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?
Hi Yves. I agree with Joanne in that if a client is fairly new to training, or simply to training with me, I like to have a certain amount of structure and repetition so that they begin to understand the basics.
That being said however, a lot depends on the type of training that I’m doing as well. For example, if I’m working with one of my athletes, repetition and progression via repetition is a MUST. Certain sports performance skills such as proper deceleration only comes from repetition and building a sound foundation of the basics. Even when I’m repeating certain skill, exercises and drills, I ALWAYS introduce new things for my clients (both athletes and non-athletes) in EVERY training session. My clients look forward to this “surprise” each session and I’m careful to plan those new exercises as a way to build on what they are currently learning through repetition. A good example of what I mean is let’s say I am working on learning the basics of deceleration training with a girl athlete, I may at the end of training play a game of tag with her (lots of agility, cutting, stopping and deceleration training/reinforcement going on there, all in the disguise of a game).
I hope that this helps.
LaRue, CSCS
www.lecfitness.com
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