Your 6-Week Workout Plan for Claude

Severin Sorensen
6 days ago
4 min read

One of the most frequent requests I get from executives and business owners sounds like this: "Severin, just give me an exercise plan. A workout plan. Something I can follow day by day to actually get good at this AI thing."

I love that framing. Because most people miss this: getting value from AI isn't about one magical prompt. It's about building a practice in the same way you'd build physical fitness. Nobody walks into a gym on Day 1 and deadlifts 400 pounds. You follow a program. You build progressively. You show up consistently.

So, I built a plan: Thirty sessions. Five days a week. Six weeks. Zero to mastery.

I'm calling it Claude Cowork Mastery, and it treats your AI capability the way a serious training program treats your body: foundations first, then skills, then systems, then advanced technique.

Here's the breakdown.

A 6 Week Workout Plan for Mastery in Claude Cowork

Week 1: Foundations — Zero to First Value

The "Learn the Equipment" Phase

Every good training program starts with form and fundamentals. Days 1-5 take you from your very first conversation with Claude through installing Claude Desktop, learning the 5-part prompt formula (Outcome + Format + Context + Sources + Safety Valve), running file operations, and completing the five quick wins of organizing downloads, summarizing PDFs, drafting a presentation, turning receipts into a spreadsheet, and writing a memo.

The goal of Week 1 is to build confidence through small, immediate victories. To prove to yourself that this works before you go deeper. Think of it as your first week in the gym. You're learning the machines, finding your range of motion, and getting comfortable showing up.

Week 2: Skills & Documents — Professional Deliverables

The "Add Resistance" Phase

Days 6-10 focus on the professional outputs that actually move your business forward. You'll learn Claude's planning engine (Observe → Plan → Act → Reflect), tour its built-in document skills for PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, and PDF, and then build real deliverables: a board-ready slide deck from actual data, a formatted Excel tracker with working formulas, and a polished Word report with professional formatting.

The key insight gained from Week 2: Give Claude a complex task, read its plan, and request one change before letting it execute. This is the equivalent of checking your form in the mirror before adding weight. It's where most people skip ahead, and where most injuries happen.

Week 3: Connectors & Ecosystem — Your Digital Tools

The "Compound Movements" Phase

Here's where it gets interesting. Days 11-15 move you from using Claude in isolation to connecting it with your actual work environment. You'll install plugins, connect Gmail or Google Drive, learn MCP (the protocol that lets Claude talk to external tools), and (this is the big one) chain a workflow. For example, leveraging Claude to read emails about a topic, summarize findings, and save a report to Google Drive. Multiple tools, one task, one prompt.

Week 3 is your capstone, where you’ll design the one repeatable workflow you'll use most. This is where people start saying things like, "Wait, it can do THAT?"

Week 4: Architecture — Markdown, Priming & Custom Skills

The "Build Your Own Program" Phase

If Weeks 1-3 taught you how to use the gym, Week 4 teaches you how to design your own training regimen.

In this phase, you’ll cover Markdown fundamentals (the structured language Claude responds to best), building priming documents that teach Claude who you are and how you work, configuring your .claude settings, creating custom skills, and migrating your existing GPTs into Claude's native format.

Day 17 is a game-changer (aka Markdown document frameworks). You'll create a "priming-docs" folder with three files: README.md (your name, role, audience, and top 5 quality rules), STYLE_GUIDE.md, and PRACTICES.md. These become the persistent instructions that shape every interaction. It's the difference between training with a random gym buddy and training with a coach who knows your history, goals, and preferences.

Week 5: Chair Practice — The Four Pillars

The "Sport-Specific Training" Phase

This week is built specifically for Vistage Chairs, executive coaches, and peer group facilitators, but the principles apply to anyone who leads through conversation.

Days 21-25 apply Claude across the four pillars of chair practice: group facilitation (issue processing synthesis, meeting energy design, blind spot analysis), one-to-one coaching (cognitive bias checking, rapid learning briefs, 90-day development plans), practice growth (LinkedIn posts, executive briefings, objection-handling roleplays), and member value-add (behavioral interview questions, competitor intelligence, AI roadmaps).

Day 25 pulls it all together: you create your personal Chair AI Playbook, which will consist of one operational document with sections for each pillar, your top workflows, prompts, and tools.

Week 6: Advanced — Scaling, Safety & Your 90-Day Plan

The "Peak Performance" Phase

Week 6 (days 26-30) are about optimization, responsibility, and sustainability. You'll score your prompts against the PromptSensei 7-dimension framework, audit your setup against the 8 Rules for CEOs safety checklist, onboard colleagues with shared folder instructions, write your personal AI ethics statement, and on Day 30 you’ll build your 90-Day AI Integration Plan with monthly milestones, KPIs, and a personal commitment statement.

You'll also write a Letter to Your Future Self. It sounds soft, but it’s the kind of reflective practice that separates people who dabbled in AI from people who transformed their practice with it.

Why a "Workout Plan" Works Better Than a Course

Here's my philosophy, and it comes from 8,000+ hours of executive coaching: knowledge without practice is entertainment. A course gives you information. A training plan gives you capability.

The design principle behind this program is what I call "Specify 10, Execute Once,” where you’ll invest the time to get your instructions precise, then let Claude deliver. That ratio of thinking-to-doing is what separates people who say "I tried AI, it wasn't that useful" from people who say "I can't imagine working without it."

The Invitation

I've made the full 30-Day At-a-Glance poster available. It maps every session, every exercise, every starter prompt across all six weeks. If you're a CEO, executive coach, or business leader who's been meaning to get serious about AI but hasn't found the right on-ramp, this is it.

Your move, Day 1: Go to claude.ai and start a free conversation. Ask: "What can you do?" Then show up tomorrow for Day 2.