The program design looks simple from the outside. Sets, reps, some conditioning bits, maybe a test or two. But if you want to be a professional coach who can coach clients for years, not weeks, you need to think about a lot more than that. You have to think systems.
Week 6 of the OPEX Method Tutorial was about this bigger picture. Long term, medium term, short term. Macrocycles, mesocycles, microcycles. And how to turn those ideas into a clear, usable plan within CoachRx for real clients.
This post describes what I learned, how I use it in my own coaching, and why it has already changed the way I think about programming for both my clients and the coaches I teach.
What Week 6 looked like within the OPEX method
My calendar is currently at a nice pace:
Tuesday: Lecture with Carl, where we learn the concepts.
Thursday: Small group call with my mentor, Anaki, where we apply these concepts to real customers and real projects.
This week, the focus was on long-term program planning and how to build structure into the process rather than writing workouts on an island.
Lecture Day: Concepts and Big Picture
On Tuesday, Carl described to us:
Macrocycles, mesocycles and microcycles.
How to think in 6 to 12 month arcs, not 6 to 12 workouts.
How assessment results guide training priorities and phases.
The goal was not to memorize labels. We had to train our brains to zoom out, pick a clear endpoint, then zoom back out and decide what would happen in the next block, week, and session to move toward that endpoint.
Small Group Day: Implementation with CoachRx
On Thursday, Anaki took these same concepts and helped us apply them to CoachRx, the coaching software I use for all my clients in person and online.
We did three main things:
Review real customer examples.
Create long and short term plans right in CoachRx.
Practice using design functions that tie the whole process together.
I’ve been using CoachRx for months and it’s already made my life easier, but I’d never really explored the built-in planning capabilities. That changed this week and will remain changed.
Thinking in long-term, medium-term and short-term plans
Every client I work with signs a minimum 6 month commitment. That time frame alone pushes me to think in bigger arcs.
From there, I like to define:
3 month and 6 month goalsboth objective and subjective.
A draft 6 to 12 month programbased on assessment, training age and lifestyle.
Clear training blocks that connect with each other instead of fighting each other.
The OPEX framework helped me refine the way these pieces were structured.
Macro, meso and micro in real training language
Rather than getting lost in jargon, here’s how I’m thinking about it now:
Macro cycle: The story of 6 to 12 months. What mountain are we trying to climb together?
Mesocyclic: An 8 to 12 week phase with a strong theme. For example, accumulation or intensification.
Microcycle: The weekly rate. What days, what patterns, what energy systems and how they repeat and progress.
Program design becomes a connection process. Each workout is part of a week, each week is part of a block, each block is part of a year.
CoachRx gave me a handy place to put this entire structure so it’s visible every time I sit down to plan.
Using CoachRx for long and short term planning
CoachRx has long and short term scheduling features built into the calendar. I had seen them before but never committed to using them.
Once I started making real designs with them, a few things became apparent:
My thinking was already long-term, but my screen didn’t match my brain.
I relied too much on memory and scattered notes.
I could be more accurate and faster if my designs lived in one place.
Now, when I open a client’s calendar, I see at the top what I decided would be the focus of that day and week. No more digging through old notes or second-guessing my original design.
From evaluation to priorities
Within CoachRx, you can create a structured objective assessment, link a client’s results, and then prioritize.
The smart part is this: when you go into the program for that client, CoachRx suggests priorities based on the assessment results you entered.
This matters for one simple reason. If you’re training more than a handful of people, you’ll forget details. It doesn’t matter how sharp you are. If an assessment was done 2 weeks ago or 12 months ago, some nuance will slip through the cracks.
In our call, even with the priorities visible on the screen, I still missed one for a sample customer. This was a good reminder that tools like this aren’t luxuries, they’re supports for real human limits.
Example: Creating an accumulation phase for a beginner
To make it concrete, here is a sample client I created in CoachRx during the session.
Training age: Beginner to Intermediate.
Current phase: Accumulation.
Primary focus: Hypertrophy, with moderate intensity and moderate to high intensity.
Aerobic level (OPEX Language): MAP 8 for this block.
Within the long-term planning view, I set:
The name of the phase: Accumulation.
