Contingencies
If things had gone as planned, I'd be driving a Honda CRX and be married to my 8th grade girlfriend.
“The most important part of any plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.” - Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
We always talk about planning in pencil, and that being flexible with training is a key to success, happiness, and staying injury free. Too often we see people using their training plans as a rigid, drill sergeant style of motivation. “If I can’t keep up with this hard training, I don’t deserve to perform well.” The problem is that things don’t go according to plan. I’ve pulled other quotes along these same lines:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike Tyson
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” - von Moltke the Elder
So why have a plan at all? Why not just let training happen when it will? We need a plan because it details some key things that can be lost once you’re in the gym or at the crag:
What is the goal of the training? There should be one, and you can have one sub-goal. This is of massive importance - way too often we have five divergent facets of fitness we’re trying to develop and we get nowhere. A good example: “The goal of this phase is to increase finger strength and general cardiovascular conditioning.” These two goals can be achieved with effort, don’t compete for time or resources, and are clear. When it comes time to do an abdominal circuit with friends, it’s easy to check the behavior against the goal. Does this planned activity help my finger strength or general cardiovascular fitness?
How long is this training plan going to last? We fall off both sides on this one. Too often we get psyched by hearing an interview or seeing a video and decide we need to change or training right now. It’s exciting, but there is no consideration for the adaptations we are already working on, nor how it might fit into an already full schedule. If I planned for 6 weeks of power, I need to stick it out. Why six weeks or eight or whatever? Probably because that is how long the people that came before you found it took to develop those abilities. On the other side, we often find a groove in training, like the workouts, and stick with them long after progress has flatlined. Once your workouts have not progressed for a few sessions, it’s really worth looking at the plan. Might be time to change focus.
What is the desired outcome? Often, we enter a training cycle with only the goal of “being training.” We go to the gym, get tired, and come home. We do it every Tuesday and Thursday for months and hope when we get to Red Rocks we’ll magically be better climbers. In training, we need clear targets. “I can do two pull-ups. I want to improve to doing 4 pull-ups.” Go to the gym. Work on pull-ups for reps, weighted pulls, do some rows, and every couple of sessions see if you can do more than two. Once you get to four, don’t get greedy. Switch to another adaptation that will allow you to rest the pulling a bit, and move on. You reached your target, so it’s time to stop aiming at it.
Once we have the “whys” of our plan laid out, it’s easier to stay on track. It’s also easier to know what to do when things go off track. There are any number of things that interrupt training. Many of these are scheduling issues that can be addressed in your programming. Others are discipline issues. Others are just part of life.
The most common is that life gets busy. We had something come up, and couldn’t make it to the gym. Often, a missed workout can really throw a person off. They feel as though they are backsliding and won’t reach their goal because of a missed session. The first thing to do is to stop and look at your program so far. Have you been consistent for the past few weeks? Have you been making steady progress?
If you’ve been good so far this cycle, a surprise recovery day might be just what your body needed. If your schedule is flexible, you can simply push that workout to the next day. If it is a fixed schedule and you can only work out certain days of the week, you can probably scoot it to the next training day with no issue.
Some people have appointments with trainers, training partners, or other restraints to sliding workouts around. Maybe they have three hours on Wednesdays but just one on Fridays to train. Maybe they meet friends for roped climbing every Tuesday. Whatever the issue, if we can’t scoot our missed session to the next day, it’s OK to push it all the way to the next week. Nothing bad will happen, and if you’re like most of the climbers I know, you can use the rest!
Other problems can come up. Crowded gyms are notorious for messing up plans. You get to the gym and there is a group of teens occupying the campus board. Maybe there is some dude hogging ALL the kettlebells. There is a birthday party in the bouldering cave.
If you have to change tools or location, keep the goal of this session in mind. Whether you planned the training or if someone else planned it for you, the session will have a desired outcome. It will have a specific duration, intensity, and motor plan. If you had planned on doing 20 minutes of hard campusing, you can aim instead to do 20 minutes of powerful bouldering or some explosive work on a hangboard. If you were going to do a metabolic kettlebell circuit, build a similar one that uses dumbbells or bodyweight. The main idea is to hold to approximately the same intensity (i.e. hard sessions should not be replaced with a walk) and duration.
Other things come up. Because of the many factors that go into performance, you don’t always show up at the gym showing the same level of readiness. Your sleep, nutrition, stress, and more all play into this. Some days, you’ll show up for training and just not be ready for what’s planned. At the end of your warm-up, you’ll have a good idea whether or not you’re up to the plan. If today is not the day, you have two options: either give yourself a recovery day and come back tomorrow, or do a less difficult session.
One of the big mistakes athletes make is to double down on motivation. Even though they are clearly not ready for the session, the mentality is, “If I just push hard enough, I’ll break through.” They remember some training montage from a movie, saw a clip of some pro climber training for the camera, or whatever. The fact of the matter is that unless you are training for some kind of low-intensity work capacity, consistently taking on training under a pre-fatigued state is going to get you nowhere.
Going hard on these days eventually sets you back. It takes a mature athlete with a long-term view to say “no” to just charging forward.
Injury is a real possibility in training. Everyone gets hurt at some point in training, and although we can guard against it in most cases, sometimes it just happens. If we do something that hurts us, we need to stop training for that session. A pop, tweak, strain, or zing should tell us only one thing: stop until further assessment is possible.
When we are warm and going hard, noticing injuries is hard and judging their severity even harder. It is infinitely better to feel silly for stopping your last session because of a nothing injury than to regret having made it worse. It’s OK to stop five minutes into a session and come back tomorrow. For having this level of self-control, you get a gold-start sticker in your training log.
More common than injuries are time constraints. We all simply over-schedule and can run out of training time. The first solution is to prevent the problem. Every training session should be planned with at least a 30 minute buffer. Do it.
Once you’re in the gym, things happen. Crowds on the spraywall. That same dude at the kettlebells again. Some acquaintance deciding that you, too, need to know the step-by-step beta of his latest project. For me (since I work at the gym) there is always something that needs to be done work-wise.
If your session is going to be cut short, it’s better to cut back on the number of sets or time allocated to each of your exercises, but to do them all, rather than just cutting out the last four things you were going to do. If you plan on 4 sets of each exercise, but are short on time, do just two sets each. It will be enough to carry you to the next session.
Things happen. Training never goes as planned. The solution? Train anyway, to the best of your ability.
Go forward.