How to Turn Testing Data Into a Program (Without a Spreadsheet Meltdown)

You ran the testing day. Bars were loaded, numbers were called out, and somewhere there's a clipboard with everyone's maxes on it. Two weeks later, that clipboard is in a drawer and your athletes are training off feel again.

Testing only matters if it changes what happens on the floor. Here's the system we use to go from a testing number to a working set — every week, without re-doing the math by hand.

Test the few things you'll actually program from

You don't need fifteen data points per athlete. You need the handful that drive the program. For most strength programs that's a back squat, a bench or press, a hinge, and one power marker. Test those well, and skip the rest.

The trap is testing things you never use. A number you don't program from is a number you wasted a rep collecting.

Anchor every working set to a percentage

Once you have a max, every prescription becomes a percentage of it:

• Strength work lives in the 80–92% range for low reps.
• Volume and hypertrophy sit around 65–78%.
• Speed and power stay light — 30–60% — and move fast.

The point isn't the exact bands. It's that "315 for a triple" becomes "85% for a triple," and the bar weight updates itself the moment an athlete re-tests. One source of truth, no manual rewrites.

Let the math run itself

This is where a clipboard falls apart. Twenty athletes, four lifts, twelve weeks — that's thousands of individual weights, and one typo means someone trains too heavy on a bad day.

A simple template fixes this. Enter the max once, and every working set across the whole block calculates automatically. Re-test in week six, change one cell, and the back half of the program re-weights for that athlete instantly.

If you're updating loads by hand, you're not coaching — you're doing data entry.

Re-test on a schedule, not a whim

Programs drift. An athlete who tested in January is a different athlete in March. Build a re-test into the calendar — usually every 4–6 weeks — so percentages stay honest. Without it, you're prescribing 85% of a number that's no longer true.

Keep the loop tight

The whole system is four steps: test what you program from, convert maxes to percentages, let a template do the arithmetic, and re-test on a schedule. That's it. No meltdown, no drawer full of dead clipboards.

If you want the spreadsheet that already does the percentage math for you, the free Evaluations & Testing template is built for exactly this — drop in a max, get a full program back.