The slot that never moves

Christie is in the 7am group, four mornings a week.

She is also as time poor as anybody I train. Eight to ten hour days as a matter of routine, and days of twelve to fourteen often enough that they are not remarkable to her.

By any sensible reading she is the woman who does not have time to train. She is the exact person the phrase was invented to describe.

What she does instead

She blocks out 7am and nothing is allowed to have it.

Not a meeting that could go early. Not a favour. Not the general drift of a busy life expanding into any space you leave it. That hour is hers, it is the only part of the day that is purely hers, and it does not move.

That is the entire mechanism. There is nothing clever underneath it.

Why the fixed slot is the whole thing

Here is what I have watched happen to the women who train when they can rather than at a set time.

Something comes up on Tuesday, so Tuesday moves to Wednesday. Wednesday is already tight, so it moves to Thursday. Thursday is gone by then, so it becomes next week, and next week they are starting from a standstill again and it feels harder than it did, because it is harder than it was.

Nothing in that chain is a discipline failure. Every single link in it is reasonable. That is precisely why it works so well at dismantling a training week.

A fixed slot is not motivation. It is a decision you make once instead of forty times a year.

Where it got her

What Christie wanted when she started was to turn fifty feeling, looking and being in the best shape of her life.

In the weeks before her fiftieth birthday she set a personal record on every single lift. Not most of them. Every one.

She walked into that birthday on top of the world.

She is now being prepared for a marathon and for the biggest hike she has taken on. She did not start anywhere near there. It was built slowly, over a long time, in one protected hour at a time.

The work ethic matters. The consistency matters more. Protecting the hour is what made both of them possible.

If time is your reason

I want to be careful here, because “I do not have time” is usually treated as an excuse to be argued with, and it is not one. Most women who say it to me are telling the plain truth about their week.

So I am not going to tell you that you have time. You might genuinely not.

What I will tell you is that finding a spare hour and protecting a fixed one are different problems with different answers, and almost everybody attempts the first one. Christie attempted the second.

Three sessions a week is what I recommend. The women it works for are almost always the ones who decided when, once, and then stopped deciding.