Most check-in forms were not designed. They accreted. Yours started at six questions, then a client got hurt and you added a pain question, then someone's sleep fell apart and you added sleep, and two years later it is nineteen questions long and the answers have gone from paragraphs to "yeah good".
Below is the form itself — every question, the answer format, and why it survives the cut. Copy it as it stands, or use it as the thing you delete from. The cadence and the review routine around it are a separate job, covered in how to run client check-ins.
Why the long form gets you worse answers
A fifteen-question form gets shorter answers than a six-question one. Not fewer answers — shorter ones. The client is deciding on a Sunday night how much effort this whole thing is worth, and that budget is set by the length of the form, not by the importance of any single question in it. Once the form crosses the point where it feels like admin, every answer gets rounded down to the cheapest thing that will pass.
The same length is what makes them stop submitting altogether. Clients rarely announce that the form is too long. They submit it late, then partially, then not at all, and the coach reads that as a motivation problem.
There is a second cost, which is yours. Every question you add is a question you read for every client every week. At thirty clients, one extra free-text field is thirty paragraphs to read on a Monday, and the questions that actually decide something get skimmed alongside the ones that do not.
So the template below is eleven questions. Nine of them are a number, a tap or a photo. One is free text.
The template
Objective measures
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| What was your average morning weight this week, in kilograms? | Number (body metric) | The trend is the primary read on whether the plan is doing what it was set to do. Asking for the week's average rather than one morning kills most of the day-to-day noise before you see it. |
| Waist at the navel, in centimetres | Number (body metric) | Catches the recomp weeks where the scale does not move and something else has. One measurement is enough — five gets measured badly. |
| Progress photos — front, side, back | Photo upload | The only measure that shows what the client actually looks like, and the one they will thank you for having six months later. |
Photos and the waist reading are the two most commonly skipped items on any check-in, so make the standard explicit once and never again: same time of day, same light, same clothes, first thing on the same morning each week. That instruction belongs in the onboarding material, not repeated at the top of the form every week — it is one of the things a coaching welcome packet exists to carry.
Training
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| How many of your programmed sessions did you complete? | Number, out of the number scheduled | Adherence is the gate on every other reading. A weight trend from a week at three sessions out of five is not a result you can adjust against. |
| Did anything hurt, or did you have to work around something? | Yes/No, then a text box if yes | Clients under-report pain because they do not want the program changed. Asking directly, weekly, is how you hear about it in week one rather than week six. |
The pain question is the only one on the form that clients answer differently depending on how it is worded. "Any injuries?" gets a No, because most people do not consider a sore shoulder an injury. "Did anything hurt, or did you have to work around something?" gets the swapped exercise and the set they cut short.
Nutrition
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| On how many days did you hit your nutrition targets? | Number, 0 to 7 | A count you can compare week to week. "Pretty good" cannot be compared with anything, including itself. |
| What were your average daily steps? | Number | The variable that moves most between a good week and a bad one, and the one clients will not mention unprompted. Cut this question entirely if steps are not part of the plan. |
Two questions is the right amount of nutrition on a general check-in. A client on full nutrition coaching gets more, and those additions are further down.
Recovery and life
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Sleep quality this week | Scale, 1 to 10 | Moves before the scale does. Two bad weeks here explain a stall you would otherwise fix by cutting calories. |
| Energy in your sessions | Scale, 1 to 10 | Separates a program that is too much from a client who is not recovering from the rest of their life. |
| Stress outside the gym | Scale, 1 to 10 | The reason most good weeks turn into bad ones, and the earliest warning you get that someone is about to disappear. |
Three sliders take a client about eight seconds and give you a trend line each. Keep the same scale every week — a rating is only worth anything against the same client's previous ratings, never against another client's.
The open question
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| What made this week harder than it needed to be? | Text | It explains everything above it. The numbers tell you what happened; this is the only field that tells you why, and it is where the fixable constraint usually turns up. |
One open field, and it asks about obstacles rather than the week in general. "How did your week go?" is answerable with "good" and so it will be. Getting more out of the answers you do receive is a writing job, covered in how to write check-in messages clients reply to.
Do not add "anything else for me?" underneath it. Clients answer that with "nope" nearly every time, and the open question above already covers it.
Answer formats matter more than question count
An eleven-question form is fine when nine of the questions are one tap. The same eleven as free text is a twenty-minute chore nobody completes twice. Free text is the expensive format — expensive for the client to write and expensive for you to read — so spend it once.
