At some point, we’ll all encounter a hectic season in which aggressive fitness progress just isn’t realistic.
There’s an important, time-crunched project at work. Kids sports practices and games dominate your calendar. The weather warms up—which means the lawn needs to be mowed, the garage and basement need to be cleaned out, and the twelve other house projects that stared at you all winter can’t wait any longer to be started.
And when that happens, the standards that felt perfectly reasonable a few weeks earlier—like regular exercise, weekly meal prep, and consistent sleep schedules—can suddenly become much harder to maintain.
During times like that, it’s easy to start thinking that you’re losing all the progress you worked so hard to achieve in the first place.
But, fortunately, that’s not usually the case. There’s a biological cost to everything the body does, and it won’t give up all of its gains easily—especially those that have accumulated over years.
So in times like these, it can be helpful to remember that rest is a necessary part of training and that not every season needs to be aimed at significant improvement. Sometimes holding steady is actually the optimal choice.
Maintenance is an active goal
Because people are goal-oriented, simply maintaining a given fitness level doesn’t feel particularly exciting. In fact, not seeing some type of marker moving in the right direction can actually feel kind of depressing.
But that perspective misses an important idea: Completely ignoring anything leads to its degradation. Lawns become overgrown. Houses and vehicles wear. Relationships falter. Bodies become weaker and less resilient.
All of that means that maintenance—however boring or uninspiring it might feel compared to noticeable progress—still requires some type of effort. In other words, by definition maintenance can’t be passive but rather must be intentional.
And recognizing and remembering that matters.
Because if we treat maintenance like a form of failure—as we often do when it comes to fitness—we’re more likely to abandon helpful habits entirely when life throws us curveballs. But if we treat it like a normal and legitimate phase in the process, we’re much more likely to keep enough structure in place to not have to completely rebuild from scratch later.
Keep the floor from dropping too far
This matters even more when we zoom out to a complete lifetime scale, as shown in a recently published long-term study in which researchers tracked participants’ physical capacity across several decades.
The unsurprising finding was that most physical qualities decline with age. The more useful finding was that the amount of decline varied significantly between people—and the gap widened with age. Some of that difference was genetic, but much of it appeared to come from years of lifestyle choices accumulating in either direction.
Those who were less active throughout life experienced decline sooner and to a greater degree than those who were more active. And those who became more active at any point during the 47-year observation period even experienced some progress from their inactive starting points.
The conclusion was that, while we can’t completely control when our physical capacities peak or decline as we age, we can influence how high the peak gets, how steep the decline becomes, and what our physical “floor” looks like later in life.
Of course, that means there do need to be times when we experience forward progress. But it also means that even the seemingly small and insignificant actions we take during seasons of maintenance serve to keep the floor from dropping too far before we’re able to get back to actively progressing.
Putting it into practice
Spend a few minutes reflecting on what life is currently throwing at you.
If you feel like you have the capacity to make some strong forward progress, I encourage you to set some challenging goals and “make hay when the sun shines”.
Alternatively, if you feel like you’re stuck in hectic land for whatever reason, remember that maintenance mode is a normal part of the process and that you’ll bounce back quickly when the current season passes—especially if you stay consistent with what your current capacity allows.
Then intentionally choose one habit you can keep in place this week, even if it has to be smaller than usual.
Even if it doesn’t feel significant enough to produce forward progress, maintaining as much as possible of what you’ve already built is meaningful in the long run.