In Defence of the Missed Workout
Your workout is not your movement. This summer, protect the second one.
The last few weeks have been a lot, in the good way.
Wrapping up a fabulous month in Mexico City, where I ate the best food of my life and watched the World Cup in packed bars (we don’t talk about France and the semi-final...) Then on to beautiful Oaxaca, where I’ve mostly been swimming in mole.
In between: packing, moving, and closing out sessions with my coaching clients.
And despite having access to a genuinely great gym this whole time, I have not visited it anywhere near as often as the version of me who arrived had planned.
There’s a very specific kind of guilt that shows up when you miss a workout.
As if: workout missed = routine compromised = identity under full review.
Dramatic? Yes. Familiar? Also yes.
Because of course I was going to train.
Then the day got hot, the time made no sense between coaching and football, dinner moved to 9pm, and the workout quietly vanished.
And because the workout vanished, my brain filed the whole day under “fell off”. Let’s go again tomorrow.
Which is a bit rude, because on days like that you may not “exercise”, but you DO move.
You walk to breakfast, climb 3 flights of stairs, wander a market, carry your bags.
That’s 100% movement. It just doesn’t come with a mat, a timer, or someone shouting “last set, team”.
I’m a health coach, and I love a proper workout. On the road, mine is basically press play on a workout video, follow the plan, feel smug for the rest of the morning. Beautiful.
But summer isn’t always built for beautiful. Summer is heat, travel, late dinners, weird gyms, and the kind of humidity that makes a strength session feel like a negotiation with your will to live.
Here’s where the wires cross. We think: I didn’t work out today, so I didn’t move.
But your workout and your movement aren’t the same thing.
Your workout is the structured bit: the gym session, the spin class, the run, the video I press play on because designing my own session in a 34°C Airbnb is a tax I’m no longer willing to pay.
Your movement is the bigger category: the walk to dinner, the stairs, the swim, the dancing, the long route home because the evening finally cooled down.
A workout is one kind of movement, not the whole thing.
And this isn’t me being generous. In a study of more than 25,000 people who did no formal exercise at all, around 4 minutes a day of incidental movement, climbing stairs, carrying shopping, rushing for a bus, was linked to a 26 to 30% lower risk of early death (Nature Medicine, 2022).
The stairs and the bags weren’t the consolation prize. They were doing what the workout was supposed to do.
That means most of the health benefits of being active come from your total movement across the day, not the structured session. You could, in theory, never do a formal workout again and still collect the vast majority of them. The workout builds fitness on top. Lovely to have but not the foundation.
That matters, because summer and travel will absolutely mess with the structured bit. They won’t always let you train. They rarely stop you moving.
So here’s the only split worth making this summer. Your workout gets to flex. Your movement is the thing you protect.
For me, the baseline is steps. The workout videos come and go with the Airbnb, the gym, the wifi and the heat. The steps don’t. (I've made the full case for walking before, including why the magic number is lower than you think).
Your baseline might be totally different. A walk after dinner. Swimming whenever there’s water. Taking the stairs without turning it into a moral event.
The point isn’t to make movement impressive. It’s to make it something that survives your actual week.
On a good week, do the workout too. On a melted, jet-lagged, fully booked week, protect the movement that still fits.
You haven’t fallen off anything. You were moving the whole time.
So the question isn’t “how do I keep my training plan intact through summer”. Good luck with that.
The real question is quieter: what movement still happens on a day when the workout doesn’t?
Name it. Protect it. Let everything else be a bonus.
The Unwritten Check-In
This week’s bare minimum: pick your 1 movement baseline and write it down. The smallest thing that happens whatever the day looks like, so a missed workout stops counting as a fallen-off day.
Ask yourself: what movement can still happen on a day when the workout doesn’t?
Noemie x
P.S. If you want the bare-minimum version of all of this, the anchors that survive heat, travel and a 10pm dinner, I re-recorded my Summer-Proof workshop. It’s free, it’s 45 minutes, and it’s built for the weeks when workouts don’t happen.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.