Author: Gaelle Abecassis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the foundation of Humango’s coaching app for runners, cyclists, swimmers, and triathletes. By drawing on AI — not an algorithm with its inherent limitations — to create and adjust individual training programs after each workout, Humango’s digital brain already ensures you, the athlete, receive the coaching that’s specific to your goals, experience, fitness, and ambition.

With Humango’s ChatGPT-powered interface, you can now tell Hugo, our AI-powered digital coach, what you want to do, how you feel, and what you want or need to change. And thanks to the powerful LLM (Large Language Model) integration, every interaction will feel more seamless and natural — and your communication will continue to improve over time. Here are a few highlights of what ChatGPT integration means for your coaching experience.

Fine-tune your training program

Let’s say you’re working with Humango to guide you to peak performance in a Gran Fondo race, but you’re curious to see if you could train for and compete in a short, local criterium race. Tell Hugo. By talking to it just like a human coach, you can let Hugo know the additional race you want to train for, and it will automatically add the goal and create a plan for accomplishing it.

Or, you can now ask Hugo for a day off during the week. It’s as simple as saying, “Hugo, I need a day off.” That’s all it takes for Hugo to clear your workouts for the day. Need to log a sickness or injury? Instead of trying to figure out how to input that info into your Humango dashboard, just tell Hugo and let it adjust the intensity or duration of your upcoming workouts.

As a Humango athlete, you can use the conversational power of ChatGPT to get the most out of your interactions with the app. Whatever information you need, it’s just a quick chat away. You can even ask Hugo where specific data fields are located, to help you navigate the app, or let it know you’re tired and ask it to adjust the next workout. 

Race days made easy

One of the benefits of working with a coach is their ability to create a race strategy based on the months of training data available. For athletes, the race plan provides a significant confidence boost; instead of guessing how they might do, they have a clear understanding of what a perfect race, a good race, or even an off-race will look like. Humango’s AI and ChatGPT integration makes asking for and receiving general race advice easier than ever. 

Humango’s AI has always been capable of handling all the tasks above. But now, the integration of ChatGPT makes it simple to access and take advantage of these features. All you have to do is ask.

At first glance, the time demands of work and family make the idea of training for and finishing a triathlon feel like a fantasy. Even more fantastic? Training to be competitive in a triathlon. Well, it’s no fantasy — getting to and flying through your next triathlon while managing a career and a happy family can be done. All it takes is expert time management, the perfect training plan, and the ability to endure hard yet relatively short workouts. The time management and determination are up to you. The perfect training plan? Humango can help with that. 

Plug in your goal race and time available each week to train, and Humango’s AI-powered coach, Hugo, will map out a unique plan that considers your current fitness. And when life interrupts, as it always does, your Hugo will reconfigure your plan to put you back on track. That said, there are some things to know before you tackle a time-saving triathlon plan.

Sprint and Olympic Distance Triathlons? Yes. Ironman Triathlons? Not Recommended.

Objectively, a triathlete with less than 10 hours to train each week will struggle to accrue the necessary mileage required to finish — much less race — an iron-distance triathlon of 70.3 miles for the half and 140.6 for the full. But, 10 hours a week is plenty to race a sprint triathlon (16 miles) and enough to pull together a strong effort in an Olympic distance triathlon (32 miles). 

Thanks to Humango’s AI, all you need to do is plug in your goal distance and the event date. Based on your current fitness level, the AI coach will lay out a training plan to get you to the start line in top shape. If the prescribed workload is too much, you can change your goal to better match your training availability. (switching from a half-iron-distance race to an Olympic-distance triathlon). 

Train Smarter and Harder, Not Longer.

With less time to train, you need to make every workout count toward building up your capacity to swim, bike, and run at threshold, which is the maximum amount of power or speed you can sustain for one hour. As such, most of your workouts will be extended intervals at just under your threshold intensity or short, max-effort intervals designed to boost your top-end power. The silver lining to these hard workouts is they don’t last long, and thanks to the nature of triathlon, you spread them among three different sports, utilizing your muscles in different ways. This means less risk of burnout or injury since you have plenty of time to recover from each workout.

