When I spoke to over 100 personal trainers during the research phase of my last company, the most common tool in their stack wasn’t Trainerize, TrueCoach, or any of the dozen other platforms I expected. It was Google Sheets. Sometimes Excel. Occasionally Notion. Almost always with a side of WhatsApp.
This was surprising to me at the time. It stopped being surprising once I listened carefully. Trainers aren’t using spreadsheets because they haven’t heard of the alternatives. They’re using spreadsheets because spreadsheets do three things the purpose-built tools do worse.
Spreadsheets adapt instantly
Every trainer I spoke to has a coaching methodology that is at least partly their own. Some have strong views on auto-regulation. Some run block periodisation. Some use RPE, some use RIR, some use a 1-to-10 vague effort scale they made up. Some track mood. Some track sleep. Some refuse to track either because they think it interferes with the work.
Coaching software has opinions. Every platform makes a bet on what the right prescription model is, what the right check-in cadence is, what the right data to track is. If the platform’s bet matches yours, great. If it doesn’t, you’re either fighting the tool or abandoning it. A spreadsheet has no opinions. If you want to add a column for sleep quality, you add a column. If you want to drop RPE for a client who finds it confusing, you delete the column. The cost of change is zero. This is the single biggest reason spreadsheets win against more polished tools, and most coaching platforms don’t respect it.
Spreadsheets are portable
Every trainer I know has a horror story about trying to leave a platform. Client data locked behind export walls. Program history available only as PDFs. Chat history that doesn’t export at all. One coach described moving 40 clients off a platform over the course of a summer, manually, because the export function gave them a CSV with half the fields missing.
A spreadsheet is a file. You own it. You can email it to yourself. You can back it up to three places. You can open it in Excel, in Numbers, in Google Sheets, in LibreOffice. When you decide to change tools, your data comes with you in a format every tool on earth can read.
This is not a nice-to-have. This is the single most important thing tools can give trainers, and most coaching platforms actively work against it because lock-in is how they justify their pricing.
Spreadsheets respect the coach’s intelligence
The third thing, and maybe the most important, is that spreadsheets don’t try to coach the coach. They don’t nudge you about a client you haven’t messaged in four days. They don’t auto-generate a “weekly summary” that misses the one detail that actually matters. They don’t wrap your program in a layer of suggested modifications or habit prompts that pull attention away from the training itself.
Trainers with real experience have strong intuition about their clients. Software that overrides or distracts from that intuition feels, to a good coach, exactly like a junior colleague who doesn’t know when to shut up. The spreadsheet says nothing. It sits there. It stores what you put in it. It gives you the floor.
A lot of coaching software builds in the opposite direction: more notifications, more automated check-ins, more AI-generated prompts. These are not improvements for the experienced coach. They are noise.
What this means for software that wants to compete
If you’re building for trainers, the bar isn’t “be better than the other coaching platforms.” The bar is “be better than Google Sheets.” That’s a harder bar than most founders realize. It means:
- Flexible enough to bend to the coach’s method, not the platform’s.
- Data ownership treated as a right, not a support ticket.
- Quiet by default. Loud only when it genuinely helps.
- Export functions that actually work.
When we built Formline, the spreadsheet question was the one we kept coming back to. Not “how do we get trainers off spreadsheets?” but “what are we giving them that’s worth trading the spreadsheet for?” If the honest answer was nothing, we added nothing. If the answer was something specific (client billing without taking a cut, progress tracking that graphs itself, a client app the client actually uses), we built that.
The spreadsheet is a compliment to the trainer. It says: you’re capable of running your business, here’s a tool that gets out of your way. More coaching software should take that seriously.