Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about solving the problem of falling out of the habit of training for weeks or months at a time.
It’s a serious issue, and one I believe is the root cause of why so many don’t really go anywhere, despite sweating bullets on those occasions when they do train.
That said, it’s not something I have personally ever had to wrestle with, even when I was working punishing shifts, gallivanting around the country on training courses, and, most recently, siring my ever growing tribe of children.
Why?
Luck or providence, depending on your point of view regarding matters theological.
Certainly no “special” quality on my part. I am truly not a great deal more disciplined than the average man, and what discipline I do possess is entirely the natural byproduct of training week in, week out, without fail (planned rest weeks aside) for a Very Long Time.
If you’ll believe it, I’m not even especially interested in training. I’ve not logged my workouts in any meaningful way since I was at university some 14 years ago and I’ve never once kept a “food diary” or similar. (A good friend growing up was constantly in and out of hospital for her anorexia, often disappearing for many months, and the dietary methods and approaches I see promoted by fitness personalities bear uncanny resemblance to the sort of things I saw her doing; so you’ll understand why I want no part in any of that.)
Nope, Yours Baldly was simply fortunate to be taught the “old school” way of training from pretty much day one, which has been my bread and butter (with few notable exceptions that were disastrous in one way or another every time) for well over a decade.
A big part of that is creating what the old timers used to call a “basic schedule”. A balanced programme of lifting and cardio that’s flexible enough to be modifiable on those occasions when you’re genuinely up against it.
For the last couple of years or so, mine has been a 2/2/7 basic schedule: Two lifting sessions, two cardio sessions, and seven short-ish walks.
At other times, I’ve run a 4/2/7 or even a 5/3/7 (in the latter case, I’d generally tack my cardio onto the end of at least two of the lifting sessions to keep things manageable).
The workouts themselves are painfully simple. Full body lifting sessions featuring one “big” exercise to tackle each of the primary movement patterns, plus a little work for arms, calves, abs, and sometimes neck when I can be bothered. Obviously when training at higher frequencies, I have to be a bit clever about my exercise selection to avoid overdoing it, but there are loads of ways to set things up without recourse to a spreadsheet, calculator, and probably an app as well.
Cardio is and never has been my strong suit, so I just go for a run or do some sprints. Cycling hurts my backside a lot, so I only do that on the little spin bike in our front room when the weather is vile.
Hopefully you don’t need me to explain walking.
The greatest strength of this approach is that you can pretty much just “punch the clock” with your workouts while still making progress, with the caveat that the progress you do make WILL be significantly slower than what you’ll get with more intensive efforts.
Hence, training becomes a habit. Something you just “do” with no fuss or hassle. Not a big deal and never a creepy cult-like obsession.
But there are other advantages as well.
Most notably that you can, when the mood takes, go off on a dalliance with approaches more suited to attaining specific results in (usually) a tighter timeframe without worrying about falling off the wagon when you’re done or if it goes wrong because you’ll always have a “home” to come back to.
Consider the worst case scenario:
Let’s pretend you try a fat loss regime and about four weeks in you’re burned out and sore to the point you’d rather scoop your eyeballs out with a rusty fork than continue.
If you have a basic schedule in place, you don’t have to carry on. You need only take a week or so off training to recover before slipping back into a proven routine you can comfortably manage indefinitely.
Much better than the alternative of having no alternative and either pressing on regardless, getting seriously injured or ill, and quitting for a few weeks to a few months or just straight up quitting for a few weeks to a few months while you figure out where to go next.
But I am biased, of course.
Doubly so, as a basic schedule is exactly what I equip my Private Coaching clients with. The details differ based on what they want to achieve, but the underlying principle is always the same.
To learn more about that, consult my 13-page PDF on what I have called “The Systematic Method of Training” which is first and foremost a pitch, but a pitch that includes a lot of teaching.
Some might say too much teaching.
Whatever.
If you want it, email me the word INFO, and I’ll send it over.
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman