Weekly Review Template

Thirty minutes, Sunday afternoon, same time every week. The point is consistency, not perfection. A bad review run consistently for a year beats a perfect review run once a quarter. Copy this template into your own Google Doc, Notion page, or paper notebook. The format matters less than the cadence.

(a) Numbers — 10 minutes

Pull the week's raw data into one page. The five numbers that matter most:

Sleep average. Mean duration across the seven nights, to the nearest quarter hour. Note the worst night and the best night — the spread tells you almost as much as the mean.

Training volume. Total hard sets per primary muscle group, or total tonnage per primary lift, depending on how your current block tracks. Compare against the prescribed week (over, under, exact). Compare against the same metric last week and the same metric four weeks ago.

RPE drift. Average top-set RPE across the week's prescribed sessions. Compare against last week and four weeks ago. If RPE is creeping up while load stays flat, fatigue is accumulating ahead of recovery. If RPE is creeping down while load goes up, the block is working.

Body weight delta. Seven-day rolling average versus the prior week's rolling average. Single-day numbers are noise; the rolling average is signal. A delta of more than 0.7% of bodyweight in a week, in either direction, is worth flagging.

Subjective recovery composite. Average of your daily readiness scores (sleep quality, stress inverse, morning subjective recovery). One number, 1-5. Compare against last week.

If you track HRV or other wearable data, add it here. If you don't, don't.

(b) The honest question — 10 minutes

This is the part people skip and the part that matters most. Write the answer down. Two or three sentences is enough. Five is plenty.

If I removed my own ego from the answer, what would I tell a friend who showed me these numbers?

The reason this question works is that you are kinder, clearer, and more honest with a friend than you are with yourself. You will tell a friend their sleep is the problem. You will tell yourself your sleep is "okay considering everything." You will tell a friend they are running too much volume. You will tell yourself you "just need to push through this block."

Write the friend version. Read it back. Sit with it for sixty seconds before moving on.

Optional second question if the first one feels too soft on a particular week: what is the pattern in the numbers that I am pretending not to see?

(c) One change for next week — 10 minutes

One change. Not five. Not three. One.

This is the discipline that separates a feedback loop from a planning session. The temptation, every Sunday, is to identify five things that should be different. Acting on five things at once means you will not know what worked, and the system stops being a system and starts being an opinion.

Pick one. Write it down with a specific implementation:

• Not "sleep more." Try: "Phone out of the bedroom by 9:30, lights off by 10:15, M-F."
• Not "eat better." Try: "30g protein at breakfast, every weekday, no exceptions."
• Not "manage stress." Try: "10-minute walk between 2pm and 4pm, every workday."
• Not "lift more carefully." Try: "Drop top-set load 5% on the two days following a stress-5 day."

If the change is not concrete enough that someone reading it back to you could enforce it, it is not concrete enough.

Then close the doc. The review is done. The change runs for one week. Next Sunday you'll know if it worked, because you only changed one thing.

What this template will not do

It will not motivate you. The cadence does that, not the content.

It will not catch every drift. Block-level drift (volume creeping, recovery debt accumulating across six weeks) shows up in the monthly recalibration, not the weekly review. That's why monthly is its own layer.

It will not work if you do it twice and quit. It works if you do it every Sunday for a year. The compounding is in the consistency.

Copy this into your own tool. It's yours.