What Happens When Life Gets in the Way of Training?
What a month it has been.
Two of my daughters performed in a musical for their school, and one of those daughters has also been diagnosed with severe stress fractures in her shin. That has meant appointments, scans and working out what happens next. My son also performed in a musical for his school, while tennis lessons, dance lessons and everything else kept rolling along. On top of that, the grandmothers have been living with us while they were in town to see the musicals.
Apart from dealing with the stress fractures, most of it has actually been great family time. But it still takes time, and when you add it to normal work and family life, as well as taking on three new athletes, something has to give. Over the last month, some of that has been my own training. Sessions have been shortened, moved around and, on a couple occasions, just haven't happened.
So how much does that actually matter?
I think we can get far too caught up in individual training sessions. We write a program, see six sessions for the week and start thinking that if we don't get all six done exactly as planned then we've somehow stuffed the week up. I don't really look at training like that, particularly when I step back and look at how much training I actually do across a year.
I normally train for around 48 weeks, with roughly three gym sessions and three track sessions each week. That works out at about 144 gym sessions and 144 track sessions. If I miss one gym session, I've missed around 0.7% of my planned gym training for the year. Across all of my training, it represents about 0.35%.
Is missing that session going to kill my performance? I seriously doubt it. If I start missing one or two sessions every week for three months, then clearly we have a problem, but there is a big difference between occasionally missing training because life gets busy and constantly missing training because the program doesn't fit your life. If it's happening all the time, perhaps the problem isn't the athlete. Maybe the program needs to change.
This becomes even more relevant for Masters athletes because training is only one of the things we are trying to recover from. Work, sleep, family, travel and general life stress all matter. Research around athlete load has increasingly recognised that what happens outside training can influence how well we cope with the training itself. That doesn't mean a difficult day at work is automatically a reason not to train, but it would be equally silly to pretend the rest of life doesn't count.
When I know I don't have enough time to complete a session as planned, the first thing I don't do is cut the warm-up to pieces so I can squeeze everything else in. The warm-up is there to help me get the best result from the session. If I'm sprinting, I need to be properly prepared before I start running quickly, so I want temperature up, movement improving, coordination switched on and speed gradually building before the main work starts. If I can remove half my warm-up without changing how well prepared I am, then I'd probably ask why that stuff was in the warm-up in the first place.
So if time is short, I normally cut volume first. Six runs might become four. Five exercises in the gym might become three or four. An ancillary exercise might disappear altogether. I'd rather cut a couple of reps or exercises and keep the quality high than try to squeeze everything in just because it was written in the program.
I also think we overestimate how much damage is done when we temporarily do less. There is good research showing that strength and endurance can often be maintained with substantially less training than was required to build them in the first place, particularly when the important intensity is still there. We see something similar with tapering, where athletes deliberately reduce training volume before competition without suddenly losing the “fitness” they have spent months building.
I'm not suggesting that a messy month at home is some kind of brilliant tapering strategy. Clearly it isn't. The point is simply that doing less for a short period does not mean all the benefits of training suddenly disappears.
The same applies when I miss a session completely. I don't automatically try to “catch it up” . If Wednesday's gym session disappears, I'm not necessarily squeezing it into Thursday, pushing everything else back a day and ending up training five days in a row just so the spreadsheet looks complete. Sometimes I'll move it, sometimes I'll take the most important part and put that somewhere else, and sometimes I'll simply miss it.
A missed session isn't something that always needs to be paid back. If catching up one session makes the next two sessions worse, I'm not sure what has been achieved. The purpose of the program is to improve performance, not to produce a perfect record of attendance.
There is also a difference between being short of time and being too tired or run down to train properly. If I've only got 45 minutes instead of 75 but I feel good, I'll probably keep the important work and reduce the amount. If I've slept badly for three nights, work has been a mess, family life has been hectic and I feel flat, then I might need to make more than just minor adjustments. Sometimes the session itself needs to change, and that is something a program written weeks earlier can't always predict.
My own training over the last month hasn't looked exactly like the original plan. I've done fewer reps in some track sessions, removed exercises in the gym at times, moved things around and missed some sessions completely. I'm not particularly worried about it because one missed session out of nearly 300 across a year means very little. A messy week means very little if it sits inside months and years of consistent training.
If you're constantly missing sessions, that's different. Maybe the program is too big, maybe the week is poorly organised or maybe you're trying to fit training around a life that simply doesn't have room for what you've written. That's information worth acting on. But occasionally life gets in the way. Kids have musicals, work gets busy, someone gets injured and families need you.
The answer isn't to panic or try to jam every missed session back into the next available space. Sometimes you shorten a session, sometimes you move things around and sometimes you just accept that a session has gone and get on with the next one.
Consistency over months and years matters far more than getting every session right in one particular week.
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