No matter how dedicated you are to your fitness goals, life sometimes gets in the way. Maybe you’re sick, stuck at work late, or just need a break. It happens to all of us—even me. Sometimes, I’ve even skipped a workout to play video games. We all have highs and lows in motivation. That’s normal.

The good news? A missed workout doesn't have to derail your progress. The key is knowing how to bounce back without losing momentum. Figuring out how to handle a missed workout can make all the difference in keeping your fitness on track.

Clarifying Your Training Priorities

In the next sections, I'll share three practical tips for handling a missed workout. But before we dive in, let's quickly review your main training priorities to help you understand what's really important and what can sometimes take a back seat. There are three keys to muscle size and strength: volume, frequency, and intensity. Each one plays a crucial role in your progress.

Let's talk about volume first. Training volume is the total amount of work your muscles do, calculated as sets x reps x weight. But to keep it simple, think of it as the total number of challenging sets you complete per muscle group each week. If you’re hitting close to the minimum number of sets needed for your goal, you’re on the right track!

How Much Volume Do You Need?

Figuring out how many sets per body part you need can be a bit tricky since it depends on things like your muscle fiber composition, training experience, and how much volume you can handle. It also changes with your goals. For instance, maintaining muscle requires fewer sets per body part each week than building muscle.

For an off week, let’s focus on maintenance. Think of your training like a volume knob. When life is hectic, you can turn it down and maintain your muscle with minimal effort. When things settle, you can turn it up again to focus on growth. The good news is that maintaining muscle mass doesn’t need a lot of volume.

How much? Good question! A 2021 study by Iversen et al. [1] found that as little as four sets per muscle group per week can be enough to maintain muscle. Just four sets per muscle group! You can fit them into a single session or spread them across two, three, or more workouts—whatever suits your schedule.

What About Training Frequency?

Training frequency is how many times per week you train a muscle group. Ideally, we want to train each muscle group at least twice a week. But if you're having a rough week, no problem. With a little creativity, you can still hit your weekly volume target. Here are a few ideas:

• More workouts but shorter ones: If you can’t commit to hour-long workouts, see if you could instead fit in more sessions of a shorter duration.

• Fewer workouts but longer ones: if you can't make it to the gym 4 days your usual sessions, you could also condense your workouts into two slightly longer sessions.

• Two workouts in the same day: Depending on your schedule, it might be feasible to split a longer workout into two shorter ones. For example, a 15-minute lower body workout in the morning with a squat and a hip hinge superset, then a quick upper body session in the evening with a push-up or bench press paired with a row or pull-up.

Aim to hit your overall weekly volume for your largest muscle groups—like chest, back, quads, and glutes—but don’t stress over the details. Just do your best to spread out your volume in a way that fits your schedule. And don’t worry if it’s not as well-organized as you’d like it to be. Remember, training doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.

What About Training Intensity?

Training intensity is all about how hard you're pushing yourself during your workout. It's super important because it directly impacts how well you maintain or build muscle. You can measure intensity by how close you get to failure, which is when you can't do another rep with good form.

Ideally, you want to work at a high intensity, lifting weights that are heavy enough to be challenging and coming close to failure on most working sets. But if you're short on time, there are plenty of ways to boost your intensity and make a few sets really count. Now that you know how to maintain progress even when life gets in the way, let’s explore three simple ways to handle a missed workout.

Option 1: Push the Workout Back

One of the simplest fixes when you miss a workout is just to move it to another day. You'll need to plan a bit to ensure you still get enough recovery time for the muscles you worked on, but don’t sweat it when that’s not feasible.

Here's an example. Suppose you train four days a week on a half-body split, and you usually take Wednesdays and weekends off. Now let’s say you miss your regular Monday workout. Here are some ideas for how you might rearrange your training week.

These are just a few ways to fit your workouts into your schedule, but honestly, the possibilities are endless. You can also make it work by squeezing your usual four sessions into three, taking five down to four, or even three to two.

Let's take the example of a four-day training split. Pick your favorite upper and lower body workouts to do separately, then combine the rest into one full-body session. This way, you still work all your major muscle groups throughout the week.

Option 2: Combine Workouts

Another option for making up for a missed workout is to combine it with your next session, but with a few tweaks to keep the duration reasonable. Here's a quick template:

1. Pick your main movements. Choose two compound exercises from the missed workout and mix them with two from your next one. Aim for a push and a pull for both the upper and lower body. These will be the core of your combined workout.

2. Add some accessory movements. If you have time, throw in one or two single-joint exercises from each session. Think bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises, front raises, calf raises, and leg extensions.

Here’s an example of combined upper and lower body workouts.

Superset A

1. Lower body push: pick a knee-dominant exercise, like a barbell squat, leg press, or lunge

2. Lower body pull: pick any deadlift or bridge variation, like a hip thrust

Superset B

1. Upper body push: pick a horizontal press, like a bench press, or a vertical press, like a shoulder press

2. Upper body pull: pick a horizontal pull, like a bent-over row, or a vertical pull, like a lat pulldown

Perform 3 rounds of 8-10 reps per exercise. Don’t rest between the exercises in the superset, but rest for up to 2 minutes at the bottom of each round. The exercises are paired into two supersets simply to save time, but performing them separately or rearranging them into upper and lower body pairs, like A1 with B1, works just as well.

If you have time, feel free to add 2-3 isolation moves like curls, pushdowns, or lateral raises. But if you’re in a time crunch, don’t worry. You're all set as long as you hit these main movement patterns, and you can resume your isolation stuff next week.

Option 3: Skip the Workout

Skipping a session can sometimes be the smartest and kindest option. Think about it—if you missed a workout, there’s probably a good reason, like work commitments, family responsibilities, or needing some rest. Hey, maybe you just weren’t feeling it that day. That’s fine too. Try not to beat yourself up about it because one missed session, or even a missed week, won’t ruin your progress.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you have to—or choose to—skip a workout:

• Don’t beat yourself up. As long as skipping workouts doesn’t become a habit, missing a session is completely okay when life gets in the way. Instead of feeling guilty, see it as a necessary adjustment for your overall well-being.

• Rethink your schedule. If skipping workouts becomes a regular thing, it might be time to rethink your training schedule. Long-term fitness isn’t about doing everything perfectly; it’s about adjusting your routine to fit your current life, interests, and motivation. Whether that means doing a full-body workout two or three times a week, an upper/lower split four days a week, or a body part split five days a week, all these options can give great results.

Tips for Saving Time In the Gym

If you've missed a session and are short on time this week, don't worry! There are plenty of ways to maximize your workouts while saving time. Here are some tips to help you out when you have an off week and need to tweak your routine.

Rethink Your Exercise Selection

• Focus on compound exercises. Prioritize heavy compound lifts like deadlifts, squats, barbell rows, and bench presses. These moves work multiple muscle groups, including your smaller ones like biceps, triceps, and shoulders, giving you more bang for your buck.

• Skip isolation movements. Single-joint exercises, or isolation moves, involve only one joint at a time. Think arms, side delts, calves, and leg extensions. While they're great for muscle growth when you have time, skip them when you're in a hurry. Instead, focus on multi-joint movements like pulling, pressing, lunging, squatting, hinging, and bridging.

• Swap out unilateral exercises. Unilateral exercises, which work one arm or leg at a time, are awesome and should definitely be part of your normal routine. But if you're short on time, replace them with bilateral equivalents. For example, go for a two-arm curl instead of a single-arm one. This simple switch can save you 5-10 minutes per session.

Choose Easier Loading Methods

Machine and dumbbell exercises typically need fewer warm-up sets and less loading time than barbell exercises. If you're short on time, go ahead and swap them in. For example, if you only have 30 minutes to train, you probably don’t have time for heavy squats. By the time you do 3-4 warmup sets, juggling plates between each, then do your 3-4 work sets with 3 minutes rest between each, you’re probably looking at about 20-25 minutes for just one exercise. There goes your entire workout!

Instead, try something faster, like lunges or lighter and higher-rep Smith squats or leg presses. These can still give you a great training stimulus and leave enough time for another 2-3 exercises. Remember, unless you're a powerlifter, the goal is to stimulate the muscle, not to perform a specific exercise. It’s totally fine to pick another tool from the toolbox when needed!

Ramp Up the Intensity

Intensity techniques like drop sets, supersets, and myo-reps can be game-changers when you're short on time or catching up on missed workouts. They help you maximize efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness. Let's break them down:

• Drop sets: Start by doing an exercise until you can't do another rep with proper form. Then, immediately lower the weight and keep going. Repeat this process multiple times without resting until your muscles are completely exhausted. When pressed for time, don’t be afraid to replace three sets of an exercise with a single long, super-intense drop set.

• Supersets: Perform two exercises back-to-back without any rest in between. This halves the rest time for both exercises, sometimes saving around ten minutes! Supersets can combine opposing muscle groups, like pairing a bench press with a cable row, or similar muscle groups, like doing lunges after squats. Only have 30 minutes? Superset everything!

• Myo-reps: This technique involves doing an initial set to near failure, then taking a quick rest and doing additional low-rep sets with the same weight. For example, start with a set of 12-20 reps done close to failure. Take a quick breather for about 10-20 seconds, then do a mini-set of 3-5 reps. Keep repeating these mini-sets and short breaks until you can no longer complete 3-5 reps. This will really stack up effort without needing a lot of time.

Don’t hesitate to give these techniques a shot when you’re short on time but want to make sure you cover your bases. You can even combine them if you're feeling ambitious (or masochistic, take your pick). Just remember, don't go overboard with intensity techniques all the time. Intensity is great, but we don't always need to do the most.

Conclusion

To wrap everything up, missing a workout doesn’t mean you’re off track. What really matters is how you bounce back and keep going. You can stay on top of your fitness and juggle life’s demands by rescheduling, combining, or sometimes skipping workouts. If you find yourself skipping workouts frequently, it might be time to rethink your training schedule.

Life changes, so your fitness plan should, too. Flexibility and consistency are the keys to reaching your fitness goals, and they work hand in hand because flexibility helps you stay consistent. So, don't be afraid to tweak your routine—it's the key to making your fitness journey manageable and fun.

Remember, fitness is a lifelong habit. It's not about doing everything perfectly or the same way every time. The key is sticking to the basics in a way that works for you. So, what’s your game plan? Pick a strategy and keep moving forward.

References

1. Iversen, V.M., Norum, M., Schoenfeld, B.J. et al. No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review. Sports Med 51, 2079–2095 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01490-1