Training Programmes for Clients: How to Write Plans That Work and Get Done

Most training programmes for clients fall apart in the first week a child gets sick, and it’s rarely the rep ranges’ fault.

It’s Sunday evening. You’ve spent two hours on it. There’s a spreadsheet with colour-coded tabs, a four-day upper/lower split, tempo prescriptions for every lift, a deload pencilled in for week six and a note about adding a fifth day “once the base is built”. You send it over with a voice note explaining the logic. Your client replies with a thumbs up and three flexed-arm emojis. On Wednesday he texts to say his daughter’s off school sick, so he’ll “double up on Thursday”. On Thursday he does about half of Monday’s session, because the gym was busy and he couldn’t get the squat rack. By the second week he’s doing a workout he found on his phone, and by the third you’re getting the message every coach knows by heart: Sorry, mad few weeks, I’ll get back into it properly next month.

Nothing in your programme was wrong. The sets were sensible, the exercise choices were good and the progression made sense. It was written for an imaginary client with a free diary, an empty gym and no children, and the man who actually had to do it had none of those.

Writing training programmes for clients is a skill, and it’s simpler than a lot of people make it look. This guide covers the whole process, from the first conversation with a client to a worked 12-week plan for a real week, and then what a good programme design course should teach you.

Why Most Training Programmes Fail

Most training programmes fail because the client stops doing them, far more often than because of a bad choice of rep range.

That changes how you should think about programming. When coaches argue online about programming, they argue about the variables that matter at the margin: whether 12 sets a week beats 16, whether a muscle should be trained twice or three times, whether a particular exercise is better than its cousin. Those questions are real, and later in this guide we’ll go through what the evidence says about each of them. But for a typical client, the gap between a good programme and a perfect one is small. Whether the programme actually gets done matters far more.

You see, training works through accumulation. Each session nudges the body a little, and the nudges add up over months and years. A programme that’s 90% optimal and followed for a year will beat one that’s 100% optimal and followed for three weeks, nearly every time. The best programme for a client is usually the one they’ll still be doing in six months.

So the angle of this guide, and of writing training programmes for clients in general, is this: write the simplest plan that drives the adaptation the client needs, and that survives their real week. Both halves matter. A plan that survives the week but doesn’t challenge the body won’t change anything, which is how people end up “training” for years and looking and feeling much the same. A plan that challenges the body perfectly but collapses the first time a child gets sick won’t get your client anywhere either. Your job is to find the overlap.

Why clients drop off

When a client drifts away from a programme, it’s tempting to put it down to motivation. Sometimes that’s part of it. More often, the programme asked for something the client’s life couldn’t give.

There are a few usual culprits. The programme needed more days than the client really had, so the first busy week broke it. The sessions were too long, so the client kept cutting them short and feeling like they’d failed. The exercises needed equipment that wasn’t free at the time they could train. The volume was so high that the client was sore for days and dreaded the next session. Or the programme was built around the coach’s preferences, so a client who wanted to feel fitter and move better found themselves doing a powerlifting cycle they had no interest in.

These usually come down to how the programme was designed, rather than anything wrong with the client, and the person who designed it can fix them. So a lot of what looks like poor adherence is within your control.

What a programme is for

So, what is a training programme actually for? It’s a plan for creating a particular kind of stress, repeatedly and in a dose the body can recover from, so that the body adapts in the direction the client wants. That’s it. Everything else, the spreadsheets, the periodisation diagrams, the fancy terminology, is in service of that.

Thinking about it this way stops you over-engineering. If the client needs to get stronger, the programme has to give their muscles and nervous system a reason to get stronger, and enough recovery to do it, for long enough to matter. If the programme does that and the client does the programme, you’ve succeeded, even if it looks boringly simple on paper.

Start With a Needs Analysis

A needs analysis is the first step in writing training programmes for clients. It’s the process of working out what this particular client needs from their training and what their life will allow. It’s the step most new coaches rush, because writing the programme feels like the real work and asking questions feels like a delay. It’s actually the other way round. Get the needs analysis right and the programme gets much easier to write.

There are five things you’re trying to find out: the goal behind the goal, the client’s training history, their health and any injuries, what they’ve got to work with (time, equipment, setting) and what they enjoy. Let’s go through each.

The goal behind the goal

Clients usually arrive with a surface goal. I want to lose a stone. I want to get stronger. I want to tone up. I want to get fit. These are a starting point, and they’re worth taking seriously, but they rarely tell you enough to programme from. So, I’d recommend asking what’s underneath the goal before you write a single set, and at the end of the needs analysis, asking the client to put their reason in one sentence, in their own words, and writing it at the top of the programme. Mark’s might read: So I can still kick a ball with my grandkids. On a wet Monday, a plan someone handed you is easy to drop, and a reason you wrote yourself is much harder to walk away from.

So ask what’s underneath. What would be different if you lost the weight? What made you want to start now? What does “fit” look like for you on a normal day? The answers are often more specific and more motivating than the original goal. “Get fit” might turn out to mean “keep up with my kids on the beach this summer without getting out of breath”. “Get stronger” might mean “stop my back hurting when I pick up shopping bags”. “Tone up” usually means some combination of building a bit of muscle and losing a bit of fat, which changes the programme considerably from what the word might suggest.

This matters for programming because different goals call for different adaptations, and different adaptations need different stimuli. Building maximal strength needs heavy loads and practice at the specific lifts. Building muscle needs enough hard sets per muscle. Improving cardiovascular fitness needs enough time at the right intensities. Improving how someone feels day to day often needs all three in modest doses, plus more movement outside the gym. If you don’t know which adaptation you’re chasing, you can’t choose the stimulus.

It also matters for motivation. A client who’s training to keep up with their kids has a reason that will still be there on a wet Tuesday in February. A client who’s training to “lose a stone” might drop off the moment the scale stalls. Knowing the deeper reason gives you something to come back to when things get hard.

Training age and history

Next, find out what the client has done before. Coaches call this training age: how long someone has been training consistently and seriously. It’s different from their actual age, and from how long ago they first joined a gym. Someone who’s had a membership for ten years but trained twice a month has a training age close to zero. Someone who lifted seriously for five years in their twenties, then stopped for a decade, is somewhere in between, and will usually regain strength and muscle faster than a true beginner.

Training age changes almost everything about the programme. Beginners respond to nearly any reasonable stimulus, because they’re starting from a point where the body has had little reason to adapt. Their early strength gains come largely from the nervous system getting better at using the muscle they already have, so they can progress quickly, sometimes session to session, on modest volumes. More experienced clients have used up those easy gains. They need more precise programming, more volume or intensity to keep progressing, and more patience, because progress is measured in months rather than weeks.

Ask about the history in some detail. What did they enjoy? What did they hate? What worked, and what made them stop? If a client tells you they’ve started a gym programme five times and stopped five times, that pattern is the most important piece of information you’ve got. It’s telling you that whatever those programmes asked of them, their life couldn’t sustain it. Your programme had better ask for something different.

Health, injuries and when to refer

Then there’s health. Before anyone starts a new training programme, you need to know whether there’s anything that means they should see a doctor first. Most coaches use a pre-exercise screening questionnaire for this, such as the PAR-Q+, which asks about things like heart conditions, chest pain, dizziness or loss of consciousness, bone or joint problems, and medications. A “yes” doesn’t send everyone straight to a doctor, though. It leads to follow-up questions, and depending on the answers, the client may be cleared to start, directed to a qualified exercise professional or the ePARmed-X+, or advised to see their doctor first. Doing away with blanket medical referral was one of the main reasons the questionnaire was revised. Follow its pathway exactly, work within whatever guidance comes back, and refer whenever you’re unsure.

