Ask most coaches what the biggest threat to an athlete’s progress is, and they’ll talk about injury. Or overtraining. Or technical breakdown under load.
What they should be talking about is July.
Summer is the most underestimated threat to consistent training. Not because the training gets harder. Because it gets optional.
Routines that held through winter — through dark mornings, packed schedules, the natural momentum of a full training calendar — start to loosen when the sun’s out and the diary changes. People take holidays. Children are off school. Social lives fill back up. The session that was non-negotiable in February starts looking very negotiable in July.
And then people wonder why they feel like they’re starting over again in September.
The Problem With Unplanned Breaks
I’m not against rest. Rest is part of the process and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand how adaptation works. Planned deloads, periods of reduced intensity, intentional recovery weeks — all of that has a place and I build it into programmes deliberately.
What I’m talking about is the unplanned break that happens because structure temporarily disappeared and nobody put anything in its place.
Those breaks don’t happen because athletes decided to rest. They happen by default. The session got skipped because of a day trip. Then another one, because of a barbecue. Then a week goes by and suddenly the conversation shifts from “I missed a session” to “I haven’t trained in three weeks.”
What was a pause becomes a stop. And getting back to the level you were at takes considerably longer than the break itself.
The insidious thing about this pattern is that it doesn’t feel like a problem while it’s happening. It feels like flexibility. It feels like living your life. And all of that is true — right up until you’re standing in the gym in September wondering where four months of progress went.
Why Summer Hits Different
The gym environment does more for you than you probably realise.
The community, the timetable, the coaching, the regular faces — all of that creates accountability that doesn’t announce itself. You show up because everyone else is showing up. You push because someone next to you is pushing. The structure is external and you benefit from it passively, without having to generate all the discipline yourself.
Summer disrupts that. People are away. Sessions are thinner. The Saturday training crew is scattered. The coach you see three times a week sees you once, if that. And suddenly you’re relying far more heavily on internal motivation, which is — and I’ll be direct about this — the least reliable fuel there is.
This is why so much of what we build at Crazy Strength goes beyond the programming and the coaching. Community that people don’t want to leave, even when the easier option is to stay home. But community alone doesn’t solve it. You have to have something to hold onto when the environment goes away.
What Summer Is Actually For
Here’s a different frame on this.
Summer isn’t a problem unless you treat it like one. If you go into it with no plan, you’ll lose ground and spend September frustrated. If you go in with the right plan, you can come out the other side further ahead than if you’d just continued your normal training unchanged.
What does the right plan look like?
First: decide what you’re keeping. Not hoping to keep. Actually committing to. Two sessions a week. Three. One, if that’s genuinely what’s realistic given your summer. Write it in the diary the same way you’d write anything else that matters. Treat it like a fixed appointment rather than something that will happen if things align.
Second: use the flexibility summer gives you to work on things that get squeezed out during busier training periods. Technique. Mobility. Movement quality. The areas of your game you know need work but that get deprioritised when you’re in competition prep or running at full volume. This isn’t junk training — it’s foundation work that pays dividends when intensity picks back up.
Third — and I’d particularly say this to coaches — summer is your best window for the developmental conversations that the pace of a normal training week doesn’t always make room for. About goals. About what the next twelve months look like. About what’s working and what isn’t. That kind of coaching investment, made in a quieter period, returns value across the whole year that follows.
What the Young Athletes Remind Me Of
We’re running CUBS Summer Camps at Crazy Strength right now — junior athletes from ages six through to sixteen, across August.
What strikes me every year about the young athletes in our programmes is that they bring everything they’ve got, regardless of the external context. They don’t arrive at camp reasoning about whether it’s worth showing up today. They’re just there, fully in it, doing the work.
And that’s instructive.
There’s something adults talk themselves out of that kids haven’t learned to do yet. The reluctance, the rationalisation, the quiet internal negotiation about whether the session is really necessary today — all of that is learned behaviour. It’s not hardwired.
Young athletes haven’t developed the habit of talking themselves out of things yet. Watching them work is a useful reminder that your brain’s job, left unchecked, is to find reasons to be comfortable.
Practical Guidance for the Next Eight Weeks
If you’re reading this in July and you’ve already lost a week or two, here’s what I’d do.
Don’t add it to the list of things to beat yourself up about. That’s not useful and it doesn’t move anything forward. Start from where you are today.
Pick a realistic number. How many sessions per week is actually achievable for the next eight weeks given your real schedule — not the ideal version of it? Two sessions a week, consistently delivered, is worth considerably more than five sessions planned and three skipped.
Keep the main movements. If you’re a powerlifter, squat, bench, and deadlift stay in. If you’re a weightlifter, snatch and clean and jerk stay in. Everything else can flex around the season.
Communicate with your coach. If you’re training at Crazy Strength, tell us what your summer looks like. We’ll build around it. The athletes who struggle in September are almost always the ones who didn’t say anything in July. Get in touch and we’ll help you make the most of the period.
And if you’re coming back after a longer break than you planned — walk in, do the work, and don’t make it a bigger thing than it needs to be. The bar doesn’t care how long it’s been.
The Honest Point
Progress is a product of consistency applied over time. Not a product of perfect individual sessions, or months where everything lined up exactly right.
Summer is going to disrupt something. That’s not a crisis — it’s a season. What it disrupts is exactly as much as you let it disrupt. And the athletes who come out of summer ahead are the ones who decided in advance that the disruption was not going to become the story.
