Even the most committed athletes miss the occasional workout. In this week's episode, Wahoo sports scientists Mac Cassin and Neal Henderson give practical advice on what to do when life gets in the way of your training.
Even the most committed athletes miss the occasional workout. In this week's episode, Wahoo sports scientists Mac Cassin and Neal Henderson give practical advice on what to do when life gets in the way of your training. Bottom line: skipping a session isn't the end of the world, in fact, it may actually do some good.
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Neal Henderson 0:00 Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge podcast brought to you by Wahoo. I'm Neal Henderson, head of Wahoo sports science,
Mac Cassin 0:07, And I Mac Cassin senior sports scientist with Wahoo. Today we're going to discuss how to manage disruptions in your training plan. Neal, as you know, every training plan that we create is perfectly developed and scheduled that must be followed 100% accurately tailed any positive results. In fact,
Neal Henderson 0:21
Mac, we've also accurately calibrated each and every plan to ensure optimal benefits if and only if you complete the plan with 100% compliance. If you fall short or exceed the plan by any small amount, we've inserted technology that will guarantee that your results will be reduced by a minimum of 20. And up to 50%. If you happen to make any small adjustments to the plan, as we always say, a plan is a plan. And the plan is the plan.
Mac Cassin 0:50
Now, for those of you who couldn't pick up on that it was completely inaccurate, completely false. That's actually not how any plan that we make or recommend is viewed.
Neal Henderson 1:00
Definitely a joke. So plans are created in a vacuum. When Matt and I write plans and our other coaches write plans, we are actually in a hermetically sealed vacuum, where there is no oxygen, and rewrite the plan such that it must be completed at 100% compliance for it to be useful.
Mac Cassin 1:21
Again, that is completely false. Yeah,
Neal Henderson 1:24
I forgot we do create it in a vacuum. No Mac, don't we like in a vacuum of we are thinking of writing this plan for somebody who is not going to have any disruptions based on work, family illness, weather, anything like that. So our vacuum is kind of just the in a perfect world, which we don't live in, then you would want to do all of these workouts with this progression. And that's what our plans look like, we've created them in a bit of a vacuum, but they are applied in the real world. And so the real world has all these other things that will come up. And so actually, we think about a training plan, it's something that if you're able to follow it at more like an 80 or 90% of implants, you're most likely going to have even better results than if you actually followed it at 100% of perfect compliance. The reason that that is what we think and the way we think of this is that if you do 100%, you're probably ignoring things that have come up in the real world that will impact your ability to follow that plan, whether it's a work assignment that you had to stay up late, and you missed your morning workout, because you had to get some things together or one of your kids got sick, and you stayed up all night with them, or you had to take them to the doctor and or any of those things, it could just be that you know, you didn't eat very well for a few days you were under fueled, and then you know you needed to recover before doing a harder session. There's a lot of different things that will create that reason why sometimes it's better just to skip a workout.
Mac Cassin 2:59
And beyond that, what we're trying to get at here today is everyone is going to miss a workout, no matter if you're a weekend warrior. If you're a professional getting ready for the tour or the Olympics, everyone for one reason or another is going to miss a workout. And it can be very easy to let that get into your head and have Neil in the background saying if you don't do this 100% of the time, you will make sure that you're slower. At the end of this. Everyone gets stressed about missing that workout. And it can kind of snowball into more stress because you missed a workout because you're already stressed. And it's really not good. So what we're what we want to make sure that you can take away one thing here is that if you miss a workout, Do not stress it is not the end of the world.
Neal Henderson 3:38
Yeah, I would go as far as to say probably close to 10% of the sessions of athletes that I've coached to have recently won medals at World Championships and Olympic Games missed pretty close to 10% of the sessions in the last one to two weeks leading into those events. And the reason they missed them is that it was better to not do them based on the situation, what was going on how they were feeling, the weather, travel, stress, all of those things come together and mean that you do need to pull back a little bit and not just put your head down and plow forward. That is not the path to getting you where you want to go.
Mac Cassin 4:18
So number one thing here does not to freak out, do not panic because you missed a workout. Breathe a deep breath. The second thing is to then okay, you're gonna ask yourself, what do I do now? Do I make up that workout tomorrow? Do I do even more work over the weekend? What should I do there? And that really comes down to the first question you have to ask yourself is why did you miss that training session? And those are generally going to have you're going to have two types of answers and we call those external factors and internal factors. So now you touched on some of the external factors. What are those look like?
Neal Henderson 4:52
Yep. So some of the A lot of times these are kind of like a stress-related thing. So something with your family that's going on, that is going to take your time energy away from what you would plan to do because you have to address whatever situation is going on, there could be work as well-fitting that bucket, a new project, something that went wrong, that needs to be fixed, corrected, unexpected work events clearly, you know, affect all of us in some way. And then other life events, major life events, if you think of things like moving, getting married, a loss of a loved one, all of these are major life events, and they have a significantly associated stress with them, meaning that our body cannot adapt to the same amount of physical training stress that we place on your body doesn't care whether it's coming from what we think is a positive stressor of exercise, or what we might consider more of a negative stressor with some of these other situations,
Mac Cassin 5:46
that external factor, okay, is it a stress-related one, generally speaking, any of those external factors are just going to result in basically a lack of time. And so you can have a good reason like you can have good family stuff like going to a family member's wedding, and that's a lack of time, maybe it's not stressful, but it's not realistic to fit in training, that is okay, as well. So, okay, that external factor, what was it? Was it good? Was it bad was it, you know,
Neal Henderson 6:11
is, what it was,
Mac Cassin 6:12
Is what it was? So then the next type we look at is internal factors. So those are going to be things like, just fatigue, you know, if you're sick, maybe you haven't been getting enough sleep lately, or one of the big, big red flags for us, which is one that should really be considered and is often ignored is, are you just unmotivated to train, because a lack of motivation to train is a pretty good sign of overtraining.
Neal Henderson 6:34
Yep, or failure to recover, maybe not getting adequate sleep. One of the other big things that can be contributing on this site, too, is also fueling and what you're doing before, during, and after your workout. So make sure you listen to those episodes, because your fueling can very much impact what's going on not just for motivation, but really how you're adapting to your training that you're doing and having an impact on your fatigue levels, and potentially even relationships to getting sick. If you're under-fueled, it's much easier for you to succumb to different illnesses.
Mac Cassin 7:07
And so it's important when you miss a workout, for whatever reason is be honest with yourself and ask yourself why you missed a workout. And I actually, for a lot of people who have a training diary or some counter where they record workouts, it's pretty common that if they miss a workout, they just don't add any comments. Don't add any notes. I think it's really helpful when you do miss a workout to the add-in. Okay, why did you miss it? Was it was it stress? Was it extra work? stuff came up? Was it just I went out with my friends and didn't have time to ride? Was it? I'm super tired. I'm unmotivated. Like what was it? Because that can be looking back, you know, two months, it can be hard to remember why specifically missed a session?
Neal Henderson 7:42
Yep, keeping those notes. And that kind of information is definitely helpful.
Mac Cassin 7:46
Because you can then potentially start to see patterns of okay, wow, every Thursday, I'm too tired to do a hard ride. And maybe it's just because that's how your work and family week goes up to that. So that's useful to know. Okay, maybe in the future Thursdays, I shouldn't have really hard key sessions, because I know historically, I'm just not there.
Neal Henderson 8:03
Yep. One of the things that I often talk about with athletes over time is well, Time keeps moving forward. So we have our plan, and it was scheduled to be done. And for whatever reason, we miss it so we can assess really, what are some of those root causes? And then we can talk about okay, well, is it going to be beneficial just to move forward and not try to make it up? Or was the reason that you missed it, you know, one of these things where you could still insert it back. So let's think about you know, what, one of the reasons and times that you might want to be able to push that workout forward and try to make up that session.
Mac Cassin 8:38
Yeah. So So with that in mind, okay, how do you make that decision? The first thing we've already covered is, okay, why did you miss the workout? That's the first thing you need to establish. The second one is okay, what workout Did you miss? Was it a super key one to whatever event you're coming up on? Was it just a general endurance ride? Like, how significant is that workout in the scheme of your plan, or even just the week? And then the last thing you need to look at is Okay, where am I in my training plan? Am I at the am I just coming off a Recovery Week? And I'm pretty fresh? Am I at the end of a three-week block? And I'm like, pretty stuffed at the mark. What are all those things? And I know that's, that's a lot to think about. There's a lot of branches that go off of there. But asking yourself and answering those three questions is, is the most important thing and, okay, what do I do next?
Neal Henderson 9:25
Yeah, I would say the simplest and easiest answer is to move forward. You can we can go into the weeds a little bit here. And we're going to do that now. But by and large, I often think about just it's better to move forward and not try to make up for it. And also don't beat yourself up for missing that session. It happened for a reason. Sometimes it's a really, really good reason. Sometimes you just you know, oops, you know, you did a bunch of other things and and and you ended up not doing that if that's a pattern for you. Now that becomes more of an issue that you need to address but Every now and then, like we say, missing 10 or 20% in some way is actually not a terrible thing, it means that you're listening to what's going on and adapting to the situation, having a plan is great. But being able to adapt and adjust is what is critical for success.
Mac Cassin 10:17
And one easy way to find out what to do next. Again, when you ask these, well, you know, why did you not work out? What was your workout, where was your workout, you know, if it's an internal factor, if it's fatigue, lack of motivation, sickness, don't make up that work.
Neal Henderson 10:32
Generally, yeah, you just keep going forward and do what you can to help yourself recover. Whether that means you know, you get a little more sleep, you put more emphasis there into to sleep, proper nutrition, hydration, reducing stress and anxiety where you can write, you may still, you know, if you have a job, and you have some work responsibilities, that has ramped up after you've gotten through that period, maybe you can catch up on your sleep. But the other thing too is making sure that you give yourself some time and space to spend distressingly. And it may or may not always just be that physical outlet, some of us use our training as that primary outlet for that stress and anxiety. And then when we run into these situations where we don't have time to do that, we need to have some alternatives. And that might just be doing some breathing exercises, trying to do some meditation, it may just be a couple of minutes of stretching, it may be playing a musical instrument, it may be you know, watching something for a few minutes. But making sure that you have some alternatives for an outlet for that stress, especially when you can't do those, the normal things based on the amount of time it takes or where you're at, you know, if you had to travel somewhere, and you don't have access to your equipment, your training, you know, your bike or whatever they don't, the hotel you're staying at doesn't have any kind of a stationary bike, you got to figure something out. Otherwise, you're going to go down a spiral and make everything continually worse for you until you get out of that.
Mac Cassin 11:57
Yeah, I can say from personal experience that riding a bike is kind of your outlet for stress, and then you become stressed about missing riding, it gets it can go south pretty quickly. And that's not a fun place to get in when you're one outlet for stress is now causing you stress because you can't do it. And that's not
Unknown Speaker 12:14
Yep, that's a vicious vicious circle. And it is very common for endurance athletes, you know, we know that you know, all of us, you know, really have had some positives that we take from the exercise that we do that helps us manage our daily stressors. And when we miss that, it's important to make sure that we do have some other alternatives to be able to rely on and insert.
Mac Cassin 12:37
If you're following a plan, it's because you're working towards a goal and it can feel bad to miss a foundational piece to working towards that goal. But yeah, as Neil said, You need to just move forward, you have to leave it as is. And so again, when we're talking about okay, maybe I do this workout tomorrow or later in the week, if that factor is external, and it's lack of time, and it's just because maybe you were having fun doing something else, then yeah, it's reasonable to say it's hard to work out, and then your next workout that you'd have tomorrow is like an endurance ride, you know, that's an appropriate swap to make. If that reason you missed it is just lack of time, that was not a stressful lack of time.
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Yep. And in that case, that it's really like which workout is more important at this point. And again, what's following to so if you have a recovery day, following that, that next, you know, in the day after, then yeah, you could probably tolerate throwing that intensity back in if you didn't miss it, because you were sick, or had potentially an injury, or all those other kinds of more negative things that just you ran out of time, okay, instead of that two-hour endurance ride, maybe you're going to do that, you know, do an external extended warmup, get an hour of warm-up, and then do that higher intensity session that you missed the day prior, and you're good to go.
Mac Cassin 13:49
And then again, regardless of you know the why if you get to the end of a training block, then it's definitely best to just leave it as is if you're on week three of a block and you miss a workout. You've already put in three good weeks of hard work, don't add the extra stress of trying to cram session in because you missed it.
Neal Henderson 14:06
Definitely, you know, rest is not a four-letter word.
Mac Cassin 14:09
Well, it is Neal.
Neal Henderson 14:09
Ah, dang it, I always mess that up. It's not a bad word. That's, that's what I was trying to say. And rest and recovery are part of this. And so in some cases, again, that plan was developed, expecting, you know, everything to be going smoothly. And in reality, you know, not everything is always going smoothly. And so being able to just pull back, miss a session here and there and not worry about trying to make it up and not stressing about the reasons why, you know, again, if it's a pattern that just keeps repeating address that but every now and then 10% of your time, no stress 15 20% Even still is in the acceptable range. Yeah, don't overthink it.
Mac Cassin 14:49
It's often said that the most important thing to any type of training plan is consistency. And that's, that is true. But consistency doesn't mean writing every single day. In fact, you probably shouldn't ride every Single Day professionals don't ride their bikes every single day. So there are times when you need to be away from the bike and consistency is key. But missing a few sessions here and it is fine after consistently missing sessions, like Neil just said, that's a different issue and should probably be addressed in a larger sense.
Neal Henderson 15:17
Exactly. And sometimes that's resetting your expectations. You know, if you think that training five or six days a week is what you really need, but you have all these other things going on, it actually maybe that's too much for you that you may be doing a lot better with three or potentially four sessions a week, and having a plan and being able to adjust as you move forward, then the next time not going for that more aggressive, like higher volume plan or higher frequency of sessions pulling back a little bit, we find most folks again, they adapt better not being at their absolute limit of what they can handle. But being somewhere where they have that little bit of a range to adjust, you know, when their body, you know, when they need a little more rest, or when they can dial it up a little bit more and being kind of more in the middle gets us there better than being at that upper limit edge where most people think they need to be
Mac Cassin 16:05
Yeah, I think visually how I think about this is if you have a graph, and you have the x-axis being the improvement you're getting is not the amount of training and when restarted. Okay, so. So if you were to visualize this as a graph, and say that on the x-axis is the amount of training you're doing,
Neal Henderson 16:23
The x-axis is the one that goes across the bottom, right. Okay, great.
Mac Cassin 16:27
The y axis, so the one going up and down, that's going to be your amount of improvement. And so when you start off, you train a little bit, you improve a little bit, you train a bit more, you get a bit better, it keeps going, everyone gets to a point where all of a sudden, more training and that line starts to go down. And it's not like a nice bell curve where being 10% undertrained is just as effective as being 10% overtrained. It's more of a steady rise, and then a very steep precipitous drop. And so it is better to be 20% undertrained than 5% overtrained and 1% overtrained so they won't be even then. So keep that in mind when okay, if you're really pushing it to the limit each week in terms of balancing work life, your family, and your training. And maybe your rest is being a bit compromised. Maybe you're sleeping a little less each day. Just be really cognizant that hey, maybe missing your training session today might be the best call for you. So we will I think that's it for this episode of the knowledge hopefully the next time something comes up and you miss a workout you will save yourself a panic attack and just take a deep breath and accept that is what it is. Until next time. This has been The Knowledge Podcast by Wahoo
Neal Henderson 0:00
Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge podcast brought to you by Wahoo. I'm Neal Henderson, head of Wahoo sports science,
Mac Cassin 0:07, and I Mac Cassin senior sports scientist with Wahoo. Today we're going to discuss how to manage disruptions in your training plan. Neal, as you know, every training plan that we create is perfectly developed and scheduled that must be followed 100% accurately tailed any positive results. In fact,
Neal Henderson 0:21
Mac, we've also accurately calibrated each and every plan to ensure optimal benefits if and only if you complete the plan with 100% compliance. If you fall short or exceed the plan by any small amount, we've inserted technology that will guarantee that your results will be reduced by a minimum of 20. And up to 50%. If you happen to make any small adjustments to the plan, as we always say, a plan is a plan. And the plan is the plan.
Mac Cassin 0:50
Now, for those of you who couldn't pick up on that it was completely inaccurate, completely false. That's actually not how any plan that we make or recommend is viewed.
Neal Henderson 1:00
Definitely a joke. So plans are created in a vacuum. When Matt and I write plans and our other coaches write plans, we are actually in a hermetically sealed vacuum, where there is no oxygen, and rewrite the plan such that it must be completed at 100% compliance for it to be useful.
Mac Cassin 1:21
Again, that is completely false. Yeah,
Neal Henderson 1:24
I forgot we do create it in a vacuum. No Mac, don't we like in a vacuum of we are thinking of writing this plan for somebody who is not going to have any disruptions based on work, family illness, weather, anything like that. So our vacuum is kind of just the in a perfect world, which we don't live in, then you would want to do all of these workouts with this progression. And that's what our plans look like, we've created them in a bit of a vacuum, but they are applied in the real world. And so the real world has all these other things that will come up. And so actually, we think about a training plan, it's something that if you're able to follow it at more like an 80 or 90% of implants, you're most likely going to have even better results than if you actually followed it at 100% of perfect compliance. The reason that that is what we think and the way we think of this is that if you do 100%, you're probably ignoring things that have come up in the real world that will impact your ability to follow that plan, whether it's a work assignment that you had to stay up late, and you missed your morning workout, because you had to get some things together or one of your kids got sick, and you stayed up all night with them, or you had to take them to the doctor and or any of those things, it could just be that you know, you didn't eat very well for a few days you were under fueled, and then you know you needed to recover before doing a harder session. There's a lot of different things that will create that reason why sometimes it's better just to skip a workout.
Mac Cassin 2:59
And beyond that, what we're trying to get at here today is everyone is going to miss a workout, no matter if you're a weekend warrior. If you're a professional getting ready for the tour or the Olympics, everyone for one reason or another is going to miss a workout. And it can be very easy to let that get into your head and have Neil in the background saying if you don't do this 100% of the time, you will make sure that you're slower. At the end of this. Everyone gets stressed about missing that workout. And it can kind of snowball into more stress because you missed a workout because you're already stressed. And it's really not good. So what we're what we want to make sure that you can take away one thing here is that if you miss a workout, Do not stress it is not the end of the world.
Neal Henderson 3:38
Yeah, I would go as far as to say probably close to 10% of the sessions of athletes that I've coached to have recently won medals at World Championships and Olympic Games missed pretty close to 10% of the sessions in the last one to two weeks leading into those events. And the reason they missed them is that it was better to not do them based on the situation, what was going on how they were feeling, the weather, travel, stress, all of those things come together and mean that you do need to pull back a little bit and not just put your head down and plow forward. That is not the path to getting you where you want to go.
Mac Cassin 4:18
So number one thing here does not to freak out, do not panic because you missed a workout. Breathe a deep breath. The second thing is to then okay, you're gonna ask yourself, what do I do now? Do I make up that workout tomorrow? Do I do even more work over the weekend? What should I do there? And that really comes down to the first question you have to ask yourself is why did you miss that training session? And those are generally going to have you're going to have two types of answers and we call those external factors and internal factors. So now you touched on some of the external factors. What are those look like?
Neal Henderson 4:52
Yep. So some of the A lot of times these are kind of like a stress-related thing. So something with your family that's going on, that is going to take your time energy away from what you would plan to do because you have to address whatever situation is going on, there could be work as well-fitting that bucket, a new project, something that went wrong, that needs to be fixed, corrected, unexpected work events clearly, you know, affect all of us in some way. And then other life events, major life events, if you think of things like moving, getting married, a loss of a loved one, all of these are major life events, and they have a significantly associated stress with them, meaning that our body cannot adapt to the same amount of physical training stress that we place on your body doesn't care whether it's coming from what we think is a positive stressor of exercise, or what we might consider more of a negative stressor with some of these other situations,
Mac Cassin 5:46
that external factor, okay, is it a stress-related one, generally speaking, any of those external factors are just going to result in basically a lack of time. And so you can have a good reason like you can have good family stuff like going to a family member's wedding, and that's a lack of time, maybe it's not stressful, but it's not realistic to fit in training, that is okay, as well. So, okay, that external factor, what was it? Was it good? Was it bad was it, you know,
Neal Henderson 6:11
is, what it was,
Mac Cassin 6:12
Is what it was? So then the next type we look at is internal factors. So those are going to be things like, just fatigue, you know, if you're sick, maybe you haven't been getting enough sleep lately, or one of the big, big red flags for us, which is one that should really be considered and is often ignored is, are you just unmotivated to train, because a lack of motivation to train is a pretty good sign of overtraining.
Neal Henderson 6:34
Yep, or failure to recover, maybe not getting adequate sleep. One of the other big things that can be contributing on this site, too, is also fueling and what you're doing before, during, and after your workout. So make sure you listen to those episodes, because your fueling can very much impact what's going on not just for motivation, but really how you're adapting to your training that you're doing and having an impact on your fatigue levels, and potentially even relationships to getting sick. If you're under-fueled, it's much easier for you to succumb to different illnesses.
Mac Cassin 7:07
And so it's important when you miss a workout, for whatever reason is be honest with yourself and ask yourself why you missed a workout. And I actually, for a lot of people who have a training diary or some counter where they record workouts, it's pretty common that if they miss a workout, they just don't add any comments. Don't add any notes. I think it's really helpful when you do miss a workout to the add-in. Okay, why did you miss it? Was it was it stress? Was it extra work? stuff came up? Was it just I went out with my friends and didn't have time to ride? Was it? I'm super tired. I'm unmotivated. Like what was it? Because that can be looking back, you know, two months, it can be hard to remember why specifically missed a session?
Neal Henderson 7:42
Yep, keeping those notes. And that kind of information is definitely helpful.
Mac Cassin 7:46
Because you can then potentially start to see patterns of okay, wow, every Thursday, I'm too tired to do a hard ride. And maybe it's just because that's how your work and family week goes up to that. So that's useful to know. Okay, maybe in the future Thursdays, I shouldn't have really hard key sessions, because I know historically, I'm just not there.
Neal Henderson 8:03
Yep. One of the things that I often talk about with athletes over time is well, Time keeps moving forward. So we have our plan, and it was scheduled to be done. And for whatever reason, we miss it so we can assess really, what are some of those root causes? And then we can talk about okay, well, is it going to be beneficial just to move forward and not try to make it up? Or was the reason that you missed it, you know, one of these things where you could still insert it back. So let's think about you know, what, one of the reasons and times that you might want to be able to push that workout forward and try to make up that session.
Mac Cassin 8:38
Yeah. So So with that in mind, okay, how do you make that decision? The first thing we've already covered is, okay, why did you miss the workout? That's the first thing you need to establish. The second one is okay, what workout Did you miss? Was it a super key one to whatever event you're coming up on? Was it just a general endurance ride? Like, how significant is that workout in the scheme of your plan, or even just the week? And then the last thing you need to look at is Okay, where am I in my training plan? Am I at the am I just coming off a Recovery Week? And I'm pretty fresh? Am I at the end of a three-week block? And I'm like, pretty stuffed at the mark. What are all those things? And I know that's, that's a lot to think about. There's a lot of branches that go off of there. But asking yourself and answering those three questions is, is the most important thing and, okay, what do I do next?
Neal Henderson 9:25
Yeah, I would say the simplest and easiest answer is to move forward. You can we can go into the weeds a little bit here. And we're going to do that now. But by and large, I often think about just it's better to move forward and not try to make up for it. And also don't beat yourself up for missing that session. It happened for a reason. Sometimes it's a really, really good reason. Sometimes you just you know, oops, you know, you did a bunch of other things and and and you ended up not doing that if that's a pattern for you. Now that becomes more of an issue that you need to address but Every now and then, like we say, missing 10 or 20% in some way is actually not a terrible thing, it means that you're listening to what's going on and adapting to the situation, having a plan is great. But being able to adapt and adjust is what is critical for success.
Mac Cassin 10:17
And one easy way to find out what to do next. Again, when you ask these, well, you know, why did you not work out? What was your workout, where was your workout, you know, if it's an internal factor, if it's fatigue, lack of motivation, sickness, don't make up that work.
Neal Henderson 10:32
Generally, yeah, you just keep going forward and do what you can to help yourself recover. Whether that means you know, you get a little more sleep, you put more emphasis there into to sleep, proper nutrition, hydration, reducing stress and anxiety where you can write, you may still, you know, if you have a job, and you have some work responsibilities, that has ramped up after you've gotten through that period, maybe you can catch up on your sleep. But the other thing too is making sure that you give yourself some time and space to spend distressingly. And it may or may not always just be that physical outlet, some of us use our training as that primary outlet for that stress and anxiety. And then when we run into these situations where we don't have time to do that, we need to have some alternatives. And that might just be doing some breathing exercises, trying to do some meditation, it may just be a couple of minutes of stretching, it may be playing a musical instrument, it may be you know, watching something for a few minutes. But making sure that you have some alternatives for an outlet for that stress, especially when you can't do those, the normal things based on the amount of time it takes or where you're at, you know, if you had to travel somewhere, and you don't have access to your equipment, your training, you know, your bike or whatever they don't, the hotel you're staying at doesn't have any kind of a stationary bike, you got to figure something out. Otherwise, you're going to go down a spiral and make everything continually worse for you until you get out of that.
Mac Cassin 11:57
Yeah, I can say from personal experience that riding a bike is kind of your outlet for stress, and then you become stressed about missing riding, it gets it can go south pretty quickly. And that's not a fun place to get in when you're one outlet for stress is now causing you stress because you can't do it. And that's not
Unknown Speaker 12:14
Yep, that's a vicious vicious circle. And it is very common for endurance athletes, you know, we know that you know, all of us, you know, really have had some positives that we take from the exercise that we do that helps us manage our daily stressors. And when we miss that, it's important to make sure that we do have some other alternatives to be able to rely on and insert.
Mac Cassin 12:37
If you're following a plan, it's because you're working towards a goal and it can feel bad to miss a foundational piece to working towards that goal. But yeah, as Neil said, You need to just move forward, you have to leave it as is. And so again, when we're talking about okay, maybe I do this workout tomorrow or later in the week, if that factor is external, and it's lack of time, and it's just because maybe you were having fun doing something else, then yeah, it's reasonable to say it's hard to work out, and then your next workout that you'd have tomorrow is like an endurance ride, you know, that's an appropriate swap to make. If that reason you missed it is just lack of time, that was not a stressful lack of time.
