Category: Training

Whether you’re getting ready to line up at your first event or you’re a seasoned veteran looking to qualify for the UCI Gran Fondo Worlds, training is the difference between feeling accomplished or feeling dejected when you cross the finish line.

Throughout this blog, I take you on a journey of self-discovery, guiding you through all the irrelevant and non-individualized training advice found on Google — or from your riding buddies — and helping you find the right pathway for your Gran Fondo preparation.

Goal setting

The first question you need to answer is, “Are you focused on completing or competing?”
The former describes someone happy enough to experience the day, take it at a comfortable pace, and focus on enjoyment and just finishing. The latter describes someone who is treating the event as a race — maybe aiming for the overall win, qualification for the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships, or even just for a personal best finishing time. 

Once you decide what kind of cyclist you are, take an honest, objective look at your current ability. To keep your ego and ambitions out of the equation, use your training data or do some field testing to gauge where you are. Some metrics, such as recent volume and load, current fitness, and thresholds, can provide great insight into your current ability.

With a clear picture of your baseline, you can start looking at events and the demands of those events. If your current longest ride is three hours, it is highly unlikely that you will finish Mallorca 312 (an incredibly challenging Gran Fondo course with a 14-hour time limit for receiving a finisher medal) with only one month to train. This stage can be tricky, but being realistic ensures you set yourself up for success.

Once you have a rough idea of what you can achieve, you can start to look over some of the available options. Factors such as travel distance and cost might come into play. If you aim to compete, you might try to find an event you can specialize in. For example, if you are a lightweight rider who climbs well, a mountainous event might be a good one for you. 

Methodology 

Knowing where your current ability is and where it needs to be, you can start putting a plan in place for getting there. Having a big picture in mind will aid this next step by helping you train consistently and see the biggest improvements. This is where you will periodize your training.

Long low-intensity and steady-state winter training is a little outdated; even the pros include some intensity year-round now. That being said, don’t write it off completely. If you’re a new cyclist, spending your off-season developing aerobic fitness by doing long (“long” being a subjective term here — an hour is a long ride for someone who has never ridden a bike) low-intensity rides might bring the most noticeable gains.

To understand what you need to do, look at your biggest limitation (what needs improving most). If you need to develop your aerobic fitness, spending a lot of time during the off-season riding in the endurance zone (zone 2) will probably be the biggest win. If you’re already capable of riding the duration but need to work on climbing speed or power, work on these specific areas. Of course, you will want to maintain your strengths, too, so it’s always a good idea to include some long, low-intensity rides.

While there are many factors to consider and countless ways to adjust this approach, it’s wise to spend the most time improving your weaknesses. Once you’re satisfied with your progress, you can start to work on improving your strengths. Training in this manner will help you raise your riding level to the point where your goals are achievable. 

Training

If you’ve completed the work in the last two sections, the work in this section is actually relatively easy. Well, deciding on what training to do is easy — not necessarily the training itself! You should know your current ability, where it needs to be, what you need to work on during the off-season, and what you will do as you get closer to the event itself. 

Even if you focus on developing your threshold power, you probably won’t spend 100% of your available time on it. Generally speaking, the less time you have available to train, the higher the percentage of time you dedicate to your main objective — in this case, developing threshold. So, if you have five hours per week, you might spend most of that developing your threshold versus someone with 15 or more hours to train, who will spend far less time as a percentage of their total but still more actual hours.

Two of the most important factors to consider are progression and consistency, which are closely linked. Slowly ramping up your training from your current ability to your desired ability will be the easiest way to ensure you don’t overload your body and mind. In turn, this gradual build will help you maintain consistency. This gentle progression can be easily accelerated if you find it too easy, but utilizing a 3:1 or 2:1 load-to-recovery cycle (three or two weeks of training and one week focused on recovery) and adjusting based on these blocks will help you pace yourself. Often, a workout at the beginning of a training block will feel completely different from the same workout at the end. If you find yourself completing the entire block with ease, that is a good sign that it’s time to increase the load.