After uploading the results of each workout (heart rate for running and heart rate and power, if available, for cycling), Humango’s coach can ascertain whether or not you’re on track, falling behind, or progressing ahead of schedule and able to adjust the training plan accordingly.

The Humango AI Edge

For time-crunched triathletes, every single workout matters. Missing half a week due to unexpected things in life will impact your progress, but a tech-enabled coach who readjusts the rest of your training plan after those missed workouts can mitigate the setback. The program will bring you back to speed gradually, assigning workouts and intensities you should be able to handle as you rediscover your training rhythm.

Come race day, you shouldn’t have doubts or “woulda, coulda, shoulda” scenarios playing through your head on the start line. With Humango’s training plans and your hard work during every training session, you know you arrived in the best form possible. That’s all you need to execute your best race possible.

Despite their non-contact nature, cycling, running, and swimming still generate overuse and overtraining injuries. Common ailments include sprains, muscle strain, joint pain, and stress fractures. In some respects, these injuries can feel more insidious than, say, a broken bone caused by a collision on the playing field. Why? Because they don’t always feel catastrophic when they happen. As a result, many athletes push through the pain, unwilling to throw out weeks or months of productive training by stopping to heal.

Common Signs That Lead to a Future Injury

A poor training plan that demands an athlete do more volume or higher intensity than their body is ready for is one of the top paths to physical destruction. While the body is excellent at adapting to the workloads placed on it, adaptations take time to evolve. Hence, the classic progressive training plan that builds up the athlete’s endurance and strength week by week. 

Another common source of overuse injury is poor gear fit. The most advanced and highest-performance gear will do more damage than good if it doesn’t fit properly. This could mean anything from running shoes that don’t fit or support an athlete’s foot to bicycles that aren’t adjusted to maximize an efficient pedal stroke and rider comfort. An athlete will significantly reduce their injury risk by taking the time — and investing the money — to find the perfect fit.

Not warming up before an intense workout or race also contributes to injuries, specifically muscle pulls and strains. A light 5-10 minutes of activity is all it takes to prime the muscles and joints with blood flow and go. At the end of a workout, a 5-10 minute cooldown will help reduce muscle soreness and pave the way for better recovery. 

Reduced Injury Risk Through Coaching

Coaches know that they need to push their athletes to the limit and just beyond to help them reset their mental and physical awareness of what’s possible. Conversely, a coach can’t continually push athletes to exhaustion day after day. If they did, their athletes’ injury risks rise dramatically, and a coach who guides athletes to injury will quickly find themselves out of a job.

A massive part of avoiding these injuries comes from listening to the athletes. Are they tired? Are they sore when they shouldn’t be? Are they in any pain? Another guide to avoiding injury comes from monitoring athletes’ workout data. Were they able to complete the prescribed workout? Was their heart rate higher than expected? Were their watts at threshold on the bike down while perceived exertion was up? If so, these early signs indicate that the athlete has not recovered and is pushing themselves into a window where overuse injuries can occur.

The AI Assist for Training Smart

With Humango’s AI app, athletes can load their workout data into their program, let the AI crunch the results, and set up the next workout. Humango’s intelligence will prescribe a program that incorporates rest and recovery while ensuring that the athlete stays on track to become faster, stronger, and more resilient. The guesswork that can often plague a motivated athlete (Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much?) disappears. The AI-generated plan will accommodate warm-ups and cool-downs and add cross-training to shore up muscles that don’t see much use in a sport (i.e., hamstrings in cyclists).

Ultimately, Humango’s AI coach utilizes a data-driven approach to keeping the athlete on track to achieve their goal by prescribing the right amount of training volume and intensity along with the necessary amount of rest and recovery. The net result should be a successful, injury-free journey.

The multi-week taper is the most welcome block in any periodization training program, and it’s not hard to see why: the hard work is done. There are no more days where the athlete is pushed to their limits and beyond. The day-to-day exhaustion from the final building block of workouts is over. In short, the athlete is as fit and strong as they’re going to get — and they should have a pretty good understanding of how well prepared they are to finish, compete, or even win their goal event. 

