You open your training programme on Monday morning and everything looks perfectly organised.
Then real life happens.
Work runs late. The kids have something on. You have to travel. The swimming pool isn’t available. A family commitment appears. Suddenly, the carefully planned training week doesn’t fit your actual week.
What should you do?
One of the most important skills an endurance athlete can develop is learning how to adjust a training plan without turning one disrupted session into a disrupted week.
As a coach, I try to lay out an athlete’s training in the optimal way. Sessions are positioned according to the physiological demands of the training, recovery requirements, periodisation and the athlete’s goals.
But you’re not training in a laboratory.
You’ve got a real life.
That’s why I use five simple rules when helping athletes adjust their training programmes.
Rule #1: Done Is Better Than Perfect
The first rule is simple:
Done is better than perfect.
Your training programme represents what we’d ideally like you to accomplish. But completing a modified version of your training is often much better than doing nothing because you can’t execute the original session perfectly.
Perhaps you have a 90-minute workout scheduled but only have 60 minutes available.
Don’t automatically write the session off.
Ask yourself:
What can I accomplish with the time I’ve got?
There may be a way to shorten the workout while retaining its primary training purpose.
Athletes can sometimes become so focused on completing their programme exactly as written that anything less feels like failure.
It isn’t.
Training consistently over weeks and months is far more important than producing one theoretically perfect week.
Rule #2: If You Miss a Session, It’s Missed
This is one of the hardest rules for motivated endurance athletes to accept.
If you miss Tuesday’s session, you don’t necessarily need to find another place for it.
Tuesday’s session can simply be gone.
Don’t automatically shift it to Wednesday, push Wednesday’s training to Thursday, move Thursday to Friday and gradually compress your entire training programme into the remaining days.
Why?
Because training isn’t simply about accumulating kilometres, hours or Training Stress Score.
You need to recover from your training to gain the physiological adaptations you’re trying to create.
If you squeeze five or six days of planned training into two or three days, you haven’t necessarily rescued your training week. You may simply have created a much larger recovery problem.
The missed workout is history.
Accept it, look forward and concentrate on completing the next appropriate session.
I explored this lesson in more detail several years ago in my article “What Mick Learned by Not Sticking to the Program”. It’s a great example of what can happen when an athlete becomes too focused on fitting everything in rather than responding to what is actually happening.
Rule #3: Swap Like for Like
Sometimes you can’t complete the planned session today, but you can complete it later in the week.
That’s when swapping sessions can work very well.
The important principle is to try to swap like for like.
For example, imagine you’ve got a three-hour bike ride scheduled but don’t have three hours available today. You do, however, have enough time for the shorter long run that is scheduled later in the week.
You may be able to swap those two aerobic conditioning sessions.
Do the long run today and move the long ride to the day when you have enough time available.
Triathletes commonly encounter another example with swimming.
Perhaps you’ve got a hard swim scheduled, but travel, pool opening hours or lane availability mean you can’t get to the pool.
You might be able to swap it with another harder workout from later in the week and move the swim accordingly.
But there’s an important catch.
Look at What Comes Before and After
Don’t consider sessions in isolation.
If you have a hard swim scheduled the day before your long run, replacing that swim with a hard running interval session probably isn’t a sensible like-for-like swap.
You’ve dramatically changed the stress placed on your running muscles and potentially compromised the following day’s long run.
A cycling interval session might be a much better alternative.
Whenever you move sessions, look at the whole training week, not simply the empty space in your calendar.
Ask:
- Is this session targeting a similar physiological purpose?
- What training did I do yesterday?
- What have I got tomorrow?
- Will I have sufficient recovery?
- Am I putting two very similar demanding sessions back-to-back?
Moving a workout is easy.
Moving it intelligently requires understanding why that workout was positioned there in the first place.
Rule #4: Reduce the Session
Sometimes the best solution isn’t moving the workout at all.
It’s shortening it.
Imagine your planned workout contains:
10-minute warm-up
8 × 4-minute intervals with 4-minute recoveries
10-minute cool-down
That’s approximately 84 minutes of training.
But today you’ve only got an hour.
Instead of abandoning the workout or attempting to cram everything into 60 minutes, you could complete the warm-up and the first five intervals with their proper recoveries, then cool down.
You’ve reduced the total training volume while retaining the important part of the session.
