Siobhan Derry has been head coach at a CrossFit affiliate in Leeds for six years. She programmes for a membership base of roughly 110 athletes across five different ability tiers. Watching her build a training week reveals decisions that most members never see and most gym owners rarely discuss openly.
How the week actually gets built
Siobhan starts on Thursday evening by reviewing the previous week's whiteboard data. She tracks which movements caused the most scaling, which time domains produced the highest no-show rates, and where coaches flagged form breakdowns during the session. This takes her around 40 minutes before she writes a single rep scheme.
She then maps the following week against a 12-week mesocycle template, adjusting for any competition or community event on the calendar. The template is not rigid. It functions as a constraint that prevents her from defaulting to familiar movement patterns out of habit.
The scaling problem most gyms underestimate
Siobhan noticed that her intermediate athletes were consistently under-challenged because coaches were scaling them alongside beginners for convenience. She introduced a colour-coded whiteboard system in month three of her tenure, separating Rx, Performance, and Foundations targets visually. Coach briefings dropped from 12 minutes to under six because the decision-making was already made before class started.
What she watches during a WOD
During workouts, Siobhan tracks rest intervals rather than scores. An athlete resting more than 20 seconds between movements in a couplet signals a load or skill issue she logs for the following week. This is the feedback loop most programming discussions skip entirely.