When September blows up your training schedule
It happens the same way every year and it still catches me out.
Last week of August, the schedule works. First week of September, it doesn’t, and nothing about me changed. Everyone else changed.
The kids go back, which moves the morning. Lana’s week reshuffles around that, which moves the evening. And the gym that was half empty at a certain hour is suddenly not, because a few hundred other people just had their September too.
Nobody really warns you about this part. You come out of summer feeling fine about your training, the calendar quietly reassigns four hours of your week to somebody else, and by Thursday you’ve missed two sessions and you’re annoyed with yourself.
You didn’t get lazy. Your slot got taken.
What actually changes in September
Worth being specific here, because "I’m busier" is too vague to plan around.
The morning gets a hard edge on it. In summer there’s slack in it. In September there’s a time the kids have to be somewhere, and everything in front of that time compresses.
The evening fills up from the other end. Homework, clubs, the stuff that starts back in the second week and then runs till Christmas.
The gym’s busy hours move. Whatever was quiet in July isn’t quiet now, and the machine you never had to wait for has a queue.
And it gets dark earlier, which sounds like a small thing and isn’t. If you build a plan now that only works in daylight, you’ll be rebuilding it again when the clocks change.
Pick the training time you’ll keep, not the one that sounds impressive
This is where I watch people go wrong.
You sit down with the new week, you find the gap, and then you fill it with a version of yourself who doesn’t exist. Four sessions, all early, all before the house wakes up. It sounds brilliant on Sunday night. It lasts until the first bad night’s sleep.
The useful question is a boring one. Which slot in this week would I still turn up to on a bad day? Not a good day. A bad one, where you slept badly and something went sideways at work and you’d rather just go home.
Whatever survives that question is your real schedule. It might be three sessions. It might be two and a long walk on Sunday. Three you keep does more for you than five you planned.
Be honest about the shape of the week too, not only the hours in it. If Wednesday is the day everything lands on you, Wednesday isn’t a training day, and pretending otherwise just hands you one more thing to fail at.
My son has started training this year and I didn’t expect to enjoy watching it as much as I do. He copies what I do, asks me questions about all of it, and he’s proud of himself, which is the part I like best.
What a minimum session looks like on a bad week
Everyone needs a floor, decided in advance, so you’re not negotiating with yourself in the car park.
A floor worth having is short enough to say in one line. Get there, do the main lift, leave. No accessories, no extras, no sitting on a bench between sets reading your phone. In and out.
It has to be small enough that you can’t talk yourself out of it. If your bad-week session still takes an hour, it isn’t a floor, it’s just a slightly shorter good week, and it’ll go the same way the good week went.
The floor isn’t there to make progress. It’s there so the habit doesn’t get a gap in it, because the gap is the expensive part. Turning up badly keeps the thing alive. Not turning up starts a negotiation you’ll have again tomorrow.
The week you miss three
You’ll miss three. Not might.
When it happens, don’t try to make it up. You can’t, and trying turns the following week into a punishment for a week that was mostly not your fault.
Start again on the next ordinary day. Not Monday. Monday is a trap, because it’s usually a few days away and it hands you a few days of not training with a clean conscience. If you’re reading this on a Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon is the day.
And don’t shrink the plan because you missed. The plan wasn’t wrong. The week was. Cutting it down after a bad week is how three sessions becomes two becomes none by half term.
Keeping the standing stuff standing
The last piece isn’t training at all, and it’s the part that falls over first without anyone noticing.
There’s a category of things in your week that only survive if they stay boring. They don’t need motivation and they don’t reward enthusiasm. They need to be in front of you.
What I’ve noticed is that whether something stays in the routine has almost nothing to do with how much you care about it. It’s whether you can see it.
So put CREATINE MONO on the counter. ESSENTIAL AF next to it. AMINO AF BCAA + EAA in the same spot, and anything else of ours you keep in the rotation. Not for any reason I’m going to lecture you about here. Purely because a tub on the counter gets picked up, and a tub in the cupboard behind the cereal gets rediscovered in November.
That’s the whole trick, and it’s slightly embarrassing how well it works. The September version of your week is forgetful and in a hurry. Leave things where it’ll trip over them.
None of this is clever and none of it’s new. September just tips the board over, and the job is putting the pieces back somewhere they’ll stay.
Being in my forties has mostly taught me that the unglamorous version is the one that’s still running at Christmas. lol.
Stay Swole,
Justin