"Shorty" Workouts...

Last Monday was a scheduled workout. When I came home from work I found my newly purchased copy of Helter Skelter had arrived and was waiting for me on our doorstep. I decided to read a bit of it for "just an hour or so" and then hit the weights. By the time I bothered to look at the clock again, it was nearly 8 PM and too late to do a full workout.

My schedule is fairly full between work, Combato and weight training. As it is now, even with free time, I'm still only able to cycle in to weight training days per week unless I wantt o be working out righ tbefore bed in the middle of the week. This is no good as it ordinarily take me two to three hours to cool down enough to actually get to sleep.

Rather than skip the training session entirely, I decided to chop it down o the bare minimum. I ended up doing the squats, dead lifts and my usual ab sets of heavy side bends and leg raises. Iwas able to get through this mini-session in less than an hour as opposed to the 60 to 90 minutes it normally takes me to do a full training session.

So for all of you who are in the habit of skipping your training sessions because you "don't have time, make a not of this:

1) Skipping sessions entirely throws off your bodies building and recuperration cycle.

2) Skipping sessions entirely retrains your mind and body to fabricate excuses to encourage you to stop training.

3) Once you acclimate into the "laze-off" habit, it becomes easier every time you do it.

4) The aforementioned habit trains you into a cycle of self-defeatism and your psychological and emotional response will be an decrease in self image and confidence.

The mini-sessions are NOT a replacement for a FULL ON training session. I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT recommend starting to do these extremely abbreviated sessions as a replacement for a full, sensible and effective program. What I am suggesting... is that ANY training session that forces you to work the core muscles is bettter than not training at all.

1) It keeps you programmed to train... and programmed to train on the days that you've scheduled.

2) It staves off the loss of strength you suffer when you do habitually skip sessions. One day skipped can often turninto a week or more. You're eventually looking at starting from scratchyet again.

Regarding the last point... if you're just starting out and are having motivational issues you've probably noticed that when you have made some pgrogress and then have allowed yourself to slip for a few days... which turns into a week or more... you lose A LOT of what you'd gained previously. This isn't so true of advanced trainees. They tend to retainmore strength and muscle mass during lay offs because they have far more of a reserve built up. They're probably eating better as well.

So this post ties in well with my Consistency post from a week or so ago. Train yourself to sopt accepting the fabricated excuses and faux logic for blowing of the training. That's traiing that you KNOW you should be doing. Occasionally skipping the full routine but still making yourself work will keep you honest and after a time will have you looking forward to fitting in the full trainng sessions.

I know that Monday night and for the following days, I was regretting not working in a little more that night. I wished I'd done the overhead presses as well. Friday nights session wil be a good test of whether or not I retained my limits by doing this "shorty" rather than not training. I'll let you all know.