Fitting it all in
Professional athletes have a job that is dedicating their lives to their sport. Their life is busy with family, sponsorship obligations, recovery, travel, etc. But it is largely constructed around getting workouts in.
Most of us are not fully professional athletes. As a result, we have to fit training sessions in around our other obligations. Jobs, family, social lives, etc. often come first. These take time and energy. They add stress to our lives in ways that are both perceptible and imperceptible.
One important consideration in designing training plans for those of us with full-time jobs, families, and more is time. Time is valuable and we want our sessions to be focused. That doesn’t mean we need to jam everything we can into each session. Rather it means we need to identify two aspects of a successful program. One is minimum-effective dose. The other is structure.
Minimum-effective dose is essentially built around the idea of doing as little training as possible while still getting results. For an elite marathoner, that might be running 150 miles per week. But they don’t have a full-time job to contend with. Training puts stress on our body. And a job also puts stress on our body. Between those two major stressors, an athlete working 40 hours a week doesn’t need 150 miles per week to elicit a positive training response. An athlete I worked with had a lot of stress surrounding school and college applications. Rather than continuing to pile on stress with more training, we cut his hours in the fall when all these other stressors were at their highest too. As a result, he had his most successful season. In subsequent years, his hours increased but because his other stressors stayed the same in college, he was unable to find improvement.
The second piece, structure, is related and equally important. While we often have our bigger plans in mind (volume block, taper weeks, etc.), we don’t always apply the same principles to our weekly microcycles. Unless there is an express purpose to it, doing back-to-back intensity sessions or doing legs day after day in the gym doesn’t make sense. The week should be structured to get the most out of each session. It should also take those other factors into account. Is there a particularly busy day at your job? A wedding you’re attending? These are factors that impact a training week. They are positive things, but they take mental and/or physical energy. The busiest day at work may not be the best day to get in a hard anaerobic development session. Or if you have a long work day, trying to fit in a long-distance workout in is unreasonable, especially with limited daylight. Off days, interval days, strength sessions, and over-distance days are all better scheduled with intention.
