A realistic, sustainable training week for an overweight beginner isn’t about perfection—it’s about building consistency, protecting your body, and developing habits that stick. When you’re starting out, you start with basic building blocks, we’ll start with basic walk sections. If you’re already doing something that you enjoy, keep it. Likewise, as you get stronger and faster, you start developing a training plan that works for you. You don’t want to jump into doing several activities or you will likely not get a good view of what does and does not work for you.
We start with 4x 20-minute walk sessions per week. Pick a time that works for you, a lot of people do enjoy mornings, but if that’s not realistic, there’s nothing wrong with using lunch time or evenings as long as it’s feasible for you. Once you are comfortable with the walking, we slowly integrate running.
We make a plan with the intention of hitting every planned workout, though we like to see at least 80%. The math doesn’t work out exactly, but if you hit 3 or 4 of these in a week, you’re doing great, if you hit 0, 1 or 2, you may need to revisit the timing and priorities.
Something will come up and mess with your routine, when that happens for these workouts and any in the future, you have to decide how to react. First I would ask if it’s truly an interference you cannot work around, don’t let little things take away your time. Second, can the workout or the conflict be moved or adjusted slightly to allow for both to still happen? Third, can I easily adjust my weekly schedule to accommodate? This is one of the perks of rest days, is you may be able to flex your schedule. Fourth, this is the last option, but not a bad option, but can I just skip the work out?
You’re the one who gets to decide how this plays out, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately you’re the one who has to handle the consequences. If you push too hard for too long, you may get over trained and/or burnt out, if you don’t push hard enough, you won’t see the benefits and get discouraged. You will not make progress without some discipline, but beating yourself up too much accomplishes nothing. Find what works for you and stay consistent.
Many people are somewhat obsessed with the New Year’s hype, though really any month, any Monday, any day is a great time to start something new. For me, I use a combination of all of these, most often Monday’s, but it may also relate to an event and/or training plan for an event.
Once you are comfortable with your walking and running, you can continue to make minor tweaks, but this is where you look at adding other things that are interesting to you for cross training. I still like to revisit my plans about every 4 weeks to see how it is working. This gives me enough time to give something a good try, but let’s me adjust it as needed or try something different and put the new thing off for another day.
Regardless of how much you build, you need to make sure you give your body time to recover, that’s where you get stronger. Remember, this could also include active recovery where you work different muscles on different days. That’s the beauty of cross training, especially with something like swimming or upper body strength training.