Training
Five sessions a week, sixty minutes each, all in the same early hour, all fasted. The hour is fixed. Almost nothing inside it is.
N=1, not medical advice. This is one person’s log, tuned to one set of injuries and constraints. Nothing here is a recommendation.
Last updated . This page changes when something changes, not on a schedule.
The week
Two rest days, five active ones, four different modalities. Three of the five are taught by someone else, which is deliberate — see below.
| Day | What | Who programmes it |
|---|---|---|
| Mon | — rest | — |
| Tue | Spin, ~45 min, high throughout | Instructor |
| Wed | Yoga — vinyasa / flow | Instructor |
| Thu | Calisthenics — skills, strength, conditioning | Instructor |
| Fri | — rest | — |
| Sat | Yoga, padel or tennis — picked that morning | Weather and recovery |
| Sun | Full-body gym, autoregulated | Me, the night before |
The mix is strength on Sunday, a skill-and-strength hybrid on Thursday, hard cardio on Tuesday, mobility and flow on Wednesday, and whatever Saturday turns out to be. If you were looking for the interval work, it’s Tuesday — it isn’t a block inside a gym session, it’s a whole day of its own.
Why it’s built this way
Most training advice assumes the hard part is discipline, and prescribes sameness to solve it: one programme, fixed anchor lifts, linear progression, the same four sessions every week for twelve weeks. That works for a lot of people.
It does not work for me, and not for a reason I can push through. Monotony is my failure mode. When things stay the same I disengage — not gradually, and not because I lack the will to continue. So a programme that requires sameness to work is a programme that will be abandoned in week five, and a programme abandoned in week five is worse than a slightly suboptimal one still running in month nine.
So the design constraint here isn’t stimulus. It’s engagement. Everything below follows from that:
| Standard advice | What I do instead |
|---|---|
| Fixed programme, anchor lifts, linear progression | Anchors plus rotation menus |
| The same session every week | Same patterns, different movements |
| Optimise it, then lock it in | Review every three to six months, deliberately change something |
| “Stay consistent” = do the same thing daily | “Stay consistent” = keep showing up; what I do can vary |
Outsourcing three days a week to instructors is part of the same idea. A live class is different every week without me having to invent the difference, and turning up to a class at a fixed time is a much smaller decision than designing a session at 07:15.
What this costs. It is not free, and pretending otherwise would make this page useless. Rotating movements every week means no clean progressive overload on any single lift, no reliable strength numbers, and no way to tell whether I am actually getting stronger or just staying busy. I have accepted that trade. It is a real cost, not a clever workaround, and if the recomp goal stalls this is the first thing I’d re-examine.
The Sunday session
The one day I programme myself. Planned the night before based on what I feel like training and what I want to avoid that week. Never the same twice, but it always fills the same slots:
| Block | Pattern | What I rotate through |
|---|---|---|
| Warm-up | Mobility + activation, ~5 min | Band pull-aparts, hip openers, a lighter version of the first compound |
| Compound 1 | Hinge or squat | Trap-bar or conventional deadlift, RDL, back or front squat, goblet squat, lunges, Bulgarian split squat, hip thrust, leg press |
| Compound 2 | Push | Bench (barbell or dumbbell), incline, overhead press, loaded push-ups, dips, flyes |
| Compound 3 | Pull | Pull-ups (bodyweight or weighted), lat pulldown, barbell / dumbbell / cable row, face pulls |
| Accessory | Single-joint or unilateral, optional | Lateral raises, biceps, triceps, single-leg work |
| Core | Various | Planks, hanging leg raises, ab wheel, Pallof press, dead bug |
| Finisher | Conditioning, not every week | Rower, wall ball, kettlebell swings |
The gym has bands and CrossFit kit alongside the normal equipment — rower, bike, wall ball, plyo box, rope — which is most of why the finisher column has anything in it at all.
The mobility menu
Five to ten minutes a day. The point is that it is a menu, not a routine: I look at it, pick three or four drills that appeal or that match whatever feels stiff, do them, and stop. Same reasoning as everything else on this page — a fixed daily sequence is a sequence I will stop doing.
Shoulders and upper back — pick one or two
- Band shoulder dislocations — 2 × 10
- Wall slides — 2 × 10
- Prone Y/T/W raises — 2 × 8 each
- Doorway pec stretch — 30 sec each side
- Thread the needle — 8 each side
- Light banded face pulls — 2 × 15
- Foam roller thoracic extensions — 1–2 min
Hips and lower body — pick one or two
- 90/90 hip rotations — 8 each side
- Kneeling hip flexor stretch — 45 sec each side
- World’s greatest stretch — 5 each side
- Pigeon — 1 min each side
- Cossack stretch, unloaded, partial range — 8 each side
- Couch stretch — 45 sec each side
- Banded hip openers — 10 each direction
Spine and core — pick one
- Cat-cow with thoracic rotation — 8 each direction
- Bird dog — 8 each side
- Dead bug — 8 each side
- Open book — 8 each side
- Supine spinal twist — 30 sec each side
Neck and traps — pick one, most days
- Upper trap release, hands or lacrosse ball — 30 sec each side
- Levator scapulae stretch — 30 sec each side
- Chin tucks — 2 × 10
- Suboccipital release, towel under the skull — 1 min
When even the menu is too much structure
- Five minutes of moving through whatever feels stiff
- Five minutes of any yoga sequence on YouTube
- Five minutes of dancing, shadow boxing, or messing about
The goal is daily mobility input without monotony. If picking from a menu starts failing too, that means the menu isn’t varied enough and the answer is to go more freestyle, not to add discipline.
The rest of the library — every strength, core and finisher movement the builder draws from, with what each one needs and an ordinary starting load — is written out on the movement library page.
What I train around
Three things shape what does and doesn’t appear in a session.
Right knee — five years, unresolved
Sharp posterior pain with no warning, and only ever on deep flexion combined with rotation. Cossack squats are the reliable trigger. Completely absent in normal life, which is exactly why it has gone five years without a proper diagnosis. An ultrasound years ago came back clean, but ultrasound is not the tool that would find what this probably is.
- Out: Cossack squats, deep ATG squatting with rotation, anything that reproduces it
- Fine: every standard squat pattern at non-deep range, lunges, single-leg work above parallel
Left trapezius and neck — recent
Turned up in May 2026, probably downstream of the shoulder mobility problem rather than its own thing.
- Out while tight: loaded shrugs, heavy overhead pressing
- In: scapular work — face pulls, band pull-aparts, prone Y/T/W — and neck mobility most days
Shoulder mobility deficit
The upstream issue. Band work, and the shoulder half of the mobility menu.
How I track it — and what that misses
Whoop, for strain, recovery, HRV and resting heart rate trends, and sleep. Plus how training subjectively feels, plus whether the body composition is visibly moving. No fixed anchor lifts, no logged PRs.
Whoop is good at cardiovascular load and recovery over time. It is blind to everything strength-related: it cannot see a lift going up, a lift going down, or a muscle group being quietly neglected for two months. So the honest description is that I have detailed data on the part of training I care about least, and no data at all on the part I say I want to improve.
When recovery comes back red or yellow I swap the planned session for yoga or a walk. That part I’m confident is right.
Questions this page answers
Why not just follow a fixed programme?
Because monotony is my failure mode, and not for a reason I can push through. A programme that requires sameness to work is one that will be abandoned in week five, and a programme abandoned in week five is worse than a slightly suboptimal one still running in month nine.
What does rotating movements every week cost?
No clean progressive overload on any single lift, no reliable strength numbers, and no way to tell whether I am getting stronger or just staying busy. That is a real cost, accepted deliberately, not a clever workaround.
Why a mobility menu rather than a mobility routine?
Because a fixed daily sequence is a sequence I will stop doing. The menu is five to ten minutes: look at it, pick three or four drills that match whatever feels stiff, do them, and stop.
What isn’t working
The section that makes the rest of this page worth reading.
- The mobility menu is aspirational, not yet a habit. It is written down and the theory is sound. It is not happening daily. There are active mobility issues and currently one structured input a week, which is Wednesday yoga. This is the biggest gap on the page.
- Sunday has no volume check at all. Full autoregulation with no record means I cannot tell the difference between rotating intelligently and simply avoiding the things I don’t enjoy. A phone note after each session would settle it. I don’t make one.
- Tuesday might be too expensive. Forty-five minutes of high-intensity fasted cardio, stacked on a high-stress baseline. If Wednesday recovery is consistently poor, the honest read is that the session is costing more than it returns, and something — the fasting, the intensity, or the day — has to give.
- “Recomp” is not a training problem. It sits at number three on the goal list and the training week is already well positioned for it. Calorie balance is the actual lever, and it lives on the nutrition page. Adding training volume here would be solving the wrong thing.
- No zone 2 work. Relevant to the longevity goal, absent from the week. Saturday could absorb it without costing anything. Hasn’t happened.