We’ve all been there. You spend 3 months working your butt off for a goal and now you’ve achieved it! Now what?
This is the place that we usually get stuck. Do you keep doing your training plan 3 times a week to hold on to what you’ve gained? Or do you just stop training that goal and move on to a new one hoping your results magically stick around?
The answer is neither of these options; what you really need is a maintenance program
A maintenance program is all about doing the absolute bare minimum so that your achieved goal is still accessible to you whenever you need it
Strength programs are pretty easy to create a maintenance program for. It essentially comes down to: what was your initial goal when you started your strength program? Do that. It really is that simple
Were you aiming to be able to do 10 chin ups in a row? Do one set of 10 chin ups once per week
Were you aiming to be able to do a 20sec meathook hold? Do one 20sec meathook hold once per week
Were you aiming to be able to run 5km without stopping? Run 5km once per week
Rehabilitation programs are a bit more complex to turn into maintenance. This is due to the fact that a rehabilitation program is all about stabilising a joint in most cases which is not a singular goal; it’s actually about 12 goals in one
The key to applying maintenance to rehabilitation programs is to put a single set into your warm up every time you train that joint and do the top-level exercises at a higher speed
If you’ve done a shoulder rehabilitation program then every time you do an upper body day at the gym, train your handstands or train on an aerial apparatus, one set of your final exercises should be included in your warm up
The easiest way to find out what you should be doing for maintenance is to ask your trainer or physio in a debriefing session once your goal has been achieved. Let your coaches do the work for you, that’s their job
Happy Training!
CirqueFlex 