If you have ever paid attention to any Personal Trainer marketing you would notice one thing stands out again and again.

Individualisation.

Individualised training programs.

Individualised macro prescriptions - Don't start me.

Individualised feedback.

It all needs to stop! The truth of the matter is simply this:

You cannot individualise anything for an individual to the degree that will make a tangible difference until you have seen how they respond compared to other people. 

And in my opinion, this is the key advantage of coaching - having an external and experienced person analyse the results from the inputs of the program. 

This is why I get so frustrated when I see coaches saying they will straight up individualise everything at the beginning of the program - do they have clairvoyant powers I am not aware of? A personal training crystal ball that predicts volume capacity?

How do we know what a clients ideal macro ratios are if we don't test it? There are so many options and yes we do have some very good data to base our initial predictions against, these are hardly individualised. These are copies of what has worked for someone else!

That been said there are a few things we can individualise when a client starts with us. To do this properly however we need to assess our clients properly (something I teach in my mentoring programs). 

These are:

Warms Ups: We can individualise the warm up to address the movement limitations and restrictions someone has that impair their ability to perform the exercises needed for their training goals. 

Exercise Selection: We choose exercises keeping in mind their movement limitations. An example of this is not giving Romanian Deadlifts to a client who struggles to achieve hip flexion. The other situation when we would do this is off a client absolutely hates an exercise or loves an exercise. It would be best practice to not give or give that exercise based on the client.

So there we have it. Individualised programs can't exist in the beginning of a clients training journey. They can however be developed over time as a relationship deepens between a coach and client and as responses are observed.

This is the way.