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It’s that time of year when the holidays, family, commitments, and New Year’s resolutions all collide. And while it’s a great opportunity for us to recommit to achieve our fitness goals, sometimes despite our best efforts, we need to skip workouts, omit training, and take a loss in the fitness department for the day. So when this inevitably happens, which training sessions do we cut, and which ones do we keep? This is a question that many endurance athletes, and weekend warriors alike struggle with. On the one hand, we want to execute our training plan, coaches instruction, or fitness challenge correctly, yet there are only so many hours in a day and sometimes our priorities have to shift. Knowing which workouts we can afford to cut and which ones we need to keep can be the key to maintaining fitness during busy times of the year. As such, here are two considerations to cutting out planned training sessions: FIRST: Understand WHY it may be necessary to cut a training session.
Most instances where we need to cut training sessions can be grouped into three reasons: The first is fatigue. I know countless runners and triathletes who get 3-4 hours of sleep just so they can get up early and get in a workout before a long day at the office. This inevitably leads to lower performance long term. We DON’T compromise sleep for workouts! Yes, every once in a while we may need to burn the candle at both ends to get in our training, but this should be the exception and never the rule. Training adaptations happen when our bodies are at rest- not during the work phase of training. If we are fatigued and need to sleep, do so! It is much better in the long run to get adequate sleep than squeeze in that extra workout. If we are constantly having to cut workouts due to time constraints and need for rest, we need to reevaluate our goals and adjust our training and racing to match our bandwidth. The second is injury or illness. Trying to train while battling illness or staving off injury is just asking for disaster down the road. When the body is fighting illness, it can't simultaneously adapt to our training. We shoot ourselves in the foot when we continue to plow through an injury or illness and fail to listen to the body. This happens all too often when hard charging, type-A, competitive age-group athletes don’t take a break. Ultimately, their body forces them to. Remember that an ‘ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. So how do we determine what is ‘injury or illness’ vs just not feeling good? I’ve written several posts on this in the past, so review them and learn how we make that distinction. The last reason we’d skip a session is life stress. This can be anything from simply not having enough time to fit in our training (highly likely during the Holidays), to dealing with pressing issues that take a serious mental, or emotional toll. Work deadlines, relationship challenges, family drama, and a host of other challenges can siphon away the energy required for our training. And while in many cases exercise can help relieve stress, we need to remember that our bodies respond to mental or emotional stressors in the same way it does to physical ones- it breaks us down. This is why we feel fatigue at the end of a long run just like we do at the end of a long and stressful work day. Too much stress- be it physical, mental, or emotional- will be detrimental and we’ll find ourselves in a deep hole, unable to climb out. SECOND: Understand WHAT sessions to cut and which to keep a training week. So, once we realize we need to skip a day or two from training, what sessions do we keep and which do we cut? Most training plans have specific days to train and which to take off, with a variety of volume and intensity built in. For the athlete who is emotionally invested in their training and looking to nail each session, it can be a real struggle to determine what to cut. To help, here are a few easy rules of thumb to help. Of course there are always exceptions due to proximity to goal races, time of the year, etc. but as a general guideline this is what we want to do: Back in Jr High school, we learned about the ‘order of operations’ in math. When faced with a multi step problem to solve, we start with certain operations - first we solve for (what's in) the parentheses, then exponents, then multiplication, etc., and thereby solve the problem. Well, similar rules apply here. As athletes, our training is like a complex math problem with many steps (or training sessions) required for our success. However, each training session is not created equal. Our “order of operations” is pretty simple: The harder the training sessions, the more critical it usually is and those are the ones we keep when faced with the need to miss training during a given week. So, as a general rule, if we need to cut a session or two during the week, assuming we’re healthy, we will keep the most critical workouts. In a normal training block, the most important sessions are those with high intensity, and those with high volume. These are the sessions which will elicit the greatest adaptations over time (which is our ultimate goal). For example, an athlete training for a marathon would keep the early week high intensity track session, but skip the easy aerobic run. They might keep the weekend long run, but skip the recovery run the following day. This can also be extrapolated to strength training and multisport. When we have strength sessions we need to execute, we want to keep those sessions that will yield the greatest adaptations. So, heavy days in the gym we keep, the lighter days we might skip. Hard efforts on the bike or in the pool will be prioritized over those maintenance-specific training days. This principle holds true in most cases, when we need to alter a training session due to time. For example, if time in the gym is limited, we would focus on our compound lifts - squats and deadlifts- where multiple and muscle groups are recruited, over other more auxiliary lifts and core exercises. Now, let’s be clear- I’m NOT advocating skipping ‘easy’ workouts on a regular basis- doing so long term is a great way to tank athlete goals and subsequently get injured. Once again, if sessions are being skipped on a regular basis, an athlete needs to determine if the competition goals and subsequent training volume is conducive to realistic bandwidth. But for the occasional week where skipping a workout or two is necessary, prioritize those workouts that will yield the biggest bang for the buck. Comments are closed.
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