Adam C. Stewart
When life happens and you need to adjust your exercise program, these strategies will help you meet your goals or deadlines.
It is important to be flexible in your approach to training.
I have already written in collaboration with Dr. Pak about how to exercise effectively when you have extended periods with limited time to work out. You can read about it by clicking here. However, sometimes you have time to exercise normally, but from time to time something affects it.
If you have a specific deadline or a contest coming up, these interruptions can cause the invoice to be lost.
This may mean that you cannot do every workout that you had planned for a week in your training block. Maybe you are away for a day or two without access to the gym, or your family unexpectedly arrives from out of town, forcing you to skip a session.
There will be other times when a training session will be interrupted. A busy gym could mean that you have to wait until the equipment is available so that you can’t fit in your entire session, or you could be at the gym and get a phone call that means you have to leave early.
If you are human, these things will happen from time to time. You will have planned the “perfect” training block and something is bothering him.
Such is life.
So how can we prioritize in our training to make sure that these things don’t affect us more than they should?
Let’s consider some approaches that could be useful.
Prioritization of the exercise
This is probably the area already integrated into most of our programming methods, but we will cover it briefly.
Prioritizing exercises within a session simply means making sure that the order of a session goes from the most “valuable” exercises to the least “valuable” ones. I use the quotation mark because what is considered valuable is subjective. The things you are trying to accomplish will determine which exercises are of the most value to you.
For example, if you are focusing more on your bench press strength, you will want to make sure that the exercises that have the greatest potential to improve your bench press take place earlier in each session. This goes back to the principle of specificity.
This allows you to do these key exercises when you are freshest and concentrating the most, but it also means that if a session has to be interrupted, you have already done your most important work for the day.
Wider than a simple single-lift focus, we should generally choose to place more complex exercises earlier in the session. This accomplishes two things:
A wide range of muscle groups are trained early in the session.
You have the most energy for these important compound exercises, which may be more important for those who focus on strength goals.
This is the first step to make sure that your workouts allow prioritization.
If you need to shorten a session, but you performed the most important and complex movements earlier in the session, you can leave the gym knowing that you have already done most of the “Bang for your Buck” workouts.
