What This Summer Actually Taught Me About Training Simple
There's a version of this post I could have written that skips over the last month entirely and picks up as if nothing happened. I'm not going to write that one. If you've been following Fitfrenchkiss for a while, you'll probably have noticed things went quiet. No blog, no podcast, barely an email. I want to tell you honestly what was going on, because the reason matters more than any excuse could, and because what happened during that quiet stretch turned into one of the more useful lessons I've had in years about what cross-training actually needs to look like.
What Actually Happened
I went home. My mum needed me there this summer, and there was no version of the plan I'd built for July, a new programme launch, a full content calendar, weekly emails, that was going to survive contact with that reality. So I let it go. Not reluctantly, not as a compromise I was unhappy about, but as an obvious decision once I was actually faced with it. Family came first. Everything else waited.
I say this partly because I think a lot of us, coaches and clients alike, carry a quiet assumption that stepping back from a plan means failing at it. I want to push back on that directly, because it isn't true, and the rest of this post is really about why.
What Training Looked Like With Almost Nothing
Before I left, I picked up a second-hand Pilates bar. That was it. No rig, no studio, no proper equipment beyond that one bar and whatever I could improvise from what was already in the house.
Some days that meant fifteen focused minutes of pull and roll conditioning squeezed in between everything else. Some days it meant nothing at all, because there simply wasn't room. I didn't track it obsessively. I didn't beat myself up about the days that didn't happen. I just kept returning to that one piece of equipment whenever there was a window, and did what I could with it.
If you'd asked me in June whether that would be enough to maintain any meaningful strength or conditioning, I'm honestly not sure I'd have believed it. It felt too minimal, too inconsistent, too far from what I'd normally call proper training.
What It Proved
It held. I came back without the regression I'd quietly braced for. No dramatic loss of pull strength, no starting from zero on rolls, nothing that needed rebuilding from scratch.
What I think actually happened is that the bar I'd feared clearing, some imagined threshold of real training, was never as high as I'd assumed. Consistency at a genuinely low level, applied honestly over weeks, did more than I expected. And the parts of my training that had always felt the most complicated, structured splits, specific rep schemes, equipment-dependent drills, turned out to be far less essential to maintaining capability than I'd been telling myself, and my clients, for years.
This isn't just a personal anecdote, either. A 2024 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research compared minimal-equipment resistance training against traditional gym-based training over six weeks and found meaningful improvements in both performance and body composition in the minimal-equipment group (Cintineo et al., 2024). A separate review of lower-dose, lower-intensity resistance training reached a similar conclusion: less can still be genuinely effective, provided it's applied consistently rather than abandoned.
What I'd Tell a Client in This Position
If a client came to me having just had a summer like this, own equipment reduced to almost nothing, sessions inconsistent, plans abandoned, I know exactly what I'd tell them, because I've said versions of it for years without always fully believing it myself until now.
I'd tell them the goal was never to replicate their normal training under different conditions. It was to protect the habit of showing up, however briefly, and to trust that the specific exercises mattered less than the consistency of returning to them. I'd tell them a few honest minutes with one piece of equipment beats an ambitious plan abandoned by day four. And I'd tell them that whatever they came back to afterwards, whether that was full studio training or something closer to what they'd been doing, the summer wasn't lost time. It was a different kind of training, and a useful one.
I believe all of that more now, because I lived it rather than just coached it.
The Belief I Can't Unsee Now
Here's the belief this summer dismantled for me, and the one I want to spend the rest of this month talking about properly: cross-training for aerialists does not have to be complicated to work.
I think a lot of us, myself included until recently, quietly equate complexity with seriousness. If a programme isn't detailed, varied, and demanding, it can feel like it can't really be doing much. But that instinct gets things backwards. What actually builds and maintains capability is consistency applied to the right, simple things, not the elaborateness of the plan itself.
This isn't a claim that structure doesn't matter. It matters enormously, which is exactly why I build programmes the way I do. But structure and complexity aren't the same thing. You can have real, effective structure inside something genuinely simple. In fact, I'd argue simple structure is usually the more durable kind, because it survives the weeks when life doesn't cooperate, which is most weeks, for most people, most of the time.
Where This Leaves August
This is the thread I want to run through everything this month. Not because it's a convenient narrative for a delayed launch, though I won't pretend the timing isn't obvious, but because it's genuinely what I believe now, more than I did before this summer.
You'll see it in how I talk about pull and roll strength over the coming weeks, in how Pull and Roll Lab is actually built, and in the small, low-effort tools I've been adding to the free Digital Hub. None of it assumes you have ninety minutes a day or a fully kitted-out home setup. All of it assumes you have a life, and that your training needs to fit inside it, not the other way round.
If you want a genuinely low-effort way back into some structure, I've just added the Session Logger to the free Smart Aerialist Digital Hub. No plan to follow, no pressure, just somewhere to note what you did and watch it add up over time.
I'm glad to be back. Thank you for sticking around through the quiet.
