Week one, in full — and the shape of the eleven weeks after it.

This is a draft for your trainer to approve, amend and film from — not credentialed programming. Where a choice is backed by published evidence, the source is named. Where it is not, that is said plainly, because a great deal of what is repeated confidently in this category turns out to rest on nothing.

Four design choices worth knowing, because they are load-bearing:

Names are written as she would hear them, per the voice rules — turn and look, not seated thoracic rotation. The clinical name is kept alongside for the trainer.

Six research angles were run before this draft was finalised: menopause physiology, range-of-motion dose-response, which joint ranges matter functionally, contraindications and harm, programme structure and adherence, and what women in this group say themselves. Several findings overturned earlier versions of this document. They are recorded here rather than quietly corrected.

The mobility half of a session is still built as a single pass rather than as sets and rounds. That is supported by how this market actually delivers — five shipped follow-alongs for this exact buyer, none of which uses rounds or asks the viewer to count anything —

— and by the mechanism. Chronic range gains are driven by increased stretch tolerance, not tissue change: fascicle length does not change (g = 0.07, p = 0.95), and in older adults the range gain and the tissue-stiffness change are uncorrelated (r = 0.086). Repeating one movement three times with rests buys nothing a single forty-second exposure does not. On up and down from the chair, the rounds buy a great deal. That asymmetry is the whole design.

But the same mechanism predicts poor transfer. If new range is a raised discomfort threshold at a passively-tested joint angle, nothing makes it automatically produce a better sit-to-stand. And that is what the best-matched review finds: 22 studies, 1,127 participants, 75% female, mean age 74 — range improves reliably, function does not. Level 4, Grade C. If you want the new range to be usable, it has to be loaded — which is the block.

The only study to measure multiple joint ranges against multiple functional tests in the right population — 95 women aged 65–83 — gives something close to a ranking. Of seven ranges tested, these survived stepwise regression across five performance tests:

Knee strength entered every single model. Strength beat range on nearly every outcome — which is what this document now turns on.

Two consequences. First, hip extension has been added: it is the range that declines most (−30% in older adults) and the one operating closest to its ceiling during ordinary walking. Second, open the hip — the seated figure-four — has been removed from the sessions. It trains hip external rotation, which entered no model, and it is a named contraindication after posterior-approach hip replacement. It stays in the morning routine, with a screening line.

Any three days, consecutive or not. Rest days only matter once there is load, and there is none until week 3 — so do not impose a gap she has to schedule around.

The same session all three times. That is deliberate: by Friday she has done every movement three times, starts on autopilot, and has one thing to learn rather than three. It also means one filming block covers the whole week.

Thirteen movements, sixteen minutes. Every sweep movement is forty seconds, single pass — the cue is keep going until I say stop, never do six. The block is where reps and rounds are correct, and where the programme's results actually come from.

The justification for this has changed. Earlier drafts argued that range adapts to frequency more than to session length. That is false — weekly session frequency has no independent effect on flexibility gain (g = −0.001, p = 0.95); total volume is what matters, and 2–3 sessions a week is enough to hold gains once made.

The morning routine survives for two better reasons. First, it is a habit anchor, and morning is the only reliable one this group has. Asked to plan when they would exercise, older adults repeatedly say the same thing — the only fixed routine we have is actually in the morning — because retirement removes the time-based cues that used to structure a day. Second, it is the best retention instrument in the product: a daily touchpoint tells you she is drifting on day three, not on day nine when a session goes missing.

What it is not is a fourth workout. Her stated problem is starting and quitting, so three sessions is already three chances to fail. This is a daily sequence on the edge of the bed, before she stands up, that is never called a workout.

Making it comprehensive introduces the exact risk the original three minutes avoided: at six and a half minutes it starts to feel like a fourth session, which is something she can negotiate with herself about. The sequence is therefore ordered so that stopping early still leaves a coherent routine.

Eighteen movements — thirteen in the session, five that exist only in the morning routine — each filmed standard and gentler, plus three single clips and four substitutions. Fifteen to thirty seconds each, long enough to show two clean repetitions.

Forty-three clips. Add three establishing shots — the chair set-up, the room, the trainer introducing herself — and it is comfortably half a day.

