Feedback on my weird training plan as I try to cope with life

Training Q&A [Moderated]
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I have posted here before about how difficult it is for me to stick with a training plan. I have ran a few BBM programs and I have good results. But I never can commit to a program for more than about 4-6 weeks.

I’m 39, my wife is pregnant with our sixth kid. I am an Associate professor who does a lot of field based research that is very seasonal, and I travel fairly often for scientific conferences and work related stuff. Often staying in hotels with pretty crappy gyms.

I might run a good program for a few weeks, and then life just derails me, I give up on barbell training and switch to dumbbell, kettlebell, or body weight circuits, or just do burpees for strength training. It’s very hard to be able to stick with barbells for a long time.

My priority is just general health, and I am getting 150 minutes of cardio most weeks (a bad week might just be 90).

My current plan is to start doing a whole body split three days a week, with a squat, hinge, pull, and press each day, but, with a barbell lift as the main lift, a dumbbell as the accessory, and body weight exercise as a tertiary.

My reasoning is that if I am traveling or really busy, I can still stick to two thirds of my program on the road and not fill so derailed all the time about not being able to train. This is mostly a mental approach to stop filling pessimistic about not being able to train the way I want.

Any thoughts or advice on how this may or may not be an idea or suggestions of a better approach.

Running something like Time Crunch is hard as I am both time and equipment constrained a lot of the year, but not always both constraints at the same time. I just want something I can really lock into for a few months and make some kind of progress. Whether it be getting my squat up, or increasing my pullups numbers, or hitting a strict Nordic.

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Hey David,

The way I interpret this is that it sounds like you are struggling with a bit of program perfectionism (relatable tbh). You’ve created a mental barrier where if you aren’t doing a specific barbell lift, you aren’t “training,” which leads to the cycle of quitting and restarting.

With six kids and a career in academia, your life is inherently high-variability. A static program is always going to fail you in this environment. So, we need a system over a rigid routine,

Your idea of a barbell/dumbbell/bodyweight hierarchy is a step in the right direction, but I want to think even less about the specific exercises. Instead, I want to think about them as tools to accomplish a goal.

The stress on your quads doesn’t know if it’s coming from a 140kg Barbell Squat, a 40kg split squat, or a BW pistol. If you are traveling and only have access dumbbells, you haven’t “derailed” the program; you’ve simply pivoted the tool to generate the stimulus. It doesn’t matter if somedays all of your exercises are BW-focused, just as if other days many of your exercises could be barbell based.

I’d think about having a barbell, dumbbell, machine, and BW exercise in rotation for each “slot”, rotating through them as needed for example. To do this, I would be using the Barbell Medicine App so you can easily swap exercises. f you find yourself in a hotel gym with only dumbbells, you can swap any barbell movement in your template for a dumbbell or bodyweight equivalent right in the interface. One benefit of doing it this way is that it tracks your progress across those variations. This solves your “pessimism” problem because you can see that you are still racking up volume and intensity, even if it’s not on a platform.

At age 39 with five (soon to be six!) children and a research career, your “progress” is going to look different than a 22-year-old’s due to life…not necessarily a difference in your physiological response. Some months, progress is a 5kg PR on your Squat. Other months, progress is simply consistency: not missing a session for 12 weeks regardless of whether that session happened in a power rack or a hotel room.

You’ve noted that you can’t stick to a plan for more than 4-6 weeks on your own. Given your constraints and your history of “giving up” when life gets busy, you are the prime candidate for 1-on-1 Coaching.

A coach does the “pivoting” for you. When you’re at a conference, your coach adjusts your week and gives you options so you stay on track. This removes the mental burden of decision-making, which seems to be where you are currently hitting a wall.

2 Likes
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Thank you for the nuance. I might give the Barbell medicine app another go. Last time I used it, it kept bombarding me with notification in the app to turn on notifications after turning off the notifications and it got annoying.

I also thought that if I changed the exercise mid block it would change the previous exercises in the block after completing them. But I never did test that.

I might try the coaching, but probably not until post baby as I might be doing very little workouts for a month or so.

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Copy that. We’re here when/if you need us.