Coming back after time off without wrecking your first week

It isn’t the coming back that makes people quit, in my experience. It’s how the first week goes.

It goes the same way pretty much every time, and you can see it coming.

You take a few weeks off. Not on purpose. Work gets loud, somebody at home is sick, there’s something on every night of the week, and the gym quietly falls off the list. Nobody decides to stop. It just stops.

Then one morning you decide you’re going back. And because you feel bad about the time off, you decide you’re going back at exactly the level you left at. Same weight, same volume, the whole session, all of it.

Four days later you can’t walk down the stairs properly, Thursday’s session becomes next week, next week becomes never, and you’ve talked yourself out of it again. Not because you’re lazy. Because week one was miserable and nobody signs up for more of that.

I’m in my forties, and that version is an easy one to talk yourself into. So here’s what I’d do instead.

Your first session back should feel too easy

You should walk out slightly annoyed, wondering whether that even counted. That’s the target. A good first session back barely registers.

The hard part has nothing to do with training. It’s that you remember your numbers. Walking up to a bar with half of that on it feels like admitting something, and standing in a gym feeling that way is genuinely unpleasant.

Nobody in that room is doing the math on your warm-up sets though. Everyone around you is in their own head, counting their own reps. The only person keeping score on you is you, and you’re the one who has to come back on Thursday.

Cut the plan in half, don’t cut it out

There’s a version of this where you decide you’re not ready yet, so you’ll start properly on Monday. Then properly turns out to mean the full program, and Monday keeps moving.

Take whatever you were doing before and halve it. Half the sets. Half the weight too, if that’s what it takes to get you through the door. Then go and do that.

A half session you did beats a full session you’re still planning. That’s not a motivational line, it’s just arithmetic.

Halving it also gives you something to aim at that isn’t heroic. You already know the plan. You’re just running it small for a while.

Go more often, not harder

For the first two or three weeks the only thing you’re really training is showing up.

Four short sessions in a week does more for that than one enormous one that leaves you flattened. You’re rebuilding a slot in the calendar and a handful of small decisions, like putting your stuff by the door the night before. None of that gets easier from a single heroic Monday.

Forty minutes four times beats two hours once. When going stops needing a decision every time, that’s when you start making the sessions harder.

You’re going to be sore, and that isn’t a verdict on you

First week back you’ll be sore from things that never used to touch you. Stairs become an event. Sitting down becomes a plan. lol.

Being sore isn’t the mistake. The mistake is reading it as evidence about yourself, deciding you’ve lost everything, that you’re starting from zero, that all those years were for nothing. You took time off and now you’re sore. There’s no more to it than that. It isn’t a scoreboard.

Leave the ego lift alone for a bit

Everybody’s got one. The lift you’d load up if somebody asked what you can do. Leave it alone for a few weeks.

That’s the lift you’re most likely to jump straight back to your old number on, because it’s the one you’re proudest of. It’s also the one that’ll cost you the most Thursdays if you get it wrong.

Do the boring accessory work instead. Train in ranges where the weight isn’t the point. Your ego lift will still be there in a month, and you’ll be in a much better spot to go at it properly.

My oldest is at the other end of all this

My son is getting into training, and I’ll admit I’ve been watching him more closely than he knows. He’s right at the start of it. Everything is new and nothing is a comeback yet.

I’m on the other side of twenty years of it. Same thing from opposite ends, completely different problems. I’m proud of him, and I’m quietly taking notes. haha.

How to know when to put the weight back up

There’s a test for this and it isn’t how you feel on the day.

Put the weight up when the current weight has felt easy for two sessions in a row and you finished both of them knowing you had more left. Two, not one. One good session is a mood. Two is a pattern.

Then move up small. Smaller than you want to. You’re not trying to be back where you were by the end of the month. You’re trying to still be doing this in six months, which is a completely different problem, and it’s the one that matters.

Where ours fit into that

None of this is really about supplements and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the routine parts of a comeback get easier when they’re boring and they happen in the same slot every day, so if you want somewhere to put ours, here’s where I’d put them.

• CREATINE MONO, daily. Same time every day, attached to something you already do.
• ESSENTIAL AF, daily, in the same slot.
• El Chapo, before a session.

Set it up once and stop thinking about it.

Anyway. Halve it, go four times a week, be patient with the first fortnight. The whole trick is being someone who trains again by the end of the month rather than someone who trained hard once.

Stay Swole,
Justin 💪

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.