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 week 1. It trains hip external rotation, which entered no model, and it is a named contraindication after posterior-approach hip replacement. It can return in a later block only if the trainer believes it earns a place and approves the screening and regression.

Any three days. A day between sessions is welcome but not a gate; if she is sore or unusually tired, wait. Week 1 is deliberately low-load and supported.

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.

Twelve movements, sixteen minutes. The ramp raises pace and rehearses the three patterns that follow. It is not a claim that gentle mobility needs a warm-up. Every ramp and 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 Wake-Up survives for two better reasons. First, it is morning exercise that helps the body transition out of a long period of sleep, progressing from very small seated motions to supported standing. Second, it is a habit and retention anchor: a daily touchpoint can show drift before a session goes missing.

It is not preparation for the later workout and does not need to happen on a session day. It is one six-and-a-half-minute arc rather than a menu of tiers. If she feels light-headed on standing, she sits back down; completing the seated portion still counts.

Twenty-one movements — twelve in the session and nine that belong only to the Morning Wake-Up — filmed standard and gentler, plus three single clips and four substitutions. Fifteen to thirty seconds each, long enough to show two clean repetitions.

Forty-nine clips. Twenty-one paired movement demonstrations make forty-two; three setting-specific single clips and four substitutions complete the list. Establishing shots — the chair set-up, the room and the trainer introducing herself — sit outside this movement count.

The session remains fixed across all three days. The new production cost comes from giving the dynamic ramp and the Morning Wake-Up clear ownership, not from manufacturing variety.

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. The dynamic ramp and main sweep stay unchanged; all progression is in the strength 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 seated figure-four in week 1. Hip external rotation did not enter the functional models reviewed above, and the position creates extra screening complexity after hip replacement. It can return later only if the trainer believes it earns its place and approves the cueing.

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: the pace, reach height and support geometry of the dynamic ramp; the range and cueing for seated knee drops, long leg, soft fold, circle your hips and open the front of your hip; the wall-press starting distance; and whether this rewrite of the safety rails has moved too far towards permission for their comfort.