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Yep. And in that case, that it's really like which workout is more important at this point. And again, what's following to so if you have a recovery day, following that, that next, you know, in the day after, then yeah, you could probably tolerate throwing that intensity back in if you didn't miss it, because you were sick, or had potentially an injury, or all those other kinds of more negative things that just you ran out of time, okay, instead of that two-hour endurance ride, maybe you're going to do that, you know, do an external extended warmup, get an hour of warm-up, and then do that higher intensity session that you missed the day prior, and you're good to go.
Mac Cassin 13:49
And then again, regardless of you know the why if you get to the end of a training block, then it's definitely best to just leave it as is if you're on week three of a block and you miss a workout. You've already put in three good weeks of hard work, don't add the extra stress of trying to cram session in because you missed it.
Neal Henderson 14:06
Definitely, you know, rest is not a four-letter word.
Mac Cassin 14:09
Well, it is Neal.
Neal Henderson 14:09
Ah, dang it, I always mess that up. It's not a bad word. That's, that's what I was trying to say. And rest and recovery are part of this. And so in some cases, again, that plan was developed, expecting, you know, everything to be going smoothly. And in reality, you know, not everything is always going smoothly. And so being able to just pull back, miss a session here and there and not worry about trying to make it up and not stressing about the reasons why, you know, again, if it's a pattern that just keeps repeating address that but every now and then 10% of your time, no stress 15 20% Even still is in the acceptable range. Yeah, don't overthink it.
Mac Cassin 14:49
It's often said that the most important thing to any type of training plan is consistency. And that's, that is true. But consistency doesn't mean writing every single day. In fact, you probably shouldn't ride every Single Day professionals don't ride their bikes every single day. So there are times when you need to be away from the bike and consistency is key. But missing a few sessions here and it is fine after consistently missing sessions, like Neil just said, that's a different issue and should probably be addressed in a larger sense.
Neal Henderson 15:17
Exactly. And sometimes that's resetting your expectations. You know, if you think that training five or six days a week is what you really need, but you have all these other things going on, it actually maybe that's too much for you that you may be doing a lot better with three or potentially four sessions a week, and having a plan and being able to adjust as you move forward, then the next time not going for that more aggressive, like higher volume plan or higher frequency of sessions pulling back a little bit, we find most folks again, they adapt better not being at their absolute limit of what they can handle. But being somewhere where they have that little bit of a range to adjust, you know, when their body, you know, when they need a little more rest, or when they can dial it up a little bit more and being kind of more in the middle gets us there better than being at that upper limit edge where most people think they need to be
Mac Cassin 16:05
Yeah, I think visually how I think about this is if you have a graph, and you have the x-axis being the improvement you're getting is not the amount of training and when restarted. Okay, so. So if you were to visualize this as a graph, and say that on the x-axis is the amount of training you're doing,
Neal Henderson 16:23
The x-axis is the one that goes across the bottom, right. Okay, great.
Mac Cassin 16:27
The y axis, so the one going up and down, that's going to be your amount of improvement. And so when you start off, you train a little bit, you improve a little bit, you train a bit more, you get a bit better, it keeps going, everyone gets to a point where all of a sudden, more training and that line starts to go down. And it's not like a nice bell curve where being 10% undertrained is just as effective as being 10% overtrained. It's more of a steady rise, and then a very steep precipitous drop. And so it is better to be 20% undertrained than 5% overtrained and 1% overtrained so they won't be even then. So keep that in mind when okay, if you're really pushing it to the limit each week in terms of balancing work life, your family, and your training. And maybe your rest is being a bit compromised. Maybe you're sleeping a little less each day. Just be really cognizant that hey, maybe missing your training session today might be the best call for you. So we will I think that's it for this episode of the knowledge hopefully the next time something comes up and you miss a workout you will save yourself a panic attack and just take a deep breath and accept that is what it is. Until next time. This has been The Knowledge Podcast by Wahoo