I just completed a class in Program Design and for my final paper I wrote up a 30 page program designed for a trail runner preparing for a season of 10+ mile runs. It’s way too long to post here so I figured instead I’d just take the outline of the paper and turn it into a framework of sorts. If you are looking to write up a more formal program (beyond just the exercises) then I hope you will find this helpful.

Needs Analysis

A needs analysis is a comprehensive look at both the individual athlete as well as their sport. The idea is simple, you can’t design a specific program without knowing the specifics of the athlete and their sport. Here’s what would be typically included (minimum) in a needs analysis:

Sport

The goal here is to understand the movements and techniques enough to assure that the prescription (the exercises) add value to the movements in the sport in terms of both injury prevention and performance. For example, you wouldn’t add a whole bunch of hypertrophy prescription in a trail running program. Some of the things to consider:

• Energy Systems: See my earlier post for info on what these are all about; you need to determine which are primary for the sport in question.
• Biomechanical: I did a short post on this a while back but just barely scratched the surface. The idea here is to understand the primary movements in the sport and match the prescription as much as possible to the muscles/movements involved.
• Common Injuries: Do some research and find out what the most common injuries are and how to prevent them. Work in the prevention techniques into the prescription.

Athlete

The athlete’s training status, history and specific goals are important in designing a customized program that is as efficient as it can be for the individual. Some of things to look for include (partial list):

• Experience Level: This pertains to whatever the main theme of the program is. For my paper it was trail running so I examined the runner’s experience both on trails and on the street. Resistance training experience (equipment, free weights, etc) is also important if that is going to be a big part of the prescription.
• Training Preferences: Are there specific likes and dislikes? If you have the choice between two exercises or even modes of exercises and all other things are equal, go with what the athlete prefers and to do that you have to ask first and write them down.
• Available Training Time: Kind of obvious why you need this.
• History of Injuries: This is critical, you don’t want to design a program that is going to include exercises that directly aggravate an old injury.
• Goals: The athlete should have a bunch of goals so prioritizing them is important. They’ll likely want to get big, get lean, get fast, get strong, and gain skills all at the same time. Figuring out what is the most important is the only way to get to a realistic couple of goals for the program.

Program Key Elements

In this section you can list some of the key concepts that drove decisions made in creating the prescription. This is arguably more of an academic thing but depending on your athlete, having at least some solid justification as to “why” this thing is designed how it is may just lend the program that little extra bit of credibility that pushes them to really stick to it.

• Specificity: The term SAID (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands) is used interchangeably with specificity and simply means that the adaptation that results from any particular exercise will be specific to that particular exercise. In other words, exercise selection must take into account Needs Analysis in order to a program to be as efficient as possible.
• Dose-Response Relationship:   For a given population the exercise prescription, or dose, is the recommended program provided to most efficiently meet a specific goal referred to as the response. There is a great deal of literature on this and it basically boils down to understanding the right amount (volume, frequency, intensity) of exercise to meet the stated goals. So yeah, doing your homework in this area and using it to justify why you chose the sets/reps combos that you did can be very valuable.
• Resistance Training: Use this section to identify the evidence based research that backs up your resistance training protocols. Or even some basic definitions like this.
• Cardiovascular Training: Again, identify the evidence based research that justifies your selection of exercises in this area.
• Periodization:  I did a post on this a while back and depending on the athlete’s needs analysis, periodization may or may not be a big part of your program. I did a full paper on periodization for my last class so I will post more on it at a later date. For now, I would only go with a periodization model if your athlete has a specific competition season coming up.
• Progressive Overload: It means just what it says, it is the systematic increase in training frequency, volume, and intensity in various combinations and depending on your periodization model (if used) this can take on many forms. The most basic is a planned linear increase in intensity as volume decreases proportionally. In other words, at the beginning you have a lot of volume at lower intensity and as you approach your competitive season the intensity goes up and the volume goes down.

Prescription Model

This could also been seen as more of an academic thing but I think (a) its a nice way to visually represent what the prescription is doing over time and (b) if the program includes multiple exercise modes, modeling it first can serve a a great tool in creating the detailed prescription . Also, without the model If you just look at the exercises on a spreadsheet it would be hard to tell that there’s a bigger plan at work.  As an example, here is the model for the trail running program that I wrote:

In this example each cycle (or phase) is 6 weeks long and represented by the colored & labeled rectangles. I won’t go into all of the details but you can see how the volume and intensity of each type of workout in the program was purposefully manipulated throughout. I wrote the model first, based on research, and then wrote the prescription to match taking into account the needs analysis mentioned earlier. It is a great systematic approach for program design.

Testing

In this section you would identify specific pre and post tests that you want to measure, could be speed & agility tests, could be measuring 1RM, whatever. Reasons for doing this are obvious, and its important that there’s a solid relationship between program goals, the prescription and what you are measuring.

The Prescription

So finally the fun part. This can take any form you want but this is where you spell out exactly what the athlete is going to do over the course of the program.  It can be as simple or as complex as needed. Mine was reasonably complex because it included detailed resistance and HIIT elements in addition to basic running. So I created a table for each week of the program and then referenced difference resistance and HIIT protocols, sub-plans, within that table. Here’s an example of one table and one plan for each.

So that’s it! If anyone wants a copy of my full trail running plan just drop me a note, I’d be happy to share the whole thing.  By the way, the ‘theme’ of the resistance part of the prescription above came from a previous post of mine as did the HIIT section 🙂

Note that nutrition needs to be a key element of any complete program however I didn’t mention it here because this class about exercise prescription. I did post a few nutrition blogs in the past though… A basic one on nutrition and a little about what I eat.