Nutrition

“Train low and race high” describes the methodology used to help your body fuel more from its fat stores. While our fat stores provide an almost unlimited fuel source, metabolizing fats takes a long time, especially compared to how quickly our bodies metabolize carbohydrates. Having a fat-adapted body can be especially important for athletes who are riding ultra-endurance events where fuelling from fat stores is essential. For the average Gran Fondo, the risks of not fuelling workouts correctly — thus not giving your body enough chance to recover — often hinder improvements more than they help. 

Periodizing your nutrition might bring the greatest adaptation you can make as a cyclist. This approach involves eating fewer carbohydrates on easy days and more carbs on days that prioritize intensity above tempo (zone 3). The strongest way to ensure this works is to focus on getting most of your daily carbohydrate intake before, during, and after training. On low-intensity days, you should still consume carbs in this manner. Even if you have identified your “fat max” power in testing, you are still burning glucose at this intensity, so replenishing it with carbohydrates will improve recovery.

Recently, we’ve seen more professional teams focusing on fueling their athletes in races, aiming to get far higher than the old advice of intaking 60g of carbohydrates per hour and, in some cases, pushing this to 120g. While there is strong evidence to suggest this approach is achievable for everyone, it comes with the caveat that you need about 12 weeks for your gut to adapt to digest this much. Regardless of your nutritional methodology, it will be smart to start fueling around 12 weeks out to allow your system to adjust and digest the most fuel on event day. Start with 60g carbs and increase slowly every week until you get to 120g. In almost all cases, cyclists stand to lose far more by being unable to digest fuel than by carrying a little extra weight or being slightly more fat-adapted. 

Have fun

I tell all my clients that we need to have as much fun on the journey to our goals as we do in achieving them. (Of course, I also like to add that there will likely be times when they are cursing me in training!)

One of the biggest warning signs that something isn’t working is when you stop enjoying the cycling or find that it simply isn’t fun anymore. Don’t be afraid to change it up. That said, don’t avoid challenging workouts — those aren’t always fun at the moment. Instead, look back after a block of training and ask yourself if you felt engaged or were just doing it because you think you should. 

Long-term performance progression relies on your mental desire and will to do something. Too many people ignore this, focus on doing the “right” training for their Gran Fondo, and then hang the bike up for three or more months because they’re just so sick of it.

None of us started riding bicycles because we didn’t enjoy it. We started because it was fun. Let’s remember that and find ways to make sure our training journey is as fun as the outcome. 

Coach Pav

Coach Pav is an Amazon #1 New Release Author and a coach to clients who have set world records (Mark Beaumont), earned their world champion jersey (Steve Bate MBE), and won ultra-cycling events (Matt Seward and Thomas Becker). 

Mostly, his clients are those riding a Gran Fondo or two, and some are even riding his personal favorite: the Maratona dles Dolomites. 

If you’re like most folks, your New Year resolution to go to the gym three times a week, drop 10 pounds, train for a spring 10k run, or crush an early summer triathlon will crumble by Valentine’s Day. The problem is that these New Year’s resolution ideas are often vague. Consider the “New Year, New Me!” mantra as an example of the worst. Sure, we lay out the goal (an important step!), but we don’t think too hard about the plan to get there. And then, sure enough, motivation peters out, or something else comes up that detour sabotages your fitness journey. Sooner than later, you give up and shelve that resolution until next year.

But in 2024, we’re not going to let that happen. This year, we’re going to make SMART fitness goals. In this case, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound, the five elements of a successful training program. Humango’s AI coaching app will help guide us through the beginning, progression, and finish line. With SMART goal-setting, we’ll turn our resolutions into successful achievements. 

Specific

The more specific the goal, the clearer it becomes in our minds. So instead of saying, “I want to bike a 100k century this year,” say, “I want to ride the Tour de Big Bear Gran Fondo on August 3rd.” This step sets a deadline to reach the goal, defines a location where it will occur, and adds some details to the type of training required (long, sustained climbs and descents to handle the mountainous course). With Humango’s help, we can plug in the event date and the training plan needed (gran fondo), and voilá, we end up with a detailed plan starting on January 1st and ending with the race on August 3rd.

Measurable

Logging and charting our progress is crucial to sticking to any resolution. Thankfully, training for endurance sports such as running, cycling, or triathlons provides tons of measurable data. Mileage, speed, heart rate, and watts are the big ones. The more we log, the more we see the positive progression in our fitness. This visualization generates a positive feedback loop that propels us to maintain our training momentum and keep that positive data flowing. Humango’s dashboard makes it easier and more rewarding than ever to chart and see that growth.

Achievable

For the sake of the “SMART” acronym, Achievable comes third here, but it should sit second on this hierarchy. It’s one thing to define a specific resolution. It’s another to pick one with a high probability of success rather than frustrating failure. With Humango’s help, we can see what is realistically possible given the constraints of real life and our current fitness level. For example, maybe we want to ride the 150-mile Steamboat Gravel Gran Fondo on August 18th. But after entering that goal, we realize we can’t commit the training time needed to pull it off. So, we recalibrate our resolution and shoot for the shorter 70-mile Tour de Big Bear event. Of course, the opposite can be true, as well. We may think we can only pull off the 70-miler, but a quick check with Humango may show us that the 150-mile race is, in fact, very doable.

Realistic

Realistic feeds off Achievable. We want to build our New Year’s resolutions around activities we can either do already or develop quickly. For example, we may dream of finishing a full iron-distance triathlon next year, but if we have no history of doing laps in a pool, it may be a stretch to think we can swim more than two miles at the race (plus biking 112 miles and running a marathon). In this case, being realistic means being honest with ourselves about where we are on our fitness journey and adapting our resolutions accordingly. The key to success is starting where we are — not where we wish we were. 

Time-Bound

We touched on Time-Bound in our discussion of Specific. Simply, it’s assigning a defined deadline to our goals and resolutions. Once we do this, we can work backward to the present and build a training schedule and program that takes us step-by-step to our resolution’s deadline. Humango makes this step easy. All we have to do is plug in the goal date; Hugo, Humango’s AI-powered digital coach, does the rest.

Done right, this SMART approach to setting health and fitness resolutions for the New Year should make 2024 our best year yet.

At the pinnacle of sports coaching, a coach watches your every move, analyzing your form and intensity while noting split times, watts, and heart rates. A coach’s expert eye can correct your form while you practice, but you see the most athletic improvement from the progressive training program they build for you. They will tweak it on the fly, as needed, to help you overcome injury or allow for adequate recovery ahead of a goal event. This data-driven approach has been a boon to athletes at all levels, enabling coaches and athletes to create athlete-specific training programs. 

Research backs this up. A 2022 study from Finland published in Medicine and Science in Sports Exercise found that out of 40 experienced male and female runners, those who followed an individualized 15-week training program ran roughly 6% faster. Those who followed a predetermined and rigid 15-week plan ran only 3% faster. 

That difference may not seem like a big deal, but it works out to 6:18 minutes for a 3:30 marathon runner. Wouldn’t you like to run (or bike or swim) that much faster by doing nothing more than following a real-time feedback training plan unique to you? You wouldn’t work harder. You’d work smarter. 

Data Matters: Crush Plateaus & Avoid Overtraining

Utilizing data analysis to ensure a productive balance between training stress and rest is key to your success. A coach will check your stats to determine whether you recovered enough from the previous workout to tackle a hard workout next. If you recovered enough, then off you go. If not, a light session may be scheduled to keep you from spiraling down into an overtraining scenario. Conversely, you may be adapting ahead of schedule and stuck on a plateau with no improvement in speed. Seeing this data will give your coach the green light to increase your training volume, intensity, or both. 

