It’s the classic dilemma of every working parent: whether to spend your off-hours getting in that much-needed workout, or whether to stay home and snuggle your little ones.

There is no doubt that snuggling has its own unique set of rewards — but believe it or not, you don’t have to choose one activity over the other. Whether your babies are actually babies or they’re seemingly-independent tweens, you all have options for getting out, having fun, and blasting fat at the same time.

Working Out with Infants

If you’re a new parent, chances are you’ve recently taken part in a childbirth class or a new parents group — groups that typically meet in library meeting rooms or coffee shops. Instead of skipping out on that regular get-together, ask your group members to make the meeting more active by suggesting the following:

• Bring your strollers and spend your “share time” walking around the neighborhood.
• If you’re willing to spend a little cash, ask the group members to chip in to hire a “mommy and me” yoga or fitness instructor.
• Another way to bond more with baby: wear her around. Using a sling or baby carrier can burn about 50 calories every 15 minutes, suggests mothering.com

Working Out with Toddlers 

By the time your child is a toddler, his constant motion may make you tired just by looking at him. The challenge: satisfying his need for movement and your need to work out into one cohesive package. The local playground is a great resource for this:

• Use the low-hanging bars to do pull ups with your feet resting on the floor.
• As you get stronger, move to the jungle gym and perform the flexed-arm hang, or test your mettle with “real” pull-ups.
• Use the knee-high platforms on the play structure to do elevated push-ups and dips.
• When your toddler runs from one object to another, join him; performing a few sprints in succession is a form of interval training that can boost your metabolism for the rest of the day, reminds the American College of Sports Medicine.

Working Out with Bigger Kids

Once your child gets to be school age, he’ll be ready to explore a wide world of new activities — including sports. Open up your child’s world by learning alongside him, or returning to activities you yourself enjoyed as a young child.

The first step is to obtain some basic sports equipment and keep it near the door to your home:

• This could include jump ropes, balls of all sorts, bicycles, skates and scooters. Use the balls to play a pickup game of soccer in the neighborhood or to teach your child the fine art of wall ball.
• Gear up with helmets and kneepads and start skating or cycling to school.
• If commuting to and from school is not feasible, get a bike rack for your car so you can drop off your child’s bike and then ride to get him in the afternoon.
• Kids this age also love contests, and they love beating you in those contests. Challenge your child to beat your record for:
  • The number of jumps you can do with a jump rope
  • The number of baskets you can make in a minute’s time
  • Or, in classic parental form, time yourselves as you run from one side of the yard to the other.
  • When the weather gets too bad for any of that, check out fitness or dance video games, which often come with a “challenge” feature allowing two or more people to compete against one another.