Auriga for Coaches: Getting Started

The spreadsheet you cobbled together for your coaching has broken again. Formulae point to nowhere, and "#N/A" is all you see. "That's the last time," you cry, for the tenth time. Except this time, what if it was? What if there was something else, something that managed your check-ins with athletes, helped you plan months ahead for your clients, monitored when new programs were due, provided advanced analysis of your lifters' data, and did it all in a package that wasn't a spreadsheet you're ashamed of. Well, say hello to Auriga.

First, go sign up for a free trial! After you've signed up, the first thing you're going to want to do is get your athletes into the system. Each page in Auriga is represented by a Tarot card, and each card's symbolism relates to what that page does for you. The Empress, representing growth and new beginnings, handles this first step for you.

Your athletes will be sent sign-up links, and are covered by your plan, so they don't pay anything. Even before they've checked their email, you're ready to get started with your programming.

The Emperor is your dashboard. It helps you track who's doing what and when, and what you still need to do. It shows when you need to write programs, and for whom, and helps you manage check-ins. If you and your athletes have entered your phone numbers, the check-in feature can open a prefilled Google Calendar invite, with a Google Meet link if your calendar's set to add one automatically, and a ready-to-send weekly check-in message, at the touch of a button.

Below this is the calendar. At the top is a list of all your upcoming comps, so you always know where and when you'll be coaching. Below that, you can see programs for each athlete on a timeline: full blocks (solid), holidays (striped), and rough plans (outlined) are all shown here, so you can see what's happening, and when, at a glance.

Let's have a look at filling out this calendar.

The World is your planning tool. Add competitions, holidays, and rough plans for blocks here. Say your athlete is starting prep for a competition on Monday: simply link your plan to the comp and add the start date, and the page will track how much time you have left and automatically fill out start dates for you. Add some notes to each plan too, so when it's time to write out the whole program, you can look back and remember what you had in mind.

Let's look at that now.

The Magician lets you create reusable template programs, which you can individualise when you assign them to an athlete. You can import old programs from Excel using the template we provide, or start fresh.

If you want to start fresh, you'll see this page. Set the program length, tack on a reset or taper week if you like, and you're ready! Let's do a 4-week block plus a 1-week taper here.

Next, you set the weekly structure: which days do what, primary, secondary, or tertiary, for squat, bench, or deadlift. Let's go for the ol' faithful 4-day block, with an SBD Saturday.

Based on what you just set for the weekly structure, some cards get laid out for you. Every lift you're programming that day gets its own card, plus two accessory-card slots per day, ready for you to fill in. You can add more by duplicating or adding a blank card, and you can drag them around to reorder them.

At the top of each column is information about that training day: what lifts are programmed, whether they're primary, secondary, or tertiary, and the number of sets programmed, that's the header shown above.

Let's look at an individual card. At the top, you pick the exercise. Some of Auriga's cleverness relies on consistent formatting, so we advise you use it (the conventions are laid out at the bottom of this article).

You can duplicate or delete the card from the top right, and cycle it between different lift types too (Accessories, Physio, Squat, Bench, Deadlift).

The next line lets you change the set type: normal, Cap-AMRAP (a fixed weight and RPE, where the athlete does as many reps as they can up to that RPE), or time-based (like a plank). If you want the number of sets or reps to change week to week, tick the Volumize box.

Next you set the sets and reps, and below that is a week-by-week RPE and weight grid. There are a few clever shortcuts here to speed up your programming, all genuinely working in the card below, try them.

For ascending sets, you can type the ramp straight in! Say we have 3 sets ascending from RPE 5 to RPE 7: just put 5-7 in the box and it'll space the RPEs out cleanly. You can also write out an explicit list, like 8,7,6, if you want more control over each set.

For the next week, you can offset against what you did the previous week. If you wanted the next week to read 6-8, you'd just write +1 in the box, and the system takes care of the rest.

Weights work exactly the same way, just in the weight field.

If you want to prescribe RPE but give athletes a rough idea on weight too, you can do that: say you want your athlete to do about 100kg, write "100?" or "100 ish", and Auriga will treat it as rough guidance and adjust what the athlete sees accordingly.

Rep ranges are supported too: just put the range in the reps field, in the format "8-12".

