We're software builders who took the coaching question seriously.

Why we built this

In late 2025 we surveyed 138 Reddit posts in r/personaltraining, r/Fitness, and r/strength_training, looking for a real recurring complaint we could turn into a product. One showed up over and over: 5-10 hours every Sunday, manually copy-pasting last week's weights into next week's plan, across a roster of 10-50 online clients.

We followed that thread to the people writing it. Forty trainers got a casual DM asking how they'd spent the previous Sunday. Twenty-eight responded. Of those, sixteen said within the first reply that they'd considered building their own spreadsheet system, or already had. Six of them showed us screenshots. One of those screenshots came from a Bulgarian coach with nine clients: numbered folders in his Drive, master template, per-client copies, inline "Achieved" comments in mixed Bulgarian and English next to each set. That image is the architecture we ended up shipping.

How we source content

The articles, glossary entries, and calculator explainers on this site lean on three categories of source:

1. Published research. Schoenfeld on volume and hypertrophy. Helms (Stronger by Science) on RPE-based programming. Israetel on volume landmarks (MEV, MAV, MRV). Greg Nuckols and Mike Zourdos on autoregulation. We cite these by name and link to the original where it's free, the paywalled DOI where it isn't.
2. Direct field signal. What real trainers told us, attributed verbatim where they agreed to be quoted, paraphrased and anonymised where they preferred. We keep the raw artifacts (Reddit threads, screenshots, transcripts) in our research folder.
3. Our own product. When we describe a workflow that runs inside Coach Sheet, we ran the workflow ourselves, on real data, and we screenshot the result instead of mocking it.

What we don't claim

We don't claim any of us are coaches. When we explain a methodology, we credit the methodologist and treat them as the authority. The tool is the product. The thinking inside the tool is borrowed from coaches who have spent careers on it, openly.

On health-adjacent topics (calorie targets, body composition guidance, training frequency for specific populations), we are deliberately conservative, link to peer-reviewed work, and add a clear note that the article is not personalised medical or coaching advice. If you're building a program for a real human, you bring the expertise. We bring the spreadsheet.

Reviewers and contributors

From the day we launch publicly, articles in the methodology cluster are reviewed by a working coach before publication. Reviewer names appear at the top of the piece, with links to their LinkedIn and a short bio. We pay reviewers a flat $50 per article and offer a free Founder's Plan. If you coach competitively and would like to contribute, the inbox is hello@coachsheet.fitness.

How we make money

Coach Sheet sells software subscriptions. $0/month for one client, $15/month flat for unlimited clients, and a one-time Founder's Plan at $99. We do not sell ads on this site. We do not insert tracking pixels for third-party affiliate networks. We use Plausible Analytics, which is cookie-free and privacy-first. The only conversion we care about is "did this trainer find the tool genuinely useful enough to pay $15".

What this site is not

It is not a fitness blog. It is not a personal training certification course. It is not an aggregator of generic AI-spun "10 best ways to train chest" listicles. We don't link out to affiliate offers. We don't sell ebooks. The site exists to bring trainers who already know what RPE means into orbit of a tool that respects their methodology.