Progression and Regression: High Intention, Nowhere to Hide
Behind the Design, Episode 37, with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher
What does progression actually mean for the client in front of you? Is it more weight, or is it something you would have to explain? And when the numbers stop moving, is the program broken, or has the definition you handed the client just run out?
Last week Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher opened the client side of the work with goal setting. This week is the next step in the journey: progression and regression, not as a list of exercise variations but as a way of thinking that runs from the first consult through the moment a program stalls. Both of them said the same thing about it. Five years ago, this question would have sent them straight to program design. It does not anymore.
Where the Question Goes Now
Ask Daniel about progression today and his mind goes to the desired destination, not the lift. What did the client tell him they want to reach? With the athletes he works with, that is rarely a number on a bar. It might be getting the joy of competing back. It might be coming back from an injury. Progression is how you get to a more advanced state in the future, and the definition underneath it is nothing fancy. Try to be slightly better than last time. Drive adaptation by increasing the demand on the task. A few years ago it was a buzzword. It is really just that.
Brandon's first question is what the person is capable of right now, and what stimulus they need today. He does not mean a strength or conditioning stimulus. He means whether today is a day to work on some basic things that push the goal forward, or a day to take a step back so they can take two forward later. Progression, like design, happens in steps, and the steps depend on the timeline, the goal, and what the individual can actually do.
Both of them warned against the same trap. Coaches hear a goal, pull up the progression, and treat it like a map. Turn left here, add this here, take that away here, test here. Daniel used the muscle-up as the example a couple of weeks ago and Brandon brought it back. The progression adjusts and adapts. It is not just add weight, and it is not just make the movement harder. You have to start from the general idea before you start making specific changes to the program.
Intention, Progression, Evaluation
Daniel has used the same three-part check for years, and it is the most portable tool in the episode. For every piece in his design, every decision, he should be able to answer three questions. What is the intention, meaning what stimulus am I trying to create and where am I going with this? What is the progression, meaning how will I build on this piece over the coming weeks and how does it fit the bigger picture? And what is the evaluation, meaning how will I know whether it is working?
If he cannot answer all three, the piece probably should not be in the design, or at least it needs a rethink.
Seen that way, progression is the link between the intention and where the client is right now. And evaluation is not about whether you have arrived. It is about whether you are moving in the right direction and whether this step is taking you to the next one. Daniel is honest about the limit of that. If a client is fifty percent of the way there, he may not be able to tell them what the last ten percent will look like. He is fine with that.
What he is not fine with is a client who cannot evaluate the plan themselves. He uses the word progression with clients in a way that takes the magic out of it. The definition is just us trying to improve. So a client should be a hundred percent able to assess him, and the two of them together should be able to look at what they are doing right now and answer whether it is working.
Same Taste, Same Smell
Brandon had been having this conversation with himself earlier that day while writing a new week for a client. He has been teaching this person the lunge. They started with a split squat, worked into a reverse lunge, just finished a deficit reverse lunge block, and now he wants to introduce the walking lunge, which he thinks is the most important and most complex movement of the bunch.
To get there, he took load away and added assistance, and the client struggled with it because it looked like a step backward. It was not. This person is not especially free physically yet, and the walking lunge asks for more than the pattern they had just finished. Progression is sometimes mixed with a little regression inside the same pattern. The next step is not always the perfect next step, and, as Daniel said, you cannot always describe the last ten percent.
Brandon's own ring muscle-up is the other side of the same idea. He could not get one for the longest time. He followed the progressions. He chipped away. And as he got close, he felt like he needed to take a step back to take two forward. He stopped giving himself rules about this many reps and this much rest and this drill before that one, and just tried to get better at completing the movement. Then one day he walked in, warmed up, went straight to the rings, and got his first one.
His summary is the line of the episode. Progression looks different, but it always has the same taste and the same smell, and it follows the same path. You understand where you are trying to get to, and you chip away as quickly as you can, inching toward it.
Linear, Non-Linear, and the Water Bottle
Daniel drew the distinction coaches will recognize. Linear progression is the intent to be better each time, in a straight line. A beginner on a classic five by five back squat can add weight every session and it works beautifully. Take the world's best powerlifter, put them on the same five by five, add two and a half kilos each session, and picture week five. That is not going to happen. With experience you move to non-linear progressions, where you intentionally pull back sometimes. That applies to a single exercise and it applies to a year. In an accumulation phase, Daniel is fine with an athlete not being super strong. Top-end strength is not the priority in that block.
