What do you do when life interferes with your training, and makes it hard to stay on track towards your goals?
This might mean you can't get every workout in you had planned for a week, because unexpected work/personal engagements arise causing you to skip sessions.
Or maybe, your training sessions get cut short. Perhaps you’re in the gym and you get a call that means you have to leave early.
Sometimes these things will happen, you’ll have the “perfect” training schedule planned and something interferes with it. That’s life.
All this can lead to frustration with training, especially if you don't know how to make adjustments during these situations.
In this post I will discuss various training strategies that you can use to stay on track toward your goals, especially when life gets demanding.
1. Exercise Prioritization
Exercise prioritization simply means putting the most "valuable" exercises in a workout, first. This is subjective by the way, your goals will dictate what exercises carry the most value for you.
For example, if you want to increase the size and strength of your quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes, you'll want to ensure that exercises with the greatest potential to do this are performed in the beginning of the session.
This will allow you to hit these exercises when you have the most energy and focus, but it also means if a session has to be cut short, you’ve already done the most important work for the day.
Additionally, choose to perform multi joint (compound) exercises first, rather than single joint (isolated) exercises. In our example, squats and deadlifts are compound exercises, whereas leg extensions and leg curls are isolated exercises.
Utilizing compound exercises offers 2 key benefits: 1) They train multiple muscle groups at once, maximizing the use of your time. 2) They allow for significant loads to be placed on the body, which is ideal for increasing strength.
Following this step will ensure that your workouts allow for prioritization. If you have to cut a session short, but you’ve already done the most important exercises in the beginning of the session, you can leave the gym knowing you've performed the most “bang for your buck” training.
2. Session Prioritization
Another useful form of prioritization is to plan your training sessions in a manner that ensures the most important sessions occur when you're the least busy during the training week. It's a concept that means skipped sessions will have less of a negative impact on your major goals.
In our example, increasing strength and size of the quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes is a major goal. So, scheduling lower body training on days when work/personal obligations are least likely to interfere makes perfect sense.
3. Workout Planning
If you know your week's going to be crazy, and you'll have to skip some training days. Try using different training schedules to still get ample training in. Here's an example below:
Day 1: Legs
Day 2: Chest & Back
Day 3 Shoulders & Arms
Day 4: Legs
Day 5: Chest & Back
Day 6: Shoulders & Arms
In this 6 day training schedule, let's say you have to skip days 2 and 4 because of a busy work week. Consequently, you'll miss training your chest and back, as well as a second leg day. Instead, if time allows on days 1 and 3, you can switch to full body workouts to avoid this. Let's see what this looks like:
Day 1: Full Body
Day 2: Skip
Day 3: Full Body
Day 4: Skip
Full Body Routine | Muscles Trained |
1. Squat | Quadriceps, Glutes |
2. Leg Curl | Hamstrings |
3. Bench Press | Chest |
4. Dumbbell Row | Back |
5. Overhead Dumbbell Press | Shoulders |
6. Reverse Fly | Rear Shoulders |
7. Tricep Press Down | Triceps |
8. Bicep Curls | Biceps |
9. Knees to Elbows | Abs |
By switching to full body workouts, you can train all of the muscle groups from the original schedule twice during the week, solving the problem of missing chest and back day, as well as the second leg day. This option also gives you time to recover on the days you have to skip, so you're not training the same muscle groups back to back, letting you smoothly transition back to your normal training schedule on days 5 and 6.
This is just one way you can adjust your training to still make things work for you. Certainly, there are other ways you can approach this. It's just a matter of keeping your goals in mind and using a little creativity to come up with the right adjustments.
4. Set Ranges
Training volume, better known as the amount of sets and reps you perform for a workout is another important metric to consider when your goals are to increase strength and size.
To maximize gains perform multiple sets of an exercise during a session. Studies show that performing 1 set of an exercise increases strength to a lesser extent than three sets do. They also show that performing more than 3 sets doesn't significantly increase strength to any greater extent.
Now, this may not be the case for you. If you get better results performing a greater number of sets per exercise, than do what works best. Rather, take these findings as a recommendation for a set range minimum.
According to this, consider a practical application of 2-5 sets per exercise. Where the majority of the time you perform a set count towards the upper end of the range. While on days when life happens and you need to do a shorter session, a minimum of 2-3 sets will suffice.
Essentially, if you prioritize the first couple of sets, you will likely achieve the vast majority of strength gains you may get from performing more sets. Yes, a greater number of sets might lead to slightly greater increases in strength.
However, you can be confident that if you perform at least a couple of training sets, you have done enough to obtain the majority of the benefits available. This is huge in maintaining progress towards your goals especially when time is limited.
5. Exercise Count
In addition to set ranges, also experiment with the number of exercises you perform during your workouts. Here's an example demonstrating 2 approaches for emphasizing quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes.
Routine 1 | Sets & Reps | Muscles Trained |
Squats | 5 sets x 6 reps | Quadriceps, Glutes |
Romanian Deadlift | 5 sets x 6 reps | Hamstrings, Glutes |
Total training volume: 60 reps
Routine 2 | Sets & Reps | Muscles Trained |
Squat | 3 sets x 6 reps | Quadriceps, Glutes |
Romanian Deadlift | 3 sets x 6 reps | Hamstrings, Glutes |
Leg Extensions | 2 sets x 8 reps | Quadriceps |
Leg Curl | 2 sets x 8 reps | Hamstrings |
Total training volume: 68 reps
You can see both routines target the lower body, and the training volume in reps is close. Routine 2 offers more variety, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's better. Additional training variables such as the weight you lift, recovery between sets and exercises, as well as the time you take in the eccentric and concentric phases of your lifts will all impact how your body responds to your training sessions.
Ultimately, time constraints, a busy gym, personal preferences, and how you'll be performing your exercises, will determine what number of exercise will be best for your workouts.
Summary
When it comes to training, it's important to be adaptable, especially when life happens. Remembering some of these practical suggestions will help you to easily adjust your training, so you can stay on track towards your goals.
Here's a recap of what we discussed:
Prioritize the exercises within your plan by placing the most valuable exercises for your goals at the start of your training sessions.
Plan your training week in such a way that priority workouts are least likely to be skipped.
If you know you'll have to skip days in advance, use alternative training routines that still allow you to get ample training in for the week.
Understand that set ranges can be used in training; so long as you hit a couple of sets for each exercise, you’ll have obtained a decent training stimulus.
Experiment with the number of exercises to maximize the effectiveness of your workouts when time is limited.
Kommentarer