Why I Write Every Program By Hand The Night Before

There is a moment, usually around ten at night, when I open a spiral notebook and start writing tomorrow's program for the client I'll see at six in the morning. Coffee's gone cold. The gym is closed. It's just me, a pen, and what I remember about how they moved on Tuesday.

This is the part nobody talks about in fitness marketing. Nobody advertises the notebook. Everyone advertises the app.

The template industry

Walk into any commercial gym in Arlington or anywhere else and you will find a trainer standing next to a client holding a phone. On that phone is a template. That template was purchased from another trainer, or generated by software, or copied from a third trainer's Instagram. The client's name has been dropped into the header. The sets and reps are identical to the eleven other clients that trainer sees this week.

There is nothing morally wrong with a template. Templates work. Templates get results for a certain kind of person — the person who was already going to succeed no matter what you handed them. The problem is that templates cannot see. They cannot see that your right shoulder rolls forward when you press. They cannot see that you slept four hours last night because your kid was sick. They cannot see that the deadlift you did on Monday made you limp for three days and you never told me about it.

The night before

Every night, before I sleep, I sit down and go through tomorrow's roster. One page per client. I write the date. I write the goal for that block. I write what happened last session — not what was programmed, but what actually happened. Did she hit the top set clean? Did he ask to skip the accessory work? Was there a shoulder complaint that we brushed past?

Then I write the program. Not from a menu. From memory of who they are and where we're going. It takes me between eight and twenty minutes per client. It is the most important twenty minutes of my day.

What clients get out of it

The visible thing is a program that fits them. The invisible thing is that I have spent time thinking about them, alone, with no distractions, the night before we train. When they walk in the next morning I already have their session in my head. I know what we're pushing on and what we're pulling back from. I know what I'm going to say when they tell me they only slept five hours.

This is what I mean when I tell every new client my catchphrase: you can, trust the process. The process is not the sets and reps. The process is the fact that somebody was thinking about you last night, at their kitchen table, with a pen.

What I refuse to do

I will not sell you a fake diet. I will not sell you a program I bought from somebody else. I will not tell you that twelve weeks will change your body if you're only willing to give me three sessions a week and eat garbage in between. This is the part of the industry I stand against — the part that dresses up template fitness as personal coaching and then blames the client when the template doesn't fit.

If you want somebody who is thinking about you between sessions, we should talk. If you want an app to send you push notifications, there are cheaper options.

Read next

For the actual method — how I structure a twelve-week block for a busy adult — see the piece on building strength without wrecking the rest of your schedule. For a client story about what this looks like in practice, read Marcus's transformation.