The problem is that even experienced athletes default to linear thinking and let the last session define where they are going. One bad session and it is over. Daniel admitted he is guilty of it. One bad deadlift session and he wants to throw his water bottle across the room. He gives it ninety minutes and he is fine. But the assumption underneath, that you should always be better, stops being realistic as you get more experienced. The intention to improve every session should still be there. The expectation that you will is a different thing.
Skill makes it messier. Daniel sees people practicing ring muscle-ups with a pile of expectation and frustration attached, and six weeks later the context has completely changed. He likes challenging movements with context on purpose, rowing into ring muscle-ups to test the skill under load. But there is another context that builds by itself. I should have had this by now. The pressure the athlete puts on themselves makes the skill contextually harder as time goes on, and a coach who only measures reps will describe what is happening unfairly. Progression is a broad term. Daniel wants more in the definition, not less, so the description stays honest.
Brandon's default now is a non-linear model, but he has not stepped away from linear progression, because it is simple, easy to teach, and it can mean so many things. Add five pounds to your squat every week until you cannot. Complete more reps every week until you cannot. Add a set every week until you cannot. Each of those is a progression, each has a different stimulus and outcome, and every one of them eventually ends. Fitness does this terrible thing to you. When you start, you look at the barbell and get stronger. So you add five pounds. Then twenty. Then another twenty. Five years later you are hoping for what, exactly? One of Brandon's old coaches ran heavy squats as your weight plus a piece of gum. That was the progression. It is a great progression, and it stops.
This is why he loves a concept like conjugate for lifting. It taught him that progression is stimulus, not just add weight or hold. Sometimes it is stepping away to learn a new skill that lets you take three steps forward. In a squat or deadlift, eventually you hit a skill limitation, a physiological limitation, or a mental limitation, and a basic progression model stops moving you toward the goal. The program stalls. That does not mean it is not working. It means you are at a plateau, and the job is to find the next step around it.
Live by the Same Logic
Before getting into tools, Daniel wanted to finish a thought about the beginning, because it decides a lot of what happens later.
Everyone does the math in year one. He remembers his first year of CrossFit, adding twenty pounds to his snatch and calculating that three more years at this pace would put him at the Games. Now he has spent four years trying to put three kilos on his deadlift. Eventually you sit there for years and cannot add a kilo. That is the normal shape of it.
The temptation as a coach is to take credit for the early wins. Newbie gains, a good day where everything lined up, a number that jumped. Look, see, what we are doing is working. Daniel has been working on this over the last few years, because the problem is that you have to live by the same logic. If you took credit for the win, you have to answer for the loss.
His example was an InBody scan. Day one shows a big jump in muscle mass and you call it an absolute win. Next scan, the circumstances are worse, muscle mass reads lower, even though the client is stronger, leaner, and more confident in their body. Now you have to explain it with the same logic you used to celebrate. The same thing happens with strength. Look how great my design is, we have added ten pounds every week. What is the conversation when the gains stop? Not capitalizing on wins you cannot actually claim is an investment in the relationship, in trust, and in keeping the client for the long run. You do not have to be negative. You have to be true.
Daniel's Tools
On accessories, Daniel keeps it basic. Clients add a rep or add some weight. He uses an auto-regulated rep range, eight to ten, and when they hit ten on all sets they go up. On the main lifts he is more traditional with non-linear progressions. And he challenges things contextually: where a piece sits in the day, in the session, in the week.
That contextual piece connects to priorities. Progression and regression sit inside the same conversation as what matters right now, and Daniel is fine with some regression in what is not prioritized. It does not mean the client is losing capacity. It means they are losing readiness to express that capacity in that way, for now.
The example he gave was himself. Because of where he is in life, he is repeating the same bodybuilding week, four sessions, week after week. He opens exercise history in CoachRx and tries to do better than last week. It is so simple that five years ago he would have argued against it. The science says you can progress linearly, and so on. But there is so much going into whether he performs that session. It is not a controlled environment producing a true expression of his strength. What it gives him is an intention and a trigger. If you repeat the same thing over and over, you get pushed into a place of high intention with nowhere to hide, down to the last bicep curl, where he knows he needs to beat nine reps. The quality of the session goes up enormously. That, to him, is the real argument for linear progression. It builds confidence, and it takes an inexperienced client to their end range for the first time, which takes time to find.
