How to create a workout plan for a client

The goal determines the entire dosage. Strength, muscle growth, muscular endurance and fat loss each call for different sets, reps and rest intervals. A client who wants everything at once ends up with a plan that does nothing fully.

Ask concrete follow-up questions. “Getting fitter” is not a goal you can hang a dosage on; “training twice a week and climbing the stairs without being out of breath in three months” is. Write the chosen goal on the plan itself, so your client can also see why the plan looks the way it does.

The ACSM ties training frequency to the level of the trainee, not to the goal. Beginners sit at 2 to 3 sessions per week, intermediate trainees at 3 to 4, advanced at 4 to 5.

More important than the number of sessions is that every major muscle group is trained at least twice a week. That is the best-supported recommendation from the position stand on resistance training. If your client's schedule only allows one session a week, that is possible, but know that you are below the recommendation — and say so.

Plan a block of 3 to 6 weeks in which the same exercises return. Less than three weeks is too short to measure progress on the same exercise; more than six weeks makes the plan dull and raises the odds of stagnation.

Repetition here is not a lack of creativity but the condition for measuring anything. Give a client different exercises every session and you are training them, sure, but at the end you have no idea whether anything improved.

At two or three sessions per week a full body split works best: every session hits all major muscle groups, which meets the twice-a-week recommendation automatically. At four sessions an upper/lower split makes sense, since each half then comes around twice.

At five sessions a pure push, pull and legs rotation falls short, because legs are then only trained once a week. A mixed split solves that. Always check the split against how often each muscle group actually gets trained.

Start from what your client actually has. A plan with a cable station in it is worthless to someone training at home with two dumbbells. The 2026 position stand states explicitly that resistance bands, bodyweight exercises and home routines produce clear results, so a home plan need not be a second-rate plan.

Then filter on limitations. For low back pain, drop repeated loaded flexion and rotation and build the core work along McGill's Big 3: one exercise per protective direction instead of three arbitrary ab exercises. For knee complaints, limit depth and impact; for shoulder complaints, avoid overhead pressing.

Build in variety by rotating across movement patterns (horizontal push, vertical pull, hip hinge, and so on) instead of picking different exercises at random. That way the variation has a purpose.

Sets, reps and rest follow from the goal. The table below gives the standard values. The difference in rest is bigger than most plans let on: 150 seconds for heavy strength work versus 30 seconds for endurance work is not a detail, it is a different kind of training.

The load itself matters less than long assumed. For muscle growth, loads between roughly 30 and 100 percent of the one-repetition maximum give comparable results, as long as the set ends close to muscular failure. Two to three reps in reserve delivers as much as going to failure, with less fatigue and less risk.

Note the build-up not as an absolute weight but as a percentage relative to week 1. Roughly 5 percent per week is a safe default, with a ceiling around 25 percent so week 6 stays achievable.

The advantage of that notation is that your client finds a workable starting weight in week 1 and builds from there. The same plan then works for a beginner and for an advanced trainee, and you don't have to guess weights for someone you have met twice.