You had a sensible week planned. Then work ran late, the children needed something, or you got home and realised you were absolutely knackered.
The session didn’t happen.
Now you’re looking at the rest of the week, wondering where you can squeeze it in.
Before you start moving everything around, ask yourself one question: will doing that session now help the training that comes next?
Sometimes it will. Sometimes leaving it behind is the better decision.
Start with why you missed it
A missed session tells us something about the week. What it tells us depends on the reason.
If a meeting overran and you otherwise feel rested, it might be straightforward to rearrange things. If you skipped training because you were exhausted after several demanding days, adding more work tomorrow deserves a bit more thought.
Your body has to deal with the demands of everyday life alongside training. Research on training load and recovery supports considering factors such as fatigue, sleep and stress when adjusting a programme. [1] [2]
That doesn’t give us a formula for rescheduling a missed run. It does give us a good reason to look beyond the empty space in the calendar.
Decide whether to leave it, move it or adapt it
These are the three options I’d work through.
Leave it
For an isolated missed session, carrying on with the plan can be a sensible choice.
Say you miss an easy Wednesday run, with a harder bike session planned for Thursday. Adding the run before the bike might be possible, but what does it achieve? If it makes Thursday rushed, reduces your sleep or leaves you less prepared for the session, the extra training may offer very little.
You don’t have to repay every missed minute.
Move it
Moving a session can work when there is room for it and the surrounding training still makes sense.
Perhaps you miss Tuesday’s swim because the pool is closed. There is another suitable session on Wednesday, and attending it doesn’t create a difficult sequence of demanding days. That could be a useful adjustment.
Look at what you’re moving it beside, though. A blank evening isn’t necessarily spare capacity, particularly if it follows a hard morning session and a long working day.
Adapt it
Sometimes a smaller version fits the day better.
If you have 30 minutes instead of an hour, you might shorten an easy ride or complete a simpler swim session. The choice depends on what the session was meant to achieve.
With intervals, don’t try to preserve all the hard work by removing the warm-up and recovery. Reduce the session sensibly. You may need fewer repetitions, a different session or a rest day.
Keep a useful purpose, rather than trying to squeeze the original workout into less time.
Be careful with the weekend catch-up
Imagine you miss Thursday’s harder run. Saturday already has a long ride, followed by a long run on Sunday.
Putting the missed session on Friday gives you three demanding days together. Putting it after Saturday’s ride changes that day too.
Neither arrangement is automatically wrong. Both require a decision about the whole weekend, including what you can recover from and which sessions matter most.
My starting point would be to protect the training ahead. I’d only move the missed run if there were a clear reason to do so, and I’d consider what else needed to change.
Don’t use the calendar colour as your decision-maker
If you use TrainingPeaks, an incomplete workout can be surprisingly irritating. It’s tempting to do something simply to make the week look better.
But a completed workout doesn’t tell the whole story.
Write a short comment explaining what happened. “Work ran late; otherwise felt fine” gives your coach different information from “Very tired, poor sleep and struggling through the warm-up.”
That context helps us decide what comes next.
If it keeps happening, review the plan
One disrupted week is part of life. Repeatedly missing the same session is useful feedback.
If Thursday evening training rarely happens, we need to ask whether Thursday evening is a realistic place for it. If every week requires you to catch up at the weekend, the planned workload may need adjusting.
A programme should reflect the time and energy you can usually give it. There will still be difficult weeks, but completing it shouldn’t depend on everything going perfectly.
What should you do today?
Before rearranging a missed session, work through these questions:
Why did I miss it?
How do I feel now?
What was the session intended to achieve?
What happens to the next few days if I move it?
Would leaving it or doing a shorter version make more sense?
If you have a coach, share the reason and ask before making several changes. If you’re following a plan independently, avoid piling missed sessions into the remaining days just to reach a weekly total.
Make a decision that helps you train well from here.
Need help making those decisions?
TCC ONE provides personalised coaching with ongoing review and adjustments around your goals and everyday commitments.
If you’d like support with a training week that works for you, explore TCC ONE.
References
1. Soligard, T. et al. (2016) ‘How much is too much? (Part 1) International Olympic Committee consensus statement on load in sport and risk of injury’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50, pp. 1030–1041. Read the consensus statement.
2. Kellmann, M. et al. (2018) ‘Recovery and Performance in Sport: Consensus Statement’, International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 13(2), pp. 240–245. Read the consensus statement.
