Building a Weekly Training Routine

The hardest part of training is rarely any individual session. It is arranging a week that you can repeat next week, and the week after that, without it falling apart the first time something else comes up.

Start from the number of days you can genuinely commit to rather than the number you would like to. A three-day week you actually complete beats a five-day week you abandon in the second month, and it is not close.

Put the sessions on specific days rather than leaving them floating. A session with no fixed place in the week is the one that gets postponed, and a postponed session is usually a missed one.

Leave room for recovery. Training is the stimulus and rest is where the adaptation happens, so a week with no easy days in it is not a harder week, only a less productive one.

Then leave it alone for a while. Changing the plan every fortnight makes it impossible to tell whether any of it is working, and the temptation to keep adjusting is strongest exactly when patience would serve better.