The Client Check-In Template That Actually Tells You What's Wrong

Why most check-ins are wasted

Most check-in templates suffer from one of two failures:

1. Too short. A scale weight and a thumbs-up doesn't tell you whether to change anything.
2. Too long. A 25-question survey trains your client to skip it (or fake it), and trains you to skim.

A great check-in is focused, fast, and produces a decision. If a question's answer doesn't change what you do this week, cut it.

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The 9-question template (what to ask)

This template runs every week. It takes a client 5–8 minutes to complete and a coach 5–10 minutes to review.

Section 1: Numbers (3 questions)

1. Weekly average bodyweight. Daily weigh-ins, averaged. Single readings are noise.
2. Waist (or chest / hips, depending on goal). One tape measurement, same time of day.
3. Workouts completed this week. Out of how many programmed.

Section 2: Adherence (3 questions)

4. Days you hit your protein target (out of 7).
5. Days you hit your step or cardio target (out of 7).
6. Sleep — average hours per night this week.

Section 3: Subjective (3 questions, short)

7. Energy in workouts (1–10).
8. Hunger between meals (1–10).
9. One-sentence note: anything that affected your week (travel, stress, illness)?

That's the whole template. Nine questions. Don't add a tenth.

What to do with the answers

Here's the part most check-in articles skip: the template is useless without a decision tree. This is mine.

The point is that the template forces a decision every week — even if the decision is "no change."

Photos

Photos add huge signal at low cost. Add them on a 2-week cadence, not weekly:

• Front, side, back. Same lighting, same time of day, same clothes.
• Compare to the photo from 4 weeks prior, not last week. Weekly photo comparisons drive clients (and coaches) crazy with noise.
• Keep photos in a private space your client controls. Privacy is not optional.

Habit-based check-ins for general-population clients

Lifters and physique clients respond to numbers. General-population clients — the ones whose primary goal is "feel better, move more" — need a different version. Replace numeric adherence with habits:

• "Did you walk 3+ days this week?"
• "Did you eat a vegetable at 2 meals per day?"
• "Did you log every workout, even short ones?"

Yes/no questions, not "1–10". For lifestyle clients, tracking concrete behaviors (steps, vegetable servings, training sessions) is easier to coach against than a single weekly outcome number, because you can intervene on a missed behavior the same week instead of waiting on a slow-moving outcome like bodyweight.

Common check-in mistakes

1. Asking what you can already see. If you have access to the workout log, don't ask "how many workouts did you do?".
2. Asking subjective questions on a 1–100 scale. Use 1–10. People can't distinguish 73 from 81.
3. Letting answers sit unread. A check-in answered and ignored teaches the client to phone it in.
4. Adjusting every week. Most weeks the right answer is "stay the course." Coaches who tweak every variable every week create chaos and hide the real signal.
5. Skipping check-ins on travel weeks. The travel-week check-in is the most diagnostic one of the year.

How Fitly handles check-ins

If you don't want to wrangle a spreadsheet:

• Check-in templates ship with photos, measurements, mood, and sleep already wired up.
• The adherence engine flags clients whose completion rate drops, before you would notice manually.
• Weekly trend lines on weight + measurements remove the noise of single-day readings.
• Smart Coach can suggest a calorie or volume adjustment based on the answers — you review and approve.

Fitly Trainer is $50/mo. No free tier or free trial in this release.

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Related reading

• The Online Coaching Stack
• The Adherence Problem: Why Clients Quit at Week 6
• Trainer Onboarding Checklist