Lesson Overview
Lesson 02 set out the principles on which all training rests: progressive overload, specificity, recovery and adaptation, individual difference. A principle is not a plan. An instructor who knows that the body adapts to a stress applied steadily and then allowed to recover still has to decide what stress, on which day, for how many weeks, before a particular test or task. That decision is the work of this lesson. Programming is the craft of turning the principles into a written plan that takes a group from where it is now to where it must be by a known date, without breaking the people in it on the way.
The method starts from the goal and works backwards. It divides the time into phases that build on one another (periodisation), lays out a training week that balances hard days against easy ones and places recovery on purpose, manages the total load week by week, adapts the Recruit Fitness Programme for a group of mixed abilities, and builds in testing and review so the plan answers to evidence rather than hope. Hold one thing throughout: a programme is not only a route to performance but a duty of care written down in advance, the way an instructor keeps a promise to bring people to the standard and back again whole. By the end you will be able to build a periodised training programme from a goal and a fixed time, lay out a balanced training week, progress the total load safely from week to week, adapt the Recruit Fitness Programme's structure for a group of mixed abilities, and place testing and review so the plan can be corrected as it runs.
Key Terms
- Programme: a written training plan covering a stated period, built from a goal, that lays out what training is done, in what order, and at what load, week by week.
- Periodisation: the division of a training period into phases that build on one another, each with a different aim, so that the body is progressively prepared and then brought to a peak for a test or task.
- Phase (or block): a span of several weeks within a programme that shares one main aim, such as building the aerobic base or developing strength.
- Foundation phase: the first phase, which builds a broad base of general fitness and conditions the body gradually, accepting volume at a moderate intensity, so that harder work later can be tolerated.
- Development phase: the middle phase, which raises the load and targets the specific components the goal demands, building on the base the foundation laid.
- Peak: the point at which a soldier's fitness for a particular task is at its highest; it cannot be held for long, so it is timed to fall on the test or task.
- Taper: a deliberate easing of training load in the final week or two before a test, reducing volume while keeping a little intensity, so the body sheds fatigue and arrives fresh and adapted.
- Training load: the total stress of training, taken together as how much (volume), how hard (intensity), and how often (frequency); it is the quantity an instructor manages week to week.
- Volume: how much training is done, measured as distance, time, or total repetitions.
- Intensity: how hard the training is, measured as pace, effort, or the weight carried or lifted.
- Deload: a planned lighter week, typically after three building weeks, in which volume drops by about a third so the body consolidates its gains and injury risk falls.
- Scaling: adjusting the same session up or down for individuals of different ability so that one common plan suits a mixed group.
Start from the goal and work back
A programme is not a collection of good sessions. It is a route from a starting point to a destination by a known date, and like any route it is planned backwards from where it must end. Before writing a single session, an instructor settles three things.
The goal comes first, because it governs everything after it. For most RKA training the goal is plain: the group is to meet the Annual Fitness Test by a particular date, or to be ready for a particular task such as a working spell with the civil authorities, an exercise, or a period of loaded marching. The test set out in the Basic Training Manual's Module 11, and built toward by the Recruit Fitness Programme delivered as the Physical Training Component, gives a clear and demanding target: a timed run, a loaded march, press-ups and sit-ups to a count, a casualty drag. A programme an instructor writes for a group is that same Component carried to others, planned and led rather than self-paced. A programme aimed at the test trains those things; one aimed at a long relief task trains carrying and endurance. The principle of specificity from Lesson 02 begins here, at the goal.
The time available comes second. Count the weeks honestly from today to the test or task. Twelve weeks is a full preparation, the length the Recruit Fitness Programme uses, and enough to take a group from a modest base to the standard. Eight weeks is enough to sharpen a group that already has a base. Four weeks is enough only to peak a group already near the standard; it cannot build one, and pretending otherwise is how instructors injure people. The honest count protects you from promising what the time cannot deliver.
