Every health programme assumes you’ll have a good week

You’ve probably done this before. You’ve had the best intentions to start running, go to the gym, start a new diet, take part in a challenge. The first few weeks go well and then you have to stop because your child gets sick, you have a work deadline, your mother has a fall, or the flare-up comes back. By the following Monday you haven’t done any of it and you’re quietly beating yourself up, not feeling good enough and wondering why you’re failing.

This is something I see all the time with clients — people assume they have to go all in all of the time.

Before I had my daughter I was able to push through most of the time, but now I have limited time and energy. What I’ve realised over years of working with clients is that every programme and health routine assumes a settled diary, decent sleep, nobody else needing you, and 60 spare minutes you can spend on yourself without negotiating for them.

What I’ve realised when trying to help clients stay consistent is that I adapt my practice based on my life. I’ve intuitively known how to do that and keep some kind of consistency — maybe some days are 30 minutes and others it’s 5 minutes.

You feel like a failure, so you stop altogether.

I was working with a client who runs a business, has a part-time job on top of it, and a teenage family at home. We were trying to treat her menopausal and digestive symptoms, and I could have written her a lengthy protocol of an ideal routine — the morning yoga routine, the right meal timings, time to cook every day and take an array of herbs.

This wasn’t working, so instead I built something that I knew she would be able to adapt — what was expected of her could shrink and expand with each week’s demands. Three modes: Basal, Tend and Repair. Each week, you decide which one you’re in, and the programme adjusts to meet you there.

I’ve used it with almost every client since, and it’s now built into our Remedy support group.

The Three Modes

Basal — As In Baseline

This is the bare minimum your body needs to keep functioning when everything else is demanding more of you.

It’s for when sh*t hits the fan. A presentation, a stressful stretch at work, someone’s ill, you’re juggling all the plates and your own practices have gone out of the window entirely. Which is, unfortunately, exactly when you most need them, and exactly when you’re at the bottom of your own list.

Sometimes you can see a Basal week coming and plan for it. Sometimes you can’t — nobody prepares for a child or family illness.

So in a Basal week, all that’s asked of you is the minimum. Take your herbs and eat three meals. Legs up the wall at the end of the day. A quiet moment and a few deep breaths. Three sun salutations. Whatever minimum you’re able to stick to when you have so many other demands.

When we had a few of these weeks with very little time and energy, I even created a meal plan with the simplest, most easily digestible meals here, so we didn’t have to think too much or do a load of shopping, and could just have a week where things are very simple.

Tend

Life is running as normal. There’s a bit of space in the diary, your energy is reasonable, nothing unexpected has landed. You can plan your movement, your food and your herbs, and actually stick to it.

In practice, that means the full practice rather than the short one. Cooking properly instead of assembling something at half past eight. Ayurvedic herbs at the times they’re meant to be taken, not whenever you remember. The food shop that gets done, meal prep, bed at a reasonable hour most nights. None of it dramatic or even new — just good daily habits done as intended.

This is where you plan, prep and set yourself up for a good week. It’s where most of your weeks should sit, and where the actual progress gets made — the consistency, the repetition, the slow accumulation. Tend weeks are unglamorous and they’re doing most of the work.

Repair

You’ve come through something. A deadline, an illness, a flare-up, a hard stretch. You’re functioning, but you’re closer to empty than you’d like.

Repair is where you deliberately pull back and replenish, rather than pushing straight back into life or any full programme because you feel guilty about the weeks you missed. It’s also where the seasonal digestive resets sit, in spring and autumn.

And this is the part I’d most like you to take from this article: book Repair weeks on purpose. Not just after a crisis. Choose one during a quiet stretch, put it in the diary, and treat it as seriously as you’d treat a dental or hair appointment. Maintenance costs less than repair; it’s cheaper to stay well than to get well. Most people skip this mode.

How to tell which week you’re in

This should be simple to identify:

• Am I in the thick of it? Something unexpected has happened, you’re not sleeping, capacity is low → Basal.
• Am I steady? Normal week, normal demands → Tend.
• Am I coming out of it? Functioning but feeling exhausted and depleted, or I’ve been in Basal mode for too long → Repair.

Basal and Repair can at times look similar from the outside — in both, you’re not doing as much as you think you should. The difference is that Basal is survival while you’re in it, and Repair is recovery after it. That difference in intention, and knowing which one you’re in, changes how long you stay there.

You’re also allowed to change your mind mid-week. You might start on Monday fully expecting a Tend week and be in Basal by Wednesday afternoon. That’s not a failure of planning. That’s just Wednesday.

Why this works

Some weeks you can do everything. Other weeks you can barely do anything. That’s normal — your cycle, your workload, how you’ve slept, what else is going on.

Hormones, digestion, perimenopause, sleep: these take months to shift, not weeks. They respond to what you do most days over a long stretch. So a rough fortnight doesn’t actually set you back much.

But it feels like it does, and that’s when most people stop altogether.

That’s what Basal, Tend and Repair is for. Instead of doing everything or nothing, you drop down a level and keep going.

In a Basal week, I ask my clients to do the things that give them the biggest benefits, which might look slightly different with each client. With my Ayurveda client I might ask them to keep their herbs and eat three actual meals at roughly regular times. Everything else can go. For a hip and back pain client it might be a simple mobility routine in the morning and then some self myofascial release in the evenings.

In a Tend week, you run the full routine. In a Repair week, you lighten the food, go to bed earlier, and swap the strong practice for something restorative.

If you keep those baseline habits and routines, you haven’t stopped.

When you feel like stopping or it’s not working

Many clients have moments when things aren’t working, so they stop instead of moving into a Basal or Repair phase. They feel they’ve gone backwards.

You can never go back when you start this journey. You gather knowledge, awareness, wisdom.

A flare-up, or the fear of one, is not a reason to abandon what you’ve started. It’s a reason to drop to Basal or Repair and stay there until it settles. The people who make the best long-term recoveries aren’t the ones who never have a bad month — they’re the ones who kept doing something small through it.

Nothing I’m suggesting is a compromise or a watered-down version. Doing 80% of something for two years beats doing 100% of it for five weeks.

If you take one thing away: next Monday, before you look at what you’re supposed to do, decide which kind of week you’re actually in. Then do that version.