Dealing With The Waves of Life

Any normal adult life will have some more challenging patches both personally and professionally, this could be going through a divorce, moving house, changing job, having a baby, dealing with a health scare etc. The list of potential waves goes on. When we consider how much stress our system can take, everything including physical training needs to be taken into consideration. Sometimes, something has to give, and when that something is physical exercise the goal should never be to drop everything but rather to follow a plan that will allow you to maintain health while going through a more challenging period.

This is why having a default health plan ready to go when one of these waves hits is an excellent way to stay consistent with your health goals even when life stress is very high.

The Idea of A Default Health Plan

The default health plan is all about having a plan in place for when the waves of life get a little bit choppy and something has to give. It is a way to take a step back from more aggressive training to help mitigate life stress.

This Article Isn’t for Everyone

I am more than aware that a lot of individuals will not be able to apply this to their lives as they currently do not have an ingrained physical practice. Meaning there can be no default health plan and there is no current health plan being run. This article is for those who have been training for long periods of time and strive to continue our practices when life stress is high.

Principles of The Default Health Plan

Reduction in Both Intensity and Frequency

There needs to be a drop in both frequency (how often you exercise) and intensity (the difficulty of the exercise). If you are heavily into physical training this can be a very difficult pill to swallow, but remember, in the long term it will be the best decision for your health. Performing high frequency and high intensity training adds a great deal of stress to our bodies, when we accumulate that with high life stress the outcome is very rarely positive.

No New Stimulus

Adding in new stimuli is also very tempting, starting a new class or joining a new gym etc. The goal of the default health plan is to do what you already know how to do in order to keep it as simple as possible. If you are someone that loves trying new activities this can be difficult, but the last thing you need when things are unstable is to learn a new physical activity.

No New Habits

The activities you keep in your training plan should be activities that are already ingrained into your timetable. We are not looking to build new habits during this period, we are attempting to maintain the good habits we have built over the years while life has gotten stressful.

Mitigates Fatigue Rather Than Creates It

Exercise can create a lot of fatigue. If you have ever done a marathon training programme or tried to push your strength to your genetic potential you will be very aware of how much fatigue these endeavours can create. This is the opposite of the goal of the default health plan. The default health plan is something that will help you mitigate fatigue through moving in a way that pleases your body, not in a way that it creates more stress. The difference between running for one hour at a pace your body is comfortable with, compared to running for two hours at a pace that pushed adaptations to their max will have a big impact on your general feeling of life stress throughout the week. There is a time and place for both of these in any given year the key is to know when it is the time or not.

Strives to Maintain Rather Than Progress

As we are performing activities that help mitigate fatigue we are therefore not striving to progress in any of our physical activities. We are striving to maintain. Striving to maintain between blocks of striving to progress will create long term progress. Always striving to progress, not taking into account life stress will eventually lead to injury or overtraining.

Everyone’s Default Health Plan Will Be Different

No two individuals will have the exact same default health plans, but they will all follow the same principles. When I am striving to progress multiple physical characteristics I can exercise between 8 to 10 times a week, meaning in my default health plan I still have 5-6 training sessions but with a drastically reduced intensity. If an individual is currently training 5 times a week, they may drop this to 3 times a week.