We have watched a lot of people go through a hard year while training here. Some come out the other side still lifting and some do not, and the difference is almost never willpower. It is usually what they decided to do in the first bad fortnight.
The honest minimum
Two sessions a week, sixty minutes each. That is enough to keep getting stronger for a long time, and it is emphatically not a holding pattern.
If two is not available, one session a week will hold most of what you have built. You will not progress much on one, but you will not go backwards either, and staying level through a difficult three months while remaining somebody who trains is a considerably better outcome than stopping and starting again in a year.
Two sessions is not a compromise
Worth stating clearly, because a lot of people arrive apologising for only being able to come twice a week. Plenty of our strongest members have trained twice a week since 2017. The reason is straightforward: a well planned session done twice a week, consistently, for years, beats four sessions a week done for six weeks at a time between collapses.
The programme in small group strength is written for two or three sessions a week as standard. It is the normal case, not the reduced one.
What to cut when the hour is not there
If you have got forty minutes rather than sixty, cut in this order:
- The finisher. Gone first, always. It is the least important part of the session.
- The second accessory exercise. Then the first, if you have to.
- A set from the main lift. Two hard sets rather than three still does most of the job.
What does not get cut is the warm up and the main lift. A twenty five minute session that warms up properly and does one lift well is a real session. Tell the coach when you arrive and they will write you the short version rather than watching you rush the long one.
The fortnight you miss entirely
This is the moment that decides things, and the mistake is almost always the same. People miss two weeks, feel bad about it, decide to come back when they can do it properly, and the two weeks becomes four months.
Come back to the next session on the timetable. Not a fresh start, not a new plan, just the next session. Expect to feel about a week behind where you left off, take ten percent off the bar for a session or two, and it comes back quickly. Two weeks off costs you two or three weeks. Four months off costs you most of a year.
The habit is more fragile than the strength. Protect the habit and the strength looks after itself.
Tired, or actually ill
Worth separating, because they get treated the same and should not be.
Tired means come in, drop the weight, keep the lifts, finish easy. People almost always leave feeling better than they arrived, and the training itself often improves that night's sleep. Sleep and recovery covers what to do with the programme in a bad run.
Ill means stay at home. Anything with a fever, anything in your chest, anything you would not want to share with seven other people in a small room. Come back when it has gone and start a little lighter. Nobody has ever lost meaningful strength to a week with a virus.
Booking as a planning tool
Book your two sessions for the whole month at once, on the same days each week, and treat them like anything else in the calendar with another person's name on it.
People who book weekly train when the week allows. People who book monthly train because the slot is already there. It is a small administrative difference with a surprisingly large effect, and it is the most useful thing in this guide.
When to pause instead
Sometimes the honest answer is that this is not a training month. A new baby, a bereavement, a serious stretch at work. In that case pause the membership rather than paying for sessions you are not attending, and come back when it lifts. You can pause for up to three months at a time and we will not ask why. The details are on the membership page.
What we would rather you did not do is quietly stop, keep paying, and feel worse about it every month. That helps nobody, and it is a slightly odd way for a gym to make money.
The long view
Nobody trains consistently for ten years. What actually happens is that people train consistently for eight or nine months at a stretch, have a poor month, come back, and do it again. Stacked up over a decade that looks remarkably like consistency, and it is the only version of this that has ever worked for ordinary people with jobs and families.
Aim for that rather than the version in your head where nothing gets in the way.