Programs & the weekly grid
Build a multi-week program on the weekly grid: read a whole week at a time, and edit sets, reps, weight and meal portions straight from the schedule.
A program is a multi-week plan that blends training, nutrition and content. You build it in the Vault, and the whole plan lives on one screen: the weekly grid.
Two doors lead to the same place. The sidebar item is called Mixed Plans, and the screen it opens is headed Programs; your plans also fill the My Plans tab of Vault → Training. The name on the rail and the name on the page disagree, so look for Mixed Plans in the sidebar.
Creating one is a dialog rather than a screen: New program asks for a name, a length in weeks and which sections the plan carries, and puts you straight on the grid.
The grid
Each row is a week, each column a day. A day holds whatever you put on it: workouts (orange), nutrition templates (blue), content (purple), or a rest marker.
Above the grid, three buttons decide how much of the plan you see at once:
| View | What it is for |
|---|---|
| 4 weeks | Comparing a block. Four rows share the height, each day a compact list of names. |
| 1 week | Working on one week in detail. Days open up into full cards, described below. |
| All | The whole plan end to end. Rows keep the height they have at four weeks, and the grid scrolls. |
Your choice is remembered, so the grid opens the way you left it.
Showing one kind at a time
The Workout · Nutrition · Form key in the top right is also the filter. Click one to hide that kind across the whole grid; its dot becomes a cross and its name is struck through. Click again to bring it back. Useful when a plan carries training and nutrition on the same days and you want to read one of them.
This one is not remembered. It lives in the page address, so a plan always opens showing everything, and the filtered view is a link you can send to someone: copy the address bar and the person opening it sees exactly what you see. Rest markers are never hidden.
One week, in full
Switch to 1 week and each day becomes a proper card instead of a list of names. Each exercise gets three lines: its picture and name, its prescription, and its note when there is one.
A1 marks a superset or circuit member.Sets, reps and weight are editable right there: click a value, type, and click away. Changes save on their own a moment later, the same as everywhere else in Protocol. The card you are typing in drops its colour for a plain background while it has focus, so the values are easier to read, and takes the colour back when you move on.
Reps and weight are free text on purpose, so the prescriptions you actually write keep working:
6 / 8 / 10, 10x25kg, 8x30kg, 500m/400m/300m, bodyweight.
Notes fold out on their own line. Click the note icon beside an exercise’s name to open one, and type. An exercise that already carries a note shows it straight away, so nothing is hidden behind a click, and the icon stays lit on the exercises that have one. A note sits on one line until you click into it, then opens up while you type, so a week of long notes still reads as a week.
Click an exercise’s picture to open the exercise itself, with its demonstration video, instructions, equipment and target muscles, without leaving the week. The same works in the workout builder.
Supersets and circuits are marked with a letter: A1, A2, B1. Exercises sharing a letter are
performed together, and the colours match the group cards in the workout builder, so a circuit reads
as the same circuit in both places. Exercises that aren’t grouped carry no letter.
Anything beyond that, such as adding an exercise, reordering, or changing a superset, still belongs in the full builder. Click the card’s title to open it. In the 1-week view the title is the only part that opens the workout, so the rest of the card is yours to type in and a near miss on a field never takes you off the plan. In the 4-week and All views, where there is nothing to type into, the whole chip opens it. This is covered in Editing the weekly grid.
Simple and Video guided workouts
A workout set to Simple or Video guided is coached in words rather than numbers, so its card follows suit: no sets/reps/weight boxes, and the note open by default, because the note is the instruction. Any numbers the workout still carries are shown underneath, read-only, so switching a workout’s mode never looks like it threw them away. To change those numbers, open the workout and use the pencil beside them, or put it back on the full mode. That mode is called Standard when you create a workout and Advanced in the Configuration panel; it is the same setting. See Building a workout.
Nutrition days
Nutrition templates open up the same way: each meal or recipe on its own row, with its picture where there is one, its portion, and its calories.
- Foods show an editable quantity. Change it and the item’s calories and macros recalculate against its measure, so 60 g of oats becoming 75 g moves the numbers with it, and the day’s total at the top of the card moves too, using the same arithmetic the nutrition editor uses.
- Recipes open in place. Click one and its editor comes up over the grid, so you can rename it, change its ingredients, and close it again without leaving the week.
One workout on several days
If you built a week and copied it forward, the same workout record can sit on several days. It is one workout, not copies, so editing it changes every day that uses it.
The card tells you before you type: a workout or template used more than once carries a small “used on 3 days” line at the top of its list. That is what you want most of the time: fix a weight once and the whole block follows. When you don’t want it, duplicate the week instead (Duplicate week on the week menu), which makes genuine copies of every workout and template on it. Editing the weekly grid covers the difference in full.
Read-only plans
Programs from the Protocol library are read for reference, not edited. On those, the cards show the same detail with the editing turned off, and the week and day menus offer none of their editing items. Use Import on the plan first, then edit your own copy. A plan on the Team tab works the same way, with Duplicate as the word, and you only need it when you want a version of your own: putting a team plan to work for a client copies it for you.
Related
- Editing the weekly grid for filling days forward, duplicating weeks, clearing and deleting.
- Assigning a plan to a client for what a client actually receives.
- Duplicating a plan and Translating a program.