Advice On Balancing Goals?

Bigger Stronger Leaner Christian Thibaudeau Coaching
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TL;DR, having trouble balancing training goals, because I like too many things, and it’s leading to training anxiety. Please help!

Hey CT (and anyone who feels chiming in),

I’m having a really hard time trying to balance training goals and was hoping you might have some advice.

I have such bad training ADD, and this can often lead to training anxiety because I can’t seem to settle on what I want to prioritize as my primary goal for a training block.

It always seems to go something a little like this: firstly, I get my training laid out to support my athletic endeavours (martial arts/combat sports/defence training for my job). But then I’ll question if what I have is frequent enough and enough volume to promote size and strength increases (because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to look good while strength training for their sport?). But if I increase training days and add exercises to promote that goal, I worry I’ll sabotage my energy for sport training. Then I worry that I won’t be able to include other training modalities like loaded carries and prowler work if I DO increase my training days, because that will further eat away at energy reserves, but my love of them creeps in and I want to make sure I get to train what I love. Then to further compound the issues, I start to think about stuff like active recovery days, mobility work, yoga etc and where I’ll fit them in if I’m doing all this other stuff, then I remind myself of my initial goal, and the cycle continues.

The above paragraph rambles on but it pretty accurately describes the mess going on in my thought process (speific things like carries and yoga and whatnot aren’t exact examples).

If I remember correctly, I think you’ve struggled with similar problems in the past, so I’m just wondering how you went about calming your brain down and sorting out everything you wanted to accomplish. Should I lay out all my goals, major and minor, plus training practices that I find fun and put them into short blocks that I can rotate through?

Any help is welcome help!

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I think you need to take a step back and try not to micromanage your training. I would revolve around what you love, Martial Arts. If it was me I would focus on my Size first, strength will follow as you pursue that. Remember you are training as a martial artist not for the next Powerlifting competition, so don’t think you need to get your squat to 500. after you get to your size, you can focus more time on your other goals and just maintain your gains.

Time seems to be everyone’s issue, so in my opinion you only need to lift three times a week. you can use that as a base to work the rest of your schedule around.

Energy: food = energy, so eat more if you are concerned. figure out what you are burning daily, and match that in food calories… if you want to get bigger then eat 250-500 more than what you burn daily, pending on how fast you want to grow. Meal prepping will help you with this. take the time on a Saturday and Sunday to do this. Trust me it will save you a lot of time and stress knowing that you don’t have to cook and clean the kitchen every day.

I hope Some of this helps you out,

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Totally helps! A lot of what you said was stuff I’ve been trying to convince myself of, but sometimes you just need an outside voice to make it sink in. Especially the food part.

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CT has a couple articles called The Four Seasons of Lifting on his ThibArmy site. It sounds like that would be right up your alley.

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Started reading over it. Liking the looks of it so far! Thanks for pointing it out.

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