Over on the 'Coaches Corner on Versus', Robbie Ventura and Joe Friel (expert endurance coach and founder of Training Peaks) talk about an issue common with all amateur triathletes: How do you deal with training setbacks? What happens if you have to miss a couple of workouts during the week? What happens if you have to miss a lot of workouts due to work, travel, or family?
Joe recommends that if you miss less than 3 days of training, just continue on as if nothing happened. You shouldn't try to come back and have an epic training day in an effort to "catch up" on your missed training. Your body has a hard time adapting to this sort of heavy sudden stress and you can end up setting yourself back further with injury, burnout or other over-training problems. You just have to accept the fact that these workouts were lost, and it's best for you to just move forward.
For longer periods of time you may have to make adjustments in your overall training plan. If it's more than 3 days, like a week, you may need to take a step back and repeat the week that you missed. If it's more than a week then you may need to step back a full cycle, and if its more than 3 weeks of training you may need to go back to your base period to re-establish your basic elements of fitness.
I've had to miss 2-3 days of training at times due to travel or other work/school commitments, and generally if I know I'll have to miss workouts what I try to do is load up a little bit more on the front and back end of that missed period to make up for it. It seems like that may not be the best idea. How about you guys, how do you handle missed workouts?
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