Some things are clear red flags at any point, not only at the start. Chest pain or pressure during exercise, unusual breathlessness, feeling faint or blacking out, palpitations, or new pain that’s sharp, worsening, or comes with numbness, tingling or weakness all mean stop and refer. Programming isn’t a substitute for medical care, and part of being a good coach is knowing where your role ends.

Old injuries and niggles are more common and less dramatic. A client with a cranky shoulder or a back that “goes” every so often isn’t usually a reason to avoid training, and the evidence generally supports staying active with sensible loading. But it does shape the programme. You might choose exercises the client can do without pain, build up load more gradually, and keep an eye on how things respond over the following 24 hours. If something is getting steadily worse rather than better, or you’re unsure what’s going on, that’s when you bring in a physiotherapist or doctor. Our article on how to prevent injuries with smart programming covers the practical side in more detail.

The real week

This is where most programmes go wrong, so I’d recommend asking the client to walk you through a normal week. Not their ideal week. Their actual one. What time do they get up? When do they work? Who else needs them, and when? Which days are chaotic and which are calmer? How often does something unexpected blow up the plan? How long can they realistically spend in the gym, including getting there, changing and getting home?

Then ask the most useful question of all: How many days a week could you train even in a bad week? Not how many they’d like to train. How many they could still manage when work is busy and someone’s ill. That number, rather than the number they’d like, is what the programme should be built on. If the answer is two, a three-day programme will spend half its life being “missed”, and every missed session chips away at the client’s belief that they can do this. A two-day programme that gets done every week, with an optional third day for the good weeks, will get far better results.

Session length matters as much as frequency. A client who’s got 45 minutes including changing time doesn’t have time for six exercises with three-minute rests. You’ll need fewer exercises, sensible pairing, and a clear idea of what to drop first if the session runs short.

Equipment, setting and preference

Finally, find out what the client has to work with and what they like. Do they train in a big commercial gym, a small studio, at home with a pair of dumbbells, or in a park? When they train, is the gym quiet or packed? There’s no point building a programme around the barbell back squat if the client trains at 6pm in a gym with one squat rack and a queue.

And ask what they enjoy. People are more likely to keep doing things they like, and for most goals there are many good ways to get there. If a client hates running but loves cycling, programme cycling. If they find machines boring but enjoy free weights, use free weights. If they love a particular exercise, find a way to include it, even if it isn’t the one you’d have chosen.

Once you know the goal behind the goal, the client’s training age, their health, their real week, their equipment and their preferences, you know what adaptation you’re chasing and what constraints the programme has to live within. Next comes how training actually produces that adaptation, because once you understand the mechanism, the variables make sense.

How Training Actually Changes the Body

Every programming decision you’ll make is, underneath, a decision about stimulus and recovery. So it pays to understand what’s going on inside the body when someone trains, and why it adapts.

Stimulus, recovery, adaptation

The simplest useful model is the cycle coaches often call stimulus, recovery, adaptation. A training session is a stimulus: a stress that disturbs the body’s normal state. In the hours and days after it, the body recovers from that disturbance. And if the stimulus was big enough, and the recovery good enough, the body doesn’t just return to where it was. It adapts, building a little more muscle protein, recruiting muscle fibres a bit more effectively, adding a few more mitochondria, so that the same stress causes less disruption next time.

That last part explains why programmes have to progress. The adaptation is the body’s way of making the stimulus less stressful. Once it’s adapted, doing the same thing again produces less disturbance and less reason to adapt further. If the client lifts the same weight for the same reps every week for a year, they’ll get to a level that matches that stimulus and stay there. To keep improving, the stimulus has to keep creating a meaningful disturbance, which usually means gradually asking for more. That’s progressive overload, and it’s the closest thing training has to a universal law.

A slightly more detailed version is what sports scientists call the fitness-fatigue model. Every session produces two after-effects at once: a fitness effect, which builds slowly and lasts a long time, and a fatigue effect, which builds quickly and fades within days. How well someone performs on any given day is roughly their fitness minus their fatigue. This explains a lot of things coaches see in practice. It’s why a client can feel weaker in the middle of a hard block even though they’re getting fitter underneath. It’s a simplified model rather than measured physiology, but it’s a useful one. It’s why an easier week often leads to a jump in performance, because the fatigue clears faster than the fitness fades. And it’s why piling on more and more training eventually stops working: past a certain point, the extra fatigue outweighs the extra fitness, and the client feels and performs worse.

How muscle gets bigger

So what’s the disturbance that makes a muscle grow? The main driver appears to be mechanical tension: the force a muscle fibre produces against resistance, especially when it’s working hard.

As far as we understand it, muscle fibres contain sensors that detect tension, built into the structures that link the contracting machinery inside the fibre to its outer membrane and the surrounding connective tissue. When a fibre works hard against a load, these sensors convert the mechanical signal into chemical signals inside the cell. One of the most important of those signals is the activation of a protein complex called mTORC1, which acts as a master switch for building muscle protein. Once mTORC1 is switched on, the fibre ramps up translation: the process by which its ribosomes read the genetic instructions and build new contractile proteins. Over time, with repeated sessions and enough protein and energy coming in, the rate of building outpaces the rate of breakdown, and the fibre gets bigger. That protein matters here for a mechanical reason. mTORC1 has two separate inputs. Tension from a hard set is one. Amino acids, leucine above all, are the other, and they’re sensed separately inside the fibre. Training supplies the signal and protein supplies both a trigger and the raw material, so if either is missing, the response is blunted. As fibres grow, they also add new nuclei, donated by satellite cells, stem cells that sit alongside the fibre, which helps them sustain the extra protein-building work.

After a hard session, muscle protein synthesis stays elevated for a day or two, though the window seems to shorten as people become more trained. That’s one reason most muscles benefit from being trained more than once a week: a second session restarts the signal before the first has fully faded.

Now, muscle fibres get recruited in a particular order. Muscles are made of motor units: a single nerve cell and all the fibres it controls. They’re recruited in a predictable order, from the smallest, low-force units up to the largest, high-force units, as the demand on the muscle rises. This is known as the size principle. With a heavy load, the body has to recruit nearly all the motor units from the first rep. With a lighter load, it starts with the smaller ones, but as those fatigue and the set gets harder, it has to bring in bigger and bigger units to keep the weight moving. By the last few reps of a hard set, even with a light load, most of the motor units are working hard.

That explains a very practical finding. In a meta-analysis led by Brad Schoenfeld, lighter loads (60% of someone’s one-rep max or less, and in some studies as light as about 30%) built similar amounts of muscle to heavier loads, as long as the sets were taken close to failure. Heavier loads were better for building maximal strength, which makes sense, because strength is partly a skill specific to lifting heavy things. But for building muscle, what mattered most was that the set was hard enough to recruit and fatigue the high-threshold fibres. The weight on the bar was a means to that end.

This is why “effort” is a variable you have to programme, alongside sets and reps. Three sets of ten that stop with eight reps still in the tank are a very different stimulus from three sets of ten that stop with one or two left, even though they look the same on paper.

How strength improves

Strength improves through two broad routes. The first is neural. In the first few weeks of training, much of a beginner’s strength gain comes from the nervous system getting better at the movement: recruiting more motor units, firing them at a higher rate, coordinating the muscles that drive the movement, and relaxing the ones that oppose it. That’s why beginners can add weight to the bar almost every session early on without their muscles having visibly grown. The tidy “nerves first, muscle later” story is a simplification, though. Muscle protein building starts from the first session, and some of the growth measured in the first few weeks is actually swelling from muscle damage rather than new muscle. It’s also why strength is quite specific. Someone who trains the squat gets better at squatting, and some of that improvement carries over to other leg movements, but not all of it.

The second route is muscle size. A bigger muscle can produce more force, so over the longer term, building muscle supports building strength. In practice, the two go together for most clients, and a programme that builds both is usually the right call for general health and function.