You’re still training the intended energy system.
You’re still completing the planned sport or mode of training.
You’re simply doing less of it.
That’s often much better than changing the nature of the session by trying to squeeze all eight repetitions into an inadequate timeframe.
Protect the purpose of the workout and adjust the volume to suit the time available.
Rule #5: Consistency Is the Key
This is the rule underpinning everything else.
Consistency wins.
You get results from training that you can repeat week after week and month after month.
For example, you’re generally going to be in a much better position completing shorter amounts of training regularly throughout the week than doing almost nothing Monday to Friday and then attempting to cram a huge amount of training into Saturday and Sunday.
The weekly volume might look similar on paper.
The physiological effect isn’t necessarily the same.
After a huge weekend you can arrive at Monday exhausted, requiring several days of recovery before you’re ready to train effectively again.
That’s not the rhythm we’re looking for.
Regular training provides repeated stimuli followed by appropriate recovery, allowing your body to adapt and improve.
Don’t chase the perfect week. Chase consistent weeks.
Which Workout Should You Drop?
This is where things become more complicated.
Athletes sometimes ask me:
“If I’ve got to miss something, which session should I drop?”
Unfortunately, there isn’t a universal answer.
It depends on:
- your strengths and weaknesses;
- the event you’re preparing for;
- where you are within your training build-up;
- the purpose of each session; and
- what you’ve already completed that week.
For a triathlete preparing for a longer event, for example, the long ride, long run and longer swim are typically important sessions because of the aerobic development and event-specific preparation they provide.
Dropping one of those automatically may not be the best decision.
Earlier in a build-up, an interval workout might sometimes be the session that gets sacrificed when something genuinely has to go.
But even that isn’t a universal rule. Intervals can provide a very effective aerobic training stimulus within a relatively short amount of time.
That’s why training decisions need context.
Don’t Automatically Drop Your Weakest Discipline
There’s another trap I regularly see with triathletes.
An athlete who isn’t a confident swimmer often finds swimming the easiest workout to skip.
Swimming involves more logistics than pulling on your running shoes and heading out the door. You need to get to the pool, work around opening hours and find suitable lane space.
For an athlete who already finds swimming difficult, it becomes very easy to put it in the “too hard” basket.
But if swimming is already your weakness, repeatedly dropping your swim sessions only makes that weakness greater relative to your cycling and running.
Sometimes the session that’s easiest to skip is the session you most need to keep.
Don’t Let One Missed Workout Create Stress
There’s a psychological benefit to these rules as well.
When you’ve missed a workout, accept that it’s gone.
You don’t need to spend the rest of the week thinking:
I still need to fit Tuesday’s workout in somewhere.
That creates unnecessary pressure.
Instead, reset.
Get a good night’s sleep and concentrate on completing the next day’s planned training well.
One missed session isn’t going to destroy your fitness.
But repeatedly compromising your recovery because you’re trying to “catch up” can disrupt the quality and consistency of your training.
Ray’s Five Rules for Adjusting Your Training Programme
When life gets in the way of your training, remember:
1. Done is better than perfect.
Do what you reasonably can rather than abandoning training because you can’t complete everything perfectly.
2. Don’t chase missed sessions.
Sometimes a missed workout simply needs to stay missed. Focus on what comes next.
3. Swap like for like.
Move similar sessions where appropriate, while considering the training immediately before and after them.
4. Reduce the volume when necessary.
If you’re short on time, shorten the session while retaining its main training purpose.
5. Consistency is the key.
Your results come from what you consistently accomplish over weeks and months—not from one perfect training week.
Your Training Plan Should Work With Your Life
A training programme provides structure and direction, but it shouldn’t become another source of unnecessary stress.
The best programme isn’t necessarily the one that looks perfect on paper.
It’s the one that provides the appropriate training stimulus, allows sufficient recovery and can be completed consistently alongside your work, family and other commitments.
There will always be occasions when life wins.
When that happens, don’t panic and don’t try to cram everything back in.
Make the smartest adjustment you can, protect your recovery and keep moving forward.
Need Help Making Your Training Fit Your Life?
If you’re constantly juggling sessions, missing key workouts or wondering which parts of your programme you should prioritise, I can help.
Book a FREE 40-minute coaching consultation with me and we’ll look at your goals, your current training and how to structure a programme that fits around your real-world commitments.