Assigning a plan to a client
Assign gives the client their own independent copy of the plan, active straight away. The end date you pick labels the plan, it does not resize it.
Assigning is how a plan in your library becomes a plan a client is following. It is not a link between the two: the client gets a brand new plan of their own, built by copying yours.
Understanding that copy is most of what you need to know about this screen, so this page starts there.
What Assign actually does
Open the program in Vault → Programs and choose Assign in the top bar. From the programs list you can also use the card menu and Assign to a client.
When you confirm, Protocol builds a new plan owned by that client. Every workout and every nutrition template on the plan is recreated as a new record belonging to the client, along with its supplementation days and its content collections. Nothing is shared with the plan you assigned from.
That has two consequences worth holding on to:
- Editing the client’s copy never touches your template. Change a weight for one person and your library is untouched.
- Editing the template never reaches a client who already has it. A fix you make in the Vault today reaches the next person you assign to, and nobody who is already running the plan.
The new plan starts as Active, so the client sees it in their app as soon as you assign. That is different from duplicating a plan, which lands as Pending and stays invisible until you say otherwise. If the client already has a live plan that this one replaces, set the old one to Expired or Paused yourself.
The end date does not resize the plan
This is the one thing on the screen that does not do what it looks like it does, so read it before you assign a long plan into a short window.
The dialog offers a start date and an end date, and pre-fills the end date from the plan’s own length. You can change either. Changing the end date does not change how many weeks of content the client receives. The copy carries every week of the source plan, always.
Assign a twelve week template with an end date six weeks out and the client gets:
- twelve weeks of actual days, workouts and meals, exactly as the template has them, and
- a plan that describes itself as six weeks long, ending on the date you picked.
Nothing is truncated, and nothing is stretched either. The dates drive the plan’s label, its end date and the “week 3 of 6” style progress readout. They never touch the days.
So pick dates that describe the plan you are assigning. If you want a client to run a shorter block, build or duplicate a shorter plan first and assign that. If you want them to run longer, extend the plan afterwards, which is the next section.
Extend a plan, and add weeks to it
Extending happens on the client, not on the template, and it lives on their record rather than in the Vault.
Open the client, go to the Programs tab, and use the row menu on the plan:
Duplicate last phase takes the final phase of the plan, which on most plans is the final week, and adds another copy of it on the end. Run it again and you get another. It is the reschedule tool: rather than editing dates, you add real weeks of real content, so the client always has something to do.
For several clients at once, tick the rows and use Duplicate last phase on the bulk bar. That dialog offers two modes:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Once each | Adds one copy of the last phase to every selected plan. |
| Fit to a date | You give a date under Run until, and each plan is extended as many times as it needs to reach it. |
Fit to a date works out the repeats per plan from where that plan currently ends, so plans of different lengths all arrive at the same date. A plan that already runs that far is counted as a success and left alone. A plan with no end date and nothing to work one out from is reported as an error rather than guessed at, and the dialog names it.
The run is one plan at a time and shows its progress. You can cancel part way through, and the plans already done stay done.
Filling in placeholders
If the plan carries per-client blanks, such as a breakfast time, the Assign dialog asks for them before it copies anything, and your answers are written into the client’s copy.
Fill them in here. This is the only moment you get: once the plan is assigned there is no screen that edits a placeholder value, so a blank left now stays blank. See Per-client placeholders in plans for how to create the fields.
Assigning from the client’s record
The Vault dialog above is one of two ways in. The other starts on the person rather than on the plan: open the client, find the Plans & programs card on the Overview and press Template. It asks the same questions in two steps.
Step one is picking the plan. Search by name, phase or tag, and narrow the shelf you are searching with the two rows above the list:
- Mine · Team · Protocol library. Your own plans, the ones your team shares, or the library Protocol ships. Team only appears on a team account.
- Training · Nutrition · Mixed. Which kind of plan you are looking for.
- Your folders, down the left, when you have any.
Each row shows the plan’s length, how many phases it has, how many days a week it trains and when you last touched it. Choosing one fills the panel on the right with its phases and the weeks each one covers, and Preview opens the whole plan in a new tab if you want to read it properly before you commit.
Step two is the schedule. Pick the start date, or take Today or Next Monday, and set the length in weeks. The length is pre-filled from the plan’s own, and it behaves exactly as the end date does above: it labels the plan, it does not resize the content. Two switches sit beside it:
- Visible to them straight away. On, the plan appears in the client’s app the moment you assign. Off, it is saved in preparation and shows nothing until you set it active.
- Keep it linked to the template. Off by default, which gives the client their own copy. On, the plan follows the template instead. See the next section for what that costs.
If the plan carries per-client blanks they appear here too, under the length.
The panel at the bottom right says what will happen before you press Assign program: the dates the plan will run between, when the second phase opens, and whether the client can see it.
Plans that follow a template
A template-linked plan is a different animal from an assigned copy, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.
You create one from the client’s record, from the Template pill on the Plans and programs card, turning Keep it linked to the template on in step two. Instead of copying the content, the plan points at the template and reads its phases, workouts and nutrition from there every time it is opened. Change the template and every linked plan changes with it.
The trade is that almost nothing on a linked plan is the plan’s own. Only these are:
- its name
- its start and end dates, and any pause or resume dates
- its status
- its position in the client’s list of plans
- its link to a purchase
- its per-client placeholder values
Everything else, the phases, the days, the workouts, the nutrition, the description, the goal, the content collections, comes from the template.
Edits to the rest are dropped, and nothing tells you. The program editor will happily let you type into a linked plan, and the screen looks like it accepted the change. The save simply ignores it, because that content is not the plan’s to change. If you meant to change it for this client only, you wanted a copy rather than a link. If you meant to change it for everyone, edit the template.
Translation behaves the same way and says so out loud: Translate program is unavailable on a linked plan, so one action can never re-language several clients at once. See Translating a program.
A template with linked plans cannot be deleted. Because every linked plan reads its content from the template, removing the template would leave those clients with plans that have nothing in them. So Delete in the Vault refuses, and the message says how many client plans still point at it, expired ones included. If you really mean to retire it, unlink or delete those client plans first. If you only want it out of your way, leave it where it is: an unused template costs nothing.
There is no “who is on this program” view
Worth saying plainly, because it is the question coaches ask next.
An assigned plan does not point back at the plan it was copied from. The copy is complete and independent, and that independence includes not knowing where it came from. So a template cannot tell you how many clients are running it, and there is no enrolled-clients list on a program.
To answer “who is on this”, go the other way: the client’s Programs tab lists that person’s plans by name, and the programs list in the Vault shows how many plans in total are assigned.
Related
- Duplicating a plan for a copy that stays with you, or lands on a client as Pending.
- Programs and the weekly grid for building the plan in the first place.
- Editing the weekly grid for the week by week edits.