From the start of the taper, a good training cycle will have the athlete reduce their workload, which gives their body time and energy to recover, grow stronger, and build up the endurance to crush their race. Ideally, the taper will leave an athlete bursting with energy in the last few days before their event. But a taper gone wrong can leave the athlete tired (they didn’t taper enough) or with lost fitness (the taper was too long or too easy). Even messing with sleep patterns can throw off a taper. Too little sleep won’t give the body the time it needs to recover and recharge — a tough battle to fight when the body feels, but may not be, brimming with energy.

Like everything in life, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to tapering. Each person needs to find and follow the unique taper that works best for them and their event. Shorter events such as a 5K running race or sprint triathlon require a shorter taper than a marathon or half iron-distance triathlon. Same goes for a time-trial bike race of roughly one hour vs. a 100-mile mountain bike race that takes 8-10 hours.

Better Tapering with Coaching

Even experienced endurance athletes with decades of training get their tapers wrong. Something unusual throws them off their game and takes their taper with it. It can be a business trip where they did zero training when they needed to do something to maintain their fitness. Or it could be something as benign as a hike with friends or family that somehow turned into an all-day, exhausting slog. Illness, lack of sleep, you name it — there are a myriad of ways to screw up a taper.

A coach can review the data to determine what’s going right or wrong and adjust the taper accordingly. Even if the taper goes wrong due to a sustained respiratory illness, a coach can modify the taper enough to salvage what’s left of the athlete’s fitness. Likely, the coach will modify the athlete’s performance expectations as well. For example, the goal of a PR (personal record) might be lost, but a solid and respectable performance is still possible.

The taper is where races and peak performances are won and lost. A coach, even Humango’s AI coach, can help athletes do it more effectively and confidently. An athlete who believes in their taper will bring that confidence to the event — and that may be the biggest boost a perfect taper provides. 

There are two types of athletes in the endurance sports world: those who train with a coach and those who don’t know how much more successful they can be by working with a coach. Fortunately, Humango’s AI coaching app gives athletes ranging from experienced competitors to novice participants access to the benefits and guidance of a customized, flexible, and effective training program. As the following stories highlight, Humango’s app can unlock your best performances whether you’re a runner, cyclist, or triathlete.

The First-Timer

“Humango is a fantastic way to structure training,” says Mathew Hann, who trained for his first 70.3 triathlon using the Humango app. Instead of generalized workouts, the coaching AI adjusted his training loads and intensities for what he could do. The result was a plan that didn’t grind him into the ground but pushed him harder than he may have pushed on his own. Posting a time of 4:42, he finished 13th in his age group. Hann’s result speaks to the accelerated learning curve that a coach provides.

The World Traveler

Przemek, a 40-something professional from Poland, used Humango AI to train for his first sprint triathlon last spring. His finish of 1:33 kicked off an aggressive calendar of goal events that will carry him into next year, ending with a 70.3 triathlon despite a heavy business travel schedule. “Next one would be a half distance 70.3 in spring 2024,” Przemek says. “I may have to take 5-9 business trips with some training to be done in other EU countries.” That Przemek can see a pathway to training for and compete in a half-iron-distance triathlon despite his travel schedule speaks to another benefit of an AI coach: adaptability. With Humango’s ability to restructure workouts daily, Przemekcan trusts that he’s on track to be ready to go on race day, no matter how haywire his schedule gets. 

The Pain-Free Runner

“I’ve lived with running-induced knee pain my entire adult life, but with Humango’s strength training (guidance), I’m finally running knee-pain-free!” claims Bethany Thibou of Milwaukee. Strength training is a core ingredient in any Humango endurance program, and as Bethany’s experience shows, there’s a good reason for that. A strong core and body serve as the steady platform for all endurance sports. Humango athletes can all expect a comprehensive strength-training component to their program, one designed to produce exceptional results on the course, not in the gym.

The Multi-Tasker

An oft-overlooked benefit to working with a coach is the coach’s ability to incorporate training for multiple sports simultaneously. Take the case of Humango athlete, Billy Richards. “With Humango, I no longer have to go through the mental process of creating plans since the training automatically fits my schedule,” he says. “It helps to create plans when training for different events at the same time, which is a game changer for me. Currently, I’m training for a half marathon event as my A race, but I’m doing some cyclo-cross racing too.” With Humango managing his workloads and intensities automatically, Richards is assured that his cyclo-cross training and racing will contribute to making him a faster runner overall.