The starting point comes third. You cannot plan a route without knowing where it begins, so the group is assessed before the programme starts, against the very components the goal demands, exactly as the Recruit Fitness Programme has each recruit assess themselves before week one. This is the first use of testing, taught in full in Lesson 08, and it gives you the figures the whole plan rests on: how far the group can run, how many press-ups and sit-ups it manages with good form, how it copes under a light load. A group starting from little needs time spent on a foundation; a group starting fit can move sooner to development. There is no shame in a modest starting point and no wisdom in ignoring it.
With those three settled, the plan writes itself backwards. Put the test at the end. Place a taper in the week or two before it, a development phase before that, and a foundation phase before that, filling the weeks you have counted. Working back from the goal, rather than forward from enthusiasm, is the difference between a programme that arrives on the day and one that peaks two weeks early or, worse, arrives injured.
PLANNING BACKWARDS FROM THE GOAL
Today The date
| |
| FOUNDATION -> DEVELOPMENT -> PEAK & TAPER -> TEST / TASK
| build base raise load, sharpen, then the goal
| target the ease off (in person)
| components
|
+-- count the weeks honestly, then fill them back from the goal
(start: assess the group against the components of the goal)
Periodisation: phases that build on one another
Periodisation is one plain idea: you cannot train every quality hard at once, and you cannot stay at a peak, so you divide the time into phases, each with one main aim, arranged so that each prepares the body for the next. A broad base is built first, then developed, then sharpened for the day it matters. The phases are not rigid boxes; they shade into one another. But naming them keeps an instructor honest about what each part of the programme is for.
The foundation phase comes first and builds the base. Its aim is breadth and durability, not speed or records. The group does a moderate volume of general work: steady running and marching to build the aerobic engine, body-weight strength to build the muscular base, mobility on most days to build a healthy range of movement and condition the joints, tendons, and connective tissue that harder work will later stress. The intensity is kept moderate on purpose. This is where the body is taught to tolerate training at all, where good technique is grooved before load is added to it, and where the soldier who arrived unfit is brought up gently rather than broken early. Rushing this phase, or skipping it for a group that needs it, is the single commonest programming error, because it loads a body not yet prepared to carry the load. The foundation phase is the duty of care made into a block of weeks.
The development phase comes next and builds on that base. Now the load is raised and the components the goal demands are targeted directly: the runs grow longer and add some faster efforts; the strength sessions add repetitions, sets, and where appropriate weight; a loaded march is introduced and then progressed, since carrying is the most operationally important fitness the RKA trains and the slowest to build safely. This is where most of the real fitness for the goal is made, and where the load is highest and the risk of overdoing it greatest, so the week-by-week load management taught below matters most here.
The peak and taper come last and bring the group fresh to the day. As the test or task nears, training shifts to the specific demands of the goal at the effort it requires: the test movements practised to standard, the loaded march at the distance and weight that will be asked. Then, in the final week or two, the load is deliberately eased (the taper) so the body sheds the accumulated fatigue of the hard weeks and arrives rested and fully adapted. This is the part instructors most often get wrong, training hard right up to the day in the belief that one more big session helps. It does not: the adaptation from hard training appears only after recovery, so a tired group tested on the back of a heavy week performs below its true fitness, while a group that tapers performs at its best. The hard work was already done in development; the taper lets it show.
The principle underneath all three phases is that you cannot be at a peak all the time. Fitness is not a level you reach and hold; it rises and falls with the load applied and the recovery allowed. A peak is bought by the phases beneath it and spent on the day it is timed for, then the cycle begins again toward the next goal. An instructor who tries to hold a group permanently at its highest gets the opposite: a group worn flat, stale, and injured, peaking for nothing.
