You have thirty online clients and not one of them is competing at anything. Somewhere along the way you were told your programming should be periodised, so there is a document with the words accumulation, intensification and realisation in it that has never once changed what a client did on a Tuesday.
Periodisation solves a real problem. The problem is arriving in peak condition on a fixed date, and your clients do not have a fixed date. This is which parts of it transfer to a general population roster, which parts you can drop, and how to run the whole thing in blocks short enough that a cancelled fortnight does not destroy the plan.
The theory was built around a competition date
Periodisation came out of preparing athletes for a known event. That single fact explains every rule in it.
If an athlete competes on a set weekend, you have to work backwards from that weekend, and the order of the work is forced by how the qualities behave. Work capacity and muscle take months to build and fade slowly. Peak strength expression builds faster and fades faster. Freshness takes about a week and disappears in a fortnight. So you put the slow-building, slow-fading work first, the specific heavy work in the middle, and the taper last. The reason you cannot do it all at once is that the training that builds work capacity leaves you too fatigued to express peak strength, and the training that expresses peak strength does not build much of anything.
That trade-off is the entire argument for planning a year in advance, and it holds completely for an athlete. Now apply it to a client who wants to be leaner and stronger, has no date, no sport, no qualifying standard, and will lose three weeks in July to a work project. There is nothing to peak for. There is nothing to taper into. The costs of a fixed annual plan — the rigidity, the rewrites after every disruption, the hours you spend maintaining a document nobody reads — are all still there, and the payoff is not.
What does transfer is narrower and more useful: train one quality at a time, push one variable until it stops producing, take the fatigue off deliberately, and decide what the next block is for before you write it. That is worth having. The annual periodisation chart is not.
The three models in plain terms
Most of the argument online is between three models. They are simpler than the vocabulary makes them sound.
| Model | What varies | Over what timescale | Built for | Where it struggles online |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linear | Volume falls, intensity rises | Across a whole block or season | Peaking a strength athlete on a date | The light early weeks are wasted on someone with no meet; the heavy late weeks are the ones clients skip |
| Undulating | Rep ranges and effort | Within the week, or week to week | Keeping several qualities going at once | Looks random to a client, and to you, unless the progression is written down |
| Block | One quality per block, blocks sequenced | 3-8 weeks per block | Athletes with several qualities and a distant date | The sequencing logic only matters if the blocks lead somewhere |
Linear is the classic: start at three sets of twelve at an easy effort, finish at five sets of three near your limit, twelve weeks later. Undulating — usually written DUP, daily undulating periodisation — varies the rep range between sessions instead, so Monday is heavy triples, Thursday is sets of ten. Block periodisation stacks single-purpose phases, so six weeks of volume, then six weeks of heavy specific work, then a peak.
None of the three are wrong. They were designed for a training population your clients are not part of, and the honest answer for general population coaching borrows from all three without committing to any of them.
What actually suits a general population client
Run block structure at the level of months, and something close to undulating inside the week.
Block structure at the top is just deciding what the next six weeks are for and only asking one question of them. A block aimed at quad hypertrophy answers whether adding volume produced more reps at the same loads. A block that is simultaneously chasing size, fat loss and a deadlift PB answers nothing, because when the deadlift stalls you cannot tell whether it was the deficit, the volume or the sleep.
Inside the week, a fixed rep range for every set of every session is worse than varying it, mostly for reasons that are not physiological. Clients get bored. Joints get sore from the same loading pattern. Heavy sets on a bad day are the ones people talk themselves out of, and a session with a heavy top set and back-off work gives them somewhere to go when they turn up tired. Whether you call that undulating or just sensible programming does not matter much, and it is closer to the second.
What almost never earns its place is strict linear periodisation for a general population client. Deliberately training at an easy effort for the first month, so you can be fresh for a peak that does not exist, spends four weeks of a client's twelve-month attention on making later weeks better. If they cancel in month three, the light weeks were the only training they ever got.
The working unit is a block, not a year
The practical unit of online coaching is a training block of four to eight weeks with a lighter week at the end.
Everything above that is a rough ordering. Everything below it is one week's sessions.
Four to six weeks suits most clients. Go shorter for anyone in a deficit, under real life stress, or new to a movement — fatigue arrives sooner, so the block should end sooner. Eight is about the ceiling, and the last two weeks of an eight-week block are usually spent grinding through fatigue that should have been shed a fortnight earlier. The mesocycle is the formal name for this unit, and the macrocycle is the ordering above it, which for a general population client is worth about ten minutes of thought and half a page.
The block ends with a deload, and the deload is part of the block rather than a break from it. The version most clients tolerate is holding the loads and cutting the sets by roughly half, for the reasons set out in how to program deload weeks. Plan one into every block and skip it when a client finishes the last hard week still adding reps and sleeping properly. Planning one and skipping it is easy. Adding one after the client has already stopped recovering is a fortnight late.
