Eight structures cover almost every piece of conditioning you'll ever be handed, and the difference between them is smaller and sharper than most people think.
A protocol is the shape of the work, not the work itself. Five burpees is an exercise. Five burpees at the top of every minute for ten minutes is a protocol, and the shape is doing at least as much of the programming as the movement is.
Fire Your Coach runs eight of them: EMOM, AMRAP, Tabata, circuit, intervals, tempo, ladder and pyramid. That isn't a marketing list. It's a closed enum in the database, enforced by a check constraint, because the app has to know which clock to run before it can run one. A structure it can't classify gets held for review rather than guessed at.
Each page below explains what the structure is, how it behaves once fatigue arrives, and where it stops being the right tool. That last part matters most. Almost every protocol explainer online tells you what an EMOM is. Very few tell you that an EMOM whose work takes fifty seconds has quietly stopped being an EMOM.
Where the line between two structures is genuinely fuzzy, we've written down where our own parser draws it and why. A circuit is several distinct movements inside one round. Intervals repeat a single movement. Tempo is continuous by definition, and a Zone 4 reference on its own is not enough to make something steady, because interval work cites zones too.
The eight below are the structure types our parser actually stores, not a survey of everything conditioning can look like. If a session does not fit one of them it is kept as written rather than forced into the nearest match, because a protocol filed under the wrong structure gets the wrong rest, the wrong timer and the wrong coaching note.
That is the whole taxonomy. Once you know which variable a structure holds still, its pacing rules stop being arbitrary and its failure mode becomes obvious.
| Structure | Held fixed | Left to vary | How it's scored |
|---|---|---|---|
| EMOM | The work in each minute | How much rest you earn | Work held as the rest shrinks |
| AMRAP | The time cap | How much work you complete | Rounds, plus partial reps |
| Tabata | Work and rest, 20 on and 10 off | Output per round | Your worst round |
| Circuit | The movements and the round count | Round times | How flat the round times stayed |
| Intervals | Work, rest and target intensity | Pace you actually hold | Split consistency |
| Tempo | Intensity and duration | Nothing, and that is the point | Time actually spent in the zone |
| Ladder | Load and the step size | Reps per round | Total time, and whether you broke early |
| Pyramid | The step count, three or four | Load up, reps down, together | Arriving at the working set fresh |
Two structures share a word with something else in the product. Tempo here means a steady continuous piece of work; on a lift it means the speed of a single rep. AMRAP here means as many rounds as possible against a clock; on a strength set it is sometimes written to mean a single set taken to failure.
Fire Your Coach stores the structure type, not just the text. That is what lets the rest timer, the round counter and the coaching note behave differently for an EMOM than for a ladder, without you configuring anything.