not set myself further from “the pack” anyway?

Do you do workout routines on the playground?

Anywhere else that you’ve created workouts when with the kids?

Please share as I would love to hear and try them for myself!