He had a fresh example. His prime time to train is ten in the morning. This Monday, because he was getting on the road for work, he trained at six. The week before he had trained at a different gym, same equipment, completely different vibe. He fought hard just to tie last week's score, and he is certain that without the reference of trying to beat it, he would not have performed as well as he did. Not every session is a test. There has to be a relationship between training and testing. But the desire to improve is what he keeps.
You Do Not Always Need to Change
Brandon bookmarked one thing from that. You need time to get better. Progression is sometimes literally doing the same thing. It does not require new reps, bands, chains, or a new pattern. You can get better by doing something long enough for the body to adapt.
That took him a while to accept. For years he felt one month should not look like the next in some capacity. There should be carryover in theme, but new patterns needed to show up, because that is how the body keeps adjusting. Then he started to think about how many specific progressions live inside a single movement pattern. You could do one movement for a year straight and still get better at it every day. Most people never take a progression that far, because they want something new. They get bored. Everybody's attention is somewhere else now.
There is still something basic, simple, and efficient about sitting in a movement and adding a little weight, a rep, or a set for as long as you can across weeks and months. The time spent getting better at the movement is often more valuable than a change made for no reason. If Brandon is going to change something now, he wants a reason. He named a few movements he thinks reward that patience: a forearm-supported three-point row on a bench or incline, a barbell bent-over row, and the RDL, which he has barely changed for a long time other than moving between a barbell and dumbbells. There is always a better position to be found, more output to be had, and small pieces of the pattern to adjust.
Daniel added that doing the same thing was demonized in fitness for a while. If you are not changing, you are not adapting. Brandon fell for it too. He equated change with progression. Now he sees the same thing in the podcast. He and Daniel get better at talking to each other and sitting in front of a camera by doing it every week, reflecting, and doing it again. With movements, sometimes people just need to do it for months until something clicks.
When to Change, and Why
Daniel had just asked his designer for new accessories for the next few weeks, and he wanted to be precise about why, because it is a different situation. He is experienced enough to put himself in a tough place early in a block, and after two months of the same structure and trying to beat last week every session, it gets mentally fatiguing knowing what is waiting. The main lifts stay, because they are the backbone of the program and they need to keep developing. The accessories rotate, because he knows the new ones will be slightly easier to bring intention to.
He described the last three-point row session. Another member asked if he was about to pass out. He was sitting on the bench with his arms hanging, lats about to explode, after pushing a deep stretch and controlled eccentrics to beat last week's score. He got it. At some point he will not, and the reason might be physiological, or it might be that he cannot motivate himself to do it again. Either way, at that point a change is necessary progression.
Brandon called that the better explanation of what he had been trying to say. You push yourself to the absolute limit, to where you literally cannot progress it further, and then you find the reason why. Maybe it is the weight, maybe the position, maybe fatigue. You cannot fully maximize a movement unless you push to that point and give it enough time. Two months of the same structure, and the first set is a fight before the exercise has even started. That is the worst part, and it is the point.
Daniel thinks a lot of accessories get wasted. There is nothing wrong with a pump session where you just want to move and feel good. But some of your training should be very hard, and in CrossFit especially, where the format leans on high reps and high intensity, three sets of eight to ten bicep curls turn into a conversation. Then the feedback is that ninety seconds of rest was too much. If ninety seconds was too much, you did not push very hard. The session drifts into a mid-intensity day of jogging through exercises, two and a half hours long, with no clear intent. There is a reason for change and variation. It is when you feel you actually need it, because you are at the end point, mentally or physically. Change for the sake of changing and you lose the reference that guides you into high intention with nowhere to hide.
Regressing to Progress
Brandon then went to the part of the topic they had not touched yet. Sometimes you pull back to give a client room, a runway to build momentum. That is harder as a coach than adding weight, because you have to explain it. Listen, you are doing great, and I want to pull this back because there are a couple of things I want to work on. When someone has been getting heavy and building confidence, and you ask them to uncover a few positions inside the movement instead, it looks to them like a step in the wrong direction. Early progress makes people expect progress to continue. So you say it out loud. There are things I want to see here, and we are going to take a step back to work on them.
His example was the rear-foot-elevated split squat. Some clients hit a wall in it, limited by something along the way. Instead of forcing progression forward, he adds assistance, a hand on the rack or a PVC pipe, and then starts increasing the weight. Same pattern. He is regressing the internal stability demand and progressing the load, and the client gets better at the pattern instead of being forced through it.
Daniel tied that back to definitions. If a client feels like they are taking a step back, you can say no, we are shifting focus and priorities within the progression. We are progressing movement quality over absolute weight right now, because absolute weight is not the only thing that defines moving in the right direction. This is the same point as the InBody scan. If a client adds weight to that split squat with horrible movement quality and the coach celebrates the number, the coach has attached progression to load. The day they want to pull the weight back, they have to live with that. Set it up from the start as a bunch of things we want to improve, and a set of ways to measure whether we are moving in the right direction, and pulling load back later is just a different focus. Kandace put it simply: it is a good investment in your future conversations.
Accessory Work Is the Progression
Brandon added the piece that stops sitting in a movement from looking like not coaching. Keeping a movement the same for a while can feel, to a coach, like you are not doing your job. You still are. There are things to do and say inside a movement every week even when the movement itself does not change.
Accessory work exists to let the main thing progress. If the goal is a better squat, the question is what is limiting the squat. Maybe the hips rise first on the way up. Maybe there is not enough core stability or spinal rigidity to hold a heavy load at the bottom. Maybe internal rotation is poor and the pelvis tucks. Maybe shoulder extension is the problem and the client cannot hold the bar in a good rack position, so the whole squat is compromised. That client is not weak at the back squat. His shoulders cannot get into position. So the squat does not change. The warm-up and the accessory work do, targeting external rotation to build a better rack, and that is the progression. The same logic applies to the bench, the deadlift, and the row.
Progression might mean the accessory work changes, or the type of it, or the amount per week, depending on the limiter. Brandon also put a stake in the ground on what the end goal usually is. Proficiency in movement. Getting strong is a goal. Moving properly under load comes first. If someone is split squatting with hundred-pound dumbbells for eight per side, they have expressed that movement as far as it makes sense to, so switch to a reverse lunge, then a deficit, and keep expressing each one as far as it goes. Understanding progression this way makes the job easier, because it is not point A here, point B by this date, and month four you must be here. As he said, that did not work.
Do Not Hide in the Definition
Daniel's last point was a warning, and it is the one to carry out of the episode. They spent an hour making progression broader: load, movement quality, context, priorities, time. All of that is true. None of it is a place to hide from being evaluated.
Coaches have a hard time owning that a plan did not go the way they said it would. The excuses come fast. You did not sleep well two weeks ago. Maybe it was that. Sometimes you just have to own it. That gets easier when you stop tying your value to a specific program, because if your value is the program, the program has to work. Design is a tool for making decisions inside individual design. It is not the coach. You might not know what the last ten percent looks like. That is fine. Trying to trick a client with a broad definition is not.
So live by the same logic with losses as with wins. If short-term wins define you as a coach, short-term losses will too. Elevate yourself, and the coach-client relationship, above both. There will be wins and losses in the short term. Your job is to make sure you get to the long-term one.
Brandon agreed, and added that proficiency precedes a lot of things without being the be-all and end-all, so nobody should twist his words. But coaches are very good at finding holes in broad principles to hide in. He sees it constantly in CrossFit. We did not know double-unders were going to show up, too bad. It is your job to make sure you get it.
Where to Go From Here
Next week the client-side series continues with the hardest conversation of the three. You set the goal, you set the progression, and two months in it is not working. What do you say, and what do you do?
The thinking in this episode, intention, progression, and evaluation for every piece of a design, and the judgment to know when to sit in something and when to change it, is the design work taught inside the OPEX Method Mentorship. Ten weeks of live lecture, lab with your own clients, and office hours, with a cohort of coaches who take this seriously. Brandon will be in the October cohort. It is capped at 40 coaches and enrollment closes October 9. Book a call with a coaching advisor, who is a graduate of the program rather than a sales rep.
Behind the Design releases weekly on the CoachRx Podcast Network. The month on the client side continues next week.
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For the full pathway into this kind of program design, look at the OPEX Method Mentorship.
Connect with the coaches
Brandon Gallagher:Brandon’s Instagram (@bgperform_)
Daniel Persson:Daniel’s Instagram (@danielcapersson)
Join us live on Tuesdays mornings 11:30am EST on the OPEX YouTube Channel
Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.
