I went back to Jávea last week to train the same client I worked with last October.
The first trip had been fairly easy to plan. Early sessions near the port, a few simple strength workouts at the villa and enough walking to make the week feel useful without turning it into a training camp.
This time it was properly hot.
We tried starting earlier. It helped for about twenty minutes. By the end of the warm-up the terrace was already uncomfortable and every piece of equipment I touched seemed to have been left in an oven.
My client suggested moving inside.
I wasn’t convinced at first. The last time I’d been there, the living room was dark and slightly awkward. There was plenty of floor space but the old doors only opened at one end. Trying to train there would have meant moving furniture and probably knocking over something expensive.
The room had changed since then.
He’d had new sliding doors fitted across most of the back of the house. With those open, the living room and terrace worked as one space. We had shade, moving air and enough room to train without rearranging half the villa.
It also meant I had to rethink the session.
I’d planned short runs outside with strength work between them. That wasn’t sensible in the heat so we kept the strength work and replaced the running with loaded carries between the living room and the far end of the terrace.
Nothing complicated.
Goblet squats near the sofa. Resistance band rows by the doors. A suitcase carry outside and back. Push-ups inside where the floor wasn’t trying to cook our hands.
We finished each round with a slow walk around the pool rather than another burst of cardio. Heart rate still came up. Nobody felt ill. The workout did what it was supposed to do.
This sounds obvious written down. When the weather is too hot, train somewhere cooler.
People are surprisingly reluctant to change a session once it has been planned though. I see it with clients and I do it myself. We decide what a workout should look like and then try to complete it even when the conditions have changed.
Sometimes that is discipline. Sometimes it is just being stubborn.
The indoor version was probably better than the session I’d originally planned. My client moved well because he wasn’t distracted by the heat. We took slightly longer rests and the quality of each set stayed consistent. I could correct things without shouting across a terrace while a pool pump ran beside us.
By the third morning we had a routine.
The bands stayed attached to a solid post outside. The dumbbells remained indoors overnight so they weren’t hot when we picked them up. We used the change in floor surface as the end point for each carry.
The open doors made a convenient dividing line between the two parts of the session. Strength inside, carries outside. It wasn’t something I would design deliberately in a gym but it worked.
Later in the week we returned to the port for an early walk. That was enough outdoor training for the day.
There is a point during a Spanish summer when adding more intensity stops making a workout better. You can still train hard but you need to choose where and when to do it. Midday on a sunny terrace is rarely the clever answer.
We completed four sessions during the visit. None matched the plan I’d written before leaving Barcelona.
The client still trained. The work was good and I didn’t have to explain to anyone why I had allowed a film professional to collapse beside his own swimming pool.
I’ll plan the indoor option before I arrive next time.