How fitness improves

Cardiovascular fitness has its own mechanisms. When someone does aerobic exercise, the energy demands in the working muscles change the cell’s chemistry: the ratio of energy molecules shifts as ATP is used up, and calcium levels inside the fibre rise and fall with each contraction. Sensors pick these changes up, including an enzyme called AMPK that responds to a falling energy charge. Those signals switch on a protein called PGC-1α, which drives the building of new mitochondria, the parts of the cell that burn fuel with oxygen. Over weeks of training, muscles end up with more mitochondria, more capillaries to deliver oxygen, and a better ability to burn fat at a given pace. The heart adapts too: its main pumping chamber gets better at filling and pumps more blood with each beat, so the resting heart rate often falls. Our article on heart adaptations to exercise goes into this in depth.

For programming, the point is that different kinds of cardio push these adaptations in different ways. Longer, easier work builds the aerobic base and is easy to recover from. Harder intervals push the top end of fitness and can be very time-efficient, but they’re more fatiguing and harder to sustain week after week. Most clients benefit from a mix, weighted towards the easier end.

Specificity and the minimum effective dose

Two principles fall out of all this. The first is specificity: the body adapts to the specific demands you place on it. If you want a client to get stronger at pushing things overhead, they need to push things overhead. If you want them to be able to walk up a hill without stopping, they need to do some sustained aerobic work. Training is a signal, and the body responds to the signal you send.

The second is the idea of a minimum effective dose: the smallest amount of training that produces the adaptation you’re after. Because adaptation depends on stimulus and recovery, more training isn’t automatically better. Past a certain point, extra volume adds fatigue faster than it adds results, and for a busy client it also adds time, soreness and another reason to skip a session. Starting near the minimum effective dose and adding more only when progress stalls is one of the best habits a coach can develop.

The Programming Variables

A resistance training programme is built from a short list of variables. Researchers like William Kraemer and Nicholas Ratamess have set them out in roughly this form: exercise selection, exercise order, load, number of sets and reps (which together give volume), rest periods, frequency, and how fast the reps are performed. Later research has added one more that matters a great deal: how close to failure each set is taken. Every programme you’ve ever seen is some combination of choices on these dials. Here’s what each one does, and how to set it for a typical client.

Exercise selection

Start with the movements, because they shape everything else. For most clients, a good programme is built around a handful of big, multi-joint movement patterns: a squat or other knee-dominant leg movement, a hinge (like a deadlift or hip thrust), a horizontal push (like a press-up or bench press), a horizontal pull (like a row), a vertical push (overhead press), a vertical pull (pull-up or pulldown), and something for the trunk and for carrying. Those patterns cover the major muscle groups and train the movements people use in daily life. Smaller, single-joint exercises like curls, lateral raises or calf raises can then be added for specific goals or muscles that need extra work.

Within each pattern, choose the version that suits the client. A goblet squat is easier to learn than a barbell back squat and suits most beginners well. A leg press lets someone load their legs heavily without having to balance a bar. A trap-bar deadlift is often easier to set up well than a straight-bar one. The “best” exercise is the one that trains the target muscles through a good range of motion, that the client can do safely and with good control, that suits the equipment they have, and ideally that they don’t hate.

And keep the exercises reasonably stable over a block of training. It’s tempting to keep things fresh by changing exercises every week, but progress depends on being able to compare this week with last week. If the exercises keep changing, you can’t tell whether the client is getting stronger, and they spend their time learning new movements rather than getting better at old ones. Our guide to exercise selection, variety and ordering goes into this in more depth.

Exercise order

The usual rule is to put the most demanding exercises first in a session, when the client is fresh. That’s normally the big multi-joint lifts, and especially any the client most wants to progress. Smaller and less demanding exercises come later. It’s also sensible to put exercises that need a lot of technique or coordination early, before fatigue makes them sloppy.

Pairing exercises can save a lot of time. Alternating between two exercises that use different muscles, like a press and a row, lets one muscle group rest while the other works. For a client with 45 minutes, that can be the difference between a programme that fits their life and one that doesn’t.

Load and reps

Load and reps are two sides of one dial. The heavier the weight, the fewer reps someone can do with it. For building muscle, as we saw, a wide range of loads works if the sets are hard enough, which in practice means anything from about 5 to 30 reps per set. For building maximal strength, heavier loads in lower rep ranges (roughly 1 to 6) are more specific and more effective. For general fitness, the moderate range, roughly 6 to 15 reps, gives a good mix of strength and muscle with manageable fatigue and a lower technical demand than very heavy singles.

The American College of Sports Medicine’s position stand on resistance training progression suggests that novices start with loads they can lift for roughly 8 to 12 reps, which is a good default for most new clients. It’s heavy enough to build strength, light enough to practise technique, and the higher end of the range is less intimidating for someone who’s never lifted. As clients get more experienced, you can widen the range: heavier work on the main lifts for strength, moderate and higher-rep work on accessory exercises for muscle and joint tolerance.

Sets and volume

Volume is how much work a client does, usually counted for resistance training as the number of hard sets per muscle group per week. It’s one of the strongest drivers of muscle growth. In a meta-analysis led by Brad Schoenfeld, Dan Ogborn and James Krieger, there was a graded dose-response between weekly sets and muscle growth: people who did fewer than five sets per muscle group per week grew by about 5.4% over the study periods (mostly 8 to 12 weeks), those doing 5 to 9 sets grew by about 6.6%, and those doing 10 or more grew by about 9.8%. That’s a real, graded effect, and it’s also measured in single-digit percentages, which is why turning up consistently for a year matters more than squeezing in an extra set this month.

That doesn’t mean more is always better. The studies mostly ran for a few months, and the extra benefit of each additional set gets smaller as volume rises, while the time cost and fatigue keep climbing. For a beginner, even four to six hard sets per muscle group per week will produce good results, because they’re so far from their ceiling. For most established gym-goers, somewhere around 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week is a sensible range. Start near the low end. If the client is progressing, there’s no reason to add more. If progress stalls and recovery is good, adding a few sets is one of the first things to try. Our article on how many sets you should do goes further into the evidence.

A useful habit is to count “hard sets” rather than all sets. A warm-up set at half the working weight doesn’t count. A set stopped with six or seven reps in reserve barely counts. A set that ends within one to three reps of failure does.

Effort and proximity to failure

How close a set ends to failure is one of the most important variables, and one of the most overlooked. As we saw with the size principle, the last few reps of a hard set are where the high-threshold motor units are working hardest, so a set that stops very far from failure may not provide much stimulus at all.

But that doesn’t mean every set should go to failure. A meta-analysis led by Martin Refalo found little difference in muscle growth between training to failure and stopping a little short of it, at least within the range the studies tested. Going all the way to failure costs a lot more fatigue, takes longer to recover from, and raises the risk of technique breaking down on the last rep, which matters more on a heavy squat than on a biceps curl. Newer dose-response modelling led by Zac Robinson adds some nuance: muscle growth seemed to improve as sets finished closer to failure, while strength gains barely changed. So for most clients, stopping one to three reps short of failure on most sets is a sensible trade-off rather than a proven optimum. Just don’t let “short of failure” drift into five or six reps in the tank.

The practical tool for managing this is reps in reserve, or RIR: how many more reps the client could have done if they’d kept going. A related scale, the RIR-based rating of perceived exertion described by Eric Helms and colleagues, rates a set from 1 to 10, where 10 means no reps left, 9 means one left, 8 means two left, and so on. Clients who are new to training are usually poor at judging how many reps they’ve got left, and they tend to underestimate it. In a meta-analysis led by Israel Halperin, people underpredicted by about one rep on average, and the errors were smaller when the set ended closer to failure. Training experience seemed to help only a little. Because effort is set by reps in reserve rather than heart rate, it also stays valid for clients on medication that limits heart rate, such as beta-blockers. So with beginners, aim a little conservatively, teach them what a hard set feels like, and occasionally test a final set to see how many reps were really left. Our article on RIR, RPE and whether you need to train to failure covers this in practice.

