Inside The OPEX Method Week 6: Long-Term Program Design For Coaches
Most clients want results in 14 to 30 days, but real progress rarely fits into that kind of timeline. If you coach people, you already know the tension between short-term expectations and the reality of long-term development. Week 6 of the OPEX Method Mentorship zooms in on how to bridge that gap with clear planning, better systems, and stronger communication.
This recap breaks down the key ideas from the week: how to think in long-term cycles, how to use short-term and daily plans to support that vision, how CoachRx supports the process, and how to communicate it all in a way that builds trust and consistency.
Week 6 highlights: Long-Term Planning Inside The OPEX Method
This week centered on long-term program design. The mentorship team linked everything coaches have learned so far, from assessment and OPEX Gain/Pain/Sustain work, into a structured planning system that stretches out over 12 months.
The rhythm of the week looked like this:
Tuesday lecture: Concepts and structure of long-term planning.
Thursday lab: Hands-on practice building plans in Coach RX.
Friday office hours: Open questions, clarifications, and deeper discussion.
By Friday, coaches were not just hearing ideas. They were already building long-term, short-term, and daily plans inside the actual software they will use with clients.
Why Thinking Long Term Matters
When you think long term, you help clients see past the question, “Will I see progress in two weeks?” and instead connect them to a larger story.
For teaching purposes, OPEX uses a 12-month window as the “long-term” frame. In practice, long-term could be 2 or 4 years, but a year gives enough scope to plan meaningfully without getting lost in the distance.
Long-term thinking helps you:
Align training with a client’s true goals, not just quick wins.
Reduce constant program redesign and decision fatigue.
Set real expectations about progress and effort.
Coach instead of scramble.
The key is to show clients that what they do next week is part of something bigger, not random workouts stitched together.
Macro, Mezzo, and Daily: Simple Language For Clear Thinking
OPEX uses simple terms so coaches and clients can talk about planning without jargon.
In this framework:
Long-term plan = Macro cycle (about 12 months)
Short-term plans = Mezzo cycles
Daily plans = Micro cycles
Short-term plans stack together to create the long-term plan. Daily sessions live inside those short-term blocks.
That simple structure helps you always know where you are:
What is the current short-term focus?
How does this day support that short-term block?
How does this block support the full year?
The 5-Step Structure For Long-Term Program Design
A big theme from Week 6 was that many coaches skip straight from “assess” to “prescribe.” They collect a lot of information, then jump right into writing sets, reps, and exercises.
The OPEX team proposed a different path: a five-step structure that slows the coach down at the right moments.
Here are the five steps:
Assess
Use your intake, consultation, and physical assessment to gather information. This includes goals, training age, schedule, stress, movement, and more.Prioritize
Look at everything you know and ask:Why is this client here?
What matters most over the next year?
What did the assessment show that lines up with those goals?
From that, set clear priorities rather than trying to improve everything at once.
Plan
Consider the resources the client has in real life. For example:How many days per week can they train?
What does their day-to-day schedule look like?
What support system do they have at home or at work?
What can they realistically do with nutrition?
An example from the conversation: it makes no sense to ask someone living paycheck to paycheck to spend thousands each month on high-end, farm-direct food. The plan has to match their reality.
Periodize
This is where you begin to shape long-term and short-term training. You map out phases, decide how different qualities will progress, and outline what each block is meant to do. This is where macro, mezzo, and daily work start to take form.Prescribe
Only now do you write the actual program details. Because you have assessed, prioritized, planned, and periodized, your prescription can now be succinct, individualized, and efficient instead of guesswork.
Skipping steps 2, 3, and 4 often leads to bloated, unfocused programs. Working through all five steps keeps program design clear and intentional.
Turning Long-Term Vision Into Action Inside CoachRx
Coach RX is built around the same principles that the OPEX education teaches, but it is not limited to OPEX-trained coaches. The goal is to give any coach a way to think and work long term with their clients.
Inside Coach RX, you can:
Build and visualize long-term plans with clear training phases such as:
Accumulation
Intensification
Deload
Pre-competition
Competition
Set aerobic and anaerobic focus areas inside those phases.
Use cycle types to shape resistance training characteristics, so many decisions are already framed before you start writing sessions.
Stack short-term plans to see a full long-term layout at a glance.
You can then go deeper and build:
The specific short-term plans for each block.
The daily sessions inside each block, such as what happens on Monday vs Wednesday.
Once you save that work, the plan is tagged and visible in the training calendar. When you sit down to write for a given day, your priorities for that day are already clear from the plan you built.
You do not have to reinvent the wheel each week.
How Long-Term Planning Saves Time And Frees You To Coach
When you first hear “plan a year,” it sounds heavy. In practice, it is simple because you stay at a high level.
The rough time breakdown shared in the call was:
5 to 10 minutes to outline the macro 12-month plan.
About 5 more minutes to build the first short-term plan the client will start with.
You are not writing detailed workouts at that stage. You are just setting:
Phases
Focuses
Broad progressions
That small time investment pays for itself every single week. A lot of the thinking you usually try to do on the fly is already decided.