PERIODISED FITNESS OVER A TWELVE-WEEK PROGRAMME
fitness / * <- peak,
readiness . * . timed for
| . * the test
| . * * * then taper
| . * * * eases fatigue
| . * * so it shows
| * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------
| FOUNDATION | DEVELOPMENT | PEAK | TAPER | TEST
wks 1 to 4 wks 5 to 9 wk 10 wks day
11 to 12
You cannot hold a peak. You build to one, then spend it.
Designing the training week
The phases are the shape of the months; the week is what an instructor actually plans and runs, and the day, the single session, is the unit Lesson 04 teaches the instructor to conduct safely. The aim of the training week is to apply enough stress to drive adaptation while leaving enough recovery for it to happen. Get the week right and the phases take care of themselves; get it wrong, by stacking hard days together and crowding out recovery, and even a well-shaped programme will injure people.
A few rules build a sound week.
Balance hard days against easy days, and never stack hard sessions back to back. Adaptation happens during recovery, not during effort, as Lesson 02 taught and Lesson 07 returns to. A hard session needs an easier day after it so the body can absorb it. Two hard sessions on consecutive days, or two in one day, give no double benefit; they give the body no chance to recover from the first before the second, so fatigue accumulates and form decays, which is exactly when injuries occur. Alternate the stress: a hard day, then an easy or mobility day, then a hard day again, and if two hard qualities must be trained close together, separate them by at least a day. The Basic Training Manual's rule is blunt and correct: do not stack hard sessions back to back.
Spread the components across the week. Soldier fitness is aerobic endurance, muscular endurance and strength, and robustness and mobility, and a sound week touches all of them rather than hammering one. Place the run, the strength session, the loaded march (in the development phase), and the mobility work on different days, so each component is trained, each has room to recover before it is trained again, and no single part of the body is loaded every day.
Place recovery on purpose. Rest days are part of the plan, not a gap in it. Schedule at least one full rest day in the week, and use the easy and mobility days as active recovery. Recovery placed deliberately, after the hardest sessions and before the next hard block, is what turns training into fitness. Recovery left to chance, taken only when someone is too sore to continue, means the damage is already done.
Below is a balanced week of the kind an instructor might run in the development phase, when all the components are in play. It is an example to adapt, not a fixed timetable; the principle is the balance, not the exact days.
A BALANCED TRAINING WEEK (development phase example)
Day Session Load Why
-------- ----------------------------- ------- ----------------------
Monday Steady run + mobility MODERATE aerobic base; easy start
Tuesday Strength (body-weight circuit) HARD muscular endurance
Wednesday Mobility / easy recovery EASY absorb Tuesday
Thursday Intervals or hill efforts HARD anaerobic + speed
Friday Loaded march, progressive HARD* combat fitness
Saturday Mobility / light skills EASY absorb the week
Sunday Rest REST full recovery
Hard days (Tue, Thu, Fri) are separated by easy or recovery days.
No two hard sessions sit back to back. One full rest day is built in.
* The loaded march is hard in a different way (load, not speed), so it
can follow intervals; but in early weeks, ease one of the three.
Managing the total load: too much too soon
Of everything in this lesson, this is the part on which the duty of care most directly turns. The single commonest cause of training injury is not bad technique or weak soldiers; it is too much too soon, the load raised faster than the body can adapt to it. Shin splints, stress fractures, and tendon trouble are overwhelmingly the product of a load that climbed too quickly. An instructor who manages the total load sensibly prevents most of the injuries that would otherwise take soldiers off training and, at worst, harm them for life. The principle from Lesson 02 is the foundation: the body adapts to a stress applied steadily, and breaks under one applied too fast.
The total load is made of three things, and an instructor manages all three together. Volume is how much: distance run, time spent, repetitions done. Intensity is how hard: the pace, the effort, the weight carried or lifted. Frequency is how often: the number of sessions in the week. Raise any of these and the load rises; raise several at once and it rises sharply. The cardinal rule of safe progression follows directly: change one variable at a time, and change it modestly. Add distance, or add pace, or add load, but not all three in the same week. The loaded-march progression in the Basic Training Manual makes the rule concrete: load and distance increase one at a time, never together, and never by more than roughly a tenth in a week.