Rest periods

Rest between sets is mostly about letting the client recover enough to do the next set well. Short rests feel harder and save time, which is why many people assume they’re better. But a systematic review led by Jozo Grgic found that longer rests weren’t worse for muscle growth and may be better in trained lifters, probably because they let people keep the load and reps higher across their sets. The ACSM position stand suggests rests of at least two to three minutes for heavy multi-joint lifts and one to two minutes for lighter accessory work.

For a client who’s short on time, pairing exercises is the best of both worlds: they rest each muscle group for a decent period while still moving between exercises. What you want to avoid is rests so short that the quality of every set drops, or so long that the session doesn’t fit the client’s life. Our article on rest periods goes into more detail.

Frequency

Frequency is how often each muscle group is trained in a week. A meta-analysis from the same Schoenfeld group found that training each muscle group at least twice a week tended to build more muscle than training it once. A later meta-analysis from Schoenfeld, Jozo Grgic and James Krieger found that when weekly volume was equated, frequency made no significant difference to muscle growth. So most of the benefit comes from frequency making room for more total volume. In practice the conclusion is the same: twice a week per muscle is a good default, because it makes the volume easier to fit in.

This is one reason full-body programmes suit most general-population clients so well. If the client trains two or three days a week, and every session trains the whole body, each muscle gets hit two or three times, the weekly volume is spread across sessions so no single session is exhausting, and a missed session costs a third of the week rather than all of the work for one muscle. Splits that train different body parts on different days make more sense for clients who can reliably train four or more days and want more volume than fits into full-body sessions.

Tempo

Tempo is the speed of each part of a rep. It matters less than people think for most clients. The main guidance is to control the lowering phase, rather than letting the weight drop, and to lift with intent. Very slow reps don’t seem to build more muscle and make sessions much longer. Tempo prescriptions can be useful for teaching technique, for clients who rush every rep, or for making an exercise harder when someone has limited weights at home, but for most programmes “control the way down, push the way up” is enough.

Cardio and daily movement

A training programme for general health isn’t complete without cardiovascular training and general movement. The ACSM guidance, led by Carol Garber, recommends at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise (or 75 minutes of vigorous), resistance training for the major muscle groups two or three days a week, and some flexibility and balance work. For most clients, cardio can include brisk walking, cycling, swimming, rowing or anything else that raises the heart rate for a sustained period. Daily steps also count for a lot, both for health and for energy expenditure if the client wants to lose fat.

Cardio can sit on separate days, after resistance training, or in short bouts through the week. If the client’s main goal is strength or muscle, it’s sensible to keep very hard cardio away from leg-heavy sessions, but easy cardio rarely interferes much. The usual explanation is that AMPK, switched on by endurance work, puts the brake on the muscle-building switch. That’s well shown in cells and animals, but in people the interference is smaller and inconsistent, and it shows up mainly with high volumes of hard, leg-dominant cardio. The practical advice holds, even though the reason behind it is less settled than it’s often presented. Our guide to understanding cardio programming covers the options in more depth.

Here’s a summary of the main variables and sensible starting points for a typical general-population client.

Variable	What it does	A sensible starting point	When to change it
Exercise selection	Decides which muscles and movements get trained	Five or six big movement patterns, in versions the client can do well	Swap an exercise if it causes pain, needs unavailable kit, or has stopped progressing for weeks
Load and reps	Sets the type of stimulus: more strength-specific when heavy, still good for muscle across a wide range	Loads the client can lift for about 8-12 reps	Go heavier on main lifts as the client gains experience or wants strength
Volume (hard sets per muscle per week)	One of the main drivers of muscle growth	About 4-6 for beginners, 10 or so for established clients	Add a few sets if progress stalls and recovery is good
Effort (reps in reserve)	Determines how much of the muscle is recruited and fatigued	Most sets ending 1-3 reps short of failure	Push closer to failure on safer exercises later in a block
Rest	Lets the client recover enough to keep set quality high	2-3 minutes on heavy multi-joint lifts, 1-2 on smaller ones; pair exercises to save time	Shorten only if quality holds up
Frequency	Spreads volume across the week and restarts the growth signal	Each muscle group trained about twice a week	More days only if the client can reliably train them
Cardio and steps	Builds aerobic fitness and supports health and energy expenditure	Toward 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, plus a daily step habit	Build gradually; add some harder work once the base is there

Progression: How to Make Next Month Harder Than This One

You see, progressive overload means gradually increasing the demands of training so the body has a reason to keep adapting. The simplest way to think about it: if the client is doing the same thing in month six as in month one, they’ve probably stopped improving. Our introduction to what progressive overload is covers the principle. Here we’ll look at three ways to put it into practice, starting with the simplest.

Linear progression

Linear progression is exactly what it sounds like: add a bit of weight every session or every week. A beginner might squat 40 kg (88 lb) for three sets of eight this week, 42.5 kg (94 lb) next week, 45 kg (99 lb) the week after, and so on.

It works brilliantly for beginners, because their early strength gains come fast. It also gives the client a very clear, motivating sense of progress. Its weakness is that it can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, the weight goes up faster than the client can adapt, they miss reps, and the plan stalls. For beginners, that might take a couple of months on the main lifts. For smaller exercises, where the jumps in weight are proportionally large, it can stall within weeks: going from 8 kg to 10 kg (about 18 to 22 lb) dumbbells is a 25% jump, which no muscle adapts to in a week.

The ACSM position stand suggests increasing load by about 2 to 10% once the client can comfortably do one or two reps more than the target on the current weight. That’s a useful rule of thumb, with smaller increases for upper-body and isolation lifts and larger ones for big lower-body lifts.

Double progression

Double progression is a great default for most clients, and it fixes the main weakness of linear progression. Instead of a fixed rep target, you give a rep range, say 8 to 12. The client works with a weight until they can do the top of the range for all their sets, then adds weight and drops back to the bottom of the range.

Say the client is doing three sets of 8 to 12 on a dumbbell row with 20 kg (44 lb). In week one they get 10, 9 and 8 reps. In week two, 11, 10 and 9. In week three, 12, 11 and 10. In week four, 12, 12 and 12. Now they’ve earned the jump: they move up to 22.5 kg (50 lb) and might get 9, 8 and 8. Then they start building reps again.

This works so well because it lets progress happen in two ways, reps and load, which smooths out the big jumps in weight that break linear progression. It’s simple for clients to understand, and it gives them a clear target every session: beat last time by a rep somewhere. It also builds in a little flexibility, because a bad day just means fewer reps rather than a failed plan. For small dumbbell exercises, where weight jumps are large, it’s almost essential. Our article on how to use micro-progressions in the gym has more on making those small steps work.

Autoregulation with RPE and RIR

The third approach uses effort rather than fixed numbers to set the load. Instead of “three sets of eight at 60 kg (132 lb)”, you might prescribe “three sets of eight at RPE 8”, meaning a weight that leaves about two reps in reserve. On a good day, that might be 62.5 kg (about 138 lb). On a bad day after poor sleep, it might be 57.5 kg (about 127 lb). Either way, the client gets roughly the right stimulus for how they are on the day.

This is called autoregulation, and it’s very useful for clients whose lives are unpredictable, because their readiness to train varies a lot from week to week. It’s also useful for experienced lifters, whose progress is slow enough that a fixed plan often doesn’t match how they actually perform. Its weakness is that it depends on the client judging effort reasonably accurately, which, as we’ve seen, beginners often can’t. So it’s usually best introduced once a client has been training for a while and has learned what a set at two reps in reserve actually feels like.