The Team Player

For Guy Stapleford, Humango’s AI data has helped his longtime endurance coach, Pav Bryan, turbocharge his training — and his results. “I’ve been working with a coach for a couple of years now, but with Humango’s AI, we’ve been able to take my training up a gear,” he says. “Humango adds a huge amount of intelligence to how I work with my coach, and it has enhanced my training plan and the results we see from it.” Humango’s role as Stapleford’s assistant coach is another example of how Humango AI can elevate the human-coach-to-athlete dynamic with improved data, faster adaptability, and more flexibility. Stapleford’s coach can spend more of their energy coaching the mental side of Stapleford’s athletic journey while leaving much of the workout planning to Humango’s AI.

Taken together, Humango’s AI coach can help athletes through a wide range of sports, training options, setbacks, recoveries, and multi-disciplinary focuses. As these Humango athletes can attest, using Humango won’t shrink your world of possibilities to fit its intelligence. It will expand your potential and give you the confidence to set more ambitious goals.

There’s a reason so many novice runners set a 5k running race as their first goal. First, the couch-to-5k promise is a realistic goal for nearly anyone, even if they haven’t run since middle school P.E. class 20 years ago. A 5k — that’s 3.1 miles — is a short running race that usually takes beginners 30 to 40 minutes to complete. Best of all, getting in shape to finish one only requires a minimum of three 20-40 minute runs a week and roughly 7-12 weeks of training.

The beauty of the 5k race goal is that you’re motivated to stick to your running. If you stick to your running, you’re more likely to make running a habit. And once it’s a habit, distances that seem impossible now — a half-marathon or even a full marathon — will be absolutely achievable. 

Want To Run a 5K? You Need a Plan

Couch-to-5K running plans for beginners flood the Internet and lay out similar basic instructions. Start with a run/walk sequence to get through those first couple of weeks of workouts. Give yourself a day off after each run to let your body recover and adapt to the new load on your body. Don’t worry about running hard or fast or long; run at a conversational pace. (If you’re too winded to talk with a running partner, you’re working too hard.) Your body has to learn how to run and find its natural stride before you can turn on the speed and intensity.

Easy enough. But these beginner running plans don’t account for your current fitness level and where you are on your fitness journey. Instead, they serve as a low-risk entry into the sport where, unfortunately, you need to figure out what works through trial and error. Is the workout too easy? Too hard? An athlete who’s spent the last 20 years as a serious road cyclist and mountain biker will respond very differently to novice training than a new mother looking for a productive way to get out of the house and take care of herself. A coach can help each find a training plan that fits their goal — and their current fitness.

How an AI Coach Increases the Odds of Running Success

A coach will set you up with a training plan matched to your fitness level, athletic history, and time constraints. A coach will adjust your training plan to account for an illness, a business trip, or if you’re finding things too easy or hard. A coach removes a mountain of doubt from the process, letting you focus on each workout and nothing else. A coach can also be expensive.

Humango’s AI coaching app does everything above but for much less. Plus, it can adjust your next workout. Was it too easy? Too hard? Hit “replan” and it’ll modify your next workouts accordingly. As such, you know that every run is the very best one you should be doing. It won’t elevate your risk of injury by giving you a workout that’s too hard, and it won’t give you one that’s so easy you won’t see an increase in your endurance.

Best of all, after you finish your first 5k (which you will), an AI app can take that data from your couch-to-5k journey and show you how that half-marathon is now possible. 

Running Tips for Beginners

Running Shoes: There’s only one simple rule for your first pair of running shoes: Buy shoes that fit comfortably. A dedicated running shoe store can show you what to look for in a well-fitting running shoe and help you find a comfortable pair you want to run in.

Nutrition: Eat a snack at least one hour before you run to fuel up for your workout and give your body enough time to digest it. Afterward, eat a small snack within 15 minutes of finishing your run. This timely nutrition will speed up your recovery.

Warm-up: Skip stretching before you start running. Instead, try a range-of-motion, dynamic warm-up to get the blood flowing through your joints and muscles. Stretch afterward to aid recovery and help reduce muscle soreness.

Everyone hits a fitness and strength training plateau. You know you hit yours when you stop climbing your benchmark hill quicker or your 50-yard swim splits stop dropping. You feel like you can’t get any better as an athlete. Frustration sets in, and your athletic goals look suddenly impossible to reach. But it’s not all bad. A plateau signals that your body has become hyper-efficient and optimized to complete whatever workout you’re doing. Consider it a backhanded biological compliment. 

A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Health & Public Health found that endurance athletes will generally hit a plateau after the first four weeks of training. The study further states that athletes only reached 75 percent of their capacity at the plateau. Put another way, you think you’re stuck at completing 15 pushups successfully, and you swear you can’t do anymore. Science says you have five more reps in you.

Most athletes first try a simple solution. They do even more of the same in a misguided effort to break through. They run seven miles instead of five. Bike 30 miles instead of 25, or do more barbell squat reps with the same weight on the bar. Science shows this only makes you better at running or biking at the same speed or lifting the same weight. The real solution is variability and change. Throw your body a curveball, and force it to adapt — and grow — all over again. Here’s how.

Check Your Data

In many cases, training plateaus because effort and intensity start to wane. For example, if your workouts have transitioned from “work” to enjoyable runs or rides, you have a problem. It’s time to push yourself outside of your comfort zone again if you want to improve performance. Your data will tell the tale: Has your average heart rate during training dropped even though you go your usual pace? Are you following the same route(s) for every workout to the point that your body isn’t challenged anymore? Congrats on making your workout easy, but that’s not the point. Easy won’t make you better.

Time to change things up and choose new routes that include some hills that leave you breathing hard. Instead of running at the same pace, split your runs between slower, longer jogs and shorter, faster sprints. Progress comes from increasing your intensity. Humango’s AI-powered training app does just that. It will spot a change in your threshold power based on your workout data and adjust the intensity of the workouts accordingly. All you have to do is keep at it.

Additional Plateau Busters

Nutrition plays a valuable role in overcoming a performance flatline. Check to see if your weight has changed thanks to your new baseline fitness. If it has, adjust your food intake to match your new optimized body. You should see performance improve.

Take an extra day or two off. The human body needs recovery time — especially sleep — to build muscle and neural pathways that lead to better performance. When you’re doing nothing, your body has the time and energy to adapt to your workouts and grow stronger. 

Add a dynamic warm-up to your daily workout. Go through a full-body range-of-motion routine to loosen up your joints and muscles and then a short, easy cardio session long enough to break a sweat. Priming your cardiovascular system and muscles for work should pave the way for a better, next-level workout. 10-15 minutes is all it takes.

Successful athletes do the work. They log the hours in the gym, on the road, in the pool — whatever it takes to become the best athlete they can, they do it. Sounds simple, right? On paper, it is easy. In real life, it never is. While a conditioned body is essential, it takes an equally well-trained mind to succeed. And that’s where so many of us fall short of our true athletic potential.

Whether you call it mental toughness training or mental health training, developing your mindset is just as critical as an interval workout. And it does take work. The good news? Like your muscles, your mental game grows stronger and more reliable the more you work it. And like endurance training, mental training benefits from a coach that guides you to optimum performance.

The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) believes so strongly in coaches learning how to develop mental toughness that they offer a class on it. In the course, they identified four keys to a successful mindset for competitors: motivation, performance under pressure, confidence, and focus. Below, we show how Humango’s AI coach can help you develop all four aspects of toughness.

Motivation

Motivation is the first and easiest step to build a tougher you. Motivation is the desire to do hard things outside your comfort zone. Set ambitious goals for yourself and use them to fuel your pursuit. Too often, athletes fall short of their potential because they play it safe, setting goals that take work but are most definitely achievable. Elite athletes don’t want safe. They want to be the best, even if that means failing multiple times in different ways on their way to the top.

Humango helps by showing you a structured, progressive path to achieve your ultimate goal. All training plans and coaches do this, but Humango’s AI designs its plan to suit you — and only you. Once you see it, you can do it. And if you can do it, you’re motivated to do it, and your chances of success grow exponentially.  

Performance Under Pressure

Illness, weather, work, family, equipment issues — all these factors can and will conspire to derail your endurance training. But elite athletes won’t let them. Instead, top performers adapt, adjust, and stay consistent. They keep control. And that same mental agility allows them to keep going on race day no matter what happens. By overcoming adversity in training, they prepare for it in competition.

Humango helps by automatically adjusting a training program to compensate for a missed workout (or a poor one — it happens) so you can stay on track. No need to worry when the pressure of life starts messing with your workouts. Humango’s got it handled.

Confidence

Studies have repeatedly shown that confidence will separate two athletes with similar physical traits. The one lacking it might be a respectable college-level performer. The one with it can be an Olympian. But here’s a cool secret: Confidence is learned and earned. Through years of training and competition, you develop confidence in yourself. You know what works and what doesn’t. With confidence, you can realistically fake it ’til you make it. How? By believing in yourself and trusting that you will achieve what you set out to do. 

Humango helps by providing you with a training plan you can trust. Trust instills confidence. When you’re on track to your best performance, you have the confidence to push yourself to reach it.

Focus

Focus is a more difficult attribute to develop, but it comes with the biggest payoff. That’s why it forms the backbone of your mental game. Focus is the narrowing of your mental energy to the task at hand, whether your goal event or a series of intervals. Focus also means discipline, and this is where mental toughness comes into play. Top athletes apply discipline to their nutrition choices, sleep habits, and commitment to each workout. In short, focus involves making constructive decisions, not destructive ones that make your goals harder to achieve. Like confidence, focus takes practice, and anything you can practice, you can improve. 

Humango helps through its customized training program built for your athletic goal and lifestyle. You’ll have an easier time staying focused if you break up your goals into one workout at a time. All you need to do is put your attention on your effort. Plus, Humango’s feedback data will reassure you that you’re on track, leaving you committed to the task at hand rather than wondering how you’re doing. Let Humango’s AI process the results and adjust your next workout accordingly. 

Everyone hits a fitness and strength training plateau. You know you hit yours when you stop climbing your benchmark hill quicker or your 50-yard swim splits stop dropping. You feel like you can’t get any better as an athlete. Frustration sets in, and your athletic goals look suddenly impossible to reach. But it’s not all bad. A plateau signals that your body has become hyper-efficient and optimized to complete whatever workout you’re doing. Consider it a backhanded biological compliment. 

A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Health & Public Health found that endurance athletes will generally hit a plateau after the first four weeks of training. The study further states that athletes only reached 75 percent of their capacity at the plateau. Put another way, you think you’re stuck at completing 15 pushups successfully, and you swear you can’t do anymore. Science says you have five more reps in you.

Most athletes first try a simple solution. They do even more of the same in a misguided effort to break through. They run seven miles instead of five. Bike 30 miles instead of 25, or do more barbell squat reps with the same weight on the bar. Science shows this only makes you better at running or biking at the same speed or lifting the same weight. The real solution is variability and change. Throw your body a curveball, and force it to adapt — and grow — all over again. Here’s how.

Check Your Data

In many cases, training plateaus because effort and intensity start to wane. For example, if your workouts have transitioned from “work” to enjoyable runs or rides, you have a problem. It’s time to push yourself outside of your comfort zone again if you want to improve performance. Your data will tell the tale: Has your average heart rate during training dropped even though you go your usual pace? Are you following the same route(s) for every workout to the point that your body isn’t challenged anymore? Congrats on making your workout easy, but that’s not the point. Easy won’t make you better.

Time to change things up and choose new routes that include some hills that leave you breathing hard. Instead of running at the same pace, split your runs between slower, longer jogs and shorter, faster sprints. Progress comes from increasing your intensity. Humango’s AI-powered training app does just that. It will spot a change in your threshold power based on your workout data and adjust the intensity of the workouts accordingly. All you have to do is keep at it.

