Training in the Offseason
HOW TO KEEP ON KEEPING ON
Okay, so today we’ll wrap up this series on injury with the expansion of an idea raised last week: the tonic session.
Injury is one thing. But most of the time, the something wrong that is only part and parcel of a necessarily all-things-considered fitness practice, is (hopefully) rarely as dramatic. It’s just... not ideal.
It might be one or a collection of little things. Sometimes you can’t even put your finger on it, you’re not physically hurt, or even mentally cooked—just off. Any desire to train vanishes, and your internal monologue is making one watertight case after another:
It doesn’t matter today.
Who cares if you miss one session?
It’s freezing outside!
You’ve got too much on your plate.
…
It may have been happening for a while. Not just tired or unenthused. They’re part of it, for sure, but you’re irritable, your sleep is patchy, and you’re either not hungry or constantly craving rubbish.
But these aren’t just excuses. They’re symptoms.
All are symptomatic of a common problem: overtraining, otherwise known as non-functional overreach.
But you can rest easy. It’s not that. It’s a common problem, sure enough, but for advanced trainees/athletes, and vanishingly rare in the general population. Even ticking off the full set of these symptoms, there is next to no chance that you or I are overtrained. That’s the good news.
The bad news? We’re over damn near everything else. Overstimulated. Overwhelmed. Overtired. Over it. And while this will often go hand in hand with physical injury— a reality the discerning reader might have detected via my references to mood in the past couple of weeks, we all know this mental malaise can show up when we’re otherwise physically shipshape.
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
The reasons are many— too many to list. But here are the usual suspects:
Job stress or dissatisfaction
Poor diet
Sleep (too little or too much)
…
In the modern day, the inputs are endless, and the output is invariably burnout. But, while noting that the symptoms and contributing factors are often one and the same, now tell me with a straight face that adding ‘no exercise’ to the list will improve anything about this situation.
And yet, you can hang your hat on it. Instead of easing the burden by addressing anything on the (contributing) side of the ledger, the one thing that will help becomes the first casualty.
You stop training. Just until things settle down.
(facepalm)
And, in one respect, if I’m being very charitable, that makes some sense, because it’s true that training— even as a (positive) eustress, not distress— is a stressor nonetheless.
Every good training session breaks you—just a little. Enough to rebuild stronger, assuming you give your body what it needs to recover. With good nutrition, quality sleep and the requisite recovery, you will be better repaired and better prepared.
That’s the cycle: Break down, build better. And repeat.
But when it only adds to an already full-to-the-brim bucket, you don’t want to introduce any sort of ‘broken’ into the mix. And not only because our cup runneth over, but because if we already know our sleep is patchy, or our diet is rubbish, then whatever gets broken— even for good reason—isn’t getting repaired anyway, it’s staying broken.
But you can still train. Not to move the needle in a strictly fitness sense, but to be restorative in every other.
THE TONIC SESSION
There’s no recipe here—no prescriptive load, volume, or intensity. You scale it via the same autoregulation that guides every other session.
And that’s all well and good for sets and rep numbers in the moment, but we’re further acknowledging the body is also telling us things in a broader context, beyond the boundary or immediacy of a single training session.
So when you’re not sleeping well, when your diet is off, or you’re stacking any of the other symptoms described above—then it doesn’t matter how good you feel once you warm up. You dial things back.
That big-picture, all-things-considered view is critical. Not only because it’s possible to train the house down even when you’re feeling flat—it’s so common it’s a cliché. I’ve committed to just doing a warm-up and wound up hitting a PB more times than I can count. I’ve seen it happen many more.
But the reverse happens too. You rock up ready to smash it out of the park, and your warm-up says otherwise. It’s far less common—but only because we forget the most obvious thing in today’s hype-and-hustle, motivation-memed fitness culture:
Most days you won’t feel like it.
Training is like writing. I enjoy having written. I enjoy having trained. But not the process itself so much.
It’s usually meh, at best. On some days, it’s best not to think about it, because when intensity and volume are peaking, you should feel a little afraid before a session. Training is not meant to tickle.
That’s why we don’t let emotions run the show. And why, if you do, you can forget about being fit. But even when you’ve shown up, our subjective evaluation isn’t always the best guide. So let your body confirm the bigger picture, not override it.