Build the plan. Keep the habit. Use the space that summer gives you for something worthwhile. September will come. The question is what state you want to be in when it does.
Craig Spicer is the founder and head coach at Crazy Strength, Amesbury. He coaches athletes across powerlifting, weightlifting and strength training year-round. Follow @craig.spicer on Instagram.
There’s a particular kind of frustration that doesn’t announce itself loudly. It builds quietly, over months, through small moments that individually seem manageable but collectively start to wear at something fundamental in you. The moment you name it, everything becomes clearer.
This post is about accountability. Not the corporate buzzword version. The real kind — where words have weight, actions have consequences, and people are expected to stand behind both. Follow along at @craig.spicer where I share the unfiltered reality of leadership and what it actually takes to build something that lasts.
The Kind Person’s Dilemma
I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to look after people. It’s not a strategy — it’s just who I am. I’m laid-back by nature, I genuinely care about the people around me, and I will go out of my way to support, encourage, and invest in others. Most people who know me well would tell you the same.
What I’ve learned — particularly over the last 12 months — is that some people read that as permission.
Not consciously, perhaps. But somewhere along the line, kindness gets mistaken for compliance. A relaxed manner gets read as indifference to standards. And when you eventually respond with the same directness that’s been directed at you, or when you hold someone to something they said or did, the reaction is one of genuine surprise.
As if the rules only applied one way.
A Difficult 12 Months — And What It Revealed
I’ll be honest with you. The last six to twelve months have been some of the most demanding I can remember. Business pressures, a significant move, rising costs, and the kind of accumulated stress that doesn’t always show on the surface but absolutely affects how you show up day to day.
During that period, I wasn’t always as robust as I needed to be. I let some things go that I shouldn’t have. I absorbed more than I should have absorbed. And in doing so, I inadvertently gave some people the impression that the standards I hold — for myself and for those around me — had softened.
They hadn’t. I had just been running low.
The last two to three weeks have felt different. I’m back. Recalibrated, clear-headed, and reminded of exactly what I stand for. And with that clarity has come a sharper view of a pattern I’d been too stretched to address properly — people who are very comfortable saying and doing whatever they like, right up until the moment they’re held to it.
The Accountability Gap
Accountability isn’t a punishment. It’s a basic feature of any functioning relationship, team, or organisation. You say something — you own it. You do something — you own that too. The consequences of your words and actions belong to you, whether you intended them or not.
What I’ve encountered repeatedly in recent months is a significant gap between people’s willingness to act freely and their willingness to accept the consequences of that freedom.
People say things carelessly, then reframe them when challenged. People make commitments, then act as though the commitment was never made. And when you respond — calmly, clearly, and with the expectation that they stand behind what they said — the reaction is often one of offence.
It’s a revealing moment. Because the people who struggle most with being held accountable are almost always the people who’ve never genuinely had to be.
Opinions Are a Two-Way Street
This is the part I want to be particularly clear about.
I have no issue with people sharing their views. Healthy disagreement is one of the most valuable things that can happen in any conversation. I actively encourage it. What I do take issue with is the specific dynamic where someone feels entirely comfortable telling me what I should be doing, where I’m going wrong, or what the right answer is — and then becomes visibly uncomfortable the moment I disagree, push back, or offer a perspective rooted in my own experience.
Because that experience is not insignificant.
Twenty-five years working across national governing bodies, the British military, building sports programmes from the ground up, developing coaches, running a business — that body of work earns a perspective worth hearing. It doesn’t make me infallible. It doesn’t mean I’m always right. But it does mean that when I offer a view, it comes from somewhere real.
Experience doesn’t make you arrogant. It makes you qualified. And there’s a meaningful difference between the two.
If you’re going to offer an opinion, be prepared to receive one. If you’re going to challenge someone’s thinking, be prepared to have your own challenged in return. That’s not aggression — that’s an honest conversation between adults.
What Holding People Accountable Actually Looks Like
There’s a version of accountability that people fear — aggressive, personal, point-scoring. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Holding someone accountable, done properly, is measured. It’s clear. It’s direct without being cruel. It says: “You said this. You did this. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m not going to lower my standards to make you more comfortable.”
The key distinction
Reacting is emotional and immediate. Responding is considered and intentional. When I hold someone to their words or actions, it comes from a place of principle, not frustration.
Being robust is not the same as being unkind. You can be warm and firm at the same time. In fact, the most respectful thing you can do for another person is take them seriously enough to expect them to own what they’ve said and done. Letting people off the hook isn’t kindness — it’s just easier.
Getting Back in the Game
The last few weeks have reminded me of something important. Standards don’t disappear during hard periods — they just become harder to maintain. And when you come back to yourself after a difficult stretch, you see very clearly what was allowed to slip and what needs to be recalibrated.
This post isn’t a rant. It’s a reminder — for me as much as anyone reading it.
- Own your words.
- Own your actions.
- Expect others to do the same.
- When they don’t — be measured, be clear, and hold the line.
That’s not a personality flaw. That’s leadership.
For more on how I think about leadership, accountability, and building something real, head over to the Crazy Strength blog — including my recent post on knowing when to lead and when to follow.
Your Move
Think about one conversation or situation in the last month where you let something go that you shouldn’t have. Not because it wasn’t worth addressing — but because it felt easier not to.
What would it look like to go back and hold that line, calmly and clearly?
That’s where this starts. Connect with me at @craig.spicer — I’d genuinely like to hear where this lands for you.