We grade our own coach.
Here’s the report.

You have, and I haven’t forgotten: Tuesday and Thursday, and I’ve never put a Saturday in front of you. If I ever ask you something you’ve already told me, treat that as a bug rather than a survey.

It doesn’t, and I’ve never written you one. What you have is a rack, a barbell to 140 kg and dumbbells to 34, so I plan inside that. The day your gym changes, tell me and the plan changes with it.

100 kg for your first work set. I’m not guessing at that: it’s off your last four squat sessions, where 95 moved fast enough that you had two reps left in you. If it feels heavier than that today, say so and I’ll come down.

I don’t know, and I won’t invent a figure. I’ve never asked you to test a max, so everything I hold is inferred from your work sets. I can tell you what’s moving. I can’t hand you a number you’ve earned in front of me.

Then that’s what the program is for, not a nice extra bolted on the end. You get vertical pulling twice a week, loaded from where you actually are, and I’ll shape the rest of the week so it doesn’t get in the way of it.

Eight, at 60 kg, and stop two short of failure. You’ll never open a session and find a blank set: every one of them has a weight, a rep target and an effort on it before you touch the bar.

I can, up to a point. You’re at fourteen hard sets for chest this week, which is about where it should sit. I’ll add two, and take two off your front delts, which are getting more than they need already.

Then we’ll do it in three days. Thursday’s pulling moves to Saturday, and I’ve trimmed the accessories rather than cramming four days of work into three and calling it the same week.

I can’t do that yet. I plan a week at a time, and I don’t build blocks toward a date, so I’d be making it up and dressing it up as a plan. It’s the most valuable thing we could build next, and it’s on this page as exactly that.

Tell me what’s in it and I’ll rebuild around it today. What I won’t do is work that out on my own. I can’t see your calendar and I don’t notice you’ve moved, so if you say nothing I’ll go on planning for your usual gym.

Because you squatted heavy on Monday and your hard sets are up on last week. Today is deliberately easy so that Thursday doesn’t have to be. You’ll always get the reason, not just the session.

Then we’re not repeating Monday. I’ve taken 10% off today’s top set and cut the last two accessories. Same movements, less of them, so you keep the habit without digging the hole any deeper.

You should finish with two reps in reserve: hard, but you could have managed two more if someone made you. If it feels like you had five left, the weight is too light, and I’d rather you told me than quietly ground it out.

I saw it as you logged it: 80 kg against a 100 kg target is a real miss, not a rounding error. You get one card before your next set. Ease off, hold, or ask me why. I’m reading the numbers, though, not how the bar actually moved.

No, and I never will. Judging how you move is a job for a coach standing next to you, and a phone camera would give you a confident answer that might be wrong. I’ll tell you whether your squat is getting stronger, because that I can actually measure.

I’ve got it from your watch, and it counts. That’s a real amount of leg fatigue, so I’ve pulled tonight’s squat volume back rather than planning as though your legs were fresh.

You can, but I’d be careful. That puts you about 40% above your four-week average, which is the range where things start to go wrong. Make it an easy day and you get the extra habit without the spike.

Noted. I’ve taken loaded knee flexion out of your plan until it settles: Thursday’s leg curls and your lunges. Everything else stands. I’ll ask you about it again in a week rather than quietly leaving them out forever.

Probably, but I’m not the one to ask yet. I don’t do nutrition at all: I don’t know what you eat, so anything I said would be something generic I’d read rather than anything about you.

No, and that one isn’t coming later either. Handing numbers for what you eat to someone I can’t weigh, see or properly question is how people get hurt quietly. That’s a dietitian’s job, and I’d rather say so than improvise.

Yes, and I’d rather show you than reassure you. Your squat top set has gone from 85 to 100 kg since June, and you’re doing a third more hard sets a week than you were. If it had stalled, I’d be telling you that instead.

Squat and row moved. Overhead press has sat at the same weight for three sessions running. Fatigue is mostly in your legs, which is why this week opens with an upper day. You get that every Monday without having to ask.

Because you’re two weeks into a shoulder niggle, and rows load it less while keeping your back working. If you’d rather have the pull-ups, say so and I’ll tell you what I’d change elsewhere to make room for them.

I’ll take that for today. What I won’t do is remember it as a pattern. I don’t learn whether you want pushing or reassuring, so next week I’ll sound exactly the same unless you tell me again.

I’m glad you did, and I’ll rebuild this week around where you actually are rather than where the old plan left off. Here’s what I can’t do yet, though: I didn’t notice. Your sessions thinned out for a fortnight and I said nothing, because I don’t reach out. You had to come back on your own.

I’m stopping there. Chest tightness is not something I’m going to coach around, and I’m not going to guess at it either. Please get it looked at by a doctor before your next session.

From you, on 12 June. Everything I think I know about you is written down in one place, in plain language, and you can change any line of it. Correct that line and I’ll plan off the correction, not off what I had before.

You can see all of it, but not from here. It’s several taps away in your profile rather than something I can put in front of you the moment you ask. That’s our fault, not yours, and it’s written down as a gap.

It wasn’t one of your better ones, and I’m not going to tell you otherwise. You hit four of six target sets and the last two dropped off hard. Turning up on a bad day still counts for something, and I’ll say that. But I won’t tell you a session went well when it didn’t.

No. If I have the number I’ll use it, and if I don’t I’ll ask you or say I don’t know. A figure I invented looks exactly like a figure I measured, and you’d have no way of telling which one you were reading.