START WITH THE END

Start With the End

Tomorrow should be dictated by six months from now.

Abdurahmaan Saloojee is a newsletter contributor from Ottawa, Canada. He enjoys traveling, reading, and spending time with cats.

• Taking clients’ goals seriously requires planning for them long-term.
• Tracking is essential, but it must go hand in hand with reverse engineering what we need to be tracking based on the end goal.
• Give the client what they want, but give it as much structure and forethought as possible in order to deliver tangible results.

Part of responsible programming is taking our client’s goals seriously, and part of taking their goals seriously is not taking a day-by-day approach to their training. They are paying us for results, and getting there involves small daily progressions that serve the purpose of their larger goals, not coming up with something new every day. Unless their goal specifically has no end result in mind and their intention is just to move around for an hour, we must be diligent enough to plan out how we plan to get them from A to B, and in order to do that, we need to start from the end.

The first step is tracking – that should be non-negotiable. Writing down workouts, sets, reps, and comments from the day should be the baseline requirement of data tracking. However, collecting it for the sake of collecting it doesn’t really help us. Tracking only becomes useful when looked at in the form of data points that show us a trajectory towards the pre-existing goal. For example, let’s say a client has a goal of “increasing their bench press”. You could just arbitrarily start benching somewhere and make small jumps every week ,and their bench would grow. That’s not a wrong solution, it just doesn’t show excellence. 

A more thorough way of tackling this goal would be to find out if they have a specific goal number in mind. The next step is determining where they stand currently in their training, the duration of their training sessions, as well as their timeline for achieving the goal in mind. Lastly and more subjectively, we need to have an idea of their lifting history, training frequency, daily routine, average nutrition, and sleep in order to determine what reasonable jumps would be to take week by week. With a few simple questions, we now know if their goal aligns with their time frame and exactly what we need to do every week to get them to where they want to get to. In this way, if the client were to ask what we were doing for our workout tomorrow, or next week, or next month, we would have an answer ready and this would instill confidence in the client that their goals and health are in good hands. 

There are many ways to skin this cat in terms of how to program (linear/undulating periodization) and a variety of different split options. The bottom line is that in order to show our clients that we care about their results we need to show them that we have a plan for where they are moving towards - this is best done by starting with the end goal in mind and working backwards from there. This comes with caveats - if their goals specifically involve having fun and not working to any specific number, then at the end of the day we are being paid for our time, not for us to impose our opinions on our clients. All we need to do is properly convey what we feel the client would benefit most from, but at the end of the day, we need to give them what they ask for.