#177: How to Train Less & Keep Your Muscle During Vacation

You know, normally I've been working out four days a week, usually going to the weight room and then doing a sprint interval training session in conjunction with one of my strength training sessions, and that's just been way too much to fit into my calendar right now.

And so here's what I'm doing to hold on to the muscle that I have.

First thing is that I have switched over to doing full body sessions primarily.

Um, if I know that I have an exceptional week where I will be able to go four days a week, which I haven't yet had one of them, [laughs] then I'm...

I might do something different.

But right now, because I really am playing it by ear, which I don't normally do, normally I have my workouts scheduled in my calendar, I know what days I'm gonna go, but now it's been raining so much that if it's a sunny, nice day, I wanna be out of there.

So I am doing full body sessions, and my plan is to go a minimum of twice a week, and hopefully three days a week.

The beauty of a full body session is that you stimulate all the muscles in your body.

The little bit more challenging part of it is that you can't do them two days in a row.

[laughs] So you do need to leave that recovery day in between.

Getting in a few good sets has been shown to be enough to maintain what you've got.

So this is not the time that you're gonna break any records, but you're also not going to see the big backslide that you would if you just completely stopped strength training for the whole entire summer.

Which I will say, I, I have a few women who have decided to go that route, and obviously people's situations are different.

If I had an opportunity to go, I don't know, work on a cruise ship, I might not [laughs] strength train for the whole summer or, you know, if I'm, like, hiking across Alaska.

So, so obviously there are gonna be situations where, you know, you need to judge this for yourself.

But in general, I would say the best thing to do is to cut it back, minimum of twice a week full body sessions.

And these sessions can be fairly short.

As I've mentioned before, your first working set is really the one that is going to give you the most bang for your buck.

That's the one that's gonna stimulate your muscles the most.

So even if you were to go in and take your strength training program and do one set of each of your exercises instead of the normal two or three sets, that would already be a very good workout.

So, so you can shorten your actual workouts quite a bit, and that could help you [laughs] to be able to actually fit them in to your summer.

The key is to make sure that you're training with intensity anyway, right? You do want to make sure that you're getting close to muscular failure, and that means that you only have one or two reps left in the tank when you stop.

Personally, if I know that I'm only training twice a week and they're gonna be two days that are kind of far apart, so maybe Tuesday and Saturday, where I know I have a good recovery time in between, then I will go to one rep from failure or even to failure on some exercises to really push that as much as possible.

Because sometimes when we are training, we think we're one away from failure, but actually when we try, we're like, "Oh, yeah, I could actually do two." So that's kinda my logic with that, uh, is that I'm again kind of testing where my failure point is.

It's good to practice that every now and again with, with safe exercises of course.