In practice, many good programmes blend these approaches. A beginner might use linear progression on the big lifts and double progression on accessories. An intermediate client might use double progression with an RIR target, so that “add weight when you hit 12” is combined with “and the last set should feel like about two left”.

When progress stalls

Every client stalls eventually. When they do, work through the likely causes in order before changing the programme. Is the client actually doing it, and doing it as written? Are they sleeping and eating enough to recover, particularly if they’re in a calorie deficit? Is life unusually stressful at the moment? Is the effort in their sets where it needs to be, or have they drifted into stopping well short of hard?

If all of those check out, then it’s time to change the programme. The usual options are to add a little volume, to change the rep range for a block, to swap an exercise for a close variant, or to take an easier week to let fatigue clear. Our articles on training progression and progressive overload methods go through these options in more detail.

Periodisation for Normal People

Well, periodisation means organising training into phases over time, so that the programme changes in a planned way rather than staying the same or changing at random. It has a reputation for being complicated, mostly because of how it’s used in elite sport, with macrocycles, mesocycles and microcycles, peaking for competitions and detailed models of how each phase builds on the last.

Does a general-population client need that? Mostly no. But they do benefit from a simple version.

What the evidence says

A meta-analysis led by Tyler Williams compared periodised and non-periodised resistance training and found that periodised programmes produced somewhat greater gains in maximal strength. The advantage was small to moderate, and it was measured in strength rather than general health or muscle. Still, it suggests that planned variation in training is better than doing the same thing indefinitely.

The more practical case for periodisation is about fatigue and motivation. A client who trains hard week after week without any change will accumulate fatigue and will often get bored. Planning blocks with a clear focus, followed by an easier week, manages both problems.

A simple model that works

For most clients, a simple block structure is enough. Work in blocks of four to six weeks. Within each block, the training gradually gets harder, through more reps, more weight, more sets or more effort. At the end of the block, take an easier week, often called a deload, where volume and effort drop, typically by doing fewer sets and stopping further from failure. Then start a new block, often with slightly different rep ranges or exercise variations, and build again.

Over a year, the blocks can shift focus to match the client’s goals and life. A block before a summer holiday might lean towards more volume and conditioning. A block in a busy work period might be deliberately lighter, with the aim of maintaining rather than building. So, for most clients, periodisation just means planning the training around the year they’re actually going to have.

Some coaches schedule deloads every fourth or fifth week no matter what. Others only deload when the client shows signs of needing it: performance dropping, sleep getting worse, joints aching, motivation sliding. For most general-population clients, life provides plenty of unplanned easy weeks (holidays, illness, busy periods), so rigid scheduled deloads are often unnecessary. Planning one at the end of each block, so roughly every five to seven weeks, and being willing to bring it forward if needed, is a sensible middle ground. Our articles on periodisation and on periodisation for general population versus athletes go into more detail.

Linear, undulating and other models

You’ll hear about different periodisation models. Linear periodisation typically moves from higher reps and lighter loads towards lower reps and heavier loads over several weeks. Undulating periodisation varies the rep ranges within a week, for example heavier on Monday, moderate on Wednesday and lighter on Friday. Block periodisation focuses each block on a particular quality.

For most clients, the differences between these models are small compared with the basics: enough volume, enough effort, progression, and consistency. Undulating approaches can suit full-body programmes well, because they give each session a slightly different feel, which helps both recovery and boredom. But the model matters less than whether it’s applied consistently.

Putting It Together: Writing the Programme Step by Step

Before the worked example, here’s the process in order. It’s the same whether you’re writing for a complete beginner or a seasoned lifter. What changes is the answer at each step.

1. Run the needs analysis. Find the goal behind the goal, the client’s training age and history, their health and any injuries, their real week (including how many days they could train in a bad week), their equipment and setting, and what they enjoy.
2. Name the adaptation. Decide what you’re actually trying to change: strength, muscle, aerobic fitness, movement quality, body composition, or a mix. This decides which variables matter most.
3. Set the frame. Choose the number of sessions per week from the bad-week answer, the session length from the real diary, and a split that fits. For most clients training two or three days, that’s full-body sessions.
4. Choose the movements. Pick a version of each main movement pattern the client can do well with the equipment they have, then add a few smaller exercises for their specific goals.
5. Set the dose. Choose sets, rep ranges, effort targets and rest periods. Start near the minimum effective dose: beginners need less than you think.
6. Choose the progression model. For most clients, double progression with a reps-in-reserve target. For complete beginners, simple linear progression on the main lifts.
7. Plan the block and the bad week. Lay out four to six weeks of progression, an easier week, and a minimum version of the programme the client can fall back on when life gets in the way.
8. Track, review and adjust. Log what was actually done, check progress every couple of weeks, and change one thing at a time when something isn’t working.

A Worked Example: 12 Weeks, Three Days a Week

Meet Mark.

Mark is 44, works in finance and spends most of his day at a desk. He has two kids, aged 8 and 11. He played football into his late twenties, did a few months of gym training in his thirties (“bench and curls, mostly”), and has done very little since apart from walking the dog. He weighs 92 kg (203 lb), and he’d like to lose some fat around the middle, though that’s not his main reason for coming. His main reason, when you dig, is that his back stiffens up after long days at the desk, he got out of breath playing football with his son in the park last month, and his father had a heart attack at 58. He’d like to feel strong and fit, and he’d like to still be kicking a ball around with his grandchildren.

His real week: he can reliably train on Monday and Wednesday evenings and Saturday morning. In a bad week, Monday and Saturday are safe; Wednesday is the one that goes. He’s got about 50 minutes in the gym, at a busy commercial gym in the evenings, quieter on Saturdays. He completed a screening questionnaire with no red flags, and he’s not on any medication. His back stiffness is general and settles with movement, with no pain down the legs, no numbness and nothing getting worse. He likes the idea of lifting, is a bit intimidated by barbells in a busy gym, and doesn’t enjoy running.

So: training age close to zero, a goal mixing general strength, muscle, fitness and some fat loss, three days available with two guaranteed, 50-minute sessions, and a busy gym. Here’s the plan.

The structure

Three full-body sessions a week, each built around different versions of the main movement patterns, so each muscle group gets trained three times a week on the good weeks and twice in the bad ones. Because Monday and Saturday are the guaranteed sessions, they’re built to cover the whole body by themselves. Wednesday adds extra volume and variety, but if it’s missed, nothing essential is lost.

The exercises use dumbbells, machines and cables rather than barbells for now, because the gym is busy in the evenings, Mark finds the barbells intimidating, and these versions are easier to learn and set up. That isn’t a permanent decision. Once he’s confident, the barbell lifts are there if he wants them.

The 12 weeks are split into three blocks. Weeks 1 to 4 are about learning the movements and building the habit, with fewer sets and more reps in reserve. Weeks 5 to 8 build the volume and push the effort a little higher. Weeks 9 to 11 bring the main lifts into slightly lower rep ranges with heavier loads. Week 12 is an easier week, with a simple check on progress. That’s later than the usual block-and-deload pattern, and it’s deliberate. Block one is so light that Mark builds up very little fatigue, and with two kids and a desk job, life will almost certainly hand him an unplanned easy week before then. If it doesn’t, and he’s flagging around week 8, bring the easier week forward.

