the science part of coaching is relatively straigh forward.. it s very simple. I m sure you could make a program for this. Or simply grab a physiology book and write your own plan. there are already program like you mention and they do provide some value. But they have never been able to breakthrough in the market because of the limitation. perhaps the program could be improve further


What set the best coach aside is there experience and ability to make the right decision with non quantifiable elements that affect training.

That s the main reason you hired a coach..... experience. if someone dont value this...i think library should get them in good hand to be self coached.

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

Definitely. Human coaches are irreplaceable, and add a lot of value when it comes to motivation and non-data related topics.
What do you think of the communications platforms though (like trainingpeaks, etc)? It seems people would benefit from having better services - and some athletes, who don't have the capacity to have a personal coach, find it valuable to have an automated way to understand their data, while being able to interact with it, give it feedback, etc.

As a coach yourself, what tools do you use to communicate with your athletes, and are you satisfied with those?

Simon Whitfield started a company/app doing this a few years ago. I don't think it's around anymore though.

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Group Eleven – Websites for Athletes / mikael.racing / @mstaer

1st thought is that you need to offer a way to login besides FB. That is a dealbreaker right at the start for some.

What's your favourite connection way? Email or Strava would be good?

Very interesting - do you know him personally? Would love to talk to him, would be extremely relevant

Email is best in my opinion. I dislike having logins that rely on other services, particularly FB. Somehow using Strava for athletic sites doesn't bother me as much.

training peak is simply a convenient way to log in your workout and for the coach to review them. I personally don't have much interest for the different function, or performance chart etc.

I talk almost daily with athletes so the medium of communication/analysis/feedback is different.

but was i was referring to in my initial post was program like Triton that Simon Whitfield was involved with as a figure (not as coaching or programmer) and a few other program that were around and doing what your looking at.

in short, each of those program was match to a forum where a online coach would provide feedback and guidance for the shortcoming or limitation of this system. in simple term, those program was giving you a basic already made cookie plan and making small adaptation/change depending on what you would enter as feedback etc.

I m sure there is a market for this, and as long as a athlete understand the limitation of such system, it could be usefull

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

I think AI has potential to help with coaching. I see coaching as part art and part science and I think AI could help push the science side of that equation forward but I don't see it replacing human coaches. Not anytime soon, anyway.

You can now use R in Golden Cheetah. I think people are mostly using it to create custom charts, but I know some people have shown interest in attempting to build some machine learning models. Alan Couzens also has some blog posts about using machine learning in his coaching. I'm not sure what he's using it for exactly, but I do remember some blog posts about him using it to try and predict injuries. You might find those posts interesting.

I tried your link but nothing came up.

No, I don't. But he's very accessible on social media and other channels.

I agree with the others here. This can only go so far before you hit some serious limitations. Probably why Whitfield's venture did not ultimately succeed. It would automatically modify the plan based on some inputs, but sometimes the modifications need to be made based on intangible feedback. For example, the athlete may be saying they feel good and read for a session, but the coach can hear in the tone of the voice that the athlete is actually fatigued and not sounding super pumped – probably good to dial it back a touch in that case, or address external issues that may be impacting energy and motivation, which are things that are not quite possible even with the currently most advanced AI system.

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Group Eleven – Websites for Athletes / mikael.racing / @mstaer