I have been consumed lately with trying to make improvements at The Spot Athletics. A lot of these improvements revolve around our program. To me your main philosophy shouldn't change but you can add or subtract things as your knowledge grows.
The bulk of my time is not spent trying to add or subtract things from our program but figure out how to run all of our programs at the same time without people being on top of each other.
When it was just two coaches and a few clients, it was easy to program. I didn't have to worry about space, equipment or timing of everyone's exercises. Now we have as many as 8 coaches training at one time and this could include 8 year old athletes, 25 year old pro athletes, moms, dads and everything in between. During our busiest times this summer we had 40 people training at the same time. This is a training space that has about 6200ft of floor space. Needless to say, this makes things a lot more complicated. Especially when it's not aerobics class, it's real training.
What I have had to do over time is learn how to start different groups at different times, rotate exercises and drills in different order and overall, be way more organized than I ever expected.
These things seem like basic and easy concepts, and they are. The trouble comes when you lay out all the different programs, times and space availability. It literally makes me a little cross eyed after I stare at it for a while.
So while programming for one person or one group is very easy, doing so 8 groups can all train effectively without all needing the same squat rack, is a different task.
I wish that someone would have told me that when I started I needed to plan like I was going to be full of clients and coaches. When I first started programming for things at The Spot Athletics I was just taking care of the needs for that group or individual. Now it's taken a lot of time and energy to make sure that everyone gets what they need and it doesn't interfere with the other programs.
If you are starting out I recommend putting your program together with the end goal in mind. That end goal should be to run a great facility where you can maximize your space, client results and the experience for everyone. This includes your clients and your coaches. If you start out this way you won't have to make as many big changes as I have had to make over the last several years. I feel like we have finally started to figure things out but there has been a lot of hard work and mistakes made along the way.
So learn from my mistakes and start from day one like you have a full house of clients and it will make your life a lot easier in the long run.