That figure is the working guide an instructor can hold to: progress the load by about ten per cent a week, no more, and only when the current load is being handled with good form. Ten per cent is small enough for the body to absorb and steady enough to build real fitness over the weeks. It is not a law of nature, but it is a sound ceiling, and an instructor who stays under it will rarely injure anyone through progression.
SAFE WEEK-TO-WEEK PROGRESSION (one variable at a time, about +10%)
Week Run (steady) Loaded march What changed this week
---- ------------ --------------------- ----------------------------
1 20 min 5 km @ 8 kg baseline; groove the form
2 22 min 5 km @ 8 kg run volume up ~10%, march held
3 22 min 6 km @ 8 kg march distance up, run held
4 DELOAD: drop volume ~1/3, keep mobility and technique work
5 24 min 6 km @ 10 kg after deload, march LOAD up
6 26 min 6 km @ 10 kg run volume up, march held
... one change at a time; never load AND distance in the same week
Two further habits protect the group. The first is the deload: after about three weeks of building, drop the volume by roughly a third for a week while keeping technique and mobility work going. Three weeks up, one week easier, is a rhythm that produces durable gains without the injury spikes that come from grinding the load upward without relief. It feels like doing less, but it is how the body consolidates what the hard weeks built, and it is part of the plan, not a reward.
The second is to watch the group, not only the plan. A written progression is a forecast, not a command the bodies must obey. If a week's load is being met with poor form, with limping, with soldiers reporting pain that alters how they move, the load is too high whatever the plan says, and you hold or reduce it. The warning signs of too much (persistent soreness, niggles that will not settle, rising irritability, broken sleep, repeated minor illness) are the body's report that the dose has exceeded its recovery, and Lesson 07 teaches them in full as the path to overtraining. The plan serves the people; the people do not serve the plan.
And throughout, the limits of competence hold, as Lesson 01 set out. An instructor manages training load but does not diagnose or treat the injuries it can cause. Pain that alters how a soldier walks, runs, or carries is referred the same day to the medical staff, and the soldier is not loaded further until reviewed. Managing load well prevents most injuries; referring promptly handles the ones it does not. Both are the duty of care.
Adapting the Recruit Fitness Programme for a group
The Recruit Fitness Programme is the College's proven plan, but it is written for one person training alone, scaling the work to where they honestly are. An instructor's task is different: to take a group of mixed abilities and bring all of it to the standard together. The answer is not a separate programme for each soldier, which no instructor could run, nor a single fixed session that suits no one, which injures the weak and bores the strong. The answer is a common plan with individual scaling: one programme, one weekly shape, one progression, with each session adjusted up or down for the soldier in front of you.
The Recruit Fitness Programme already gives the structure. Its three four-week blocks are a periodised plan in miniature: Foundation (build the base and the form), Development (add load, distance, and the loaded march), and Preparation (sharpen to the test standard, then ease back). An instructor running a group adopts that same shape, the same backward planning from the test, the same progressive overload, the same self-assessment milestones at weeks four, eight, and twelve, and adds the management of difference across the group.
Scaling is how one session fits many: the same movement is offered at levels, and each soldier works at the level that challenges them with good form. The figure below shows a single session scaled three ways.
ONE COMMON PLAN, SCALED FOR A MIXED GROUP (a single session)
Session: 20-minute continuous effort + body-weight strength
Building a base Has a base Strong / fit
------------------ ---------------- ----------------
The run walk-run, 20 min steady run, 20 min steady run, 20 min
(run/walk intervals) conversational at a firmer pace
Press-up from the knees or full, to own count full, more reps
raised surface
Loaded march lighter load (e.g. standard load heavier load,
(dev phase) reduce a few kg) for the block same route/pace
Everyone trains together, for the same time, on the same route.
Only the load within the session differs. Form before progression, always.
