Weekly check-in questions for personal trainers

Keep it short enough to answer on a phone

Your check-in is competing with everything else in your client’s Sunday evening. Five or six questions that take two minutes are easier to answer every week than twenty.

Keep the same questions in the same order. Then a change in an answer means something.

What to ask in a weekly check-in

A starting set you can adapt:

• How did you sleep this week? (1–5)
• How sore have you been? (1–5)
• How was your energy in sessions? (1–5)
• Did anything hurt during or after training? Where, and how much (0–10)?
• How closely did you follow the food plan? (a little, mostly, fully)
• What got in the way, and what went well?

Why simple ratings work

A systematic review of 56 studies found that self-reported wellbeing responded to both short-term and long-term training load, often more sensitively than blood markers, heart rate or performance tests.

Sleep, soreness and energy ratings cost nothing to collect. Take them seriously.

Read answers next to the week’s data

An answer means more next to the records it describes. “Energy 2 out of 5” in a week with three completed sessions at progressing loads is a different conversation from the same answer in a week of missed sessions and short sleep.

Same with weight. Day-to-day scale changes are mostly water, glycogen and gut content, so talk about the two-week trend. One weigh-in tells you very little.

When to act on a check-in

Reply to pain first. Mild discomfort that settles by the next day can be acceptable in rehab-style training. Sharp, worsening or lingering pain means dropping that movement and referring the client to a clinician.

Chest pain, fainting, unusual breathlessness or palpitations mean no more training until a doctor has given advice.

For everything else, look for a pattern across two or three weeks before you change the program. One bad week is information, not a verdict.

Check-ins in Laroa

Set your weekly questions once. Clients answer them next to the week their records describe, so you read sleep, soreness and energy beside completed sessions, food and weight. A pain flag on a set lands on your Needs you list as urgent, and you reply in the same thread as your messages.