OK, so not a long term experience or an in-depth review, but I’ve been looking at Triathlon plans on Athletica.ai using the 2-week trial and I’ve decided that it’s not for me … but it could be perfect for someone else.
Background is that I’ve been following TR low volume Tri plans for a couple of years. I’m an older athlete, a relative newcomer to endurance sport and very much an amateur who occasionally races rather than a Front of Pack lifetime monster. I was interested in Athletica because of the swim/run integration, the possibility to include strength sessions and the kind of AI-managed adaptations that I’m used to with TR.
The main reason it’s not for me is my available training time, and the flexibility of Athletica workouts. Firstly the prescribed volume is higher than I’m used to. For Olympic Tri plans, Athletica Low volume is the same as TR Medium volume. I’ve tried TR Medium volume and I just can’t fit it in around life, work and commuting. I make TR work for me by adapting the length of bike workouts to fit my 20km commute, and using TrainNow for an easy ride home. Athletica doesn’t have the same flexibility to adapt workout duration, and although the Workout Wizard gives alternatives, the choice seems to be super limited. The choice of workout days is also easier with TR.
Bike workouts:
I did one indoor V02 session, and one outdoor zone2 ride.
The indoor ride was done by importing a ZWO file into indievelo (interesting platform with a lot of promise for virtual racing, with really good rider simulation and avatar interaction, but I don’t think it’s going to lure the majority of people away from Zwift - the virtual environment just isn’t as engaging or as much fun to just ride around in). It was too hard for me - Athletica took my estimated FTP and prescribed me a monster session. This is something that I haven’t had for a long time with TR. Looking at the comments above from @plaursen I suspect that this is because I’m coming off a longish off-season. The last 6 weeks might not have given Athletica enough data so it defaulted to my manual entry?
The outdoor ride was a slight surprise. I hadn’t read about the SmartCoach function, so was a bit surprised to find myself doing a Z2 ride based on HR not power. I think I like this - doing a longer easy ride on HR instead of 3s power feels like riding with a lot more smoothing, instead of getting slightly stressed about the power numbers jumping around. However, my Garmin workout screen is set up with target power and the Garmin graph. The graph was showing HR, but the target power included in the workout was way off - I think it defaulted to FTP, so I just had to ignore it.
Run workout
I did one 50minute zone2 workout. Not much to say, it was scheduled and worked perfectly with a Garmin Forerunner, with a perfect pace zone for me based on the PRs I’d filled in.
Swim workout
I didn’t really do this. Garmin doesn’t let anyone push swim workouts, and I didn’t take the time to manually enter the workout so the one day I swam it wasn’t following the slightly over-ambitious prescribed session. Also my watch refused to record so I ended up using drill mode. But Athletica still picked it up and analysed it.
Strength workouts
Only included for Medium volume plans, which is a shame as it’s a must-have for me, and it woud be great to use a platform that includes everything. I currently subscribe to dialedheath, and the Athletica sessions seem very different : higher reps, much more plyometric than strength based, and less upper body work. I’m also not convinced that the sessions are programmed into the plan taking into account of other sessions, but I could be wrong about that.
Post-workout ratings and AI analysis
Not as smooth as TR - you need to open the analysis box, set RPE, click on the feeling emoji (I think having both of these is redundant) and add a few comments.
The comments analysis is really good - the generated analysis summary picks up on all sorts of things and makes impressively relevant comments. It makes using Athletica significantly less impersonal than using TR. It takes a little time to have the analysis, but it’s really data-rich.
However, with TR I’m used to seeing adaptations to upcoming workouts almost every day. With Athletica I didn’t really see any changes to upcoming workouts. This is possibly because I changed the programming lots of times to explore the different plans, or I just haven’t given it enough time.
After 10 days I can in no way speak to the long-term effectiveness of Athletica. But I feel that it’s not for me at the moment due to the high volume, lack of flexibility in selecting workouts and uninspiring strength sessions.
If I had different time limitations, or if I were a more advanced athlete, then Athletica would probably be better for me than TR (plus it’s cheaper than TR + DialedHealth…). The Swim and Run integration and analysis is so far ahead of TR, the AI “coach” guidance is impressive and the platform independance of bike workouts adds flexibility and ease of use. Also there’s planning for different sport events - I put a 10km running race into the calendar as a ‘B’ event and Athletica gave me a short period prioritising running.
