Are you new to Athletica? Let’s get you started…
Here are a few steps to make your experience flow seamlessly:
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Connect your wearable / Strava. At the moment, we connect directly with Garmin and Concept 2 rowers, and all other wearables via Strava.
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Define your weekly hours in the settings:
Note that when you define your hours, consider what is practical and realistic for you. Put a pen down on paper and map out your weekly training hours. Is there any room for adding 30 mins easy zone 1 work anywhere? Are there weeks where you can do a little more? If not, that is totally fine. 
If you give yourself a little extra time on the upper end, the brain of Athletica will calculate top volume weeks up towards that limit on those top weeks as you prepare for your event. It does not mean all your weeks will be at maximum hours. Limiting maximum hours here can keep the guardrails a little too tight to allow progressive overload.
- Do the test week.
This is super important, especially if you have not done any recent hard efforts, because this is where Athletica begins to get to know you. What type of athlete are you?
Test week includes sports-specific field tests like running 5K Time Trial - running as fast as you can for 5K, or Critical Power Profile test in cycling, or rowing tests.
Based on these tests, we build your Pace/Power Charts like this one
and your training intensity zones:
Why is this important? Sometimes we are contacted by athlete who tells us that their workouts are too intense, or the pace/power targets are out of reach. Usually it is because the athlete has not done their test week to calibrate their pace/power zones.
Note that we use automatic threshold detection, which you can turn off, or set it “Ask me before updating” in your Profile settings:
- Understand the plan changes depending what gets completed
Athletica is an adaptive training program, it is always adjusting the plan in the background based on what did (or did not) get completed.
Practically it means that once you have generated your plan and are looking ahead a few months (we get it, it’s exciting to see what’s ahead! 
) you may find yourself scratching your head. “Where are my long rides or runs?” 
This is where a lot of people misunderstand the plan. If you’ve previously used a generic, static plan which doesn’t change at all no matter what you complete, this is a new territory for you. 
With Athletica, your plan changes as you complete (or skip) workouts, according to progressive overload principles in Sports Science. For instance, If you’ve only logged a 12K long run at week 12, Athletica will not give you 25K at week 14 to avoid injuries and overtraining.
Best advice: Give the plan enough time to give you more “leash” as you go along your merry training sessions. It is learning what you can handle as you complete your sessions. You’ll start to see the whole adaptive training program, if you give it enough time. 
What started with 30 min run, gradually lengthens. See the point about giving the system enough weekly hours above (#2)
- Add subjective markers after each session, including RPE (rate of perceived effort) on a scale 0- Rest to 10 - Maximal effort. Read more about RPE here and here.
Additionally, rate your Feel - straightforward from “AMAZING” to "
," and finally, tell Athletica a little more about how you felt / how the session went.
Try to make it into a habit to fill out this info as we use the combination of RPE/Feel/Comments not only in the session feedback from the AI Coach, but also in the training planning / adjustments. AI Coach does read your comments too, and we encourage you test it out
Give it a try! AI Coach’s feedback may surprise you.
- Use the Workout Wizard when… fatigued/ill/need variation/other modality.
We know life happens and you need to be able to pivot quickly. That’s why we offer almost endless variations of workouts for you to choose from. Maybe you know you are a “diesel” athlete and you do better with long VO2max intervals, you can simply change 30/30s to long 4min intervals using the WW.
Here’s an example from an everyday athlete, just like you.
Saturday morning, AI Coach picked up lower than normal HRV and higher than normal resting HR, which matched athlete’s life stress, lack of sleep and anxiety. What happens next?
Original training plan called for:
Athlete uses Workout Wizard to lower the training stress from ladder run to Steady 1:50 Zone 1/2 run by using the Fatigue options:
Note here, she could also have used any of these “Injury” options
Hit that purple Workout Wizard button and familiarize yourself with the next level flexibility in training with Athletica.
- Join Velocity to maximize short HIIT sessions.
Athletica is built on HIIT Science principles. You’ll find multiple key cycling sessions sprinkled in your training plans for cycling and triathlon. We welcome you to join us on Velocity for Live workouts, replays and all your Athletica workouts as OnDemand. Leverage top science-based workouts with live coaching and maximize your potential!
We LOVE hearing our athletes comment how much more fun they have during these sessions, and how they always push themselves much more … Velocity is doing an amazing job making these sessions fun with gamification!
- Make sure your training intensity zones make sense.
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
First, we highly recommend using a chest strap, not a wrist-based optical heart rate monitor.
Second, if your pace profile looks oddly shaped (see below), it is likely due erroneous data. Potential sources of this are forgetting your watch on and driving your car, treadmill runs, or recording your activity as incorrect modality (recording activity as running while you ski/bike/roller blade).
Here’s an example of a treadmill run that caused the running pace profile chart look really odd, causing intensity zones that were way too hard.
If your chart looks odd, you can find out the exact workout which is causing this by hovering your mouse over the blue line. Click on the workout, then add duration and distance as new activity and delete the old erroneous data.
- Recovery week - how to insert a recovery week as needed.
Head on to Overview, look at your Roadmap, and click on the date of the week you wish to change.
Here, you can either swop with another week in the road map, or toggle “change to recovery week”. Perfect for those family vacation weeks, or work travels when you know time is limited.
- Move or delete sessions as needed
If workout wizard, or changing an entire week to a recovery week is not your jam, you can always move, or delete any session.
If you miss a session, it is generally better to “let it go” and pick back up again the day after, instead of trying to catch up later, and potentially causing too much fatigue, risking an illness or injury.
If you know you’re not going to get to your workout, simply hit the three dots on upper right corner and hit delete.
Or grab the workout by the title and move to another day being mindful not causing too many workouts in the same day.
A good rule of thumb is to separate hard days with an easy day in the middle (athlete and experience dependent, of course).
- AI-coach is available for commentary on nearly all pages - to explain charts and training status, looking back and looking ahead.
Saturday’s Golden Nugget with AI Coach/or your own coach’s AI assistant:
Cycling power profile:
You can even choose your preferred AI Coach:
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Settings for more flexibility: Please explore your settings, because you have the power of make a lot of customizations. For example, add your workouts to your Calendar by importing .ics file your Google calendar from your Plan Settings.
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Need some time off from structured training/ or want to a blank plan ready for your own magic?
Go Unscheduled.
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Workout Reserve on Analysis tab and on your Garmin watch - read more here. . Avoid pushing it too far and risk injury or becoming overly fatigued by using the Workout Reserve in Real Time via your Garmin device, or post-session analysis.
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Use the Garmin sync to execute your sessions effortlessly via your Garmin watch. Your workouts will be sent to your watch and all you need to do is to start your watch and follow the instructions. No need to remember all the workout details (super handy when doing x number of intervals etc). Together with Workout Reserve, this allows a much more enjoyable workout experience.
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