The data you collect can reveal the difference between a plan that will work for you and one that might work. At the very least, measuring and recording heart rate and duration during workouts is a must. Speed and distance help, if only to provide a clearer picture of your fitness progress or setbacks through repeats of the same distance. Wattage, measured on a bicycle power meter, is the gold standard of intensity and strength measurements. Last is the simplest yet most telling data point: How do you feel? This is called the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). It may seem subjective, but studies have shown RPE is a highly accurate measure of how hard you train.

Put all those numbers together, and you have your unique fitness profile. It’s a lot of information to take in, and knowing what to do with it usually requires the means to hire a full-time human coach who can process all this data each night in preparation for the next day. If you can afford that, great. If not, then you’re effectively training in the dark. Is the next workout the best workout you could do right now, the worst, or somewhere in between? You won’t know for sure. 

This is where Humango’s AI-powered training app shines. Upload your workout data to the app and let it use real-time feedback to adjust your next workout to be more or less intense or the same as scheduled. All you have to do is show up and do the work, knowing that whatever your Humango training plan prescribes, it’s the perfect workout for you.

Common fitness goals and dreams suffer from a case of what we call “the vagues.” Shedding fat, building muscle tone, or losing 10 pounds — modern society has, unfortunately, conditioned us to equate fitness with outward appearances. The reality is this: Fitness is a feeling. You feel strong, capable, healthy, and energized when you’re fit. Odds are that if you pursue a fitness goal like this, you will end up with less fat around your gut and legs, drop weight, and develop some muscle along the way. And you might even develop a new image of yourself as an athlete.

Step 1: Adopt an Athlete’s Mindset

We all know men and women who commit to and identify with a sport. They may be an endurance athlete who swims, runs, bikes, climbs mountains, or all the above. Their approach to fitness involves training for and practicing their sport. Overall fitness is a benefit, not the sole focus, of what they do. This makes them athletes, not simple exercisers. 

Step 2: Set a Goal

Endurance athletes have specific goals with deadlines. These goals can range from running a first 10k to entering an Olympic distance triathlon or biking across a continent. And this goal-setting isn’t limited to endurance sports. It applies to strength training as well. Being able to do 10 pull-ups (or even one!) is a legit athletic goal. With a goal set, the training follows naturally with a prescribed pathway to do whatever you set out to do. Your goal may take three weeks to prepare for, or it might take three years to grow fit enough to accomplish. The key is finding a goal that motivates you.

Step 3: Find a Training Plan

Whatever your athletic goal, a training program exists to prepare you for it. A coach can help you layout your fitness journey and tailor your training to your current availability and baseline strength and endurance levels. Maybe you’re a harried new parent with little time to train. Or you could be single and self-employed with the flexibility to train like an elite athlete. A coach will develop a plan that works for you. Humango’s coaching app does the same. Plug in your goal event and date, and the app will produce a progressive plan to get you to the finish line. Along the way, you should grow stronger, leaner, and faster.

Step 4: Follow Your Training Plan

Unlike general fitness classes that repeat the same workout, a training plan builds you up step by step. A big part of its success involves recording your workout data, sharing it with a coach, or uploading it to an online AI coaching app like Humango. This data will reveal how your progression as an athlete is going. Are you struggling to finish each workout? Are you bored because the training is too easy? The coach — or coaching app — will cull the data and adjust your future workouts accordingly.

Step 5: Finish Strong & Revel In Your Fitness

Achieving the actual goal itself is the ultimate payoff for all your work. Your training plan should deliver you to the start of your event in peak fitness, full of energy, and in top physical shape. Before you launch into competition, take a moment to appreciate the strong, fit athlete you’ve turned yourself into. Then go smash whatever event you entered and relish the accomplishment. 

Step 6: Set a New Goal & Start the Process Again

The wonderful thing about being an athlete is that the pursuit never ends. There are always more goals to shoot for and more events to try. And if you grow bored with training for one sport, you can always try a different one. Exchange running for cycling, for example. Athletic seasons come and go; the athlete’s ultimate payoff is staying fit for life.

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.