Why you shouldn’t try to “make up” for a missed workout

It’s a common dilemma for anyone with a training plan: You miss a workout and are filled with guilt. To compensate, you add those miles or sets to your next workout or try to do an extra run on your rest day. But according to professionals, this is not the right way to do it – you cannot prepare for athletic events like an exam.

When you miss a workout, “the temptation is to think, ‘Oh, I have to do more tomorrow,’” says John Raglin, PhD, professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Indiana University Bloomington. He advises athletes to be careful not to overload to compensate. RRCA-certified running coach Ashley Mateo agrees: “If you miss a single run, don’t even make up that run. There’s no point, just let it go,” she says. “A single workout will not make or break a training plan. The key to training for any race is consistency over time. You just want to show up consistently.

Raglin and Mateo aren’t just saying this to save you from guilt. When trying to catch up on your workouts, you run a few risks: “Certainly an injury, but also getting too tired, which can ruin your workout after that,” says Raglin. This is a phenomenon called “nonfunctional overreaching,” where athletes “train so hard that they start to lose ground instead of gain ground,” he says. Eventually, this can lead to overtraining syndrome, which, according to the National Strength and Conditioning Association, is characterized by a decrease in performance due to a long-term increase in training load without adequate recovery. Once you enter the realm of overtraining, it can take weeks or months to recover. So, “if you’re constantly tired or sore, have no motivation to run, and feel like you need to do it because your training plan says so, it’s probably your body telling you that you only need a minute,” says Mateo. .

Even though you might consider a missed workout to be rest and recovery, it’s still easy to get discouraged—and derailed—when it (inevitably) happens. “Fifty percent of people who start an exercise program end up quitting,” says Raglin, “And I think the issue of guilt and feelings of failure is responsible for a fair amount of those dropouts.”

So how do you move forward if you skipped a race or five? Well, first, you might want to change your mindset about your training program. “People download [generalized training plans] and they think that this is written in stone without understanding that they were made to be adapted to their lives”, says Mateo. The average athlete faces a number of stressors in life – work, kids, friendships, travel. And as much as it makes you feel good, exercise is just another type of stress: “You are putting your body under stress so that it becomes stronger by adapting to that stress,” explains Mateo. So when things get chaotic in one part of your life, you may need to cut back on exercise.

Next, if you missed a workout, you should ask yourself why. “Was it just because your schedule got out of control? Was it because you were feeling very tired?” Mateo asks. Understanding why you missed your workout can clarify how to move forward and help you adapt your program to fit your lifestyle and schedule.

If you’re the kind of overachiever who just can’t shake the feeling that you need to make up for what you’ve lost, Raglin recommends adding an extra 10 minutes of stretching or walking to feel like you’re doing something good for your body. . But ultimately, missing a workout is just an extra day off for recovery, which Raglin says is “often more helpful than harmful.”