Term Time Is the Best Training Structure You'll Get All Year

Term starts this week, and the week gets its fixed points back. Drop-off, pick-up, clubs on the same evenings they were on in June.

That matters more for training than motivation does.

August is hard to train through because nothing in it is fixed. No anchor points, no repeating slots, so every session has to be decided from scratch. A habit doesn't attach to a good intention. It attaches to something already in the diary that isn't moving. Drop-off doesn't move. Thursday football doesn't move. Those are the pegs.

So don't plan your training week. Attach it.

Take two fixed points that already exist and hang a session off each. The 9:30 or the 11am if you're at home once drop-off is done. The 12:15 on a Monday, Tuesday or Friday if you work locally or from home. The 5:30 or 6:30 if the morning is the only hour nothing else can claim. The 6pm or 7pm on the night one of the kids is at a club and you're out of the house already. Write the two down as class bookings, not as an intention. Book them on WodBoard on Sunday evening for the week ahead, both of them, before anything else lands in that slot.

Two things make this hold. The session has to be booked, not planned. And it has to be the same two slots every week, so by October you're not choosing at all.

One additional rule: when a slot gets taken — an inset day, a sick child, a meeting that moves — you move the session inside the same week rather than writing it off. Miss a Tuesday and wait for next Tuesday and you've already lost two weeks by half term.

Pick the two now, while the timetable is fresh and nothing has taken the gaps yet. Term is fourteen weeks. Two sessions a week is twenty-eight sessions between now and Christmas, which is more training than a lot of people manage in a year.

Use the timetable while it's there. January is a much harder place to start from than September.

Pick your two slots, then book a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com. No hard sell — most of us hadn't trained in years when we started.