That is down from sixty-five in the previous draft, and the saving comes from a single decision: holding the session fixed instead of varying it across the week. The evidence that variety does not help adherence and the production economics point the same way, which is unusual and worth taking.

The last shared week, and nothing new is introduced. She starts week 2 already knowing every movement in it — which is the whole point of holding the session fixed. All the change is in the block.

Week 3 is where load enters properly and where the archetypes stop sharing a session. All four are strength-led from here; what differs is which pattern gets loaded first and how the mobility sweep is angled around it. The sweep stays fixed within each archetype rather than rotating.

Week 4 is the first retest, shared in shape — everyone redoes the same checks — but differing in which result leads.

The same four checks she answered in the quiz, so the comparison is against her own words rather than a new baseline. This is what measureRows() was written to project against — and closing that loop is what makes week 4 the payoff rather than an admin week.

Written as a block theme rather than as sessions, because weeks 5 to 8 are built from the week-4 retest. Specifying them now would either be guesswork or would make the retest decorative.

No session content at this distance, and no theme either. What she sees is a target — and the target is her own quiz answer, moved one or two steps. This is exactly the output measureRows() already produces and nothing currently renders.

Week 8 gets a second retest, and week 12 a third. Three data points is the difference between “she felt better” and a line you can put in front of the next cohort.

Three restrictions appear in almost every over-50 exercise resource and are contradicted by the current guidance:

Worth knowing where the conventional advice comes from: the flexion-harm literature is essentially one researcher’s two reports — a 1984 study with nine women in the flexion arm, non-randomised, never replicated in forty years (and whose own no-exercise group fractured more than the combined-exercise group), plus a 2013 case series of three women doing strenuous end-range yoga. Everything in this programme is unloaded, controlled and mid-range, which is the side of the line every authority agrees on.

A short screen, answered before the first session unlocks. Any yes routes to “see your GP before starting” — not a block, a redirect. It is symptom-based, not age-based: ACSM’s 2015 revision removed risk stratification specifically to reduce unnecessary referral, because over-screening is itself a barrier to activity.

Not on this list, deliberately: age, being sedentary, and suspected or diagnosed low bone density. None of those warrants medical clearance before gentle home exercise under current guidance, and gatekeeping on them causes the harm the consensus warns about.

Women in this group already draw this distinction themselves, in almost these words: soreness is good, pain is not. And the single most-repeated warning among them is about overstretching — “overuse, over-stretching, and pushing too hard can set us back weeks or months.” The gentler variant is not a lesser option; for some women it is the correct one indefinitely.

No full head rolls. Kept out, but the usual justification is wrong. The idea that the back of the circle compromises the vertebral artery does not hold up — positional testing has been abandoned in physiotherapy precisely because it does not reliably reduce blood flow in healthy people, and the 2023 international cervical framework recommends dropping it. The honest reason is simpler: in this age group the position can pinch a stiff neck and make some women dizzy, and half-circles front-only give the same useful range. Say that, not “this can cause a stroke.”

No pressing down on the knee in the figure-four. No study anywhere shows harm from it. It is removed because it loads a flexed, rotated knee from the wrong end for no added benefit — and because the useful cue is symptom-based anyway: you should feel this in your backside, not your knee.

Your paywall names pelvic floor work twice. It is genuinely specialist: cueing a woman to squeeze can make a hypertonic pelvic floor worse, and the symptom she reports does not tell you which kind she has. This draft goes no further than breathing that lets the pelvic floor move naturally, and prescribes no contraction.

Either bring in a pelvic health physiotherapist to write that strand, or take the claim off the paywall. It is the one place where getting it wrong makes a woman worse rather than merely disappointed.

Movement selection, progression rates and every regression above are a conservative reading of standard practice for deconditioned adults over fifty, informed by the evidence review in section 02 — not a clinical prescription. The trainer should approve or amend this before a single clip is filmed, which is the argument for hiring before the shoot rather than for it.

The specific questions to put in front of them: whether to keep any warm-up at all given the finding in section 02; the split-stance depth and cueing for open the front of your hip; the wall-press starting distance; whether open the hip earns its place even in the morning routine; and whether this rewrite of the safety rails has moved too far towards permission for their comfort.