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Post by willblack on Sept 14, 2016 15:40:51 GMT -7
So I'm currently in nursing school and also working quite a bit, and I've never been busier. I'm still motivated to train and have no doubt that I'll find a way to make time, but I'm curious about the craziest schedules people have worked around and still been able to train and see improvement. Right now the main things I'm struggling with are inconsistency in my schedule and managing the time demands of work and school. Every day I get up at 6am and 4am once a week for clinicals, and a couple days a week I work late and don't get to bed until 1 or 2am. My program is super demanding so I probably spend 5hrs a day studying on average and class takes up a lot of time, but I'm sure there's someone out there who has had less time, less sleep, more obligations, and has managed to train really hard/smart and see great improvement.
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Post by jetjackson on Sept 14, 2016 18:24:14 GMT -7
Training partner of mine has pushed through a fair bit of training despite having a newborn.
I think the key is to create a training program that is flexible, and when you're training, really push up the intensity - short, sharp, intense sessions.
Accept that you're going to feel crap half the time going into a training session.
Try and plan your macro cycle around the ebbs and flows in your study cycle. I try to do power and hangboard cycles during my busy periods, because I generally take 2 days of rest between those workouts, which allows for me to do other things with my life.
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Post by Lundy on Sept 14, 2016 19:32:05 GMT -7
Hey Will,
Sounds pretty manic. My suggestion would actually be the opposite of Jet's - I also live a pretty crazy lifestyle, and the way I manage to train consistently is to be super rigid in my schedule. So I roll out of bed at 4:45 or so; hit the garage gym for two hours 5 days a week (2 days finger training (HB, Campus, or LBC), 2 days weights, 1 day ARC (one of those is usually on a weekend, so I get one "sleep in" until 7a every week); come upstairs and get the kids up and out the door (I have a one year old and a three year old); am at work from about 8:30 to 5:30; home by 6:00 (except one night a week I'm an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown, so I'm home around 10:00) and helping with the kids and dinner prep; then dinner, play with kiddos, bedtime, clean the house, and back to work from about 8:30 to 10:30 or so. So I'm pretty on the go from about 5a to 10:30p. I then usually turn the tv on for half an hour to do my best vegetable impersonation, then to bed at 11:00.
All that to say, the way I can make it work is the structure of my day. I found the same thing when I was in college. I was an elite swimmer, and my day was super structured to fit in 4 hours of workout + class + studying. When I stopped swimming after my junior year, I had so much less on my plate that I basically didn't get anything done, and my grades totally suffered!
So, at least for me, what works is having a really good plan and sticking to it. I've been on the above schedule for a bit over two years (starting when my first daughter was 1, and through the birth of my second daughter), and I have seen really good progress. The only change I've had to make is that I take about three or four days off every three weeks or so, just to catch up on rest and let my body recover a bit.
Hope some of these thoughts are helpful. I'm happy to go into even more gory detail if you think it'll help...
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Post by aikibujin on Sept 14, 2016 20:27:45 GMT -7
So I roll out of bed at 4:45 or so; ... then to bed at 11:00. So you can function roughly on 5.5 hours of sleep a night? That's special. I can barely stay alive with 7 hours of sleep a night when I'm being active. |
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Post by Chris W on Sept 15, 2016 4:00:50 GMT -7
The good old RCTM didn't come out until after I was done with my education and training, but I've been through similar situations. I used to work between 50 and 80+ hours per week during those times and was still able to find some time to train. I got married and had a child in my last two years of residency. I also, quite literally, have nightmares where I'm back in those days...
Currently, I have 3 kids, are 5 years, 3 years and 8 months. I work much less now, about 43 hours per week including driving time. My schedule alternates between a week of mornings and a week of evenings. If I'm not working or training, I'm helping with the kids.
1) Going to school and working at the same time is pretty tough. Try to be efficient with your studying time
2) Planning, scheduling and discipline is super important. When I work mornings, I'm up at 04:30, in bed by 21:00 or earlier
3) Sleep is pretty vital. Sleep is when you improve; training is how you stimulate those improvements
4) Training at home is pretty critical for saving time
5) I don't spend nearly as long on my training sessions as what is prescribed in the book, and I am still improving. My warm ups are much shorter, my ARC sessions are almost always limited to two sets, my warm up boulder ladder is much shorter during my power and PE sessions
6) I get very little outdoor climbing time and maximize it when I have it.
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Post by Lundy on Sept 15, 2016 6:34:28 GMT -7
So I roll out of bed at 4:45 or so; ... then to bed at 11:00. So you can function roughly on 5.5 hours of sleep a night? That's special. I can barely stay alive with 7 hours of sleep a night when I'm being active. I get 5.5 hours of sleep four nights a week - I train early mornings Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, so Wednesday nights, Friday nights, and Saturday nights I usually get about 7.5 hours. It is tough, but not impossible. It also is the reason why every three weeks I take three or four days and get 8+ hours of sleep per night to try to catch back up. |
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Post by MarkAnderson on Sept 15, 2016 9:01:29 GMT -7
I think it really helps to have a standard schedule, whatever it is. The hardest situation for me to deal with is uncertainty about what or when I'm training. That forces you to make training decisions on the fly, which is never good.
It sounds like your schedule is not as repetitive as some others' (like Lundy's), but I bet there are patterns. I would figure out a standard routine for days when you work early, days when you work late, and days when you work long (early and late). If you can create a repeatable system that provides a regular plan for dealing with all those situations it will help a lot. If you know your work schedule a week or more in advance, you can lay out your training for the ensuing time period based on the schedule. You may have to tweak the number and spacing of rest days so they coincide with your long work days (for example), but hopefully you can come up with something that works.
It can also help to realize this phase of your life is temporary. It might make sense to make some sacrifices in your training approach now, and then ramp back up to the desired level when your life settles down a bit. You may also want to emphasize the most time-efficient methods of training, and ditch the comprehensive approach for a while (for example, just hangboard, and forget about any type of volume climbing).
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Post by jetjackson on Sept 15, 2016 11:51:12 GMT -7
So you can function roughly on 5.5 hours of sleep a night? That's special. I can barely stay alive with 7 hours of sleep a night when I'm being active. I get 5.5 hours of sleep four nights a week - I train early mornings Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, so Wednesday nights, Friday nights, and Saturday nights I usually get about 7.5 hours. It is tough, but not impossible. It also is the reason why every three weeks I take three or four days and get 8+ hours of sleep per night to try to catch back up. I guess having children has taught you to operate on little sleep. I need at least 7 hours on average, across the week to be functional, and find that whilst I can catch up on the weekend, my body usually wont sleep for more than 9 hours, regardless of how tired I am. |
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Post by daustin on Sept 15, 2016 12:38:17 GMT -7
It can also help to realize this phase of your life is temporary. It might make sense to make some sacrifices in your training approach now, and then ramp back up to the desired level when your life settles down a bit. You may also want to emphasize the most time-efficient methods of training, and ditch the comprehensive approach for a while (for example, just hangboard, and forget about any type of volume climbing). I think this is an important point. Over the past 9 months, my work schedule has been crazy, I bought a house with my then-fiancee, and got married to my now-wife. The house is in the Bay Area (aka, house hunting hell) and our wedding was on the east coast where we're from. Between planning those things out and work, I really didn't have the bandwidth to pursue another hobby and my climbing/training really suffered. In some senses, I was 'lucky' that I sustained a pulley injury right around the time that the rest of my life started getting in the way, so I would've had to take a break from climbing regardless of everything else that was happening. But even when my finger healed enough to climb, I consciously hit 'pause' on any attempt at structured climbing or training -- my day-to-day was just too unpredictable and I didn't want to put myself in a position to be constantly blowing off my unrealistic training plans. My work schedule is relatively back to normal, but more importantly -- the house and wedding are behind us now, and I'm back on the training wagon. The first few sessions back were pretty rough, as to be expected, but I was pleased to find that when I returned to the hangboard, I felt as strong as ever, and even though I was pretty conservative with my baseline resistance, I'm on track to easily hit PRs across a number of grips. If you think that you'll be this busy for a few months but then get back to a more manageable schedule, it might just be worth hitting 'pause'. In the long run, it probably won't derail your progress to any noticeable degree. If you think you'll be this busy for the next 12+ months, then I think Lundy's and Mark's suggestions as to finding a way to get super-structured is probably the best bet. |
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Post by alexandra on Sept 15, 2016 19:02:03 GMT -7
I am assuming that the "then finance" and "now wife" are the same person, but the sentence originally parsed differently in my head and i thought, wow, these have been some busy 9 months!  |
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Post by daustin on Sept 15, 2016 19:26:14 GMT -7
LOL! Yes, they're the same person. If my year had been that busy, I don't think I'd have enough time to post on these forums! |
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Post by Lundy on Sept 15, 2016 19:36:59 GMT -7
I am assuming that the "then finance" and "now wife" are the same person, but the sentence originally parsed differently in my head and i thought, wow, these have been some busy 9 months! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Ooooooh I needed that laugh today. |
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Post by aikibujin on Sept 19, 2016 21:08:20 GMT -7
I get 5.5 hours of sleep four nights a week - I train early mornings Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, so Wednesday nights, Friday nights, and Saturday nights I usually get about 7.5 hours. It is tough, but not impossible. It also is the reason why every three weeks I take three or four days and get 8+ hours of sleep per night to try to catch back up. I gotcha. Some people can just function on less sleep than others. I get around 6-7 hours of sleep every night, but I feel that's just barely enough. Any less than that for even a day I start to get weaker from workout/climbing, and I easily get sick (like now). |
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