How to Train Without A Plan

Everyone needs a plan. 99% percent of us like and thrive under structure. This is true whether we are inside or outside of the gym. Whether it’s our routine at work or our routine at the gym, all of us operate more efficiently and more effectively when the overall goals are broken down into a series of smaller steps that we can complete in some sort of intelligent chronological order.

Our brains like this and it brings us peace and comfort when we operate under a simple, detailed, structured plan.

In the gym, a plan keeps us from getting sidetracked. Leaning on decades of experience from great coaches, lifters, and athletes that came before us, we have some pretty good ideas of what works and what doesn’t. A plan is what gives us a purpose when we walk into the gym and it helps to curtail our own emotional subjectivity day to day.

When we feel lazy and tired, the plan tells us “suck it up, you’ve got two more sets to go!” It keeps us from justifying an early departure from the gym as we rationalize our way to the couch. The plan says 5×5. We can’t stop at 3 sets!

When we randomly get the urge to do something totally off the wall in the gym – the plan reels us back down to Earth. When we want to join a couple of gym buddies in that unplanned 20-rep squat challenge at the end of the workout – our plan says “hey, you’ve got to train again in 48 hours! Time to shut it down and go home!”

So here is the deal on plans – I’m obviously a fan. Hell, that’s basically what I do for a living – create training plans and systems for clients and help them stay on track with them.

However, after 15 years of coaching clients, I recognize something……….sometimes sticking with a rigid structured plan just isn’t going to happen. I’m a realist. I work with real people. With real jobs, real families, and real emotional and mental struggles. I don’t encourage or accept excuse making with my clients. I’m a firm believer that all of us have to own our own behavior. But at the same time – I allow for the fact that humans are going to be humans.

For most of the people reading this – training is a priority in life, but it isn’t the priority. Family, career, schooling, or even other interests and hobbies are in stiff competition with the gym as a top priority in most peoples’ lives. On top of that, we all tend to have ebbs in flows in our levels of motivation and discipline over the course of the year. For a variety of reasons, people get discouraged, they get confused, they get frustrated, and they get bored. Many people have a hard time articulating any actual long term goals with their training plan. Some people have goals that seem to change week to week.

All of these factors contribute to a trainee’s inability to stick to any sort of real structured training plan on a year round basis. When you’re slammed at work, when you’re discouraged and frustrated, when your goals are vague or absent you’ll miss more gym time. You’ll skip days, weeks, or even months. You get out of shape and weak and the cycle is perpetuated and amplified. You dread getting back under the bar – so you don’t.

When your life and your brain get in the way of your training you do dumb stuff in the gym. Mainly you will drift off your plan. You try programs and routines that don’t make sense for you. You chronically program hop from one thing to the next.

Understand this happens to a lot of people.

All this is an effort to “find a spark” of motivation. You’re in a rut, physically and mentally, and you are trying to get out. So you feverishly grasp at stuff. When you don’t instantly find “the answer” then you are on to the next thing. And so the cycle perpetuates and in a 2 month time frame, you’ve tried and quit 3 or 4 different programs and really haven’t made any meaningful progress. In fact, you may have regressed a bit physically. And mentally you’re probably even worse off. You are totally frustrated and discouraged.

So is there a fix?

Yeah. I believe there is.

First, understand this. Over the last 15 years of coaching clients I have seen a certain trend emerge over the vast majority of the clients I work with – most people who put in the work will usually get two really good long runs of progress during the year. Two. How long is each run of progress? Hard to say, it depends on the client, but we’ll assume at least several months…..let’s say 3-4 months minimum, maybe 6-8 months maximum.  This is a time where everything seems to come together and progress seems to come easy and fast. New PR’s are being broken, motivation is high, attendance is consistent, etc. This is when training is fun.

Have I ever coached a client where training has been like this 52 weeks out of the year? No. Unequivocally, no. And I have coached hundreds, if not thousands, of lifters, athletes, and personal training clients. No one makes progress 52 weeks out of the year. So there – now you can adjust your expectations a bit and cut yourself some slack. You’re going to have a few missteps during your year.

So why can’t we always sustain progress year round? How come we can’t leverage 4 months of steady progress into 12 months of steady progress?

Well, mainly it’s because most training plans can’t be sustained for 12 months before the body adapts to the stimulus and plateaus. Very aggressive plans that can be sustained for 4 months will overtrain you in 6-8 months. Very moderate plans peter out as well when a minimalist approach no longer provides enough stress to drive progress.

So when one training program that has worked for several months starts to falter – it’s not always a clear cut pathway on what to do next. Certainly for an inexperienced independent trainee, but even for an experienced coach like me, there is some guess work involved in programming for a client over a long period of time. And sometimes we guess wrong.

There is no guarantee that whatever adjustments we make to a client’s program are always going to deliver the desired outcome.