Once you're done, click Continue, and The Magician will tag the program with a series of key identifiers, so you can find templates that match your needs later. It also feeds the data analysis you'll see further on.

The Star lets you take a template program, an import from Excel, or a fresh start, and hand it to an athlete. Link it to a competition, add some notes about goals, and describe the program here, then click Next and you'll get one more chance to make final edits and checks. Then it's with your athlete, ready for them to train.

Prefer to watch it end to end? Here's a full walkthrough of building a template and assigning it to an athlete, start to finish.

There are four parts to The Hierophant. By default, your athletes can only see their externals analysis, so let's start there. There are trendlines for weight, steps, calorie intake, sleep, and exercise calories. The Hierophant can also offer weight-management guidance, showing athletes what a change in nutrition or exercise would likely do to their weight.

Training is next: here, The Hierophant builds a model, individualised to each athlete, that learns from their training. It produces personalised estimated one-rep-max curves and Velocity-RIR curves. These feed into tracking GL and strength over time, as well as a "what load is right for this set" calculator.

At the top, you can also view an athlete's training adherence, to check they aren't skipping too many sessions. It shows training enjoyment over time at the bottom too.

Competitions is up next. It analyses and tracks attempt hit rates over time, giving useful insight for when it comes to picking attempts. You can also use the individualised e1RM curves to produce an attempt sheet straight from RPEs.

Programming is the final of the four. Using the tagging from earlier, it produces a side-by-side comparison of each block's features, and tracks e1RM over time for each one, so you can see what's working and what isn't. It also analyses session enjoyment to show what programming structures and sessions lead to high and low training enjoyment.

The Chariot helps you manage your roster. You can give athletes permission to view more of their own training analysis, make notes, view their current, past, and future blocks, and release athletes from your roster.

The Sun and Moon are the attempt sheets for coaches and athletes, and just like the rest of Auriga, there are clever things going on inside. Write out conservative, standard, and aggressive attempts, set targets, add cues, and write notes. If your athlete enters a target total or GL, The Moon will dynamically offer different scenarios, telling them exactly what they need to hit any goal they've set.

The Hermit is how you look back at past training to see what an athlete lifted, what they were feeling, how it moved, and when, and how you adjust an in-progress block.

Select a block at the top, and a grid of cards appears. Each column is a separate session, and each card in it is a different exercise, the same card you just built templates out of, just read-only once a week is logged.

Each card is colour-coded to its lift: squats are pink, bench is sandy, deadlifts are blue, accessories are purple, and physio/rehab is green. Below the sets and reps you gave the athlete is the log itself: each week is its own row, with columns for the prescribed RPE and what the athlete actually achieved on the day.

Some of Auriga's cleverness relies on how you type an exercise name or a weekly target. Get this right and the app's own analysis, e1RM charts, and Equipped GL tracking all pick it up automatically; the exact word order below matters, but everything is case-insensitive.

For tempo or paused lifts, write them as "X-Y-Z Squat" (eccentric-pause-concentric, in seconds). For competition lifts, use "Comp Bench", or "Competition Bench" if you don't want to shorten it.

For equipped lifts, "Equipped" comes before "Comp"/"Competition", not after: "Equipped Comp Squat" or "Equipped Competition Squat". "Comp Equipped Squat" won't be picked up by the Equipped e1RM/GL charts.

For constant tension, zero-break tempo work, use "W-X-Y-Z" with both pauses at zero. Constant-tension tempo squats, for example, would be "3-0-3-0 Squat".

For ascending sets, use "5-7". Arrows and dots also work: "5->7", "5→7", "5..7". The word "to" doesn't parse, "5 to 7" is stored as plain text, not spaced out across the sets.

For an explicit, set-by-set list, comma-separate a target per set: "8,7,6,6". Distinct values are what the athlete logs against; a shorter list than the set count has its last value repeat to fill it, a longer one gets trimmed.

To offset a week against the one before it, type "+1" or "-0.5" (or any number) into the RPE or weight cell. It shifts whatever the previous week held, a single number, a range, or a list, by that amount: "5-7" last week, "+1" this week, becomes "6-8".

For "rough idea" weights, add a "?" before or after the number, or "ish" after it: "150?", "?150", and "150 ish" all read as a rough figure, not a hard target.

Rep ranges are written the same way as a plain range: "7-11".