Building in blocks is also the only version of this that survives thirty clients. If you write a block properly once, it is a template: the same volume progression works for the next intermediate client with different exercises. Fitsly's training tools are built around that — a phased program is a series of named phases of one to sixteen weeks each, you schedule which days of each week a workout lands on, and you can duplicate a phase to start the next block from the last one rather than a blank page. When a client disappears for a fortnight you change their program's start date instead of rewriting anything.
Periodise around the calendar the client already has
An athlete's year is organised around competitions. Your client's year is organised around a holiday in April, Christmas, a work trip they know about in August, and two or three weeks of illness they do not know about yet.
Ask for the known ones during onboarding, alongside training days and equipment. Two questions get most of it: what is already in the diary for the next six months, and which weeks of the year are historically your worst. Then put the blocks around them rather than discovering the clash in week three.
For the disruptions you cannot see coming, the response depends on how long it lasted.
| Disruption | Response |
|---|---|
| One or two sessions missed | Nothing. Carry on the week as written. |
| A week off, illness or travel | Repeat the last week rather than pushing the load. Shift the block's end date back a week. |
| Two to three weeks out | Restart the block at roughly the volume of its second week, not the volume of the week they missed. |
| A month or more | Write a new block. The old one's loads are no longer information about this client. |
| A known holiday, two weeks | End the block early with the deload landing on the holiday, and start the next one when they are back. |
The pattern is that time off costs you fitness slowly and readiness quickly, so the fix is almost always to re-enter below where they left and get back within a fortnight, rather than to resume at the top set they last hit and hurt themselves proving a point.
The other calendar item worth planning is the diet phase. A twelve-week fat loss phase is a periodised block whether you call it one or not — volume comes down, lifts get held rather than pushed, and the block gets an end date rather than running until the goal is hit.
Deciding what changes between one block and the next
Change one or two things. Changing everything means the next block starts from scratch and you have no evidence about whether anything is working.
The variables, roughly in the order you should reach for them:
- Volume. The default lever. Start the next block near where the last one ended if it was tolerated, lower if it was survived.
- Effort. Move the target from RPE 7 to RPE 8 across a block, or hold effort and let volume do the work. Pick one — see RPE vs RIR for which scale clients read more reliably.
- Exercise selection. Rotate accessories between blocks, keep at least one main lift constant so you have a thread to measure against.
- Rep range. Useful when a client has spent two blocks in the same range and progress on reps has stalled.
- Frequency or split. The biggest change of the five, and the one to make when the client's available days change rather than because the block ended. Choosing a split covers matching it to the days they actually have.
A worked ordering for a client with a holiday in April, training four days a week:
| Block | Weeks | Focus | What changed from the last block |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jan, 5 weeks | Establish loads, upper/lower | Baseline. 12 sets per muscle, RPE 7. |
| 2 | Feb, 6 weeks | Hypertrophy, volume up | Start at 14 sets, build to 20. Same exercises. |
| 3 | Mar, 6 weeks | Hypertrophy, effort up | Volume held at 16. Effort to RPE 8-9. Accessories rotated. |
| 4 | Apr, 4 weeks | Fat loss, maintain strength | Volume cut to 10 sets. Main lifts held. Deload lands on the holiday. |
| 5 | May, 6 weeks | Rebuild | Restart at 14 sets. Split unchanged — the client's days did not change. |
Nothing in that table needed a periodisation model. It needed a decision about what each block was for and one variable moving per block, which is the whole idea underneath the vocabulary. The process of turning a block like that into actual sessions is in how to write an online coaching program.
When periodisation is over-engineering
A beginner does not need it. Someone in their first six to twelve months of training adds weight to the bar most sessions, and planned volume progression is a solution to a problem they will not have for another year. Give them a stable program, progress the load, keep the exercises long enough for them to get good at them, and start planning in blocks when linear progress stalls.
A client with an adherence problem does not need it either. If someone trains twice in a good week and not at all in a bad one, block design is not what is limiting them, and the honest coaching work is on frequency, session length and what happens on the days they nearly cancel. A beautifully sequenced block that gets performed 40% of the time produces worse results than an ordinary one performed 85% of the time. Come back to the structure when they have strung three consistent months together.
And it is worth being straight about the third case. Periodisation is sometimes sold as evidence that a coach is more sophisticated than the last one — charts in the sales page, phase names on the program, cycles the client never sees the point of. That is a marketing decision wearing programming clothes. Clients cannot evaluate whether your block sequencing is good; they can evaluate whether they got stronger and whether you noticed when they were struggling. If the plan is elaborate because it is easier to sell than consistency is to coach, the elaborate plan is the problem.
Use the structure where it pays: one goal per block, one variable moving, a planned deload, and a decision at the end of every block based on what the logs actually say. That is enough periodisation for almost every online client, and it takes about fifteen minutes a block once the first one is written.
