A plan is a long-term, periodized collection of training phases organized around a specific timeline. You can use plans to schedule programs for various groups and individuals along the plan timeline. This helps you clearly lay everything out visually so you can see the big picture and quickly drill down into the individual programs.

Here are some general principles to consider when designing effective training plans for your athletes.

Plan's are team-specific, meaning that each team has its own plans section where you can create plans for groups and athletes on the given team. You can access a team's plans from the team navigation menu on the left.

Identify the primary objective of the plan (e.g., peak performance for a competition, long-term athletic development, injury prevention). Consider sport-specific demands and individual athlete needs, and use the goal as a driving factor for the plan's design and organization.

Plans allow you to build out long-term programming along a specific timeline. Common planning periods include in-season, off-season, annual plan, competition prep, etc. Choose a timeline that makes sense given the overall goals of the plan and the timing of key milestones.

Theoretically, there is no limit to the length of time you can build a plan for. However, the longer your time frame, the more cumbersome your plan will be.

It's usually best to think in terms of phases or cycles that coincide with competition. Many coaches create one plan for in-season, then another plan for off-season. Other coaches create a plan for the whole year. It just depends on the context and complexity of your planning needs.

Plans are laid out in one-week increments. Each week can be labeled by clicking the cell underneath the week number and entering a value. This enables you to provide the overall context of the plan from week to week.

You'll also see the months in the plan displayed across the top. Below the months are the week numbers for each week. You can click on the "Week" row header to expand the table and show the individual dates across the plan.

Plans can be built out for the entire team, various groups on the team, for many individuals, for a single individual, or a combination of all the above. You'll want to decide on the best strategy given the goals and structure of the plan. Here are some common examples:

If you simply want to deliver the same training across the entire team for the length of the plan, you can assign programs to the team. This simple approach enables you to provide the same training to everyone on the team.

In the example above, programs are laid out sequentially across the plan for the entire team.

You can also break out programming by group over the length of the plan. Use this approach if you have different groups with different training needs and objectives that you need to manage separately.

In the example above, programming is broken out into two groups: Bigs and Skills. Athletes will receive the relevant training throughout the plan based on their group membership.

You can also assign plan programs to individual athletes. You may want to create a separate plan for every individual, or you may want to have one plan that maps out training for many athletes.

The example above maps out training for two athletes: Steve Johnson and Mike Jones. Each athlete's training laid out separately, but managed in the same plan.

You may want to manage all the moving parts for a variety of participants along the same plan timeline. This is often the case in a team setting where multiple stakeholders collaborate to manage the training for many individuals and groups with different needs.

The above example has the whole team following the same program during a couple stretches of the plan. During other phases, the Bigs and the Skills groups have separate programs assigned to provide more tailored training. Additionally, David Hansen's return-to-play program is managed in the plan.

Plans are an extremely powerful collaborative tool. They enable multiple stakeholders from all disciplines to collaborate and provide precise training to every athlete on the team. It can be helpful to assign responsibilities to different coaches to avoid crossover and ensure that the needs of all groups and individuals are being met.

When you add a program to a plan, all of its sessions are automatically scheduled to the relevant groups and athletes. For example, suppose you have a plan that starts in the third week of February. If you schedule a program that spans weeks 1 and 2 of the plan, you could then navigate to the team's calendar and see all the sessions from that program show up in weeks 3 and 4 of February.

To start adding programs to a plan, hover over a given week's cell in the "Add program" row to display the plus sign.

Clicking on the button gives you the option to create a new program from scratch, or to copy a program from your database of pre-built programs.

Selecting the "New program" option opens the new program interface.

From here, select the group or individual for which you want to schedule the program, and input the number of weeks for the program, as well as any optional attributes like a description and start/stop time for program sessions.

After adding a program, you'll see it laid out in the plan for the assigned group/athlete, and it will span the relevant number of weeks.

Click on the program's name in the row header or on its red timeline indicator to open up the program builder, where you can edit the details of the program.

If you previously created programs in either the team's database or the institution's database, you can easily schedule those within your plan. Like before, hover over a given week's cell in the "Add program" row. This time select the "Existing Program" option.

This brings up a form where you select the group or athlete for which you want to schedule the program, as well as which program you want to copy from the database (some of the other options, like length and description, are already defined by the existing programs).

After the program has been copied, you'll see it displayed on the plan timeline. You can click on it to edit the program's sessions and other details.

As you modify the programs within a plan, keep the following in mind so that you can establish workflows that make sense for you.

You can delete a program from a plan by hover over its name in the row header and clicking the delete icon.

You can also delete a plan program by clicking into the program builder, then clicking the program's settings. There you will see a delete button in the top right of the screen.