Training after Time Away

For most everyone reading this, training isn’t your job or livelihood and will at some point be affected by what is known as real life. Life has a way of throwing you curve balls and derailing even the most perfect fitness plans. For us personally, last year it was our first child Layne being born. Life events like these change everything from that moment on and also challenge what you previously thought to be true. For other people, it could be a career change, a family death, illness or injuries that alter their training plan. If we lift weights long enough, these obstacles will come up and learning to navigate them will determine our long term success. If we decide to put our head down and work harder, we’ll likely create bigger issues that carry long term effects. No one wants to take down time or alter their training plan especially after making great progress for a period of time, but the ability to adjust will provide a much larger benefit for us in the long term for health, strength, and mental momentum. 

Adjust Expectations

If you were using 225lbs on the bench press before your lay off, you got there by compounding efforts from your weekly training sessions. To expect to be at the same level after time away is unrealistic and undermines the work that you had put in to achieve that number to begin with. When coming back, focus on getting the movement back regardless of the weight. Take two weeks just of practicing the movements with no concern for the weights being used. Then over the next two weeks, you can increase by 5% each week to have a comfortable base to work with again. By simply working the movement patterns, you’re rebuilding neurological efficiency and getting the habit of exercising back. After your four weeks of reintroduction training then you can begin to train for progress again…slowly. 

Adjust Training Percentages

Using the 225lb Bench Press example from above, let’s say after 4 weeks you can comfortably do 175lbs for 5 reps. It would be wise to use this formula to create a new training max to use for 6-12 weeks of training. 

(Weight lifted x Reps x Constant + Weight Lifted)

175 x 5 x .0333 + 175 = 204

I would then use no more than 80% of that number

This would make your training max 165lbs

While this might seem light, trust that you won’t become weaker especially after time away. This will give us a chance work on better movement quality and increase muscle growth in the process. Both of these are critical for the long game of lifting weights. Whatever percentages or rate of perceived exertion you use should be based upon your goals and training experience. It’s important to remember that we’re training to lift for the rest of our life. Expand your time line and get rid of the 75 hard challenge mentality. 

Build One Habit/Skill at a Time

Imagine coming back from a 3 month lay off from training. You decide it’s time to start your healthy diet, strength training, and running routine at the same time. This will bring back all the good feelings for a while and then quickly overwhelm will set in. Our bodies hate change. Throwing a lot of change at once is too much for our system no matter how much we want it back. A slow reintroduction period will help you assess the right amount of training volume for you and give a appropriate feedback on your recovery from each activity. For each skill we add, we should give it two weeks to see what adjustments we need to make in order to progress. 

Take Notes

I still use a black and white composition notebook for all my training. This allows me to easily make changes, cross things out, and write notes on each workout. I’ve done this even at times following workouts from a mobile app. Coming back from time off, it’s valuable to take notes on each part of the workout. Here are some things to note each workout:

How did you feel going into the session?

How did the warm up feel?

Did the main movement feel off?

Was there a pre-hab modality you used that made something feel better?

Did you have a great set that you felt in the zone for?

The more notes you can take, the more clues it’ll leave you on what the big picture looks like for your training, nutrition, and recovery. 

No one wants to go backwards with their training. It’s normal to feel frustrated that time and life got away from us and messed up our great training plan, but it’s important to remember that if we were able to get there before, we can get there again. The biggest thing that would change that trajectory would be our own ego wanting to do too much too soon. These are the realities of life and the better we can adjust our training to them the more success we’ll have, Our training is to fit our life, our life isn’t meant to fit our training. 

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