[ircommando]

I will be travelling to Asia for business in a couple weeks.  The ME phase of my training plan starts that same week.  That is definitely note going to work out for me and so I am just going to push out my plan and slot in my own workouts to deal with this.  My question is what should I slot in?  Travel to/from will be long but ok.  There is the potential to work 8-9 16-20 hour days in a row but if everything goes perfect then I will just work normal 8-10 hour days.

Dealing with exhaustion and lack of sleep will be a decision I make in the moment, but assuming that I do have a relatively normal work load what sort of training paradigm should I do?  I am likely to have one day where I can get out and run up literally thousands of steps, but other than that I will be working out in the gym hotel that has free weights, treadmill and stationary bike.  In order to avoid multiple days walking for multiple hours on a treadmill I was going to shift my week to be: travel, rest day (maybe ~1hr Z1), max strength, recovery workout, max strength, recovery workout, long Z1/Z2, rest day … rinse and repeat until I come home (11 days)  Or does max strength require more rest?

My experience with ME is that I should avoid it when I am likely to not sleep/recover much.  Are there other efforts that are similarly difficult to recover from?  Thanks,

Steve

[Scott Johnston]

Steve:

The most important thing to do when faced with a schedule like this is to not try to force training.  Not only do you have the time change to contend with and the sleep disruption that brings.  You may be working very long days.  In an 8-9 day period, I would get that big stair climb in since that is very specific to your goal. Make sure you are rested for that workout since it is probably the priority workout for the 8-9 days.   One or two max strength sessions should be doable.  You can probably fit in one or two Z2 treadmill runs. Trying to pack some training into each day is likely to bring you home exhausted. The consequence of that is that you will have had a compromised 9 days of training on the trip and may need a week to recover if you pushed it too hard on that trip.  You just want to do enough to not lose too much ground. Think of this as maintenance week and try to get home fairly rested so you can launch back to full training quickly.

Scott

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