Blog / Programming

Personal training programme spreadsheet: what goes in it, and when to move on

By Raziel · 3 November 2026

Plenty of good coaches run their whole client list from a spreadsheet. One tab per client in Google Sheets or Excel, a row per exercise, and a habit of filling it in on a Sunday. It costs nothing, it bends to however you coach, and you already know how to use it.

If you are building one from scratch or tidying the one you have, the layout decides how much it gives back. Below is what earns a column, how to keep the plan safe from accidental edits, and the signs that the sheet has started to cost you more time than it saves.

Give every set its own row

Most sheets start with a row per exercise and a cell that says "3×8". It reads well and it logs badly. If the client does 8, 8 and then 6, there is nowhere honest to put the 6, so it ends up in a note, or in your head, or nowhere.

Give each working set its own row. It looks longer on screen, but every number has a home, and a filter on the exercise column shows you a lift's whole history in one go.

The columns that earn their place

• Week and day. "Week 3, Day 2" sorts and filters cleanly. Dates alone get messy the moment a client trains on a Thursday instead of a Wednesday.
• Exercise. Spell it the same way every time. "Back squat" one week and "BB squat" the next splits one lift into two in every filter and chart you build.
• Target reps and target load. What you prescribed.
• Done reps and done load. What they actually did, in the next columns along, so the gap between plan and result is visible at a glance.
• RPE. Use the reps-in-reserve version. In the scale Zourdos and colleagues set out in 2016, RPE 10 means no reps left in the tank, RPE 9 means one left, RPE 8 means two. Teach it with one question after each set: how many more could you have done?
• Note. One short line per session for anything the numbers miss: a tight hamstring, a new gym, a bad night's sleep.

Resist adding more. Every extra column is one more box to fill in between sets.

Keep the plan and the log apart

The most common slip is a client typing over your targets. They log 70kg in the target column, and next week you are working from the wrong number.

Two fixes, and you can use both. Keep the programme on one tab and the log on another. Then protect the programme tab. In Google Sheets you can protect a range or a whole sheet, either blocking edits or showing a warning before anyone changes it. Google's own help page adds that this is not a security measure, so treat it as a guard against slips and no more.

A worked example

One client's bench press, with invented numbers, laid out as rows:

Three rows tell you what "3×8" never could: the first two sets went to plan and the last one was a grind. That is enough to decide next week.

Signs it has outgrown your client list

A spreadsheet works well for a handful of clients. These are the signs it has stopped working for yours:

• Sunday evening goes on carrying last week's numbers into next week, tab by tab, client by client.
• Clients send their numbers by message and you type them in.
• You hand the same block to several clients, and each copy has drifted from the others.
• There is a tab called "FINAL v3", and you are not sure it is the final one.
• A client asks what they lifted six weeks ago, and finding it takes longer than the answer is worth.

None of these mean the spreadsheet was a mistake. They mean it did its job, and the job has got bigger.