Even when you’ve been working on your fitness for years, built the discipline, and have a strong, regular routine, life will often require flexibility. Of course, it depends on your work and what your day-to-day looks like, but part of your fitness journey will inevitably throw up circumstances where you need to adapt your training and training schedule.
I do some part-time event work, which comes with some really busy days, late hours, and with it, certain levels of exhaustion. Especially on the event days themselves. You find yourself working on last-minute tasks and doing plenty of running around before the event even starts. Then, once the event starts, it becomes so easy to put training and fitness to the side and just get on with the work.
This past month is one of the busiest months in the calendar for an organisation that I do events for. It’s the Jewish holidays, and they come thick and fast, with practically four events back-to-back every week or so. There are also religious restrictions on what you are allowed to do, so things have to be fully prepared in advance.
There was really only one option: adapt my fitness routine. I wasn’t about to relinquish a full month of training, or even half of it.
I knew it was about time for a rest week. In fact, it had been coming for some time. However, knowing how busy the weeks ahead were going to be, I decided to delay the rest break until the really busy week.
The other element is that a week of training doesn’t necessarily mean Monday to Monday. It can mean whatever you need it to mean. A whole training week. For example, if I needed Thursday and Friday off because those days were going to be really busy, I could take Thursday to Thursday off and still get a full training week’s rest.
The thing is, one week’s rest wouldn’t cover the whole busy month. Nor could I take the rest week and then slack on my training around it. So further adaptability was needed.
I’ve built my current training programme for adaptability for this exact reason. As I wrote in a previous post, When Life Hands You More Than Lemons…, my programme is designed to essentially cover everything in a minimum of three days a week.
The fourth day is important, but it’s almost a double, and the fifth day I can count as the extras. All five days are important, but I’ve designed the programme so that I can still get a good full body cycle training in with only three days if necessary.
This programme not only allows me to maximise my training time but also to adapt it around my schedule.
For example, if I need to take an extra day off, the first day to go is day five of the routine because that’s the ‘extra’ day. Meaning I could push day four to day five, take day four off if needed, and still cover my preferred four days of training.
My preference is not to take more than one day off at a time, and definitely no more than two consecutive days.
Essentially, with this programme, I don’t necessarily get a maximum training week every week. But I get to keep my fitness and training on course and my levels in the right place.
It so happens that even with a few slight injuries, I’m in a good place with my training and fitness, and even at a decent strength level. The last thing I would want is to change that by taking too much time out.
Consistency matters. And when life happens, consistency requires adaptability.
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