Stride Strong Coaching’s Sort-of Weekly Newsletter, The Quarter.

It is rare that a motivated athlete will blow off a session and miss it for no reason. Invariably they miss due to feeling ill, off, or a work or family matter. In other words, they miss sessions if they have other stress in their lives which makes it unrealistic to add in further stress on that particular day. However, motivated athletes commonly will try to make up the session they missed the next day. In general, this is a bad idea.

A well balanced program has a specific cycle of stress followed by recovery and adaptation. Making up a missed session will usually remove a recovery/adaptation day from this cycle, in effect increasing total stress while reducing recovery. This makes little sense, as the very reason they missed the session in the first place was because they were overloaded with stress!

The trap people tend to fall into is under accounting for life stress. Your mind and body does not differentiate training stress from work or family stress. Therefore, when we think about training, we need to think about total stress, not just training stress. Remember this the next time you miss a session. Give yourself some grace and take the extra time to destress and get back to normal before going hard again.

February 16th, 2020

Pictured Left: Sausage, my cat, definitely knows how to recover