Program Design in 5 Minutes
My goal with this blog is to help you become your own best coach. To help you learn how to leverage principles of psychology and physiology to care for your body, enhance its capacities, and put it to use in outdoor pursuits. There is a lot of detail and nuance that goes into building a performance program. This lesson will not concern itself with any of that. This is the article you reach for when you’ve ventured too far down a specific rabbit hole and need to find the 30,000 foot view. This is program design in 5 minutes or less.
To build an effective program you need 3 things:
A clear objective or goal.
An assessment of current abilities
An assessment of abilities needed to achieve the clear objective/goal
Program Design is coming up with a plan to help close the gap between 2 & 3 so 1 can be achieved.
We close the gap by ensuring we do these 3 things in whatever we’re programming:
Make sure its progressive - do a little more each week, and every few weeks do a little less to help recover & adapt
Make sure it’s measurable - we don’t know what we don’t know…find the metrics that matter to guide better decisions
Make sure it’s flexible - life happens, have a plan for adapting and staying consistent
Regardless of the objective as long as you are doing a little more each week, tracking your work, and adjusting to maintain consistency you will make progress. An experienced and educated coach can help you refine and optimize your program. But any person has the ability to do the above.