The boring training week I can actually repeat

The week that actually happens

My training week is not optimised. It is not periodised. It does not look good in a spreadsheet.

It has one job: survive real life without breaking my chest or my schedule.

After a bypass in 2019, my cardiologist gave me clear boundaries. My recovery devices add more. The result is a week that looks boring on paper and keeps happening anyway, even when work at Ideebv is busy, a twin is sick, or the Dutch weather decides on horizontal rain.

Monday: exactly 20 minutes, no heroics

Monday is kettlebell day. Twenty minutes, not twenty-five. Not “as long as I feel like it.” Exactly twenty.

That number is not motivational. It is medical. It is the duration my cardiologist’s guidance and my post-bypass reality can tolerate without pushing my recovery score into the yellow the next morning.

The session itself is a custom complex in SecondsPro and deliberately boring:

• Swings
• Goblet squats
• Rows
• Push presses

I have done this same complex about forty times. That is the point. Boring means I do not have to think. Not thinking means I do not negotiate with myself. No “what should I do today,” no scrolling for inspiration, no new program rabbit hole. I open the app, hit start, and finish when it tells me to stop.

The value is not in optimising the exercise selection. The value is that Monday has a shape I recognise and can execute even when I slept badly or my brain is still in a client meeting.

Tuesday & Thursday: social anchors that happen to be exercise

Tuesday and Thursday are softball with the recreational team. These are not training sessions in the athletic sense. They are social anchors that happen to involve running and throwing.

I wrote about this earlier in This week on richardlemon.com — June 19, 2026.

They matter because they are immovable. I do not ask myself if I feel like going. The team expects me to show up. That external commitment is more reliable than my internal motivation, especially after a long day at Ideebv.

For consistency, this matters more than any clever program. Internal motivation fluctuates with sleep, stress, and how annoying your inbox has been. External expectation is flatter. The default is: it is Tuesday, so I go. Whether I am “on track” with training is irrelevant. I am on the roster.

Wednesday & Saturday: wildcard days, including “nothing”

Wednesday and Saturday are the wildcard days. The rule is that “nothing” is also fine.

Sometimes I do a second kettlebell session. Sometimes I walk to the office instead of cycling. Sometimes I do nothing because I coached the U12 team in the evening and that was enough physical output for the day.

The schedule does not break because I missed a session. It breaks when I try to make up for it with a double session that my chest does not want. So the wildcard days are deliberately soft. They can absorb chaos without demanding compensation later.

Sunday: just another day

There is no sacred Sunday long session. No weekly test. Sunday is just whatever fits around family, coaching, and recovery. Sometimes it is a walk. Sometimes it is nothing at all.

There is no single workout that defines the week, so there is no single workout that can ruin it.

Recovery is the plan, not the apology

After surgery, I learned that consistency is not about intensity. It is about not triggering inflammation.

More on this in my article Creatine At 57: My 12‑Week Strength And Focus Experiment.

The kettlebell is just a stimulus. The softball games are just context. The real plan lives in the recovery metrics:

• Apple Watch sleep average stays above 7 hours
• Weight trend stays flat or down
• Whoop recovery does not spike red

Those are the real scoreboard. If they drift the wrong way, “but I hit all my workouts” just means the plan is misaligned with the body that has to run it.

So the week is built around protecting those numbers. The kettlebell complex stays at twenty minutes because that is what the data and the cardiologist agree on. The wildcard days are allowed to be nothing because the goal is a stable system, not a heroic story.

When life happens, the week survives

This schedule survived a client deadline, a sick twin, and a rainout. In the past six months, there were weeks where I only hit one kettlebell session and one softball game. There were weeks where I hit zero.

The schedule did not require perfection. It required a default to return to. The boring week is the gravity well. I fall back into it because it is simple enough to remember even when I am exhausted.

Because the default is small and clear, it is easier to return to it than to invent a new plan. That is the real advantage of boring: it is reusable.

Read also The Morning a Yellow Recovery Score Overruled Me.

Consistency over ambition

On paper, this week will not impress anyone. One short strength session, two rec sports nights, and some flexible days is not a high-performance template.

For a body with a bypass and a full life wrapped around it, the trade-off is simple:

• Less variety in exercises, more reliability in execution
• Lower intensity per session, more weeks that actually happen
• Fewer “epic” days, more boring ones that quietly move the averages

I do not need a week that looks good on a whiteboard. I need a week my heart, my calendar, and my recovery data can all say yes to, over and over.

Right now, that week is boring. That is exactly why it works.