Guides / Programming
How long should a training block be?
Why four to six weeks is the usual answer, when to go shorter, and how to tell your client is ready for a lighter week.
The short answer
Four to six weeks, then a lighter week. That is where most coaches land, and it is not a coincidence. It is long enough for a client to get better at the movement and for the loads to actually climb, and short enough that you can still change your mind before the whole thing goes stale.
Why not shorter
A two week block sounds efficient. In practice your client spends the first week learning the session, so you only get one real week of training out of it. You also never see a clean trend. Two data points do not tell you whether a lift is moving.
Why not longer
Past six weeks, two things go wrong. Fatigue builds up faster than most people notice, so the last weeks look productive on paper and are not. And the client gets bored, which is a training variable even though nobody writes it down.
Signs the block should end early
- Loads stop climbing for two sessions in a row on the same lift.
- Reported effort goes up while the weight on the bar stays flat.
- They start skipping the last exercise of the session.
- Sleep or mood drops noticeably, and stays down.
Any one of those on its own is noise. Two together for a week is a signal. End the block, take the lighter week, and start again lower than you think you need to.
The lighter week
Keep the same movements and roughly the same reps. Drop the load to about 60 percent of the estimated one rep max and cut a set from each lift. Your client should leave the gym feeling like they could do it all again. That is the point.
How to write it without a spreadsheet
This is the part that eats your Sunday. Every load in a block comes from one number: what the client actually lifted last. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic is the one job software is genuinely better at than a person.
Try it with your own client's numbers, or start free and let it write the whole block.