Sprinting vs a spreadsheet: what an app does that Excel can't
A spreadsheet is free, it is yours, and it already works, so the bar for switching should be high. The honest answer is that an app is worth it when three things matter to you: athletes seeing their plan on their phone with video, copying a week or a season forward without retyping, and getting your existing written plan in without re-entering three years of sessions. If none of those move you, stay on Excel. This is the case for when they do.
Most track coaches who use a spreadsheet are not disorganized. They have a system that works: one tab per week or per athlete, intensity edited by hand, the plan sent to athletes over WhatsApp. The spreadsheet is free and it cannot be taken away. Any tool asking you to leave it should clear a high bar, and most do not. So this is written plainly, including where a spreadsheet is still the better choice.
Sprinting is training periodization software for track and field coaches. The question is not whether it is fancier than Excel. It is whether it removes work you are doing by hand today.
Where a spreadsheet is still fine
If you coach a handful of athletes, send plans by text, and rebuild each week in a few minutes, a spreadsheet is hard to beat on cost and control. It is free, it works offline, and you already know it. An app that only matches that is a supplement, and supplements get abandoned within a fortnight. Be honest with yourself about whether the problems below are actually your problems before switching anything.
What an app does that a spreadsheet cannot
The first is athlete delivery. In a spreadsheet, your athletes never see the plan. You copy text or screenshot a tab and send it over WhatsApp, one athlete at a time. In Sprinting you publish the week and each athlete opens it on their phone, with the day's session laid out and a video on the exercises that have one. That is the single upgrade most coaches can see immediately, because it changes what the athlete experiences, not just how you plan.
The second is repetition. Copying last week into this week, or last season into this one, is manual cell work in Excel, and it is easy to lose track of what changed. Sprinting copies a whole week forward in one action, sessions and sets intact, so you edit the few things that move rather than rebuilding the grid. Across a sixteen-week block that is the difference between minutes and an afternoon.
The third is the move itself. The reason coaches stay on a spreadsheet they have outgrown is the thought of retyping years of sessions. Sprinting reads your existing plan in: paste the text of a session, or upload a photo or screenshot of a written one, and it parses the exercises and sets into a structured session you correct before saving. You are not re-entering your history by hand.
The test is not whether the app is nicer than your spreadsheet. It is whether athletes seeing their plan, copying weeks forward, and reading your old plans in are worth a monthly cost to you. For some coaches that is an easy yes. For others it is a clear no.
The honest part: cost, control, and your data
A spreadsheet is free and an app is not, and that is a real difference, not a rounding error. Sprinting earns its cost only by removing enough manual work to justify it, and if your week is already fast in Excel, it will not.
On control, one thing should be said straight rather than glossed. A spreadsheet hands you your data in a file you own. Sprinting does not yet have a one-click export of your plans back to a spreadsheet. It is on the roadmap, and it matters, so if leaving with your data in hand is a hard requirement for you today, that gap is a fair reason to wait. Saying otherwise would not survive your first real question about it.
What does not change when you move
The structure of your coaching does not change, because the app is built around the same periodization a good spreadsheet already encodes. A season runs through phases, general preparation into specific preparation into competition (Bompa & Buzzichelli, 2018), and the weekly skeleton stays steady while the prescription inside it moves. If your spreadsheet already thinks in weeks and blocks, Sprinting is the same logic with athlete delivery and copy-forward attached, not a new method to learn.
Each set still holds what you track now: load, reps, rest, tempo, RPE, distance, plus velocity, power, and effort. Set a reference max per exercise and prescribe by effort percentage, and the working weight is computed against that athlete's max, the same calculation you do with a formula today, without the formula breaking when you edit the wrong cell.
FAQ
- What does Sprinting do that my spreadsheet can't?
- Three things mainly. Athletes see the plan on their phone with exercise video, instead of you texting it out one by one. You copy a whole week or season forward in one action instead of rebuilding cells. And it reads your existing written or pasted plan into structured sessions, so moving over does not mean retyping. If those do not matter to you, a spreadsheet is a reasonable choice.
- Can I import my current plan, or do I retype everything?
- You can paste the text of a session or upload a photo or screenshot of a written one, and the AI parses it into structured exercises and sets that you review before saving. You correct the draft rather than entering it from scratch. It will not silently guess illegible values, so check the result.
- If I stop paying, can I export everything back to Excel?
- Not yet, and that is worth knowing before you commit. A one-click data export to a spreadsheet is on the roadmap but is not in the product today. If leaving with your full data in a file is a hard requirement for you right now, that is a fair reason to wait.
- Do I have to learn new jargon like subgroups and mesocycles?
- Not really. If your spreadsheet already has senior and junior tabs, that is what subgroups are: a way to write one week and target it at different training groups with different loads. The periodization terms describe the season structure you are likely already using, just named explicitly.
- Is it worth paying monthly when my spreadsheet is free?
- Only if it removes enough manual work to justify the cost. If your weekly planning is already fast and your athletes do not need to see the plan in-app, stay on the spreadsheet. The honest case for switching is athlete delivery, copy-forward, and importing your existing plans, not that an app is inherently better.