So sometimes this creates a little bit of a trial and error period between great runs of progress. Make no mistake, this is NOT program hopping – instead we are just trying to “dial it in.” But this takes time. You have to give a new program or program adjustment time to fail or succeed. If it fails then you’ve lost some training time. This is one of the factors that creates those “gaps” or that “dead time” during the year where trainees are just fumbling around in the dark trying to reignite some progress as they play with their programming. It really can’t be avoided, so try not to stress about it. Think logically, stay consistent, and be patient and you’ll find the right formula again.

Purposefully Not Planning

But the purpose of this article is not really a discussion on how to make minor tweaks and changes to programming that is starting to stall.

It’s important to understand that losing a few weeks or months work of time while you trial and error some new programming tweaks is not necessarily a failure – even if you don’t make any progress. You have to experiment a little bit to find out what works for you. That’s how you learn and grow as a lifter and coach. So I never think of learning as wasted time.   And at least you’re still training so whatever amount of stagnation/regression you experience should be fairly minimal and recoverable

The issue here is how to deal with and avoid those times during the year where our time in the gym is becoming completely unproductive and/or we are seriously regressing. We have no training plan, we are lost, confused, bored, tired, demotivated, and aren’t even really sure what our goals are anymore.

So again, what we want to avoid is the gaps in training where we experience serious regression because we are either (1) not training at all (2) training sporadically (3) engaged in silly bullshit and calling it training.

If we aren’t careful and purposeful, it can happen to any of us.

So here are my 6 recommendations for those times during the year where you just kinda know that adherence to a highly structured detailed training plan just isn’t going to happen with regularity. Follow these recommendations and you can get through the “dead times” without losing everything you’ve worked for in the last several months or years. Once life slows down a bit, you get your mojo back, or whatever needed to happen has happened, you can get back into a more highly structured progressive program.

#1: You Have to Get Under the Barbell at Least Two Times Per Week

The requirements for this are pretty minimal, but for maintenance I want you under that barbell for at least two sessions per week – once for the upper body, once for the lower body. If you can do 3-4 days that’s okay too. But remember, we are assuming that circumstances are making steady gym time difficult.  Either your personal life or career is eating up your available gym time, or your head just isn’t in training right now for any number of personal emotional reasons.   In situations like these it’s best not to over commit. Two days per week will suffice, and in many cases, might actually work better than 3-4 days per week.

#2: Workouts are Short & Focused.

No long drawn out full body sessions. If you know you have to go to the gym to Squat, Press, and Deadlift for a 2 hour marathon you’ll talk yourself out of it. But if you know you only have to go Press, or just go Squat…..the excuse list gets much shorter. If you get down to business during these workouts you can easily have them done in 30-60 minutes if time is an issue. Focus will be on one main lift per training session.

#3: Work up to a single at every session.

This doesn’t necessarily mean an all-out, all-time 1 rep maximum. Some people call this a “training max” or a “daily max”. Whatever you call it doesn’t matter to me. We are working up to a relatively heavy single. If it’s an all-time PR, great. If it’s not, that’s fine too – as long as it’s a challenging heavy single.

There are two reasons for this. First, strength is best maintained with high intensity efforts rather than with lower intensity volume work. And the main goal of this “unplanned plan” is maintenance of strength. If you accidentally set some new PRs in the process – even better. But high volume work is what beats you down physically and mentally over time. If you need that mental break from training, lay off the 5×5 and just pull a single. If you can keep your absolute strength relatively steady, it will be easier to bring up your capacity on volume work later on if needed. That becomes as much about conditioning as it is about strength. It will come back faster if you keep your strength up.

Second – if you aren’t following a really rigid plan, it’ll be harder to predict what your strength will be on a given day. Working up to a regular heavy single will give you an idea of where you are at on a given day and will allow you to operate within the normal ebbs and flows of your body’s ability.  So we aren’t necessarily basing everything we do today on what we did last week or last workout.  Of course you’ll have an idea of what you’ll be aiming for, but there is some wiggle room.

If we squatted 405×1 last time, 410 is a good number to aim for today.  However, if you feel great and can go hit 425, do it.  If you feel like shit and can only get 395 today, that’s fine too.

If you are really stressed outside of the gym (work, family, health, money, etc) your ebbs and flows will be more dramatic day to day, week to week. The daily singles approach will help you take advantage of the good days and just “do what you can” on the shitty days.

#4 Do Percentage-Based Rep Work Immediately Following Your Heavy Single.

Percentages aren’t always the most accurate method of programming in the world. This is mainly due to the fact that people are basing their percentages off of guess work or singles that were done 6 months ago and are no longer relevant. However, when used immediately following a heavy single, I have found percentage based training to be highly effective and highly accurate means of performing volume or rep work.

Because we are assuming that our performance on a daily/weekly basis is variable during this time in our training year, programming volume work can be difficult. But under this system, the guess work is taken out of it for you. You simply use a fixed percentage of whatever you were able to pull for a heavy single on that given day. In this way our rep work, like our single, is based off of where our body is at today.

