 Training plans, they are great, aren't they? And they're really important, I think. If your training doesn't matter the distance, doesn't matter your level, if you want to develop yourself as a complete athlete, if you want to arrive at race day ready to tackle whatever it is that you're trying to tackle, whether that be a marathon or 5K or anything else, you want to be absolutely sure that you've covered all the different elements of fitness required to complete the distance or the time that you desire. Or maybe you're not racing even, maybe you're just looking to build your overall fitness, your general fitness, and you have some specific goals that you want to achieve. Well, the only way to do that is to have a plan. And one of the main key elements to a training plan, and that's something that we got to realize when we're looking at training plans, is that they should not be considered set in stone, okay? A training plan is not how you're actually going to train, okay? That might sound strange, I'll repeat it. A training plan is not how you're actually going to train. What do I mean by that? It's difficult to predict how something is going to happen in the future. No one's been able to actually do that quite well just yet. We don't know the future. So when you're developing a training plan, you're actually just looking at your current fitness, you're looking at your past fitness, your past race times, your training history and life in general, and you're trying to make an educated guess about how to best prepare for something that you haven't done yet, and how to best achieve that through training. And that's of course not easy because sometimes we progress faster than we expected. Sometimes we progress slower. Sometimes, well, always unexpected things come up, you know, in life or in training. We might get a little bit of an injury. We might get sick. We might have to miss a week or miss a workout. How then do we get back into training, et cetera? That's why it's good to have a coach, of course, and that's why it's good to have knowledge about these things so you're able to adjust your training plan, and that's really the key. That's really the main thing I want to get across today in this little video, that if you have a training plan, remember always that this training plan is just an outline. Now it's up to you and your coach to execute this training plan, but pay attention to how the body responds. So if the training plan after several weeks just feels too easy, the workouts aren't really that hard, maybe there's no progression, then probably we should take a look at that training plan again, revise it and optimize it, because you're essentially not progressing as fast as you hoped or maybe the training plan wasn't appropriate now that we realize that you're fitter than we thought you were, for example. On the other hand, we might also have the opposite situation where you're actually getting injured or it's just too hard, the sessions, and we realize we overestimated your fitness. And that's when we also have to modify the training plan. And of course, when things happen like sickness or injury or life events, we might also have to do modifications. And just a little bit of a plug here, I guess, I do now offer customized training plans on my website mggcoaching.com. There's a link in the description. So if you're interested in training plans, customized, built to you, we do a consultation and then I make a training plan for you so you can reach your goals and train optimally. So whether you have an eight-week training plan or a 52-week training plan, realize that it needs to be evolving. It needs to evolve with you and you need to regularly, either you or your coach or both of you, need to take a look at the training plan and say at regular intervals, how are we doing here? Is the training plan working? Are we going in the right direction? Are the workouts hard enough? Are they too hard? Are they getting us where we want to go, etc. That's one of the elements of being flexible with your training plan. The other thing to bear in mind here is also that on any given day, with or without the guidance of a coach, when you look at the plan and you see that it says, you need to do an annoying fly, you need to do a hard workout, for example, but you're not feeling optimal. Maybe you're not fully recovered from yesterday or the day before. You're just maybe you have a little bit of a niggle. In those situations, it's very important that you do not do the workout just because it says so on the plan. Your body should be the ultimate judge as to whether or not you're ready to do a workout, but that's something you need to learn over time and get experience with yourself in order to gauge. On the other hand, sometimes you feel extra strong and you're like, hey, I want to do more. This workout piece of cake, I want to go much more than that. I want to go harder than that. I want to go for more reps and whatever. That's something where you want to be careful not to get too eager though. So if that's something that happens to you regularly, over the course of a few weeks, that might mean you are after doing the workouts and you're like, this was an easy workout. I want to do more next time. If that happens regularly, then that means we need to modify the plan and you can do more and you're fitter than we thought you were, right? Whereas on the other hand, which was said earlier about if you're feeling not up to it, if that happens regularly, we also might have to modify the plan because you're less fit or the workouts are too demanding. But on any given day, listen to your body. Don't do something just because it's on the plan. Realize that the plan is to some extent arbitrary. It's not a perfect, it's a guess, right? It's a guess. It's an educated guess, but it is a guess. We're trying to delineate how to get from A to B, but we don't know where B is and we don't know how far it is and we don't know where you're at actually right now either. So it needs to be, it's a moving target so to speak and we need to be able to constantly evaluate the progress. Anyway, a lot of talk, but a simple message really. Training plans are key. Training plans are important, but at the end of the day, we don't want to be a slave to the training plan and we want to be able to have the training plan evolve with us as we progress. As I've mentioned, I do offer training plans. There's a link in the description to my website, mggcoaching.com. Also, please subscribe. Of course, if you want more videos like this, let me know in the comments what you think and if you have a training plan, let me know if you like it, if you think it's great or not, who made it, where is it from, has it worked for you in the past, what are you training for? Tell me all about it in the comments. Thanks for watching. See you around.