PLANNING & PERIODIZATION TOOLS TO DESIGN BETTER PROGRAMS

Individual design, especially when you first start, can be daunting, confusing, or at the very least time-consuming, almost to the point where it feels like you need to reinvent the wheel for each client, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to even begin.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for many coaches is coming up with a big picture plan. 

In fact, a common mistake we see is failing to even have a big picture plan at all. Instead, many coaches are almost entirely focused on the short-term, and especially the daily workout. 

But writing a greatest program isn't just about today. Instead, today’s workout plan should be but a small, yet strategic and deliberate puzzle piece that fits into the big picture plan. 

This is where the Planning & Periodization feature on the CoachRx app comes in: It takes out the overwhelm and makes programming an entire year easy. 

WHAT IS THE PLANNING & PERIODIZATION FEATURE?

Found in the sidebar of the client calendar, the Planning & Periodization feature helps you build—and easily go back and reference—long-term, short-term and daily plans.

But Why Do I Need to Have Short-Term and Long-Term Plans?

Regardless of whether your client is a competitive athlete or a general population client just looking to be fit and healthy for life, periodization—or breaking the year into chunks, and considering volume and intensity in each phase of training—is important. 

Periodization is important, as it ensures you’re creating a program that builds on itself day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month so that your clients are consistently progressing toward their long-term goals (rather than just giving them a random “badass workout” each day).

This means breaking the year into training phases, including:

• Accumulation: building volume, skills and technical ability (general population clients will likely spend the large majority of the time here)

• Intensification: decreasing volume and increasing intensity

• Pre-Competition (for competitive athletes only): Simulating a competition

• Competition: The actual competition

• Deload: Time devoted to recovery
  

The Planning & Periodization feature makes doing the above fast and easy, and ultimately helps you build more effective, well thought out programs for your clients that bring them better results.

Equally important is the fact that creating and sharing the short-term and long-term plan with clients goes a long way in building trust, as they will now start to understand there’s a method behind the madness, which helps them develop more confidence in and understanding about why they’re doing what they’re doing each day.

HOW TO USE COACHRX TO MAKE PLANNING & PERIODIZATION MORE EFFICIENT

Creating short-term, long-term and daily plans couldn’t be easier using the Planning & Periodization tool.

Step 1:

Add a long-term (macrocycle) plan, and then choose a start date, and end date, as well as any relevant notes and details. From there, you can zoom in and see short-term plans within the bigger picture long-term plan.

• Our recommendation is to build these based on the calendar year for the general population client, and based on the competition year for the competitive athlete. For example, if you’re training an athlete with CrossFit Games aspirations, the year would begin after the Games and end at the following Games. 

Step 2:

Add a short-term (mesocycle) plan, and then select the training phase (accumulation, intensification, pre-competition, competition and deload). From there, choose a start and end date, jot down the priorities that cycle, and add any other relevant notes. Then hit create and voila.

• Note: You don’t need to build out each mesocycle within the macrocycle right away. You can keep it simple and do one at a time.
  

Step 3:

Add the daily plan and add the training split breakdown for the day. By this, we mean breaking the day into movement patterns before designing the actual specific movements, sets, reps, tempos etc for the day.  

• For example, Monday might be bend, push and cyclical work, while Tuesday is a squat, vertical and horizontal pull and core day, and so on and so forth.
  

Note: Planning by using a training split will take a bit more time on the front end, but think about it like writing an outline for a paper: The outline might take as much, or even more time, than the actual paper-writing, as it makes the writing a lot less time-consuming. 

WHY IT’S BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE ON THE MARKET

Periodization is important, yet it’s difficult to do without easy-to-use, intuitive software in your corner like CoachRx.

Yes, there are other apps out there for programming, but they’re predominantly for group programming and do a lackluster job at accommodating individual design, let alone individual design that is built based on a macrocycle, mesocycles and training splits.

The long and the short of it is CoachRx was conceived by individual design coaches, for individual design coaches. In other words, they know exactly what features and time-saving tools coaches who write programs need in order to be organized and efficient and capable of building big picture plan programs to put their clients on a path to long-term success.