Damage Limitation Exercises

Most of the time the useful question isn’t “what’s the ideal plan?” but “what’s the best version of it I can actually do today?” Usually that means a compromised version of the plan rather than nothing.

This afternoon I had a short window. I lay on a Swiss ball with a 24kg kettlebell in each hand and pressed. Mostly hips up for a flat press, a few hips down for an incline. Five reps, hold at the top for a count of five, five reps again, five times through. Then two painfully slow negatives and one explosive rep to finish. Then 24kg bent-over rows, alternating arms, 40 reps. Fifty lateral raises with Indian clubs. A two-minute plank. Done.

Was it optimal? No. Holding at lockout takes tension off the chest, and anyone who reads the hypertrophy research could pick holes in it. But putting the bells down and picking them back up would have cost time I didn’t have. Holding at the top let me turn five short sets into one long one. That was a trade-off, made on purpose.

I loved it. Three hours later I could still feel it. And it got done.

That’s what this article is about: not the ideal plan, but the decisions you make when real life gets in the way of it.

The grades in this post: Strong means randomised trials agree. Moderate means trials agree, but the effects are small or the studies are short or small. Observational means researchers measured what people already did, so other differences between them can’t be fully ruled out. My view means a coaching judgement, labelled as mine, not a trial result.

The all-or-nothing trap

The biggest threat to a health plan isn’t the slip. It’s what people tell themselves after it.

I see it constantly. Someone forgets their supplements for a flight and stops taking them altogether. Someone sleeps in, misses a session, and writes off the week. A business dinner turns into a few drinks, bed is at 1am instead of 10.30pm, and by Friday the whole plan is in the bin.

Psychologists have names for this. Alan Marlatt called it the abstinence violation effect: one lapse feels like proof you’ve failed, so you give up. The dieting version showed up in a classic experiment: after being given more to eat beforehand, dieters went on to eat more, while non-dieters ate less (Herman & Mack, 1975). Janet Polivy and Peter Herman later reviewed this pattern (Polivy & Herman, 1985). It’s become known as the “what-the-hell effect”.

A 2023 review of 10 real-time studies of people dieting found the same pattern. Lapses were followed by negative self-judgement, and people who used coping strategies in the moment were less likely to lapse (Randle et al., 2023).

Not every study finds it. A study of 89 adults with diabetes found no abstinence violation effect at all: most lapses stayed lapses and didn’t snowball. And about 27% of them happened simply because the person was busy or had no choice (Kirkley & Fisher, 1988). That’s the forgotten supplements, not a failure of willpower.

Observational The pattern is well described, but how strong it is varies between people and situations, and one careful study didn’t find it.

One miss doesn’t matter. Quitting does.

A single missed day barely registers; giving up wipes out most of the benefit.

Habits survive a slip. Phillippa Lally’s team at UCL asked 96 volunteers to build a new daily habit, such as a walk after breakfast or a piece of fruit with lunch; 82 provided enough data to analyse. Missing a single day did not meaningfully set back how automatic the habit became. In the 39 people whose data fitted the model well, the estimated time to reach a plateau ranged from 18 to 254 days, with a median of 66 (Lally et al., 2010). Observational One modest study; the timings are modelled estimates.

Something beats nothing, by a long way. The biggest return from exercise comes from going from nothing to a little:

• A Taiwanese study of over 416,000 adults found that about 15 minutes of moderate exercise a day (around 60% of the usual guideline) was linked to 14% lower all-cause mortality and about 3 extra years of life expectancy (Wen et al., 2011).
• In over 63,000 adults aged 40 and over from the English and Scottish Health Surveys, people who were active only once or twice a week, and below the guideline, had about a third lower all-cause mortality than inactive people (O’Donovan et al., 2017).
• In UK Biobank, people who never formally exercised but had about three 1–2 minute bursts of vigorous activity a day, like hurrying for a bus or taking stairs fast, had 38–40% lower all-cause mortality than those with none (Stamatakis et al., 2022).

These are observational studies, so they can’t prove cause and effect: healthier people may simply move more. But the pattern is consistent across very different populations. Observational

That doesn’t make every session worth doing. As I wrote in Why Do You Move?, a session done just to tick a box gives a small return, and when you’re tired, ill or sore, recovery is often the more productive choice.

Ideal, target, minimum

Every plan I write now has three versions, so a bad day has somewhere to land other than zero.

• Ideal is what you’d do with time, energy and nothing going wrong.
• Target is a normal good week.
• Minimum is what you do when everything has gone sideways. It should be so small it feels almost silly.

The minimum isn’t a lower standard; it keeps you being someone who looks after themselves on a rubbish day. (More on that in Why Knowing Isn’t Doing.) My view

Not all compromises are equal

Part of the skill is knowing which shortcuts cost almost nothing and which quietly cost a lot.

Exercise and food work differently here. A purposeful but shortened session usually beats none, because the biggest gains sit at the bottom of the curve, unless you’re ill, injured or exhausted, when rest is the better choice. Food doesn’t work the same way. For most healthy adults, missing a meal is harmless, so a drive-through burger isn’t automatically better than waiting a few hours for something decent. Sometimes it is, if you’re about to train, drive for hours or make a big decision on an empty tank. Often it isn’t.

So before you compromise, ask two questions: what does skipping this cost, and what does the shortcut cost?

Usually low cost to skip for a day or two:

• Most general supplements. The form of vitamin D measured in a blood test, 25(OH)D, has a half-life of about two weeks (Jones, 2008; Jones et al., 2014), so a few missed days on a trip barely move it. A gap of several weeks will.
• A single training session. Your fitness won’t notice.
• One late night, if your wake time stays the same.
• One meal that isn’t on plan (more on eating out).

Higher cost, so protect these:

• Anything prescribed or clinically essential. Never let these lapse without talking to whoever prescribed them.
• Protocols that depend on continuity, such as some gut or hormone work. Ask if you’re unsure which yours are.
• Patterns. One late night is noise. Three a week is a lifestyle.
• Anything you’re using to manage a condition, like blood sugar.

The question isn’t “Was that perfect?” It’s “Does this choice cost much in a month’s time?”

Damage limitation exercises

Decide what you’ll do when things go wrong before they go wrong, because in the moment you won’t. These “if this happens, then I’ll do that” plans are called implementation intentions. Across 94 studies they had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006), but the effect on real health behaviours is smaller: small to medium for healthy eating (Carrero et al., 2019) and small for cutting down alcohol and smoking (Malaguti et al., 2020). Moderate Here are the ones I give most often.

If I’m ill, injured or flattened by stress… then the minimum shifts to rest, walking and eating well. Recovering is part of the plan, not a break from it.

If I forget my supplements when travelling… then I bring only the clinically essential ones next time, in hand luggage. For the rest, I pick them up when I’m home. No catching up with double doses.

If I oversleep and miss my session… then I move it, shorten it, or do the minimum version at home. A purposeful ten minutes still counts. The day isn’t written off at 8am.

If a business dinner turns into drinks… then I alternate with water, eat properly, and set a hard stop time before the first drink. I still aim for bed, even if it’s late. Alcohol helps you fall asleep faster but disrupts the second half of the night and delays and reduces REM sleep, especially at higher doses (Ebrahim et al., 2013). Strong Consistent across lab sleep studies. Every drink you don’t have and every half hour earlier to bed limits the damage.

If the next morning is rough… then I get up at my normal time, drink water, eat protein, and get some daylight and a walk. No punishment workout, no skipping meals to “make up for it”. Compensating tends to set up the next lapse.

If I have a bad day, a bad week or a bad holiday… then the next meal, next session or next night is the restart. Not Monday. The next one.

When good enough turns into drift

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is true, but it can also become an excuse, so damage limitation needs a floor as well as forgiveness.

Signs the compromise has become the plan:

• The minimum has become your normal week, not your bad week.
• The same “one-off” keeps happening: every trip, every Friday, every busy spell.
• You’re choosing the shortcut when the full version was perfectly doable.
• Your results, energy or test markers have stopped moving, or started moving the wrong way.

When that happens, don’t punish yourself; look at why. Often the plan no longer fits your life, which is the whole subject of Why Your Last Health Plan Failed.

My own session is a fair example. Holding at lockout to save time was a sensible trade-off on a busy day. If every chest session ended up that way, I’d be choosing convenience over results, and I’d want to change it.

The long game

What you do across months matters far more than how perfectly you follow the plan in any one week.

I’ve been training since I was a kid and working with people for 37 years. The people who get the best results aren’t the ones who never slip. They’re the ones who slip, shrug, and do the next right thing. The plan is a direction, not an exam.

So next time life gets in the way, ask three questions. What’s my minimum today? What does this compromise actually cost? What’s the next right thing? Then do that.

How strong is the evidence?

Sources

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