When it’s a simple case of the CBFs—that is, with no other supporting evidence— knuckle down and get on with it. But with other red lights on the dashboard, you need to reduce the nervous system toll that comes with high loads or maximal effort.
Even then, a tonic session— like any active recovery— can be far more intense than you think.
Can be. Not, must be.
Even if you’re erring well on the side of caution, you can get a sweat up, feel the endorphin kick, and help everything else along. Again, fitness is not the point here, but it does serve as a placeholder—so you can pick up right where you left off when normal programming resumes.
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
Of course. Showing up is the defining property of a fitness practice. And just the idea of a tonic session gets me and other Leftfielders out of bed on the hard days. Not just because full-noise training would keep us under the doona, but because we know we’ll be better for it—in every respect.
But there’s a caveat to consistency.
You can show up like clockwork, but only ever train within your capacities. Never push. Never test. Never need to recover.
Your body needs a good reason to change. And we have a long list of physiological demands requiring our attention. And this will always be so. So use a tonic session to help towards that end—not a hall pass excusing effort whenever the stars don’t align, because that’s the downward spiral:
Unmotivated> no training> no results> unmotivated.
And so, a tonic session—and echo to that other Leftfield maxim: ‘do what you can’— is both a reality check and a responsibility.
The responsibility to ease up when needed.
The responsibility to get to work otherwise.
A tonic session doesn’t just keep the habit (of training) intact, it reinforces identity — are you somebody who trains or somebody who doesn’t? As with any other training quality— strength, power, speed, endurance— you are always, inescapably, making yourself more or less mentally resilient.
So which is it?
Noting, as ever, that in making a case for mental fortitude here— as with the keep-training rehab model— is not a dismissal of your stress, distress, or situation but is to demonstrate true concern, care and respect for body and mind.
As the evolutionary mismatch of our lives makes burnout the baseline, we’ve seen a corresponding commodification of health with someone or something all ready to step in under the misnomer of ‘wellness’, but don’t kid yourself.
Get outside in the early morning. And train.
This is what your body and mind truly need and will respond to. Not to the exclusion of other factors like diet and sleep, but because this will usually recalibrate those as well.
And not just when everything is going great guns, or even when they’re a little off. But when they really go sideways.
THE STORM
Getting up and running when we’re a bit down in the dumps is one thing, but what about when it is more serious? In cases of grief, relationship breakdowns, depression, career implosions, parenthood fatigue, etc.
You know what I’m going to say.
But look, I have been as guilty of this as much as anyone. Not with training, but for me, meditation was, for a long time, very much a fair-weather friend. Rock-solid reliable until something came up, and then I would let it slide.
A big part of that problem was that— in addition to all the reasons above— I find training helps because the body can be a refuge from the mind. The mat, less so. But while it’s important not to view meditation as transactional, what good is training the mind if it’s only going to go AWOL when things get bumpy?
And so I noticed the problem.
And I stuck to it. Even though it was more difficult than normal.
And I noticed the result.
And then it only made sense to continue.
The same process—should you have any doubts—that will confirm everything you’ve read thus far. As ever, I’m not interested in making your life harder.
Anybody can train when they feel motivated, but a practice is built on the other days—all of them. For much of life training, meditation or whatever, that’s typically all it ever is— keep on keeping on. And you do that simply by getting yourself to the other side of a bit of knee-jerk discomfort.
Notice what it does for you, and it’ll take care of itself.
It will take care of you.
And especially when you’re unmoored from all the usual landmarks, because there’s an interesting paradox here.
When the bad days are furthest from your mind, everything is going well, and the practice is at its most —for want of a better word —complete, the support and structure it offers is like a connective tissue throughout your life—an intricate gossamer latticework, and nearly invisible.
But when life hits hard and your practice is pared all the way back, sometimes reduced to a single solitary thread keeping you tethered to something — then it feels as sturdy, as solid as a handrail.
And it is.
While much of fitness is rightly focused on driving performance and pushing the ceiling, with a fitness practice, it’s just as important to find the floor: a supportive, nurturing, constant in the chaos.
When the lowest scaling of volume and intensity is a literal walk in the park, any exceptions— the most dire physical and psychological instances— only prove the rule: that training, scaled appropriately, is always an act of care.
And not just an act of care, but of broader positive effect— the best thing to ‘do’ about it.
Good times and bad. And everything between. A two-word psalm that will unerringly steer you straight to physical and psychological salve.
Train anyway.
____
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI