Author: Gaelle Abecassis

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.

Triathlons demand stamina and the ability to excel at three different sports back-to-back-to-back: swimming, cycling, and running. As such, one could argue that triathletes are the most complete endurance athletes around. Becoming a successful one takes hard work and commitment. It also takes specialized gear. You need swim gear, a suitable bike, cycling gear, running shoes, and running clothes. You need regular pool access (and a lake for at least one open water swim practice) and bike maintenance and repair skills. You also need time to train and time to recover. For Ironman distance triathlons, it can take years to build up the endurance to consider training for the distance, much less tackle the event. But put all that together, and you’re ready to go. Now, all you need is a plan. That’s where an AI coach can help. 

Three Ways AI Will Make You a Better Triathlete

Below are three ways your triathlon dreams will benefit from having a tech-enabled coach to guide you to each finish line.

1. Set a Baseline.

Sprint triathlons are most newbies’ first entry into the sport. These short-distance races take top pro triathletes about an hour to finish and up to two hours for less fit or experienced athletes. The value of the sprint tri is that participants can finish the race with as little as 6-8 weeks of training. Free training plans are available all over the web. For most people, they work fine. But if you want to perform better than most people, AI can give you the edge you need.

You’ll see two benefits from using an AI coach to create and monitor your training. First, the AI coach will design a plan for your age, fitness level, and available training time. Your plan may not be perfect yet, but it’ll be magnitudes better than the free one you found on a website. Second, the data collected from each completed training session helps inform upcoming sessions, and it’s used to continually improve and build toward your next event, whether it’s another sprint tri, an Olympic distance triathlon, or a half-ironman distance triathlon.

2. Maximize the Gains From Each Workout From Day One.

AI can construct a progressive training program from the data culled during the training from your first tri. From the first week, you’ll see workouts you can complete successfully — even if they look hard at first glance. And if you have an off day or miss a workout, the digital coach will instantly adjust your schedule and workout intensities to account for the setback. The guesswork is gone. All you need to do is provide your AI coach with timely and accurate data to process.

As you get closer to race day, the training plan will taper your workouts to let you recover and grow stronger in preparation for the big day. Tapering is different for everyone, but AI learning gives you a guide for your physical transformation into a triathlete. It will custom-tune your taper, delivering you to race day rested, primed, and physically prepared for your best performance.

3. Race With Confidence, Not a Prayer.

Race day is where the power of AI coaching truly shines. Thanks to the weeks and months of training with an AI coach, you’ll hit the start line knowing that you’ll not only finish, you’ll be primed to achieve your personal best. What seemed like an ambitious goal at the start of your training is now a very real objective. All you need to do is believe it and believe in yourself.

If you’re prepping for your first foray into the world of triathlon or looking to level up in the next race, Humango’s AI-powered coaching app will make sure you’re ready. Then, instead of arriving at a triathlon race wondering how well you could do, you’ll know what you can do.

Apps make fitness success easy.

Today’s coaching apps cover nearly every aspect of an athlete’s journey from novice beginner to elite champion. Apps exist to track and monitor nutrition, sleep, and workouts, and the years of data collected by these apps have allowed the technology to improve steadily. Today, they can adjust training plans or fitness programs automatically to match a person’s endurance progression — or regression — as they work out. Many of the most popular training apps can automatically adjust workout intensities to reflect an improved fitness in terms of functional threshold heart rate and watts data (if on a bicycle with a power meter). 

Sounds great, right? It is, but these apps still rely on the endurance athlete to follow the plan. Real life has a way of fouling those plans. When these complications arise, a coaching app, especially an AI-powered app like Humango, can step in and keep that athlete on track to nail their fitness goal.

Keys to a Successful Training Program

It’s easy enough to sign up for a marathon, endurance gravel ride, or triathlon and grab a free training plan off the web. A goal race or event is the first step. To get to that start line will take more than a well-trained body. A person will need to demonstrate the following soft traits: Resilience, consistency, organization, drive, and focus. 

Successful endurance athletes are born with all of them or develop them over time and practice. An endurance coach can guide an athlete’s development of these traits. In fact, the ability to manage and manipulate these mental aspects of endurance sports is what separates decent coaches from great coaches.

Coaching from a Human or an AI-Powered App Is Still Coaching

AI-powered coaching apps can and do help athletes develop the soft traits mentioned above. Take resilience; AI can parse the data to see how a poor night’s sleep or 24-hour flu negatively affected the day’s performance and adjust the next day’s workout — or the next several — to be easier so that an athlete can recover adequately before starting again. That’s resilience.

This adjustment leads to the next trait, consistency. AI will adjust a training program to help an athlete stick to their schedule instead of burning out and quitting. Next, an athlete must be organized to stay consistent. AI’s ability to easily modify or switch workouts based on available training time ensures that an athlete has the time to get the work done. AI does the hard part of organizing training around an athlete’s life instead of forcing the athlete to organize their life around training.

Drive may seem unrelated to a coaching app, but research shows that a coaching app’s ability to hold users accountable — even if it’s just to themselves — is as effective as that of a human coach. Focus on the immediate task (i.e., the workout) is the last trait AI can help with. With AI’s ability to pull data from years of workouts, it can build a workout program that seems complex at the outset but serves to hold the athlete’s attention and, yes, focus.

It’s All About the Data

A coaching app processes and applies the same data as a human coach to its suggestions. For example, take a runner who fails to do the last two hard pieces of a workout at the assigned pace and intensity. A coach will note that failure and adjust the next training session accordingly. An AI-powered coaching app takes it a step further, instantly drawing on weeks, months, or even years of similar occurrences to ensure the program adjustment doesn’t set the athlete back too far on their road to recovery. AI also won’t push the athlete too hard or too fast based on the data.

In the scenario above, one core benefit of the AI coaching app is speed. The athlete will know how their training program will change as soon as the workout data gets uploaded to the app. There’s no need to wait 24 hours or a week for a human coach to review the data and draw up a new training program. This instantaneous feedback keeps the athlete motivated, driven, and focused. It removes that kernel of doubt that may creep in while they wonder what’s next.

If all this sounds easy, it is, except for one big caveat: the athlete must apply the same soft traits of consistency, organization, drive, and focus to collecting and uploading their workout data as they do to their sport. Without consistent, reliable data, the coaching suffers — whether from a human or an AI coach. Collecting and sharing data can be difficult for athletes when the data doesn’t show progress. Frustration and doubt start to rear their ugly heads. But these times are when a coach who can guide an athlete back on track is most valuable. Training is easy when things go well; not so much when they don’t. When game plans go sideways, having and listening to a coach will make the difference.

Humango uses artificial intelligence to elevate endurance training and boost athletic performance.

Endurance sports have long pushed the leading edge of coaching and technology. Think Bill Bowerman of University of Oregon Track fame, who famously moved U.S. runners’ training for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City to the higher altitude of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, to prepare his athletes for competing at altitude in Mexico City. He later started Nike with the goal of engineering a better running shoe. Over the decades, training technology has only gotten better. We now have heart rate monitors to track the intensity of efforts, GPS units to track speed, distance, and efficiency, and bicycle power meters to measure watts. Artificial intelligence, (AI) promises to bring all that data together and help marathon runners, ultra runners, cyclists, triathletes, and other endurance athletes — plus their coaches — perfect their training.

The Endurance Coach

Athletes who hire a coach to help them achieve their best results can pay thousands of dollars a year for the guidance. The coach designs a training program and then monitors the progress. The most important benefit they provide is knowing when to dial back efforts to avoid burnout or injury and when to push an athlete through a mental block to reach their full potential. The difference between the two is what makes an effective coach. Data helps the coach determine whether a bad training day came from a poor night’s sleep, a bad mood, or over-training. 

Artificial intelligence can process the same data to arrive at the same conclusions. And like the coach, AI can adjust an athlete’s training program to compensate for that poor training day, a sick day, or a week where an athlete can’t train for some reason. A 2022 study published in the online journal PLUS One found that AI coaches were as effective as human coaches in helping people reach a goal. The caveat is that this goal has to be focused and specific, with a clearly identified pathway to success and easily obtainable data to measure progress — exactly what training plans deliver. 

The Novice Athlete’s Shortcut to Their Best Performance

Put simply, endurance training — and coaching — is about managing fatigue. Building endurance means pushing back the moment when fatigue sets in. Most free training plans, even the best-designed ones, factor in a perfect training program where the athlete eats well, sleeps well, and never misses a workout. Unfortunately, life never works that way. A work trip blows a hole in the week’s most important workout. A bout of COVID knocks out weeks of fitness. Managing these setbacks is where coaches really earn their pay.

But cost is the main benefit of the AI endurance coach. Instead of spending thousands of dollars a year, motivated athletes can deploy an AI coach to guide them through their training for a fraction of the price, flu bugs and family vacations be damned. And because of the low cost, novices and beginners to the sport can employ AI to train smarter instead of following the usual years of trial-and-error until injury or simple frustration leads them to invest in a coach.

AI Coaching Still Needs Real Coaches

This new AI-powered era won’t bring the end of human coaching. Successful coaches will always retain the unquantifiable soft skills that no data set can capture. The word of encouragement spoken at the right moment to push an athlete out of their comfort zone or the confident command to take a day off and not feel guilty about it, these are the subtle nuances that require the human touch. Still, AI puts a powerful tool in the coach’s toolbox. AI can now review data quickly and handle the tedious and time-consuming process of rejiggering a training program based on the results. In short, a human coach assisted by an AI coach should be a more effective and efficient coach. That’s a win-win for everyone involved.