Day and exercise	Weeks 1 to 4	Weeks 5 to 8	Weeks 9 to 11	Week 12 (easier week)
Monday: Goblet squat	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 6-10, 1-2 RIR	2 x 8, 3-4 RIR
Monday: Dumbbell bench press	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 6-10, 1-2 RIR	2 x 8, 3-4 RIR
Monday: Chest-supported dumbbell row	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 8-12, 1-2 RIR	2 x 10, 3-4 RIR
Monday: Dumbbell Romanian deadlift	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 8-10, 2 RIR	2 x 8, 3-4 RIR
Monday: Pallof press	2 x 10 each side	3 x 10 each side	3 x 12 each side	2 x 10 each side
Wednesday: Leg press	2 x 12-15, 3 RIR	3 x 10-15, 2 RIR	3 x 10-15, 1-2 RIR	Optional
Wednesday: Lat pulldown	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 8-12, 1-2 RIR	Optional
Wednesday: Seated dumbbell shoulder press	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 8-12, 1-2 RIR	Optional
Wednesday: Hip thrust or glute bridge	2 x 12-15, 3 RIR	3 x 10-15, 2 RIR	3 x 10-15, 1-2 RIR	Optional
Wednesday: Dumbbell curl and cable triceps pushdown (paired)	2 x 12-15	2 x 12-15	3 x 10-15	Optional
Saturday: Split squat	2 x 8-10 each leg, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12 each leg, 2 RIR	3 x 8-12 each leg, 1-2 RIR	2 x 8 each leg, 3-4 RIR
Saturday: Incline dumbbell press	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 6-10, 1-2 RIR	2 x 8, 3-4 RIR
Saturday: Seated cable row	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 8-12, 2 RIR	3 x 8-12, 1-2 RIR	2 x 10, 3-4 RIR
Saturday: Back extension	2 x 10-12, 3 RIR	3 x 10-12, 2 RIR	3 x 10-15, 2 RIR	2 x 10, 3-4 RIR
Saturday: Farmer’s carry	3 x 30 m	3 x 30-40 m	3 x 40 m, heavier	2 x 30 m
Every week: Cardio and steps	Brisk walk 30 min x 2, daily step habit	Walk or bike 30-40 min x 2, plus 5 min easy bike after Saturday session	As before, with one session including short harder efforts	Easy walks only

The reasoning

Every choice in that table has a reason, and the reasons are what you’d adjust for a different client.

Why full body, three days a week. Mark can train three days, but only two are reliable. Full-body sessions mean that if Wednesday goes, he’s still trained every muscle group twice that week. A split routine would mean that a missed session wipes out a whole muscle group’s training for the week. Full-body training also suits his goals, which are general rather than specialised, and his training age, because he’ll benefit from practising the main movements often.

Why these exercises. Each session covers a knee-dominant leg movement, a hip-dominant movement, a push, a pull and some trunk or carrying work. The goblet squat teaches the squat pattern well and is easy to load with one dumbbell. The leg press and split squat give the legs more work in different ways, and the split squat also trains balance and works each leg independently. The Romanian deadlift and back extension train the hip extensors and the back, which, built up gradually, often helps people whose backs stiffen at a desk. The chest-supported row takes the lower back out of the equation while Mark learns. The Pallof press and farmer’s carry train the trunk to resist movement, which is useful and very easy to recover from. The arm exercises on Wednesday are there partly because he’ll enjoy them, which isn’t a trivial reason.

Why so few sets at the start. Two sets per exercise in the first block might look like too little. But Mark is a beginner, and beginners respond to modest volumes. Starting low means he won’t be wrecked with soreness after the first week, which is one of the commonest reasons new clients quit. It also leaves room to add volume when his progress needs it, and it keeps the sessions comfortably within his 50 minutes. Once the volume goes up in block two, he’s doing about 6 to 9 direct hard sets per major muscle group a week on full weeks, with chest and hamstrings at the lower end and back and quads at the upper end. That rises towards 9 to 12 once the overlap from compound lifts is counted. For a beginner that’s plenty, and it leaves room to add sets later.

Why reps in reserve, and why so many at first. In the first block, three reps in reserve gives Mark room to learn the movements without technique breaking down, and it protects his back while it gets used to loading. It also gives him time to learn what effort feels like. By block three, he’s working one to two reps from failure on most sets, which is closer to where the strongest stimulus is, but only after he’s built the skill and the tolerance to do it safely.

Why double progression. Each exercise has a rep range. When Mark hits the top of the range for all sets at the target effort, the weight goes up and he drops to the bottom of the range. That gives him a clear target every session, lets the progress happen in small steps, and copes well with dumbbells, where the weight jumps are relatively large.

Why the rep ranges change. The drop to 6 to 10 reps in the third block on the main lifts gives a slightly heavier stimulus, which is more specific to strength and gives a bit of variation. The accessory lifts stay in higher rep ranges because they’re less suited to very heavy loading and the aim there is muscle and joint resilience.

Why the easier week. Week 12 cuts the sets and pulls the effort well back. It lets fatigue clear so Mark finishes the 12 weeks feeling good, and it gives you a clean check on progress: in that week, you can note what weights he’s using compared with week one. If he wants a firmer test, you might estimate a rep max on one or two lifts, which our rep max calculator can help with.

Why the cardio is so modest. Mark doesn’t enjoy running and is new to training. The cardio starts with brisk walking, which he already does with the dog, so it builds on a habit he already has. It progresses to longer walks or bike rides and eventually some short harder efforts, which will help his fitness and his heart. Building the base slowly is far more likely to stick than throwing interval sessions at a man who hasn’t run since his twenties.

What about the fat loss? This is where coaches tend to over-promise, so let’s be precise. Skeletal muscle burns roughly 13 kcal per kilogram per day at rest. If Mark adds 1.5 kg (3.3 lb) of muscle over these 12 weeks, his resting expenditure rises by about 20 kcal a day, which is less than a biscuit. The sessions themselves matter more. A 50-minute resistance session might cost a 92 kg (203 lb) man somewhere around 150 to 300 kcal above what he’d burn sitting down, so three sessions come to perhaps 500 to 900 kcal a week. With body fat holding roughly 7,700 kcal per kilogram, that’s around a tenth of a kilo (a quarter of a pound) of fat a week at most. The real fat-loss lever is his intake, so the programme is paired with a few simple nutrition habits, agreed with him separately and kept within a coach’s scope.

What training does decide is what he loses. With a moderate deficit and enough protein, nearly all of the weight he loses can be fat rather than muscle.

A realistic expectation for Mark, with a moderate deficit, is fat loss of about 0.5 to 1% of body weight a week, roughly 0.45 to 0.9 kg (1 to 2 lb). The early weeks usually look faster on the scale, because some of it is water, and the later weeks slower, because his expenditure falls as he gets lighter and his everyday movement tends to drop when he’s dieting. That second effect is why the daily step habit matters: it’s his buffer against that drop. Over the 12 weeks, something like 4 to 7 kg (9 to 15 lb) of fat lost, possibly alongside a kilo or two of muscle gained, is a reasonable target, with neither showing cleanly on a bathroom scale.

What happens next

At the end of the 12 weeks, you review with Mark. What’s improved? How does his back feel? Has he enjoyed it? What got in the way? Then you plan the next block. Perhaps he’s now confident enough to try a trap-bar deadlift. Perhaps he wants more conditioning before a summer of kickabouts. Perhaps his Wednesday session has become reliable, and he’d like to add a short fourth session on Sunday. Each review adjusts the programme to the client’s life and goals as they are now, rather than as they were three months ago.

When Life Happens

Ok, at some point in those 12 weeks, Mark will get ill. Or work will go mad for a fortnight. Or the kids will have a run of matches on Saturday mornings. Or his back will flare up after a long drive. Every client’s training is interrupted, and how you plan for that matters more than almost any choice about sets and reps.

The minimum effective programme

I’d recommend agreeing a minimum version of the programme with every client in advance, and writing it with them, in their words, before the first bad week comes. For Mark, it might look like this: on a bad week, do one full-body session of four exercises, two sets each, and keep walking the dog. That’s it. It takes 25 minutes. It keeps the habit alive and the muscle he’s built, and it means a bad week still counts for something.

There’s good evidence that maintaining training adaptations takes much less work than building them. Keeping muscle takes far less training than building it. In a randomised trial led by Chris Bickel, adults trained three days a week for 16 weeks, then cut back for 32 weeks to just one session a week, at either a third or a ninth of their original volume. Younger adults kept their strength and muscle-fibre size on both doses, even the ninth. Older adults (60 to 75) largely kept their strength, but lost some of their gains in fibre size on both doses. Part of the reason is what researchers call anabolic resistance: older muscle responds less to a given dose of protein, so the answer for older clients is partly a decent serving of protein at each meal, and only partly more sets. Crucially, the load stayed heavy during the cut-back phase, so a minimum session can be short, but it should still be hard. These were people new to training rather than seasoned lifters, so treat the numbers as a guide. But the direction is clear: a short, hard session or two keeps most of what you’ve built for a long time. One caveat for clients who are dieting: Bickel’s participants were eating roughly enough to maintain their weight, and in a calorie deficit it probably takes more to hold on to muscle. On a bad week during a fat-loss phase, I’d lean towards two short sessions rather than one.

This changes the conversation with clients about bad weeks. Instead of I’ve missed two sessions, I’ve lost everything, I might as well start again in January, it becomes I did the short version, so I’ve kept what I’ve built. That’s a far healthier way to think, and it’s grounded in the physiology.

Lapses, relapses and the all-or-nothing trap

Even with a minimum version, some weeks will be missed entirely. What matters then is the story the client tells about it. A lapse is a slip: a missed week. A relapse is when the client gives up and returns to not training at all. What usually turns one into the other is all-or-nothing thinking: I’ve missed a week, so the programme’s ruined.

It helps to name this early, before it happens. Something like: There will be weeks where you can’t train, and that’s completely normal. When it happens, the goal is to do the next session, not to wait until Monday or next month. One missed week makes almost no difference to your progress. Stopping for three months does. The research on habit formation backs this up. In a study led by Phillippa Lally, people took on a new daily habit, and it took a median of about 66 days for it to feel automatic, with a range from 18 to 254 days. Missing a single opportunity didn’t materially affect the overall habit-formation curve. That’s the reassurance clients need: missing one doesn’t break the chain.

When the client comes back after a lapse, resist the urge to make up for it. Doubling up sessions or adding extra volume to “catch up” usually just leads to more soreness, more fatigue and another lapse. Start back with the minimum version or the beginning of the current block, at a slightly easier effort, and build back over a week or two. Most of the lost ground comes back quickly.

The first message you send after a lapse matters more than the plan, because it decides whether the client feels ashamed. Something like Good to have you back. Let’s do the short version this week is enough. No catch-up, and no post-mortem.

The all-or-nothing trap, on both sides of the desk

Go back to that message from the start of this article: I’ll get back into it properly next month. The word “properly” is the problem. It splits training into two boxes, doing it properly or not at all, so anything less than the full plan counts as nothing. The “double up on Thursday” text comes from the same place: a missed session feels like a debt to repay, rather than a week that went differently.

When a client says next month, they’re rarely being lazy. Usually the plan has made a bad week feel like a verdict, so putting it off feels like the honest option. I wouldn’t argue with the feeling. Hand the choice back instead: Next month isn’t on offer. Thursday is. What’s the smallest version you’d still do on Thursday? The only session anyone can choose is the next one.

It helps to teach clients to catch the thought themselves. Give them one question for the moment it shows up: Is this thought about one session, or about who I am? “I missed Wednesday” is a fact. “I’m useless at sticking to things” is a label. Once they can see the label as a thought rather than a verdict, the next session gets much easier to turn up for. Underneath most dropouts is a belief along the lines of I must train perfectly or there’s no point, and the evidence above doesn’t support it: keeping what you’ve built takes a fraction of the work, and a single missed day doesn’t derail a habit. A more accurate version is I’d prefer to do every session, and I don’t need to for this to work.

Coaches catch it too. If the plan isn’t optimal, it isn’t good enough is the same thinking on the other side of the desk, and it’s how you end up with the colour-coded spreadsheet from the opening. A decent programme followed for a year beats a perfect one followed for nine days.

A few design choices make all of this easier:

• Engineer early wins. Set block one so the client can’t really fail it. Each logged session is evidence for I’m someone who trains, and that belief in their own ability, which psychologists call self-efficacy, grows fastest from experiences of success. That’s a bigger reason to start low than avoiding soreness.
• Offer real choices. Goblet squat or leg press, which would you rather start with? Which day is your floating day? A plan the client helped build is a plan they own.
• Write if-then cues. If it’s Monday at 6pm, the gym bag goes in the car before work. If the squat rack’s taken, I do the dumbbell version. Plans like these are among the best-supported tools for following through.
• Make room for discomfort. Clients don’t need to feel like going. They can feel reluctant and go anyway, and it’s worth saying that out loud, because a lot of people think they’re supposed to wait until they’re motivated.

Travel, illness and flare-ups

A few specific situations come up often enough to plan for. For travel, give the client a short bodyweight or hotel-gym session: press-ups, split squats, a hip-dominant move like single-leg bridges, a row with a resistance band if they have one, and a walk. It won’t build much, but it keeps the habit going and holds on to what they’ve got.

For illness, the usual guidance is that mild symptoms above the neck, like a blocked nose, might allow light activity if the client feels up to it, while anything systemic, like a fever, body aches or chest symptoms, means rest until they’ve recovered. When they come back, start well below where they left off. And if a client has had a significant illness, or anything involving the heart or lungs, they should check with their doctor before returning to hard training.

For flare-ups of old injuries or niggles, the aim is usually to keep training around the problem rather than stopping completely. Reduce the load or range of motion on exercises that aggravate it, swap them for versions that don’t, keep training the rest of the body, and build back gradually as it settles. If it isn’t settling, or it’s getting worse, refer.

So, build flexibility into the programme from the start. A programme with built-in flexibility gets done in some form almost every week, and that’s what produces results over a year.

The Mistakes That Sink Most Programmes

Most mistakes in training programmes for clients fall into a handful of patterns, and nearly all of them come back to one test: if a programme only works in a good week, it won’t work for long.

Too much, too soon

This is the most common one, especially with new coaches keen to prove their worth. The programme has six exercises per session, four sets each, every set to failure, five days a week. The client is so sore after week one that sitting down on the toilet becomes a carefully planned manoeuvre. Shocking, I know, but they don’t come back for week four. Unfortunately, soreness just isn’t a good guide to whether a session worked, and a beginner doesn’t need it to make progress. Beginners need much less than you’d think to make progress. Starting low and building up gradually gives the client a programme they can sustain, and leaves you room to add more when they need it.

Programming your own training

Coaches often write programmes that look a lot like their own. That’s natural: it’s what you know and what you enjoy. But your client isn’t you. They probably don’t share your goals, your training age, your enthusiasm for heavy deadlifts or your spare time. A programme that suits a 28-year-old coach who loves the gym rarely suits a 44-year-old accountant with two kids. I’d recommend writing for the person in front of you.

Programme hopping

Some clients, and some coaches, change the programme every couple of weeks. Each new programme feels exciting for a while, then it’s swapped for the next. The problem is that adaptation takes time, and progress depends on doing roughly the same thing long enough to get better at it and to measure whether it’s working. I’d suggest sticking with a programme for at least one full block before deciding it isn’t working, and change one thing at a time when you do.

Too many exercises

Long lists of exercises make sessions longer, spread the volume thinly, and make it hard to progress any one of them. Four to six exercises a session is usually plenty, especially when each one is chosen to cover a major movement pattern. If you can’t explain why an exercise is in the programme, it probably shouldn’t be.