Additional Plateau Busters

Nutrition plays a valuable role in overcoming a performance flatline. Check to see if your weight has changed thanks to your new baseline fitness. If it has, adjust your food intake to match your new optimized body. You should see performance improve.

Take an extra day or two off. The human body needs recovery time — especially sleep — to build muscle and neural pathways that lead to better performance. When you’re doing nothing, your body has the time and energy to adapt to your workouts and grow stronger. 

Add a dynamic warm-up to your daily workout. Go through a full-body range-of-motion routine to loosen up your joints and muscles and then a short, easy cardio session long enough to break a sweat. Priming your cardiovascular system and muscles for work should pave the way for a better, next-level workout. 10-15 minutes is all it takes.

New endurance athletes start from zero when training for their sport. They need to learn what their body is capable of and, more importantly, what their brain is capable of. Jumping into a training plan for that first marathon, gravel ride, or triathlon, these athletes push blindly ahead, hoping for the best. 

Elite athletes have years of experience to draw from. They’ve gone through the learning process, figuring out what works for them, what doesn’t, and how to bounce back from injuries, illness, or even a long break from competition. But here’s the thing: Like novices, even top amateurs and pros are constantly tweaking their training and adapting it to the consequences of getting older and slower or, conversely, growing faster and stronger.

This is where the potential of AI-driven endurance sports training holds so much promise. Through machine learning and aggregation of data from your workouts and thousands of athletes just like you (same sex, same age, same sport, same fitness level, and so on), artificial intelligence optimizes every move you make, ensuring your effort and time are never wasted, even if it tells you to lie down and take a nap. 

5 Ways Data-Driven Training Can Optimize Your Fitness

Knowledge is power, but only if you put that knowledge to use. Here are some practical ways that AI technology does it for you.

1. Let’s Get Personal

Training through data analysis starts on day one. With an AI coach such as Humango, you enter your goal race. Let’s say it’s a half-marathon three months away. You plug in your available training slots and your fitness level. From there, the digital coach will design a customized training plan to get you across the finish line and get you there at your peak fitness level.

With AI training, you get a plan built around who you are right now, not a program that asks you to adapt to a general program built for 18-year-olds and 80-year-olds.

2. Real-Time Feedback and Adjustments

Even athletes who work with coaches deal with delays, waiting days or weeks or more before their coach analyzes the previous workouts and maps out the next training block. But with AI, the analysis and adjustments happen immediately. Based on the results of today’s workout, tomorrow’s workout will either remain the same, push you a little harder, or dial the intensity down so you can recover. Either way, the instant feedback ensures that every workout is the most productive and effective it can be.

3. Data-Driven Recovery

The popularity of sleep trackers has made millions aware of the power of good sleep. The same power applies to recovery and rest from your training. In fact, one could argue that the balance between pushing hard in training and allowing yourself enough time to recover is the most valuable insight a coach can provide. Negative adaptations — slower and less-powerful workouts, lack of sleep, irritability — are all signs that a good coach will spot before they destroy your progress. An AI coach will spot those trends before you feel them and adjust the training accordingly.

4. More Data Equals Better Training

As you work towards your race day, the AI coach keeps learning more about what makes you tick. Workout by workout, your training program becomes more uniquely relevant and customized for you and only you. For example, instead of arbitrary, high-intensity, all-out efforts of two minutes, the AI coach may start you at 75 seconds and gradually increase the length of them over time. In short, each day’s training becomes more finely tuned. And with each AI-powered training program you complete, the AI coach learns more about you so that year by year, you come closer and closer to the perfect plan.

5. Ability to Push Harder

Following on #4 above, as AI learns more about your capabilities, it will also learn how hard you should be able to push yourself in training — and in your goal event. In many cases, this may be harder than you think you’re capable of. And that’s a good thing. The difference is that AI coaching (and top endurance coaches in general) will guide you to those exceptional performances without burnout, allowing you to save your all-out efforts for the days they will produce maximum results, ideally on race day. The key is to trust your coach and see what your body can do, even if your mind thinks it can’t. 

Combine these five training optimizations, and you have the recipe for becoming the best athlete you can be and staying at the top of your game for years — if not decades.