The run becomes a walk-run for those building a base and a steady run for those who have one, all covering the same time. The press-up is done from the knees, or against a raised surface, by those not yet able to hold the full plank line, and full by those who can. The loaded march starts lighter for the smaller or less conditioned soldier and heavier for the stronger, all marching the same route at a pace the whole group can hold. The session is one; the load within it is individual. The principle of individual difference from Lesson 02 is met not by abandoning the common plan but by scaling within it.
Two cautions belong with this. First, scaling is not lowering the standard. The Annual Fitness Test standard is the same for every soldier liable to it; scaling is how an instructor brings each soldier up to that single standard from a different starting point, not a permission to leave anyone below it. A soldier not yet at the standard at week twelve holds and keeps building before presenting for the test, exactly as the Recruit Fitness Programme directs, rather than being passed soft or pushed forward unready. Second, the duty of care applies across the whole spread of ability: the fittest soldier must not set a pace that injures the least fit, and the least fit must not be driven beyond what their body can yet absorb to keep up. The instructor holds the group together at a load each member can tolerate, scaling the hard edges so that no one is broken to flatter the plan. A common plan, scaled honestly, is how a mixed group arrives at the standard together and whole.
Building in testing and review
A programme is a forecast, and no forecast survives contact with real bodies unchanged. The way an instructor keeps the plan honest is to build testing and review into it from the start, so the plan answers to evidence as it runs rather than being discovered to have failed on the day of the test. The Basic Training Manual puts the cycle in four words worth remembering: plan, perform, reflect, adjust.
Testing is placed at three points. At the start, the group is assessed against the components of the goal, giving the baseline the whole plan is built on. At milestones through the programme, on the Recruit Fitness Programme's model of checks at weeks four, eight, and twelve, the same assessment is repeated so progress can be measured and the plan adjusted: a group ahead of forecast can progress a little faster, a group behind can be held or given more time on the phase it needs. At the end, the in-person test certifies the result, conducted under qualified supervision as Lesson 08 sets out in full. Testing through the programme is not effort taken from training; it is the instrument panel that tells the instructor whether the plan is working while there is still time to change it.
Review is the habit that turns testing into better training. Each week the instructor looks at how the group went, against the plan and against the group's own training logs, the simple record of each session the Recruit Fitness Programme requires every soldier to keep. What was recorded is what can be reviewed: which sessions went well, where form decayed, who is progressing and who is struggling, whether the warning signs of too much load are appearing anywhere in the group. From that review the next week is adjusted. This is the same disciplined loop the soldier runs on their own training and the same one used across soldiering: observe, learn, adapt. A programme reviewed weekly and adjusted on evidence will reach the goal; one written once and followed blindly will arrive wherever the unexamined weeks happened to take it.
And review serves the duty of care as much as performance, because the weekly look at the group is where an instructor catches the soldier whose niggle is becoming an injury, the spread of fatigue that means the load must come down, the individual falling behind who needs scaling or referral. Reviewing the plan is, in the end, reviewing the people, carried through the whole length of the programme rather than promised only at its start.
In Practice: The Section Brought to the Test Together
A physical training instructor is given a section of eight to bring to the Annual Fitness Test in twelve weeks. They are a mixed group, as sections are: two are already fit and bored by easy work, three are sound but untested under load, and three are starting from little, one of them returning from a settled minor injury and cleared by the medical staff for graduated training. The temptation, and the error, would be to run one hard programme and let the group sort itself out, breaking the weak to keep up and holding the strong back.
Instead the instructor starts from the goal and works back. The date is fixed and there are twelve weeks, and in the first session the section is assessed against the components, the run, the press-ups and sit-ups, the plank, a light loaded carry, with each soldier's figures logged. The weeks are laid out backwards from the test: a four-week foundation to build the base and groove the form, a five-week development to raise the load and bring in the loaded march, and a final stretch to sharpen to the standard and then taper, with a deload after the third week and another in development. The weekly shape balances the work, a steady run and mobility early on, a strength circuit and an interval session as the hard days, a loaded march as development opens, with easy days between the hard ones and a full rest day, no two hard sessions stacked. Every session is run as one common plan, scaled. The two fit soldiers run the same twenty minutes at a firmer pace and march a heavier load; the three starting from little walk-run the same twenty minutes, press from the knees, and march lighter; the returning soldier is scaled gently and watched closely. The whole section trains together, on the same route, for the same time, at loads each can hold. The load climbs by about a tenth a week, one variable at a time, distance one week and load the next, never both, with the deload weeks letting the gains settle. At weeks four and eight the section is reassessed; the figures show the base building and the gap across the group closing, and the plan is adjusted, a little faster for those flying, a held week for one soldier whose shins are complaining, who is also sent to the medical centre and not loaded further until reviewed. By week eleven the heavy work is done; the final two weeks taper so the section arrives fresh.
On the day, conducted in person under qualified supervision, all eight present at or above the standard, and all eight are whole. The section reached the test together because the instructor planned backwards from the goal, periodised the time, balanced the week, managed the load, scaled the common plan, and reviewed it as it ran. A section driven hard and uniformly from day one would have arrived with its best two flat from boredom and its weakest three injured. The plan brought them in together because it was built to.
Check Your Understanding
- An instructor is given a group to bring to the Annual Fitness Test in twelve weeks. Explain how they plan backwards from the goal, and name the three phases of a periodised programme and the main aim of each. Why can a group not be held at a peak all the time?
- What are the three parts that make up the total training load, and what is the cardinal rule for progressing it safely from week to week? Why is too much too soon described as the commonest cause of training injury, and what is a deload week for?
- You are running one session for a group of mixed abilities, two fit, three sound, three starting from little. Explain how a common plan with individual scaling lets you train them together, give one worked example of scaling a single movement up and down, and say why scaling is not the same as lowering the standard.
Reflection (write a short paragraph): The lesson insists that a programme is not only a route to performance but a duty of care written down in advance, and that periodisation and load management are how an instructor keeps the promise to bring people to the standard and back again whole. Think of a real RKA group you might be asked to train, a mixed section preparing for the test, a group readying for a working spell with the civil authorities. Describe how building the plan backwards from the goal, balancing the week, and holding the load to about a tenth more each week protects the people in it, not just their times. What would go wrong, and to whom, if you instead trained the group hard and uniformly from the first day to the last?
Summary
- A programme is planned backwards from the goal. Settle the goal (usually the Annual Fitness Test or a task), count the weeks honestly, and assess the group's starting point against the components of the goal; then fill the weeks back from the test with phases.
- Periodisation divides the time into phases that build on one another: a foundation phase to build the base and condition the body gradually, a development phase to raise the load and target the components, and a peak and taper to sharpen and then ease off so the group arrives fresh. You cannot hold a peak; you build to one and spend it.
- The training week balances hard days against easy ones, spreads the components across the days, places recovery on purpose with at least one rest day, and never stacks hard sessions back to back.
- The total load is volume, intensity, and frequency together; progress one variable at a time by about ten per cent a week, deload roughly every fourth week, and watch the group, not only the plan. Too much too soon is the commonest cause of training injury, so managing load is the duty of care made concrete; refer pain that alters movement to the medical staff.
- Adapt the Recruit Fitness Programme's progressive three-block structure for a group through a common plan with individual scaling: one weekly shape and one progression, with each session scaled up or down so a mixed group trains together. Scaling brings each soldier to the single standard; it does not lower it.
- Build in testing and review: assess at the start, at milestones, and at the end, and review weekly against the training logs to adjust the plan on evidence. Plan, perform, reflect, adjust. Reviewing the plan is reviewing the people. The programme is a draft for command and medical approval, and all testing is conducted and certified in person under qualified supervision.
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