The formats also decide whether the answers are usable later. A weight typed into a text box is a string in a submission you will never look at again. The same number captured as a body metric goes onto the client's profile and builds the trend you actually make decisions from. When you build this form in Fitsly's check-in forms, weight and waist go in as body-metric questions so they flow onto the profile, photos go in as a progress-photo question with front, side and back poses requested, and the three ratings go in as 1-to-10 scales. Put it on a weekly schedule and assigned clients get the reminder at the time you set, in their own timezone.
Mark the objective measures required and leave the open question optional. A form that refuses to submit because someone had nothing to say about their week is a form that gets abandoned mid-fill.
Cutting it down for a low-touch client
A client on a low-cost or maintenance package should not be filling in the same form as someone in a fat-loss phase. Eleven questions is priced into a service they did not buy, and it is the group most likely to quietly stop.
Cut to six:
- Average morning weight.
- Sessions completed out of sessions programmed.
- Days on target with nutrition.
- Sleep quality.
- Did anything hurt.
- What made this week harder than it needed to be.
What comes out is the waist measurement, photos, steps, energy and stress. Photos and waist do not disappear — move them to a monthly check-in, where they still show a trend and cost a tenth of the compliance. Steps come out because a maintenance client's steps are not a variable you are managing. Energy and stress come out last and reluctantly; if this client has a history of grinding themselves flat, keep stress and drop the pain question to a monthly one instead.
Six questions is about a ninety-second job for the client, which is the point. The check-in that gets filled in every week for a year beats the thorough one that lasts two months.
What to add for a nutrition client
For a client whose nutrition you actually coach — targets you set, adherence you adjust — four additions earn their place:
| Question | Answer format | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| On how many days did you hit your protein target? | Number, 0 to 7 | Protein is the target that slips first and the one that explains most stalled recomps. Total-calorie adherence hides it. |
| Hunger this week | Scale, 1 to 10 | Tells you whether the deficit is survivable for another four weeks. A seven that becomes a nine is a diet break, not a willpower conversation. |
| Was there anything you ate or drank that you did not log? | Yes/No, then a text box if yes | Asked without judgement, this gets answered honestly, and it is the most common reason a compliant-looking week produced no change. |
| How many standard drinks did you have? | Number | A real number nobody volunteers, and one that accounts for calories, sleep and the following day's training in one line. |
That takes the form to fifteen questions, which is past where I said the answers get worse — and it is, so take something out. On a nutrition-led client, steps and one of the three ratings usually go. The form is a budget, not a shelf.
Every question must be able to change a decision
This is the rule that keeps the form from growing back. Before a question goes on, answer one thing: if the reply came back at either extreme, would you do something different this week?
Ask it about "rate your motivation out of ten" and the honest answer is usually no — you would send the same reply at a two as at a nine. Ask it about sleep and the answer is yes, because two weeks at a four is the reason you drop volume instead of calories.
Run the same test on the questions already there, once a quarter. Questions get added for one client in a specific week and then stay forever, and the form you are using is usually a record of problems you had eighteen months ago. If you have not used an answer to make a decision in two months, delete the question.
Some questions belong on a different form entirely. Training history, injury history, medical conditions, food allergies, the equipment they have access to — none of that changes week to week, so it is asked once at signup on the client intake form and not repeated. The weekly check-in covers what moves. Get both set up in the same sitting when a client joins, alongside everything else on the client onboarding checklist, so week one produces a baseline rather than a gap.
When an answer is outside what you can coach
A form that asks about mood, stress and eating behaviour will eventually collect an answer you are not qualified to act on. Someone reports skipping meals to make the number move, describes bingeing and compensating, mentions their weight in terms of self-worth, or writes something that reads as genuine distress.
The rule is refer, do not probe. Do not ask follow-up questions to work out how serious it is — that is an assessment, and it is not yours to make. Respond privately, name what you read without diagnosing it, say plainly that it is outside what you can help with as a coach, and give them a person to contact: their GP, a registered dietitian, or a psychologist. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation runs the national eating-disorder helpline on 1800 33 4673, and it takes calls from coaches and other professionals as well as from people seeking help for themselves.
Have those names ready before you need them. And when a client is under someone else's care, stop setting targets that pull against it — pause the calorie deficit, hide the weigh-in question from their form, or move them onto a form that does not ask about food at all.
