The first of January 2013. A day when I was beyond excited about starting a programme I had purchased to see me through until New Year’s Eve.
I’d been stuck in a rut for goodness knows how long by that point, getting fatter, struggling more with old aches; basically, all was not well on the physical front, but I was confident things would look very different in 365 days’ time.
So I got to cracking on with this new routine (which was excellent, by the way), and all was well for about three weeks… then I hit a wall harder than the Chicxulub impactor hit the Yucatan Peninsula.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not for the life of me hit the weights the programme commanded me to lift. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to shytecan the routine before things got ugly, but it so easily could have gotten so had I been even a little bit less experienced.
Hang on. Didn’t I just say a moment ago that the routine was “excellent”? How could that possibly be if it became completely unmanageable within three short weeks? Am I making up stories for dramatic effect or have I simply lost the plot all together?
Behold the context that reveals all:
When I started that routine, I’d also not long started in my first paramedic job.
For those who are not familiar, when you are new to the ambulance service, you work a lot of what is called “relief” which involves plugging gaps left by holidays, sickness, and so on while you wait to be allocated a regular shift pattern (called a “line”). I don’t know if this is still the case, but it certainly was back then.
Anyway, as you might expect, working relief meant working under conditions that obeyed the letter of the European Working Time Directive, but certainly not the spirit. Flipping from days to nights and back again was common. I was given very little advanced warning of my shifts (and they could be changed at very short notice), making planning more than a few weeks ahead an exercise in futility. Add frequent overruns to the sorry equation (my shifts were nominally ten but would usually wind up being twelve to fourteen hours), and I was, in a word:
Knackered!
But not all the time.
See, I’d sometimes get these nice runs of days off when (after the first which I mostly spent in bed cursing my life choices) I felt like I could singlehandedly conquer the world.
But there were more bad days than good, and I could not predict when those bad days would be due to my labyrinthine working pattern. Hence, a programme that required me to lift certain weights on certain days was never going to be viable.
It was actually that specific experience that spurred me to develop my own routines that would “work” even when I was so all over the place I’d struggle to tell you what day it was.
This was a long process, filled with much frustration, failure, and pain.
If you’re in a similar situation to the one I’ve just described, you’re welcome to go it alone. Of course, it’ll mean putting yourself through all of that to maybe… maybe come up with something that reliably gets you stronger and more in shape.
But if you’d prefer to have a proven routine delivered to you fresh and ready to roll, I recommend becoming a Phil Tyreman Letter subscriber because the August issue contains one such example of a robust yet flexible system you can follow to make strides in some combination of strength, muscularity, and leanness even when you are up against it.
The deadline to subscribe in time is only a couple of short days away, so make haste to the below link if you are interested:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman