Month: January 2025

Categories
Training

New Year, New Data: How to Use AI to Optimize Your 2025 Endurance Training

cyclist training in the winter

The makeup of endurance training is experiencing a revolutionary shift with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), making structured training more personalized, dynamic, and accessible than ever before. In 2025, AI endurance training platforms like Humango are at the forefront of this transformation, providing athletes and coaches with data-driven insights and instantly adaptive training plans.   

What is AI-Driven Endurance Training?

AI-driven training involves using advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze your performance data, health metrics, and personal goals, and making progressive training fit in around the constraints of your daily life. This data is then used to create a hyper-personalized training plan that adapts in real time based on your progress and any new data received. It’s like having a coach who’s constantly analyzing your every move and tweaking your training regimen to optimize your performance.

Benefits of Using AI in Training

Hyper-Personalization

Every athlete is unique. You have different strengths, weaknesses, time constraints, and goals. AI excels in personalizing training plans to fit your specific needs. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI endurance training platforms like Humango can identify patterns and optimize training loads and recovery times specifically tailored to you, reducing the risk of injury and enhancing your overall performance.

Dynamic Adaptability

Traditional training plans are rigid and will not account for day-to-day variations in an athlete’s performance or external factors like weather and health. AI-driven plans, however, continuously evolve. If you’re not performing well on a given day or if you’ve had a breakthrough in your training, AI can immediately adjust your program, ensuring you’re always training at the optimum level.

Integration with Wearables

AI endurance training platforms integrate seamlessly with various wearables and devices, collecting real-time data on your heart rate, sleep patterns, health data, and more. This provides a holistic view of your health and fitness, enabling more precise adjustments to your training routines.

How to Implement AI in Your Endurance Training

  1. Choose the Right Platform: Start by selecting an AI endurance training platform that aligns with your sport and training needs. Platforms like Humango are designed for a wide range of activities and offer extensive customization options.
  2. Set Clear Goals: Clearly define what you want to achieve with your training. AI tools are most effective when they have specific targets to work towards.
  3. Integrate Comprehensive Data: The more data you provide, the better. Connect your wearables and devices, upload your workout and health data, and add subjective metrics to give the AI a comprehensive picture of your profile as an endurance athlete.
  4. Regularly Review Settings: While AI can automate many aspects of training, regularly reviewing your settings is invaluable. This helps ensure that the AI’s recommendations are in line with your overall training philosophy and long-term goals.
  5. Embrace Continuous Learning: AI tools evolve with advancements in technology and data analytics. Keep updated with the latest developments and continuously adapt your training approach to leverage these innovations.

Summary

AI is transforming how athletes train for endurance by providing more personalized, adaptable, and data-driven training plans. As we move further into 2025, the use of platforms like Humango will become increasingly prevalent, enabling athletes at all levels to maximize their potential.

Whether you’re an amateur looking to improve your personal best or a professional aiming for the world stage, Humango’s AI has the tools to optimize your training and help you achieve your goals.

Categories
Training

How to Identify and Improve Your Weaknesses as a Triathlete

The start of a new year presents a perfect chance to reflect on your past triathlon season, evaluate performance data, and set actionable goals for improvement. Identifying weaknesses is crucial to reaching your full potential, and leveraging advanced tools like Humango can provide data-driven insights to guide your training and optimize results. Here’s how to use data analysis and Humango’s AI-powered platform to target weak areas and structure your goals for success.

1. Analyzing Data to Pinpoint Weaknesses

Effective training begins with understanding where improvements are needed. Data analysis reveals patterns and metrics that highlight both strengths and vulnerabilities.

  • Heart Rate Variability (HRV): HRV indicates recovery and readiness by measuring variations between heartbeats. A consistently low HRV may point to fatigue or inadequate recovery, suggesting a need to adjust training volume or intensity.
  • Power and Pacing Trends: Review power output on the bike and pacing during runs. Inconsistent efforts or an inability to maintain target power zones may signal pacing inefficiencies.
  • Training Load vs. Fatigue: Tracking the balance between training load and accumulated fatigue helps ensure optimal stress without overtraining.
  • Swim Stroke Metrics: Metrics such as stroke rate, distance per stroke, and swim speed efficiency can uncover technical weaknesses in the water.
  • Sleep and Training Readiness: Sleep quality and duration significantly affect recovery and performance. Consistently tracking sleep metrics, such as total sleep hours, sleep efficiency, and time spent in restorative stages (deep and REM sleep), helps gauge readiness to train. Poor sleep patterns correlate with decreased readiness, increased fatigue, and higher injury risk. Adjusting training loads based on sleep data can optimize performance and prevent overtraining.

By consistently reviewing these performance and recovery metrics, you gain a comprehensive picture of areas requiring targeted improvement.

2. How Humango Identifies Weaknesses

Humango’s AI-based platform continuously analyzes your training data to provide personalized feedback and actionable insights:

  • Training Balance Insights: The platform examines data across swim, bike, and run disciplines to highlight imbalances. For example, a disproportionately strong cycling performance compared to swimming can prompt tailored swim-focused training blocks to rebalance performance.
  • Fatigue and Readiness Monitoring: By incorporating HRV, subjective recovery scores, sleep patterns, and cumulative training load, Humango provides a comprehensive view of your readiness. This allows dynamic adjustments to prevent overtraining and optimize recovery.
  • Performance Trends and Patterns: Humango’s AI tracks long-term performance data, revealing subtle declines or stagnations across key metrics. This early detection supports timely training interventions to maintain continuous improvement.
  • Customized Training Adjustments: Humango provides targeted training modifications for each weakness. If swim stroke efficiency is low, the platform recommends specific drills or technique sessions. Similarly, for pacing inconsistencies during running, it suggests cadence-focused workouts. This tailored feedback transforms raw data into actionable strategies.

3. Developing Targeted Strategies

Once weaknesses are identified, targeted strategies help improve specific areas with Humango guiding each step:

  • Swimming: Use recommended technique drills, such as sculling and catch exercises, to enhance stroke mechanics. The platform analyzes performance trends and incorporates personalized feedback to guide adjustments.
  • Cycling: Follow structured interval training sessions tailored by Humango to build power and stamina. High-intensity intervals above your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) are scheduled based on your data trends.
  • Running: Improve efficiency with cadence drills, strides, and hill sprints as suggested by Humango. The platform tracks pacing patterns and provides cues to improve form and energy conservation.
  • Strength and Mobility: Address specific muscular imbalances and prescribed functional strength and mobility workouts to enhance overall durability, using recovery data to fine-tune session intensity and timing.

4. Setting and Tracking Goals

Use your data-driven insights to set well-defined, measurable goals:

  • Short-Term Targets: Focus on specific, immediate improvements. For example, aim to increase swim stroke efficiency by 10% within one month. Humango tracks your progress daily and adjusts workouts dynamically based on real-time performance and recovery data.
  • Medium-Term Milestones: Plan broader improvements, such as boosting bike power output by 5% in three months. Humango’s AI evaluates cumulative data trends, offering predictive insights and tailored training sessions to steadily build fitness.
  • Long-Term Objectives: Align major goals with key races, ensuring peak performance during your “A” events. Humango uses long-term forecasting tools to periodize training, balancing peak phases with recovery blocks to maximize race-day readiness.

Conclusion

By integrating data analysis and AI-driven tools like Humango, you can take a strategic approach to identifying and improving your weaknesses as a triathlete. This method allows you to craft precise goals, implement targeted strategies, and track your progress effectively unlocking your best performances in the year ahead.

Lance Watson is a world-renowned triathlon coach with over 30 years of experience, having guided athletes to Olympic Gold, Long Distance Triathlon victories, and World Championship titles. Watson is a holistic coach with a passion for training technology who guides both novice and professional athletes. Lance is the founder of LifeSport Coaching and is a coaching advisor with Humango, leveraging AI to enhance athlete training and performance.

Categories
Training

2025: The Year of Recovery for Athletes

Asking an athlete to prioritize recovery is like asking a race car driver to take pit stops—they might resist, but it’s the only way to keep performing at their best. Moving into a new calendar year can mean new goals, new resolutions, time off from a busy life, great escapes, more social time, and often, more time for self-reflection.

This can facilitate asking, and answering, important questions such as, “What went well last year” and “What could I do differently this year”? 

Why Review Your Recovery Methods?

Who you are, what you do, and what you achieve are linked by the answers to these questions. You, like many other people, may have come to the same conclusion – that after a loaded and stressful 2024, you need to shift your focus in 2025 to recovery, your health, and optimizing sleep.

This may be a new concept for you. What does it look like to include more recovery, rest, and sleep into your routine, and does this ultimately mean you are prioritizing your health over your performance?

Every athlete will have different needs when it comes to incorporating recovery into training. Read on for some tips on how to do this successfully. 

Types of Recovery for Athletes

There is a difference between active recovery for athletes, daily recovery, and sleep. Each category has a different purpose and each category demands equal priority if you want to optimize the benefits across your performance. Rather than grouping all of these categories into one, look at their individual benefits. Then, perhaps 2025 can bring you better performance and even better health.

Active Recovery For Athletes

The ultimate goal of active recovery for athletes is to optimally prepare you for your next training session. Active recovery is applied either immediately after an intense training session or in between higher-intensity training and is performed at easy/low intensity.

Post-Workout Active Recovery Example

A very easy post-workout 10-minute spin down on the bike after completing some threshold or VO2 efforts, or 15 minutes of walking after a running hill repeat session.

This concept can also be applied during the session whereby after each interval you keep moving to help your body clear out byproducts, deliver fuel and oxygen to the muscles, and prepare you for the next interval.      

By incorporating active recovery, as you cool down, you are setting yourself up for success in the next training session.

Cooling down allows your heart rate to gradually return to normal, and helps your muscles by promoting blood flow throughout the body, minimizing the risk of muscle soreness and potential injuries. Some would say it’s like a mini-spa for your muscles 🙂 

Active Recovery Sessions 

Sessions in between your high-intensity work can include zone 1 or low zone 2 aerobic training such as walking (or run/walk cycles to keep heart rate low), easy swimming, easy spinning on the bike or tai chi, yoga, or foam rolling/trigger point work.

Some not-so-common methods of active recovery include:

– Sauna

– Compression

– Assisted stretching

– Yoga

– Ice baths

– Cryotherapy

They all require some energy and focus to do, but do not deplete your body of its precious energy and don’t put you in a position where you are more tired or sore afterward. I encourage everyone to try as many recovery techniques as possible to discover what works best. 

Daily Recovery for Athletes – Aka Rest

The purpose of daily recovery for athletes is to apply rest bouts alongside hydration and nutrition tactics to augment your training cycles. This can be applied day-to-day, week-to-week, and cycle-to-cycle to ensure you get the microdoses of rest as well as the cyclical deep recovery bouts you need for your body and brain to recover from your longer training phases.

While your daily recovery is more focused on balancing your rest with hydration and nutrition, without deep recovery bouts inserted at regular intervals (every 2-4 weeks is very common), you are likely to find yourself plateauing at some point wondering why all your training isn’t making you faster or more efficient. 

Some athletes often experience challenges around these deeper recovery bouts because they believe that by doing less training they are losing fitness. Quite the contrary, however. When leaning into these deep recovery bouts athletes allow their bodies to repair, which helps you avoid injury and perform better in the future, and allows your muscles to heal and get stronger.

Rest phases ranging from 1 day to several weeks (season and phase-specific) can help prevent burnout and mental fatigue, leading to better performance when you return to regular training.

Sleep as a Recovery Tool

Maintaining quality sleep ensures you are getting the most out of your active recovery, your training sessions, and your rest days. Sleep quality impacts all of your body functions and should not be underestimated when it comes to how impactful it can be if you don’t get enough of it.

Everyone is different when it comes to sleep needs, but generally speaking, the more you train the more sleep you need as it relates to your hormones. When we sleep we undergo a recovery process which includes regulating our metabolism, improving immune function, and improving our stress response. All of these processes are critical if we are to realize any gains from our training.

Sleep Tips

Some tips to improve sleep quality include: creating a consistent sleep schedule, maintaining a cool and dark sleep environment, avoiding any screen one hour prior to bed, avoiding snacking prior to bed, taking a hot bath or shower, and avoiding caffeine before bed. 

Since sleep also contributes to stress reduction and mental clarity, by focusing on this aspect you will not only improve physical performance but your mental well-being too.

In Summary

I invite you to reflect on your training and recovery goals for the new year. Perhaps this article has encouraged you to start actively applying recovery as an athlete for better overall health and performance.

Categories
Training

How Humango Helped Me Reclaim My Triathlon Journey

As a former track and field and swimming athlete as a teenager, I’ve always dreamed about being in multisports (especially triathlon).

But life got in the way—or, rather, my mind got in the way. At 17 years old, I found myself stuck in the process of going to college and working part-time to support my studies, so I left the dream of studying physical education (because my love of sports was huge) and went to Economics school instead.

I worked in the market for a while: finances, marketing, and investments. I went through teaching for several years. Finally, when I was 31 years old, I had my own coaching and therapy business. It healed me so deeply that it led me back to my childhood dream of multi-sports.

And finally, after 22 years of being what I didn’t want to be and working with what I wasn’t really passionate about, I was able to access that memory again. I remember coming out of a hypnotherapy session (working on inner child) with TRIATHLON jumping out like a slap in my face.

With all those repressed memories coming out, I remember saying, “Why not?” In February 2023, I dusted off my swimming cap and goggles, bought a very old, second-hand mountain bike, borrowed my sister’s sneakers, and simply started training.

In the beginning, I noticed it was not something so simple. To handle 3 sports (plus strength training and transition training), I started to google some plans I could buy in order to have a training plan.

At the end of my first year of training in 2023, using fixed, general “cookie-cutter” plans and learning a lot about my mind, body, and triathlon, I was tired. Not just my body, but my mind was “kinda done” with the same training. They helped shape my beginning but I knew those generic plans couldn’t take me to the athletic level where I wanted to be.

Every time I start doing something in my life, I have to be the best at it. And with triathlon, it had to be the same.

So, I started googling for different kinds of triathlon training plans—not in my native language, Portuguese, but in English—and I found a Superleague video on YouTube that mentioned something about this adaptive app called Humango.

I thought to myself, “Why not give it a try?”

As I started using the Humango App and experiencing the dynamic training sessions, I fell deeply in love with it. The sessions were fun because they were never the same. They pushed me SOOO much further from my comfort zone and I started to notice real results, especially in my weakest sport, cycling. I was suddenly becoming a stronger athlete, which gave me the confidence to grow even bigger in the sport.

I won The State Championships twice: the 2023 Enduro Triathlon and the 2024 Standard Aquathlon, plus the other podiums that came before the big titles.

I believe that the master only appears when the student is ready. So I needed to go through all those physical and mental challenges to prepare for what Humango brought me afterward—a training program that considers my level of fatigue, my mood, my soreness, and more.

Another aspect of the app that helped my training was changing my periodization. I was so tired from my routine (being a mom, wife, athlete, and business owner), that I needed to change training heavily for three weeks heavy and one week of recovery to two weeks heavy and one week of recovery. This is another thing that up-leveled me as an athlete. I slowed down to level up.

Humango changed me from the inside out. The journey has been so transformative that it gave me the strength, power, and confidence to go deeper into my athletic skills. So much so that I transformed it in my career (dedicating myself 24/7 to races and training) and even started studying a post-graduation in physical education specializing in movements.

Blog submitted by Humango Ambassador, Leticia Mendez.

Categories
Training

Set (And Crush) Your New Year Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide for Endurance Athletes

The New Year is here, and it’s the perfect time to reflect, refocus, and redefine your endurance journey. Whether you’re gearing up for your first race, chasing a personal best, or tackling an entirely new discipline, setting clear and actionable goals can be the difference between a good year and a great one. Let’s break down how to set, track, and crush your race and training goals for the year ahead.

Step 1: Dream Big and Get Excited

Think about the events or achievements that genuinely excite you, like one of the many Challenge Family races or IronMan. Which race gives you butterflies just thinking about it? Which challenge makes you feel unstoppable? Write these down—this is your North Star.

Pro Tip: Include both big, audacious goals (like completing an Ironman or running a marathon) and smaller milestones (like shaving two minutes off your 5K PR). Together, they’ll keep your motivation high all year long.

Step 2: Break It Down

Big goals can feel overwhelming, so break them into smaller, actionable steps. These are your process goals—the daily or weekly actions that move you closer to your ultimate goal.

For example:

Goal: Complete a marathon in under 4 hours.

Process Goals:

– Run 4 times per week with one long run.

– Incorporate strength training twice a week.

– Practice nutrition strategies during training.

Pro Tip: Focus on habits and consistency over perfection. A missed session isn’t failure; it’s a chance to adjust and improve.

Step 3: Make Your Goals SMART

The best goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Here’s how to transform a vague goal into a SMART one:

Vague Goal: “Get better at cycling.”

SMART Goal: “Increase my FTP (Functional Threshold Power) by 10% by June 1st.”

Pro Tip: Write your goals down and revisit them regularly to keep them top of mind.

Step 4: Visualize Your New Year Goals Success

Visualization isn’t just for elite athletes. Create a vision board or mental image of what success looks like to you. Imagine crossing the finish line, seeing your PR on the clock, or simply feeling strong and confident during your race.

Pro Tip: Place reminders of your goals in visible spots like your training log, fridge, or phone lock screen.

Step 5: Plan for Flexibility

Life happens, and plans change. When setbacks occur—and they will—don’t panic. Instead, reevaluate your new year goals and adjust your process steps. Consistency and adaptability are the keys to long-term success.

Pro Tip: If you’re working with a coach or app, communicate openly about challenges and shifts in priorities.

Step 6: Track Your Progress

Tracking your new year goals allows you to celebrate small wins and spot trends that need adjustment. Use a training log, wearable technology, or an app (like Humango) to monitor metrics like training volume, pace, heart rate, or power output.

Pro Tip: Celebrate milestones along the way to stay motivated. Every small win adds up to big success.

Step 7: Don’t Forget the Fun Factor

Amid the structure and discipline, don’t forget why you started. Training and racing should be enjoyable and fulfilling. Mix up your routine with fun group rides, scenic trail runs, a new sport, or turn it into a game to keep things fresh.

Conclusion: New Year Goals

Setting and achieving your race and training goals doesn’t have to be daunting. With a clear plan, a focus on process, and the flexibility to adapt, you’ll build momentum and make 2025 your best year yet. So lace up, clip in, or dive in—the new year is yours to conquer.

Ready to take the next step? Our AI-based coaching platform, Hugo, can help you create personalized, adaptive training plans tailored to your goals. Let’s make this year unforgettable.