Nobody can read your spreadsheet

The program's done. Now you have to present it.

Off-season block is written. Eight weeks, four days per week, every exercise with sets, reps, intensities, velocity zones, all of it sitting in Excel. Now you have to walk the staff through it.

Now you start pulling numbers back out of the sheet you just built. Total volume by week. How the intensity moves across the block. Where the peaks land and how the movement patterns are distributed. You already know the answers because you wrote the thing, but knowing it and showing it are different jobs, and the second one takes an entire afternoon you didn't plan for.

Then you have to make it readable. Printed pages, slides, something the staff can look at together without everyone opening the same file on their own laptop and scrolling to a different row.

A spreadsheet is where you write the program, not where anyone reads it

Excel is a build tool. It holds every detail, which is exactly what you need while you're writing, and exactly what gets in the way when someone's trying to see the shape of a block for the first time.

Your staff doesn't need the grid. They need to see what the block actually does. How hard week three is compared to week six. Whether the volume is where you meant it to be. What each phase is supposed to accomplish and how the numbers support it.

That's an analysis and formatting job, not a coaching job. You already made every decision in that sheet. Pulling the summary back out of it is just labor.

Write it once, then get two versions out of it. One for your staff, detailed enough to actually critique. One for the sport coach, same program, none of the jargon.

Inside the Lab: describing your sheet

Every coach lays out a program sheet differently, so the AI tool needs to know how yours works before it can do anything with it.

Tell it what your columns are and what one row means. Something like: each row is one exercise on one day, with columns for week, day, exercise, sets, reps, intensity as a percentage, and velocity zone. Then tell it how the weeks are organized and where the phases break.

If describing it is more hassle than it's worth, take a copy of the file, keep the structure, and upload that. This still might require some description, but AI does a pretty good job figuring it out. A program sheet has no athlete data in it, so there's nothing to strip out.

Then ask for the analysis:

"Break this block down for a staff presentation. Weekly volume by movement pattern, how intensity distributes across the eight weeks, where the peaks and deloads land, and how each phase differs from the one before it. Then lay it out as slides I can print, one topic per page, with the charts I'd need to show it."

What it looks like in the real world

You get back the volume and intensity summary, laid out by week, with the phase structure visible in a way the grid never showed you.

Two things usually happen here. First, it's faster than doing it by hand, which was the point. Second, and this is the part worth paying attention to, you sometimes see something you didn't intend. Week five's average relative intensity is higher than week six when you meant it to build. One movement pattern has half the exposures of the others. You wrote it, you just never saw it laid out this way, because you were looking at a grid.

Then you ask for the sport coach version. Same block, but no velocity zones, no percentages, no volume tables. Plain language on what the eight weeks are meant to do, what their athletes will feel in each phase, and a few simple charts to illustrate the program. That's a different document, and it used to be a second afternoon of work.

Where the coach stays in charge

Check the numbers before you present them. Take some time to double check things like you usually would, and make sure everything matches. Spreadsheets get read wrong, especially with merged cells or a column that's formatted differently than the rest, and a volume number that's off by twenty percent will get caught by the one person in the room you least want catching it.

The analysis doesn't defend the program. It can show what week five does. It can't explain why you built week five that way, what you learned from last year's block, or why this year's group needs more of one thing and less of another. That's the actual presentation. The slides are just what you're standing next to.

The Coach's Scouting Report

• Signal. A spreadsheet is where you write the program. It's not where anyone reads it.
• Noise. Rebuilding the same summary by hand every block. Handing a sport coach the performance staff version.
• Next Rep. Take the block you're writing now. Describe how your sheet is laid out, ask for a volume and intensity breakdown, and have it formatted as pages you can print. Then ask for the version you'd hand a sport coach.

See you next Sunday.