SFY Coach vs doing it yourself
Programming for yourself is free, completely flexible, and if you've been lifting for years you probably already know most of what a beginner program would tell you. Plenty of people do this well for decades.
Pick doing it yourself if
you enjoy the planning as much as the training, you already have a progression scheme you trust, and you're consistent without anyone noticing whether you showed up.
Pick SFY Coach if
the plan is the part that keeps falling apart — you train hard for six weeks, life happens, and you restart from scratch. As one of our audience put it: you don't have a motivation problem, you have a system problem.
Side by side
| SFY Coach | doing it yourself | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | A 22-week strength, balance and grip program someone else wrote | Your own programming, assembled from free sources |
| Price | $29/month or $249/year, after 3 days free | Free |
| Free option | Youthspan Snapshot, free with no account | All of it, if you count your own time as free |
| Named coach | Derek Tresize — 20 years of practice, written in advance as one 22-week system | You, from whatever you can find |
| What happens on a bad week | The session changes — less load, less time, a swap around the sore joint | You skip, then improvise, then restart |
| Physical test | Five tests at the start, the same five at Week 22 | However you choose to measure — most people don't |
| Balance, grip, power, VO2 | Programmed in from the start — the qualities that decline fastest with age | Usually the first thing left out |
| Plant-based method | Plant-first Daily Five, built in | Separate problem, usually unsolved |
Everything in the doing it yourselfcolumn is what they say about themselves on their own site, as of August 2026. If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
SFY Coach vs doing it yourself — questions
I've trained for years. Is there anything here for me?
The five tests will tell you within ten minutes, and they're free. If your balance, grip and chair-stand numbers already sit well ahead of your age, you probably don't need us. Most experienced lifters find one or two of the five sit well behind the others — usually balance or power, because they're the easy ones to leave out of a program. Those are the ones worth your next 22 weeks.
Why pay for programming I could find free?
You could, and plenty of people do it well. The difference isn't the exercises — it's that the plan survives a bad week, that balance and power stay in the program instead of quietly dropping out, and that there's a retest at the end telling you whether the last 22 weeks actually moved anything.
What if I want to keep my own program?
Then keep it. Take the free Youthspan Snapshot anyway and use the five test results to decide what your own program is missing.