ProgrammeforMinimumSustainableCommitment,NotIdealCommitment

Dom Hills has a question he asks clients who tell him they want to train four times a week. He does not dispute the aspiration. He asks what the minimum is that they can actually commit to. The distinction sounds subtle. Its practical consequences are significant.

Why aspiration and commitment are not the same thing

When someone is in a consultation, motivated and optimistic, four sessions a week feels entirely achievable. In week three, when work gets busy and the motivation of a fresh start has faded, four sessions is four things to find time for. The reality of most people's lives - work commitments, families, irregular hours, the ordinary friction of getting to a gym - means that the aspiration and the sustainable habit often sit at different points on the frequency scale.

Dom's concern is practical: if you write a four-session programme and the client comes twice, the nutrition calculations are calibrated for four sessions of activity and the client is doing two. The plan no longer matches the reality. The client does not progress as expected, feels like they have failed, even though they have been training consistently twice a week, which is genuinely good. The programme was wrong, not the client.

Building from minimum to maximum

Start the programme at the frequency the client can genuinely sustain in the worst week of their normal life. Two sessions, reliably attended, for three months, produces better results than four sessions attended sporadically and a growing sense of underperformance. Once the habit of attending consistently is established, adding a third session is a progression built on a solid foundation rather than an aspiration that has not been met.

What this means for goal-setting conversations

The initial consultation is where expectations get set. The client who leaves thinking they are going to train four times a week and then finds they can manage two is already in a mild version of failure before anything has happened in the gym. The client who leaves thinking two is the plan, achieves two consistently, and then adds a third when life allows, has a fundamentally different experience of the same reality. Set the client up for success by being honest about what success can realistically look like.