Build a System, not a contingency plan
Setting yourself up for less disappointment
“The devil is in the details” is a phrase worth respecting but also one that’s easy to misuse.
Too often, athletes read so far into the weeds that they lose sight of the only thing that actually matters: what’s happening right now.
They ask or say:
“What do I do when I stop improving?
“What adjustments do I need to make, coach?”
“I just want to be ready.”
Wanting to be ahead of the curve is a defining trait of successful athletes when it’s done correctly. But embedded in each of these questions is an assumption: something is bound to go wrong.
Maybe it will.
Maybe it won’t.
Planning for uncertainty is hard to do, perhaps useless and often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t need to ignore the possibility of problems. That is reckless. But you do want to stop living in them before they exist.
This week, we will discuss how to frame your planning ahead so that you can focus on the present and establish a System that kicks into gear when you may be running into issues.
The cost of adjustment
Are you one step ahead or are you stepping out of adaptation early?
Every change to volume, intensity, frequency, or structure carries a cost. You’ll know this if you have read the article below:
When those changes are made too early, they interfere with the very adaptation the athlete is chasing.
Training works through exposure and accumulation. The body (and mind) doesn’t respond to single workouts, but rather repeated signals over time. When the signal changes too frequently, the message becomes unclear. The athlete ends up training hard, but not long enough in any one direction to fully adapt.
There is also a psychological cost.
Frequent adjustments teach the athlete to distrust consistency. They begin to associate discomfort with danger and variability with safety. Over time, this creates an athlete who is constantly scanning for problems instead of executing the work in front of them. That is a reactive approach rather than a deliberate one.
As we have seen, each new adjustment adds variables. Was it the new intensity? The reduced volume? The extra rest day? When performance improves or declines, the athlete no longer knows why. The plan loses clarity, and with it, confidence.
If you constantly chase a better plan, you bleed valuable time that could be focused on persistence which is often far less costly than the stresses of constant change.
Presence is a skill
Attention is a limited resource. As an athlete, you are often faced with a choice:
Execute today’s session well
Mentally rehearse hypothetical scenarios
Rarely can you do both effectively.
When an athlete starts drifting in this direction, I ask a simple question:
What are you protecting?
The answer is usually some version of the same fear: messing things up, losing progress, or falling behind. These are valid concerns but they pull attention away from execution and place it on outcomes that haven’t happened yet.
This is where the coach plays a critical role.
Part of good coaching is guiding the athlete away from abandoning the plan at the first sign of discomfort, while also recognizing when a true adjustment is warranted. The goal is not blind adherence, nor constant intervention. It’s creating an environment where presence is easier to maintain because presence is confidence that today’s work is enough.
That said, the coach cannot do this alone. Presence is a shared responsibility. Coach and athlete must develop a system that allows for planning ahead without living in the future without requiring constant mental negotiation.
A System for you
A good System for planning ahead will be able to filter out noise from signal.
Your bad day of training? Meh, brush it off and look at whether it was even considered bad a year prior.
A little sore from your lifting session? Probably normal.
Failed to run your track repeats faster one week to the next? Maybe you just need more reps
Only sustained, objective trends that suggest something is truly off should prompt a change. These might include persistent feelings of malaise during workouts, abnormal heart rate responses, disruptive soreness that doesn’t resolve, or breathing markers that no longer line up with expected paces.
Respecting trends is a rule to bake into your system but so is seeing things through to the end.
If there is a fire right now, you should put it out. If you think there might be a fire a month from now, you probably don’t need to do anything yet. Sometimes the right move is simply to assess the situation as it unfolds.
When meaningful trends show up, they open the door to a conversation with yourself, or with your coach. That conversation matters. If you never speak up or acknowledge what you’re seeing, uncertainty goes unmanaged. And unmanaged uncertainty is where second-guessing takes over and the self-fulfilling prophecy actually begins.
You look at what you can do next because the next step is the one within your immediate control. Address the problems that are actually presenting in the moment, not the problems that haven’t happened yet and may never happen at all.
That’s what a system is meant to do: keep you grounded in the present while giving you a clear, calm way forward when change is truly needed.
When too much attention is spent on what might happen, execution suffers in the present. Confidence erodes. Training becomes defensive. Ironically, the very effort to “be ready” is what pulls athletes away from the behaviors that actually drive progress.
A good System solves this quietly.
It allows you to stay present without being careless. It creates rules and thresholds so you don’t have to renegotiate your plan every time you may feel friction.
Most importantly, it frees you up to do the work and the work is where the magic happens.
Great stuff! And 100% true!
I was training for a backyard ultra last year and this is exactly what I learned. Be wise and aware of the future, but never ignore the “work that is in my hands.”
I had one moment where I lost sight of it, pushed a big session outside of the plan, and lost a week of good training. Quickly remembered what I was to do afterwards
Love this and plan to use it. I’m a coach who tends to over analyze .. so I need it 😀