A core point from the week:
Program design is not coaching.
Program design is the structure. Coaching is what happens when you look at what the client did, how they responded, and what needs to change.
If all your energy goes into creating something brand new every week, you have little left for actual coaching. The 10 to 15 minutes you invest on the front end of a 4, 6, 8, or 12 week block gives you time and mental space to respond to your client as a human, not just a name in your design queue.
Communicating The Plan To Clients And Boosting Compliance
Planning is important, but clients also need to feel connected to that plan.
One idea shared was using the Loom integration inside Coach RX to record short video explanations. For example, a 60 second Loom at the start of a new 4-week block where you explain:
What this phase will focus on.
What they can expect to feel.
Why some key movements or progressions are showing up.
The key here is to stay at a surface level. Most clients do not need a lecture on physiological adaptation. They just want to know why they are doing what they are doing.
A simple example: if a client is squatting every Monday and sees the squat change over time, they will likely feel more confident when they understand the basic intention behind that pattern.
Benefits of this kind of brief communication:
The client feels, “This was built for me.”
Trust increases because the plan feels clear instead of random.
Compliance often improves because the client is more connected and relaxed.
In the office hours, the group also talked about what progression means for real people. For many, especially general population clients, the biggest form of progression is simply being consistent, often for the first time in their life.
Anything that raises the chance they will show up, week after week, is time well spent.
Community, Labs, And Office Hours: Learning By Doing
A strong theme this week was how useful the structure of the mentorship has become for the coaches inside it.
The flow looks like:
Learn the ideas on Tuesday in lecture.
Apply them hands-on in Thursday lab inside Coach RX.
Clear up gaps, challenges, and edge cases during Friday office hours.
Assistant instructors work closely with coaches during lab, which means many questions get answered before office hours even start. Compared to earlier runs of similar education, the team has seen far fewer basic questions by Friday. More of the time can go to nuance, variations, and advanced application.
For the lead instructor, teaching this way is energizing. The live back and forth, not knowing in advance what questions will come in, and having to respond honestly (including saying “I don’t know” when needed) makes the whole process feel alive.
This environment also helps coaches realize the value of being around others who are aiming at mastery, asking questions, and challenging their own thinking. That sense of community pushes everyone to keep leveling up.
Looking Ahead: Lifestyle, BLGs, Business, And Marketing
Next week, the focus shifts to basic lifestyle guidelines (BLGs) and nutrition.
When asked about a favorite BLG, the answer was simple: movement.
The reason is powerful:
When you move consistently, you notice when sleep slips.
When you move consistently, you feel when your fuel is off.
When you move consistently, you can tell when stress is too high or recovery is too low.
Movement becomes an ongoing self-assessment tool. Many other helpful behaviors sit downstream of simply moving your body on a regular basis.
After the lifestyle week, the mentorship transitions into business systems, then into marketing, where coaches will get support on the resistance and emotions many feel around putting their work in front of people.
For coaches interested in joining the next cohort of the OPEX Method Mentorship, there is a Black Friday offer running, with discounts available until December 5. Enrollment for the January cohort is open until January 9, 2026. You can learn more about the education through the OPEX Method CCP Level 1 coaching education.
Beyond the mentorship, OPEX hosts a monthly community call on the first Wednesday of each month. The upcoming call includes a new partnership announcement and demos of tools that integrate with Coach RX. Anyone in the network, even those who only follow via email or social, can join.
Bringing It All Together
Week 6 made one thing very clear: long-term planning is not a luxury; it is a core part of thoughtful coaching. When you assess, prioritize, plan, periodize, and only then prescribe, you create programs that are clear, personal, and easier to manage.
Using tools like Coach RX to map out macro, mezzo, and daily work turns that structure into something visible and practical. Short Loom explanations and simple language help clients feel involved, which raises consistency, the most important progression for many people.
If you are a coach, consider how you can shift more of your thinking to the long term, free up time to actually coach, and plug into a community that pushes you to grow. The next year of development for both you and your clients starts with the plans you write today.
The livestream runs across YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Questions are welcome during the stream and after. If you have a question, add it in the comments where you watch.
The team reviews them and answers in the next live session. There are no silly questions. If something is blocking you, someone else is likely stuck on the same thing.
Curious about joining a future cohort or want the full curriculum?
Get the overview and next steps inside the OPEX Method mentorship and CCP Level 1.
Next Steps
Become A Professional Coach.
Wherever you are on your coaching journey, learn a repeatable and proven system to simplify program design and build a sustainable career. See how the OPEX Method Mentorship can help you find your version of success as a professional coach.
Elevate Your Coaching Business
CoachRx empowers fitness coaches to excel in program design, nurture client relationships, and scale their businesses with unparalleled efficiency and insight. Discover why CoachRx is the preferred choice for fitness coaches seeking to differentiate and deliver exceptional services.
Continue To Learn & Grow
Whether you want to write better training programs, increase your knowledge of nutrition & lifestyle protocols, or work on your coaching business, LearnRx has got you covered with courses, playlists, tools, and resources on demand. New content added monthly.
