Your Training Is About to Change: Inside Athletica’s New AI Coach, HRV Engine & New Athletica Interface

Hi all,

Before the year closes, I wanted to send a short note and let you in on what’s quietly been happening behind the scenes with Athletica and Sports Science 3.0.

We’ve just released a new episode of the Training Science Podcast with our lead data scientist, Dr. Andrea Zignoli:

In it, we unpack:

• How AI agents and RAG (retrieval-augmented) AI sit behind Athletica’s upcoming conversational AI coach

• How our system interprets HRV and resting heart rate to guide day-to-day training decisions

• How we estimate critical power/pace, your power/pace profile, and why we don’t just rely on a generic LLM

• How sentiment analysis of training comments is becoming a new internal load metric

Andrea has a nice way of putting it:

“Athletica is like Paul & Martin’s HIIT Science book – but applied to your own data.”

You can listen here:
AI Agents, HRV Readiness & the Future of Coaching – Training Science Podcast

(Feel free to queue it for your next endurance session.)

I’ve just come back from a closed coaching conference in the US with many of America’s top coaches.

On stage, we did something I’ve been wanting to test in public:

• We connected Athletica’s new AI coach to my own training history

• The room asked it questions like they would to a human coach or sport scientist

• In under a minute, it had read my files, assessed my power profile, my recovery profile, recent sessions, and explained its reasoning behind every response in clear language

In other words, it behaved like a top-level sport science coach assistant sitting on your laptop or phone, with perfect recall of your training history and our HIIT Science framework.

The coaches in the room were… very awake after that.

All of this is leading into a big step for Athletica in the new year:

• New Athletica Interface
  A cleaner, faster UI designed around how athletes and coaches actually use the platform – not just how we’d like them to.

• Conversational AI Coach
  Just like the US Olympic coaches mentioned, you’ll be able to ask questions like:

  • “How recovered do I appear today?”

  • “How have areas of my power profile changed in the last 6 weeks?”

  • “Should I adjust today’s session given how I’ve been sleeping?”
    And get answers grounded in your data, your context, and our AI agents and algorithms – not generic AI chat.

Athletica U (inside your account)
Not only are we offering a sleek new UI and a conversational AI-coach, we offer you our first certificate from Athletica U. This includes short, practical micro-lessons on endurance training, HRV, HIIT, and load management, built from HIIT Science and our Sports Science 3.0 work, in language that everyone can follow.

The Athletica U Cert 1 idea is simple: our new web interface doesn’t just tell you what to do. It teaches you why.

This post is your first touchpoint for that rollout. Over the coming weeks I’ll share more about:

• How the AI coach is architected (and why it’s different from ChatGPT/Gemini)

• How HRV readiness, profile analysis, and Workout Reserve will show up in your day-to-day experience

• How coaches will be able to use the same tools across their squads in the near future (our team’s focus for Q2 2026)
  

If you’re curious and want to be ready when the interface goes live, a few simple steps:

• Listen to the podcast with Andrea – it’s the best “under the hood” explanation we’ve released so far.

• Think about the main questions you’d ask an AI coach that actually knows your training history.

• If you’re a coach, start noting the repetitive questions you answer for athletes and the ones that suck the majority of your time to answer well. Those are the first things we’ll aim to tackle first. If you know those immediately, jump over to the HIIT Science coach community and post so we can prioritize for you.

For many of you, this time of year is either a deep base phase or a long-overdue break from structure. Either way, I’m grateful you’re part of this community and that you care about pairing good science with better training practice.

We’ve got a lot to share in the new year. This is just the start.

Talk soon,
Paul
Coaching Professor / Athletica & HIIT Science