I generally use a series of just two descending back off sets after the heavy single. The first back off set is 90% of the heavy single for a set of 2-4 reps. If your heavy single was an absolute ball-buster you’ll probably only manage a double. If it was a pretty easy single, smooth and fast, then you’ll probably get 4. If you can get more than 4 reps at 90% then your single was not heavy enough. If it’s at all close to being a maximum effort for the day, it will not yield more than 4 reps at a 90% back off.

Following the set at 90% I drop the load on the bar again and do a max-rep set at 80% of the heavy single. This will yield between 5-8 reps most of the time.

For example:  Deadlift – worked up to 525×1.  Follow with 475 x 2-4.  Then follow with 420 x 5-8.

Occasionally, if the single is VERY hard and slow (especially on a squat or deadlift) then we’ll alter the percentages. Back off set number one is a max-rep set at 85% for between 3-6 reps. Back off set number two is at 75% for between 6-10 reps.

Then we’re done for the day with that lift. 3 total sets. A single + two back offs for reps.

If that’s all you do for the day, then that’s fine. Mission accomplished.

#5 Do Assistance Work By Feel

Assistance work on a plan like this is truly a time where you can “free-wheel” a bit in your training. If you want to do a lot – do a lot. If you don’t want to do any, then go home. Remember why we’re doing a program like this in the first place – you’re burnt out, frustrated and bored. We not only want to get some progress going again in the gym, but we want to make training fun again. Let’s face it – barbell training can get really boring and monotonous. Do some stuff you don’t normally do. Stick to a loose template so you don’t get too off the rails.

On days where you Press/Bench, do assistance work for the chest, shoulders, and triceps. Barbells, dumbbells, machines, bodyweight. Don’t care. Have a little fun and experiment with new stuff. Treat this as a learning phase where you can identify some exercises that might actually be useful to you.

On days where you Squat/Deadlift do assistance work for the legs, low back, upper back, biceps, and abs. Don’t necessarily do everything. Just pick a handful of movements and give it a go. Never tried out the Reverse Hyper? Try it. Want to go outside on a nice day and do 100 lunges in the gym parking lot? Do it.

There isn’t anything you have to do except that main barbell exercise to start each session with, and nothing that is totally off limits (within reason).

#6 Vary Your Main Exercises Each Day

Now we are starting to sound a little like Westside Barbell. Nothing wrong with that. That program has worked well for a lot of people. We aren’t doing “Westside” but we are stealing from Louie’s methodology a bit.

Remember, we want to work up to a heavy single each session, ideally twice per week – once for the upper body and once for the lower body. Our focus will be on Squats, Deadlifts, Presses, and Bench Presses, but we can also use variants of those movements for our “heavy single + 2 back offs” approach.

There are physiological and psychological reasons for doing this. First, pulling up to a heavy single on the same lifts over and over again can cause you to stall out and get stale. By varying the exercises we vary the loads on the barbell and fluctuate the stress we are placing on our body. This is a good thing to keep from burning out. Second, one of the factors that may have derailed your training in the first place was simple boredom. An overdose of the same old same old can be a dagger through the heart of motivation and consistency.

Have some fun by learning and experimenting with some new lifts that you have never done or rarely do and you’re enthusiasm for training will start to increase.

Don’t go off the reservation with exercise selection. Just a few basic variants are enough to keep you interested. You don’t need to do a variation every time you train, but maybe alternating a variant with the main lift every other session is enough.

Below is a sample of 2 months of “training without a plan”. All lifts are performed for a heavy single followed by 2 back of sets at 90% and 80%. Lower body days can include a handful of assistance lifts for the legs, lower back, lats, biceps, and abs. Upper body days include assistance work for the chest, delts, and triceps.

 

Monday: Lower Body                                                                       Thursday – Upper Body

Week 1: Squat                                                                                                            Press

Week 2: Deadlift                                                                                                       Bench Press

Week 3: Front Squat                                                                                                 Axle Bar Press

Week 4: Rack Pull                                                                                                     Floor Press

Week 5: Squat                                                                                                            Press

Week 6: Deadlifts                                                                                                      Bench Press

Week 7: Safety Bar Box Squat                                                                                Push Press

Week 8: 3” Deficit Deadlift                                                                                    Close Grip Bench Press

So you can see that saying you aren’t training with a plan, is really not entirely true. You do have a plan. But it isn’t highly structured. It’s not rigid. It’s loose, flexible, and allows you to train at your given capacity on a daily basis. The “plan” allows you to pick and choose exercises based on what you want to do on a given day. And it’s a minimalist plan.

All of these factors combined will help pull you through those parts of the year where you just don’t know what to do. You can “coast” for a while with something like this. Once life slows down and you figure out your goals you can set up a more rigid structured training plan. And when you do, you won’t be starting all over again.