More Info, Better Choices

As a young coach, I remember getting my first private client. The night before our first workout I spent hours and hours on excel planning out our first month of training. I had color coordinated blocks. Places for sets and reps and load. I had all the warm ups planned out and big chunks of space for me to fill in notes.

I felt like a pro. I used all my knowledge from college to periodize the most perfect training plan. The progressions were thoughtful and everything had a rhyme and reason.

Then our first session happened.

They showed up late. And had to leave earlier than originally expected. 

My plan was ruined. If we didn’t get to everything on day 1, that meant the rest of the week needed to be modified too.

I was bummed. This was the first time I witnessed well-executed text book planning come face to face with the real world. All the sessions that followed had similar issues. Some days they felt really good and we did more, some days they felt off or tired and we modified the plan to do less. 

I learned an important lesson. You can have the best plan in the world. You can follow all the program design principles and have your macrocycles, mesocycles and microcycles designed for perfect linear progress and as soon as it hits the real world, which is full of uncertainty, it can be useless. 

You’ve got to be able to adapt, modify and change things on the fly as you gather more information. I’ve said it before, your plan can be great, perfect even. But then, once you start a session, you gather more information. You learn how they’re feeling, how the movements look, what their attitude is amongst so many other factors.

When you gather more information, you can make better choices and decisions. You’ve got to be willing to change, no matter how good the original plan was. When I work with someone one on one now, I rarely go into it with a full workout planned. I have a rough idea of what I want to accomplish, but I need to see them warm up, chat with them, get a read on the room to figure out how we’ll attack the day’s workout.

Remember that. Some times your weights will need to be lighter, you’ll need to skip the conditioning or just not feel up for the planned workout. It’s not a bad thing to modify, it’s a smart thing. It’s using all the available information, and ignoring it would be foolish.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain