Your Weightlifting Program Isn't Random. It’s Built on Purpose, Reflection, and Knowing the Person in Front of You.
Curious about what goes into a truly effective weightlifting program? Or maybe you've wondered why your coach holds you back from maxing out every session?
In this blog, I'll pull back the curtain on my deliberate approach to programming and explain why everything has a purpose.
Why Random Workouts Don't Work: The Purpose Behind Every Lift
Let’s get one thing clear, I don’t throw random movements into a program just to make it “look hard” or keep you entertained. This isn’t a circus act. What you’re doing in training has purpose, even if it doesn’t always feel exciting.
Everything I program serves a role. Whether it’s improving your positioning, building strength through a sticking point, developing bar speed, improving confidence, or just forcing you to actually focus during a lift, there’s a reason it’s there.
Every coach has their own preferences and biases when it comes to programming. But the idea that certain exercises are just “fancy” or unnecessary? That’s usually a red flag. If a variation is being used with intent and it’s helping an athlete improve, then it’s doing its job. Dismissing it as “fancy” often says more about the coach’s lack of understanding than it does about the exercise itself.
Why Don't We Max Out Every Session?
We all love the thrill of maxing out, loading up the bar, feeling the weight, and hitting those big numbers. It's exhilarating! But if we love it so much, why do coaches often hold us back from doing it every session? There are some really good reasons, and they're all about maximising your long-term progress in the gym.
Maxing Out vs. Smart Training: Why Less Is Often More
Think of it this way: maxing out is where you test and see how far you've progressed in your training. Training, on the other hand, is where you do the work, refining your technique, building strength, addressing weaknesses, and enhancing your existing strengths. When you finally hit that new personal best at the end of a training cycle, it's a powerful metric that clearly shows your progress. But the key word here is "progress in training."
Maxing out isn't training itself. It's a test of what you've built. For most people, and depending on your training age and program structure (typically around 16 weeks), you should only be attempting true max-out lifts about 2-3 times a year. This can shift based on competition schedules, but the general idea remains: it's a special event, not an everyday occurrence. If you're maxing out all the time, you're not giving your body the chance to make the meaningful changes needed to push that load even higher.
Beyond Load: The Other Measures of Progress
While load is a very important factor in weightlifting training, it's not the only measure of improvement. In fact, focusing solely on load can hinder your overall development. There are many other objective and non-objective measures of your training that contribute to progress, which may not always be immediately visible on a barbell but are vital for long-term gains.
The non-objective measures are:
Confidence: Finally feeling more confident in yourself to hit certain weights or hit higher reps at heavier loads.
Technique: Improving the quality of your lifts is paramount. This can involve refining your timing, balance, footwork, speed under the bar, or extension, all leading to more efficient movement.
Positional and Body Awareness: This goes hand-in-hand with technique, focusing on your ability to maintain tension throughout a lift, understanding where your body needs to be in space and time, and making movements feel more natural.
Self-Talk and Mindset: How you react to setbacks, missed lifts, or just challenging days in the gym is a huge part of your progress. Developing a resilient mindset is crucial for consistency.
Focus and Intent: Are you internalising and applying your coach's cues more effectively? Are your sessions more deliberate and purposeful? This heightened focus translates to better results.
These "non-objective" measures are incredibly important for progress in your training.
The Coach's Blueprint: Reflecting and Adapting Your Training
After a training program wraps up, and it's time to map out the next phase for continued progress, the most crucial questions I ask myself are: "What didn't go well, and why?" This one is often easier to pinpoint. But then comes the trickier, yet equally vital, question: "What did go well, and why?"
These questions are fundamental to making smarter, more individualised decisions for my clients, directly driving their progress. They help me determine which exercise variations truly worked to drive progress but also to help them feel and understand what they need to be doing. For instance, a "no foot, no hook grip" variation frequently appears in some clients' programs because I've observed a clear carryover into their classic lifts. For others, using pauses and tempos proves more effective in helping them understand positioning throughout a certain lift.
Apart from specific exercises, these reflections help me identify the root of any issues: Is it a strength deficit, a technical flaw, or is it a confidence barrier? Sometimes, the main goal for a certain exercise in a program is simply to build confidence.
Reflecting helps guide decisions on appropriate loading and rep ranges for each individual. I also track missed lifts for some athletes, how many misses per session or week? Is it always the same weight, set, or rep? Some individuals consistently miss their final rep, while others might skip a proper warm-up and miss their first working set. These subtle trends inform smarter decisions for the next program, smoothing out minor issues for a more effective training cycle.
The Big Picture: Why Understanding the Individual Matters Most
But these data points can only be helpful if I understand the person and their habits, be it nutrition, sleep, stress, or even just their enjoyment of the block. Otherwise, the data on the spreadsheet is meaningless, as it only gives me a very small amount of information that, realistically, is part of a much bigger picture. If I don't understand the person, then these may not be trends in their performance but more so their recovery, and I won't effectively be able to make changes to their training without helping and understanding other areas first.
My role as a coach is to guide my clients toward their goals and empower them through smarter training decisions. This blog post serves as an introduction to the theory behind my coaching process.
To understand more from a practical lens, I encourage you to read my other blog: "Teaching Through Feeling: Coaching the Person, Not Just the Lift." And in the future, I'll be sharing a deep dive of this process and how this has worked with one of my clients.
-Coach Sebb
