My daughter was born in June of 2020.
I’m sure you remember how peculiar life was back then.
Everybody hiding under their beds for fear of catching a cold or, more accurately, the velvet fist of Daddy Government.
A good time, for sure. Especially if you were fortunate enough to enjoy a mini-retirement paid for by our children and grandchildren in more ways than one.
Yours Baldly was not so lucky.
I’d not long (re)started in business and went from a full pipeline of work to nothing literally overnight.
Jess was heavily pregnant and struggling with it. To make matters worse, her plan to start her maternity leave in April was utterly shattered because we needed her wage and didn’t know when my business would pick up again. (She didn’t qualify for company sick pay so we had to rely on the inferior “maternity allowance”).
It was not fun.
Indeed, but for my training, I would have gone doolally tap.
Although the gyms were shut (while fast food outlets remained open – no, I don’t understand, either), I just about managed to keep things together with a combination of bodyweight routines and long runs.
It wasn’t optimal, but it was something.
And, back then, “something” was all I needed to keep going.
I didn’t stop after my daughter was born.
Yes, life got *even more* stressful given I was juggling a floundering business, money worries, and a newborn on top. But training remained my anchor – despite the fact I didn’t like the activities I was forced to do because I couldn’t go to the gym.
My point?
Simply that you’re a fool if you stop training when life gets busy or stressful.
I’m not saying you should necessarily try and keep up with your regular routine. (Indeed, this can be counterproductive, in some cases).
Yet quitting altogether is almost always a recipe for disaster.
Physically, you’ll quickly start losing whatever you’ve hitherto worked so hard to gain.
Mentally, you’ll find what is already a difficult situation even more challenging due to the loss of the stress relief and burst of “happy hormones” you get from exercise. (There’s plenty of evidence demonstrating the profoundly positive impact of training on mental health).
And when things get back to normal?
You’ll have a darn hard time getting back on the horse.
And you may never get back on the horse at all.
On a related note, there’s an entire section in my new book on how to design your own training programme (including a worked example).
The framework I’ll give you is highly adaptable, so it’s easy to scale things back when “life” happens.
I shan’t go into more detail here as I’ve written a very long letter explaining exactly what’s inside, which you will find below:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/chronicles/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman
P.S. The book is in preorder and you can get 50% off the regular price until Friday the 15th of March.
Even with the discount it’s still very expensive, so be sure to read the sales page very carefully, and only purchase if you’re certain you’re going to put the information to good use.