Chasing soreness and exhaustion

Many clients, and some coaches, judge a session by how wrecked they feel afterwards. But soreness is a poor guide to whether a session was effective. It’s greatest after new exercises or unaccustomed volume, and it fades as the body gets used to a programme, even while progress continues. Similarly, a session that leaves a client exhausted and lying on the floor isn’t necessarily more effective than one that leaves them feeling challenged but able to train again in two days. Judge progress by performance over time, not by how much it hurts.

Not tracking

If you don’t know what the client lifted last week, you can’t tell whether they’re progressing. Every programme needs a simple way to log what was actually done: weights, reps and how hard it felt. That can be an app, a notebook or a shared spreadsheet. Tracking also helps the client see their own progress, which is one of the most motivating things there is, especially when the scale isn’t moving.

Ignoring the rest of the client’s life

Training happens within a whole life. Sleep, stress, nutrition, work and family all affect how a client recovers and progresses. A client who’s sleeping five hours a night and under heavy stress at work won’t recover from the same programme as when life is calm. Sometimes the best programming decision is to reduce the training load for a few weeks rather than push through. The programme still fits the client’s real life, and that’s what you want.

Programming for the coach’s ego

Finally, there’s the temptation to write a programme that looks impressive. Complicated periodisation, fancy exercises and detailed tempo prescriptions might impress the client at first, and they might make you feel like you’re earning your fee. But complexity that doesn’t serve the client is a cost. The most skilled programmers often write the simplest-looking programmes, because they know exactly which variables matter for this person and leave the rest alone.

What a Programme Design Course Should Teach You

If you’re reading this as a coach or would-be coach, you might be wondering how to get good at all of this. Some of it comes from experience: writing programmes, watching how clients respond, and adjusting. But a good course can shortcut a lot of trial and error, and a bad one can leave you with a folder of templates and no idea what to do when a client doesn’t fit them.

Decision-making, not templates

The most important thing a programme design course should teach is how to make decisions. Templates have their place, and seeing a well-designed programme is useful. But real clients rarely fit a template. The client with the bad knee, the one who can only train twice a week, the one who’s 67 and has never lifted, the one who wants to run a marathon and build muscle at the same time: none of them fits the template. What you need is an understanding of why each variable matters and how to set it for the person in front of you.

That means a good course should cover the physiology properly, so you understand what training does and why. It should cover each programming variable, with the evidence behind it, so you can make choices rather than follow rules. It should cover progression and periodisation in a way that’s practical for real clients, not only for elite athletes. And it should cover the coaching side: needs analysis, assessment, communication, and how to adapt a programme when life gets in the way.

Applied to real populations

A good course should also show you how the principles apply to different people. Programming for general health is different from programming for body composition, which is different from programming for strength sports or for a particular sport. The principles are the same, but the emphasis changes. Seeing those differences worked through helps you build programmes for the clients you’ll actually meet.

Here’s a simple way to judge a programme design course.

What to check	A strong sign	A warning sign
Physiology	Explains how the body adapts to training, so the variables make sense	Skips straight to sets and reps
Variables	Covers each variable with the evidence behind it and how to set it	Gives fixed rules without reasons
Progression and periodisation	Practical models for general-population clients, with examples	Only elite sport models, or none at all
Coaching skills	Needs analysis, assessment, communication and adapting to real life	Assumes every client follows the plan perfectly
Application	Worked examples across different goals and populations	One template for everyone
Assessment	A real exam with a meaningful pass mark	No assessment, or one you can’t fail

What a course can’t do

Now, there are things no course can do. It can’t give you experience. Your first programmes will have mistakes in them, however good your course was, and you’ll learn a lot from watching clients respond to them. A course gives you the framework to learn from those mistakes faster. It also can’t replace the clinical skills of a physiotherapist or doctor. A good course will teach you where your role ends and when to refer, but it won’t qualify you to diagnose or treat injuries or medical conditions.

Our Exercise Program Design Course

We built our Exercise Program Design Course for coaches and trainers who want to understand training well enough to write programmes for anyone who walks through the door, rather than relying on templates. It’s built around the ideas in this guide: understand the mechanism, know the variables, and fit the programme to the real person.

The course starts with the physiology, so you understand what training actually does to the nervous, muscular, metabolic and endocrine systems, and why the body adapts the way it does. Then it moves through the tools of training and what each is good for, before getting into the programming variables in detail. That’s where you learn how to choose exercises, set reps and sets, use rest and tempo, manage effort with RPE and RIR, and progress the programme over time, for resistance training and for cardio, mobility and plyometrics.

From there, it covers training guidelines and baselines, and then how to design a programme from scratch, step by step. The progression and periodisation module shows you how to plan training over weeks and months in a way that works for real clients. The coaching and communication module covers assessments and needs analysis, so you can find out what a client actually needs before you write a word. And the applied module works through programme design for different goals: general health, body composition, strength and powerlifting, and sport-specific training.

The aim throughout is that you finish the course able to make good programming decisions for clients who don’t fit a template, which is nearly all of them. If you’d like a feel for the way we teach first, our overview of exercise programme design is a good place to start, along with our pieces on the types of exercise and exercise guidelines. And if a lot of your clients are wrestling with stress or poor sleep, which affect recovery more than most people realise, our Stress Management Coaching Certificate and Sleep Coaching Certificate pair well with it.

Training for the Life Outside the Gym

In the end, training programmes for clients are about the life outside the gym. Mark doesn’t want to get stronger at goblet squats for their own sake. He wants to get through a long day without his back seizing up. He wants to keep up with his son in the park. He wants, if he’s honest, not to go the way his father did, and to be around and able for the people he loves for as long as he can. The programme is a means to that end.

That changes how you write it. A programme that serves the client’s life has to fit inside that life, which means respecting the time they have, the things they enjoy and the reality of their weeks. It has to build capacity they’ll use outside the gym: strength to lift and carry, fitness to keep going, resilience in the joints that let them move freely. And it has to be something they can keep doing, in some form, for years, because the benefits of training only last as long as the training does.

Training is also a choice. Nobody forces Mark to go to the gym on a wet Monday evening. He goes because of what it means to him, and because he’s decided his health is worth an hour of a Monday he could have spent on the sofa. Between the moment the rain hits the window and the moment he picks up his gym bag, there’s a space, and in that space he gets to choose. So, a lot of your job as a coach is making that choice easier, and tying it back to what the client actually cares about.

Mark’s father had a heart attack at 58. Mark is 44. That fact doesn’t need to frighten him. It tells him plainly that the next fourteen years aren’t a rehearsal, and that the man who reaches 58 is being built on ordinary Mondays and Saturdays like these. A good programme can’t promise him more time. What it can do is make sure the hours he gives it go towards the life he’s said he wants: carrying the shopping without a twinge, keeping up with the kids, and still kicking a ball around with the grandchildren.

Who It Isn’t For

Our Exercise Program Design Course isn’t for everyone, and it’s better to know that before you buy.

It isn’t a clinical or rehabilitation qualification. It won’t qualify you to diagnose or treat injuries, or to prescribe exercise for medical conditions. If that’s the work you want to do, look at physiotherapy, exercise physiology or a clinical exercise route, depending on where you live.

It isn’t a ready-made template library. If you’d prefer a folder of programmes to hand out without adapting them, there are cheaper ways to get that. This course is for coaches who want to understand why programmes work, so they can write their own.

It isn’t a quick qualification. At 77 CPD hours, it takes real time and effort, and there’s a proper exam at the end. If you want something you can finish in a weekend, this isn’t it.

And it isn’t a substitute for coaching experience. It will give you the knowledge and framework to write good training programmes for clients and to learn quickly from your mistakes, but you’ll still get better by writing programmes, watching how people respond, and adjusting. No course can do that part for you.