Program Design. Evolving vs. Structured for regular clients.
When you are training a client 2-3 times a week, how do you find the right balance between a structured and predictable program vs. a new challenging workout every time. I want my clients to make measurable progress, but I also want to keep my clients guessing and teaching them new things. Clients want to see progress, but that often involves a lot of repetition with certain exercises, but if you are always doing the same thing, your are not really doing a good job of challenging your clients. Any tips?
Great question. Will be looking forward for more answers too!
What I do is I keep one day for guessing when I teach my client how to perform some new moves, use new equipment. And two other days we are doing predictable routine. I still vary but I don’t give completely new exercises during these two days.
During this one ‘unpredictable’ day I might keep some parts of the routine as usual – like warm up or abs work, but 30 min out of the training will be completely new.
But it doesn’t work with everyone though. I have few clients who are uncoordinated or have very stressful work and they prefer to keep it simple and don’t mind to do same things all the time (with certain progression). So I think this is very individual. But if you feel like your clients wouldn’t mind to vary the training don’t give them all at once. start slowly especially if you are using new equipment that requires a bit of time to get used to (like TRX or kettle bell for example).
Happy training!
Olya