Days off from Training

It's unavoidable – the baby wakes up 3x in the night, your kids throw up on you at 4am, your wife is sick, you were out way too late at that event and your little one knocked down your door at 5am – AND today you were scheduled to train.

You have a decision to make – if you’re committed you might try to reason about it – maybe its a light-ish day, or you think it’ll make you feel better to do something. That could be true, but in general in the strength world, lifting with no sleep probably isn’t going to get you very far. We have trouble with this because we think of lifting on a day to day basis – “did we get a workout or not?” is a measure of the success in a day, while the reality is that the volume and consistency over time is what makes the difference. Shifting a day here and there will not, and certainly there’s plenty of research to show that sleep is absolutely critical to making the gains in your training that you want!

Now its a bit of a different story when you’re just “not feeling up to it”, but you the requisite sleep etc is where it needs to be. These kinds of feelings trend more towards statements like “I’d rather not work out today because I feel a little tired / had a hard day at work / just don’t want to.” Learning to separate between the above situation where a critical need is not met on a sporadic basis, and letting our feelings get the better of us is a must have skill. You don’t want to be letting your whims about training dictate your schedule.

That said, its nice to have alternates in your back pocket, because in my opinion, a less intense training day beats a missed training day any day of the week. As Pavel recommends in “Simple and Sinister”, “switch to 2 hand swings from 1 hand swings when you feel like your tail is between your legs.” These kind of alternates can help you keep your training schedule consistent. Other examples might be swapping in push press for military press while keeping the weight the same, or even going so far as swapping your “light” day for your “medium” day. Yes, you can’t do this all the time, but we’re about winning the war here, and as Bruce Lee says “Long term consistency trumps short term intensity.”

Stay Strong! Stay Consistent!