(Warning: Shameless plug)
We developed Apollo (http://www.physfarm.com/apollo ) with the British Triathlon elite team to tackle some of these issues. It is a desktop / internet fusion product. With a server account, the athlete and coach exchange schedules / training data via a central server. The nice thing is that this allows redundancy: after synchronization, all data exists on the athlete's computer, the coach's computer, and the server. If the athlete and coach go their separate ways, the server account is switched off, and all parties retain all of the data. In other words, there is no need to "export" all of your data from the server. A copy always exists on your machine.
Additionally, the system allows security. All data can be encrypted via SSL to ensure competitors are kept out. (This is obviously a bigger concern at the professional / national team level.) More importantly to "Joe Coach" / "Bob Athlete", each coach has *their own* database on the server. If they decide to go elsewhere the database can be deleted entirely from our server and / or moved elsewhere. We specifically warrant that your data is YOURS, not OURS.
There are no "shake-and-bake" workouts provided with Apollo. The coach actually must author the sessions. (They do have the ability to create their own library of workouts. However, we don't provide anything in the way of workouts for the coach.)
As an aside, athletes would do well to compare the workouts they get from their coach with the workouts that are available as part of the library that comes with any particular product. People are continually surprised by how often coaches who do "custom schedules" are just regurgitating pre-fab workouts. As people have noted above, this is a very real problem.
Phil
--
Dr. Philip Skiba
Scientific Training for Endurance Athletes now available on Amazon!
We developed Apollo (http://www.physfarm.com/apollo ) with the British Triathlon elite team to tackle some of these issues. It is a desktop / internet fusion product. With a server account, the athlete and coach exchange schedules / training data via a central server. The nice thing is that this allows redundancy: after synchronization, all data exists on the athlete's computer, the coach's computer, and the server. If the athlete and coach go their separate ways, the server account is switched off, and all parties retain all of the data. In other words, there is no need to "export" all of your data from the server. A copy always exists on your machine.
Additionally, the system allows security. All data can be encrypted via SSL to ensure competitors are kept out. (This is obviously a bigger concern at the professional / national team level.) More importantly to "Joe Coach" / "Bob Athlete", each coach has *their own* database on the server. If they decide to go elsewhere the database can be deleted entirely from our server and / or moved elsewhere. We specifically warrant that your data is YOURS, not OURS.
There are no "shake-and-bake" workouts provided with Apollo. The coach actually must author the sessions. (They do have the ability to create their own library of workouts. However, we don't provide anything in the way of workouts for the coach.)
As an aside, athletes would do well to compare the workouts they get from their coach with the workouts that are available as part of the library that comes with any particular product. People are continually surprised by how often coaches who do "custom schedules" are just regurgitating pre-fab workouts. As people have noted above, this is a very real problem.
Phil
--
Dr. Philip Skiba
Scientific Training for Endurance Athletes now available on Amazon!