I've been quietly avoiding my hardest training sessions.

Not skipping them entirely, just finding myself choosing a lighter version on certain days. One that doesn't leave me wrecked for the next four hours.

I only fully noticed it last week.

I was planning my day: clients in the morning, business work in the afternoon with training sandwiched somewhere in between. And I caught myself looking at the program, seeing what was scheduled, and thinking: not that one today. Lemme replace it with something I can recover from faster.

But I didn't frame it that way in that moment. I framed it as me being smart about energy management. Listening to my body. Training sustainably.

All of which sounds reasonable. All of which is also partly a story I was telling myself to avoid discomfort.

Here's the actual situation.

I coach clients every morning. It’s physical work. I'm switched on, I'm present, I'm moving barbells, weights, and sometimes the clients themselves around if the session's hard enough. By the time I get back and sit down to work on my business, my battery’s already at 53% (mentally and physically).

And what I've learned recently is that if I go and do a genuinely hard training session in that window, the afternoon just doesn't happen the way I need it to.

What usually happens then is I sit down to work and the quality of my focus is garbage. And I’ve been in this long enough to tell the difference between a body that's been pushed to its limit and a body that's been worked hard but has something left.

So I started making adjustments. Sensible ones like being flexible with the program or “managing output” across the day.

And somewhere in those adjustments, I started avoiding the sessions I actually need. The hard ones.

The movement that made my knee squeaky two weeks ago. The sled push whose whole purpose is to kick my ass at the end of the workout. The kind of things that hurt now but pay dividends later.

This is a thing that happens to those who have more than one demanding thing going on. And I'd argue that's most of us in our 30s and 40s. You're not a full-time athlete training for a competition where performance is the only variable. You have a job, or a business, or both. A relationship. Maybe kids (in my case expecting in about six weeks!).

The standard fitness advice has no framework for this and assumes that you can schedule your life around training. That recovery is just sleep and protein and you can optimize for both without trade-offs. That if you're not hitting the program exactly as written, you're failing at discipline, bro.

None of that maps onto an actual real life.

I’m finding that what actually requires discipline is not grinding through the hardest session regardless of what else is happening, but figuring out where the hard sessions actually belong in the day so you can show up for everything else too.

For me right now, that probably means shifting training to the evening. After the coaching, after the business work. So the depletion happens at the end of the day, so I'm nice and ready to wind down.

I don't have this 100% solved yet, so I’ll monitor what the adjustment does and keep working it out in real time.

But at least I know this much: the answer isn't to just keep making the hard sessions easier.

I'm curious where you're at with this.

Be honest. When you downgrade a session, what's actually happening?

Drop your answer below 👇

Genuine recovery call

Avoiding the hard work

No consistent slot in my day for it

Too drained by the time I get to it

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I've been quietly avoiding my hardest training sessions.