a command center for the coach.
The whole roster triaged at a glance, worst-first, so a coach sees who needs them before they ask.
a list is where clients get lost.
A roster sorted by name, or by signup date, or not sorted at all, hides the one thing a coach needs to know each morning: who is drifting. The client about to quit looks identical to the client thriving until the cancellation lands. Trainbase orders the whole book worst-first and puts it on one screen, so the person who needs the coach is always at the top, before they ever have to ask.
You do not lose a client in a single week. You lose them across the quiet ones, the missed sessions and the stalled trend nobody was watching. The roster is built to make those weeks loud.
the worst-off, at the top, every morning.
One row per client: name, the fat-mass trend as a sparkline, and a status dot. Every sparkline shares one vertical scale across the whole roster, so a real climb reads steeper than a flat line and a 0.2 kg wobble never masquerades as a crisis. The rows are pre-sorted by who needs the coach most, so the top of the screen is always where attention belongs.
The dot and the trend line use the same colour logic the rest of the product does: on-track is the calm read, needs-attention is the one that earns a second look. The colour is never punishment, only a place to start the day.
the honest shape of a real book.
A healthy roster is not all green, and a coach who claims it is has stopped looking. At any moment a working book holds a few clients drifting, a handful flat, a couple unassigned between programs, and the rest moving. The mix is the coach's workload, counted honestly. Hiding the hard ones does not shrink them.
Twenty-four clients, four states, no rounding to flatter the coach. The bar chart shares one scale against the full book, so seven clients needing work read as exactly that against fifteen who do not.
what moves a client to the top.
Worst-first is only as good as the signal it sorts on. Each of these is a leading indicator a coach would otherwise catch late or by accident. The roster watches them continuously, names what each one means, and points at the action, so the sort is a to-do list, not a mood ring.
| signal | what it means | the action |
|---|---|---|
| fat trend stalled or rising | the plan stopped working, or adherence slipped | review intake and the last two weeks of logs, then adjust the deficit |
| missed sessions | the earliest, loudest churn signal there is | reach out the same week, before two becomes a habit and a habit becomes a cancellation |
| no active program | a client between blocks with nothing prescribed for today | assign or build the next block from a template before the gap turns into a drift |
| no recent check-in | no logged readings, the client has gone quiet | a short, human message; silence is rarely good news and never neutral |
| missed personal best window | strength flat where progression was expected | check fatigue, sleep, and load; a plateau named early is a deload, not a wall |
None of these requires the client to speak up first. That is the point. By the time a client emails to say it is not working, the signal has been visible for weeks.
ordering is the whole job.
Alphabetical order optimises for nothing a coach cares about. Worst-first spends the coach's scarcest resource, attention, on the clients whose outcome is still in play. The client thriving on autopilot can wait a day; the client who missed two sessions cannot. These are the signals ranked by how fast they turn into a lost client if ignored.
Urgency is about reversibility, not severity. A missed session is cheap to fix today and expensive to fix once it is a pattern, so it sorts above a slow plateau that will still be there next week.
the honest answers.
Why worst-first instead of alphabetical?
Because attention is the coach's scarcest resource and a name tells you nothing about who needs it. Alphabetical order means the drifting client and the thriving one get the same place in the day. Worst-first spends the first and best hour on the clients whose outcome is still changeable.
Does a needs-attention dot mean the client is failing?
No. It means start here. A client between programs, or one whose trend stalled for a fortnight, is not failing; they are the next conversation worth having. The dot is a sort key, not a verdict, and never punishment for the client.
How does the roster scale past a handful of clients?
The whole book stays on one screen because it is sorted, not scrolled. A coach with forty clients reads the top of the list the same way one with eight does: the ones drifting are already at the top, and the ones on track sit below, checked but not first.
Can a coach see another coach's clients here?
Never. Every row a coach sees belongs to that coach. Isolation is enforced in the database with row-level security, not by an app-code filter, so a roster can only ever show the clients assigned to the coach reading it.