The main goal: Building muscle, joint endurance and core strength.
Aerobic focus: MAP 8.
Weekly rhythm: Training Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
I then set simple end-of-block objectives:
ObjectiveMovement / TaskTargetLoaded transport Carry at least 50% of body weight 30 seconds unbroken Squat Strength Cup squat at least one third of body weight 10 reps Core strength Side plank 30 seconds without breaking form
Now when I go to Monday of the first week in the calendar, the top of my screen says:
The patterns I decided to train that day.
The target intensity range.
Aerobic work that should be present and at what level.
From there I can fill in the exact movements, sets and reps while staying within the plan I’ve already made.
I no longer have to keep two or three windows open to remember what the 12 week arc is supposed to look like.
Why scheduling systems matter to coaches
Effective programming isn’t just about choosing hypertrophy or strength and then assigning sets and reps. It’s about holding two things at once:
What the customer he wants subjectively.
What does the rating say? need objectively.
You also need to balance:
Their schedule and capacity.
Their history and coaching age.
The progress rate and feedback from each block.
A structured scheduling system helps you do all of this with less mental friction.
Efficiency, quality and confidence
Some benefits that stood out to me this week:
You become more efficient. When work is organized in one place, you spend less time chasing notes and more time thinking deeply about the client.
You give better results. Clear designs support better progress checks and cleaner adjustments.
You can take on more clients without dropping the ball. When you don’t rely on memory, you’re free to scale.
You speak with more confidence. It’s easier to explain your choices when the design is visible and logical.
This is especially important for younger coaches. At the beginning of your career, you are naturally inefficient. You learn, guess and try not to miss anything. A tool like CoachRx can take some of the friction out, so you can spend more energy learning and thinking instead of searching for scattered notes.
If you want to explore the platform I use, you can get a free trial of CoachRx directly through it test professional coaching software.
Teaching coaches while becoming a better coach
Outside of OPEX Mentorship, I personally teach a course for coaches here in Arizona. These are coaches who want to level up and become elite, long-term professionals.
This week’s timing couldn’t have been better. In my own course, I’m on a two-week program planning block. At the same time, I am learning new ways to think about planning within the OPEX Method.
This overlay gives me:
A new lens to look at my own systems.
New knowledge that I can bring back to my students.
An opportunity to show them how program design works within a real platform like CoachRx.
For the coaches in my course, I can now not only teach concepts like macro cycles and progression strategies, but also bring in my own client examples and show how that looks on screen.
If you want more educational resources beyond coaching, OPEX shares lots of free material, including guides and tools, through our fitness training downloads and Free CoachRx Resource Library. Their extensive training in coaching education is on the main OPEX Coaching Education website and they also publish quick daily lessons via LearnRx.
The Mountain Range Analogy For Long Term Coaching
Anaki used a simple optic that has stuck with me.
Think of a client’s fitness journey as a mountain range. Many peaks and valleys, many possible routes, many places where the path can change.
Our job as coaches is:
Choose a single peak for the next 12 months.
Map possible routes, trails and base camps.
Decide what equipment we need at each stage.
Along the way, a client might get halfway up and say, “You know what, I really want to go climb that other peak.”
When this happens, a robust scheduling system allows you to:
View the last 6 months of data.
See which base camps you’ve already reached.
Adjust the plan to head for the new peak without throwing away the work you’ve done.
You can only do this cleanly if you follow the path from day one and think long term from the start.
Conclusion
Week 6 of the OPEX Method Mentorship was a stark reminder that good planning is not about haphazard creativity. It is about clarity. Clarity of goals, clarity of phases and clarity of what each session is supposed to do within the bigger picture.
For me, combining the OPEX framework with the programming features within CoachRx has already changed the way I design programs and how I teach other coaches to do the same. It helps me think more strategically, work more efficiently and deliver a mentoring service that matches the expectations I set.
My mission is to leave a positive mark on how the public views health by educating the next generation of coaches. Putting better systems behind our training is a practical step towards this goal. If you’re a coach, ask yourself: what mountain range are you and your clients looking at, and do you have a clear map to the next peak?
