Marjaana Rakai (00:00)

this one, the new one, knows your training data. You can actually based on my HRV, my recovery sleep data, what should I do today? And it can give you.

better answers, right? Instead of you waking up, not maybe feeling quite right, and then looking at your data and still wondering what to do.

Paul Warloski (00:47)

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. In this special episode, we're charting a new frontier. You'll meet the latest innovation from Athletica AI, our intelligent coach chat built on both performance science and your personal data. We're going to unpack how it works, why it matters and demonstrate it live in action. If you've ever typed a training question into chat GPT and thought,

This is kind of generic. Imagine the same experience, but the AI has read the HIIT science textbook, knows your last six weeks of training, and has access to the weather, your HRV, and your past comments. This is what we've been building. Today we're introducing Athletica's AI coach.

This isn't a robot that replaces your coach. It's a science nerd assistant that has finally read all the things you don't have time for. Wow. Paul, before we dive into the nuts and bolts, why did you want to build an AI coach in the first place? What problem were we trying to solve for everyday athletes?

Paul Laursen (02:00)

Hey, thanks. Thanks, Paul. That's a great intro and it's a great question to sort of start with. ⁓ I think it probably stems from my own coaching experience and ultimately my inability and my own ego's inability to know it all. just, don't know it all. I can't retrieve everything. I can't be there for every single athlete across everything that they do. And

And I always knew that wearable data merged with AI intelligence was going to be eventually be the road forward. And that's, when we started Athletica with our co-founder Steve, back in 2015, we could almost see it even way back then that's 10 years ago. And we've been on this journey ever since. But of course it wasn't until,

large language models started really and the launch of chat GPT ideally that we knew this was actually going to happen. And then full credit to the inventor of all this that we'll talk a bunch about. So he's been on the podcast many times, Dr. Andrea Zignoli So ⁓ this is really his baby, his work. ⁓ Also Stefano Andriolo who's been on the training science podcast.

as well, we'll have to have him on one time, but he's been instrumental in bringing this forth and really making this ⁓ live and working for all of us today. So yeah, so what problem is really just the overarching, the overall fire hose of information that the coaches on the call, you, me, MJ, we just can't process it all, but.

AI coach with the help of the knowledge of the textbook can give you the right answer in the context or at least a good shot at it.

Paul Warloski (04:01)

You said before that athletes aren't suffering from a lack of information, they're drowning in it. How does this feature help with that?

Paul Laursen (04:08)

Yeah, well, it siphons out what's important in any given context for right now, right? So we're going to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts and how this thing actually works and why it's different than just chat GPT. But yeah, that's just, know, and this started at Rod Siegel, actually, he's, a guy I've been working with and he was actually instrumental. We were working in New Zealand Olympic program.

And, you know, he's written a blog for us at Athletica and he really noted the challenges. Once, you know, once all these wearables were coming into fruition and we had all of this data at our disposal, well, then the problem switched. It wasn't getting the, getting the data in, it was making sense of what was important at any given one time in accordance with what you were interested in. And that's what this, technology now does.

You if you asked a question on recovery, it's, you know, we're going to talk about the agents and how it works. It's really going to focus in on what's that, that recovery, those recovery elements. It's going to siphon out and go dig deep into the components of recovery and take out the noise of all the other stuff. and, and yeah, that's, that's something that our human brains, we can do it. We're just not as fast, Paul. We're just not as quick.

As we know, we can do this, it takes, you it might take you and me and MJ, 15 minutes to get in there and do a really good analysis of it. And of course, as we'll demonstrate today, our AI coach can do that in probably under two minutes.

Paul Warloski (05:41)

Wow, wow. So give us the simple version. What actually is this AI coach chat? I mean, what's happening under the hood when an athlete asks a question?

Paul Laursen (05:52)

Yes, yes, that's a good one. for this, if anyone is interested, anyone wants to geek out, you can read Andrea's paper on this. And he titles it, it's published in Sports Performance Science Reports, Martin's sports science journal. It's titled The Computational Paths of Knowledge in AI Coaching. And in it, Andrea describes ultimately the backend workings of ⁓ our AI coach.

And there's a few different components. There's one is like this RAG pipeline. I'm not sure. I don't think Andrea explained that one to us last time, but RAG stands for Retrieval Augmentation Generation. And ultimately, this is an AI that goes back. It knows my textbook, mine and Martin's textbook, The Science and Application of High Intensity Interval Training. And of course, it's not just interval training in that book. It's

everything to do with training, right? A lot of people call it the Bible of training. basically that's one of the jobs that actually goes in there and knows all the info that's in that book. It's, know, contributed not just by Martin and I, but we say it's built on the shoulders of giants. This is a, you 650 page textbook of, all the sports science that we know that's gone before us, plus 20 other authors. And

Yeah, it goes into that book and has that knowledge. Of course, Chad GPT, it's memorized the internet, which may be valid, of course, and may get other things, but you also get superfluous information that can be a little bit off base sometimes. You might have noticed the listening, might have noticed hallucinations or things that, yeah, I don't think that's actually quite right. Well, that kind of goes away in this system because we're just dealing with training. So that's sort of the first inner workings of it.

It asks that textbook. And then I guess maybe the other thing it works towards is this component of AI that is today, we're recording here in November, we're in the era in the AI evolution of AI agents. Agents, the word actually means like agentic or agency, independence. And we have actually built in these AI agents.

that go and do specific jobs for us. So in the context of your training, what matters to you, we might have like a recovery agent and it just goes in, as I was saying before, it just goes in and finds all the information that you wanna know about your recovery. Or maybe it's like a training load optimization agent and it just goes in and it optimizes the training load in there. at the top of all this,

is like a supervisor that's reading your words, your query that you've put forth. And then it makes its decision to go and get the agent involved that it needs to. Long story short, a lot of gobbledygook there, I know Paul, but we have a super incredible, intelligent, training specific coach that is at your fingertips now here with Athletica.

Paul Warloski (08:49)

Yeah.

Paul Laursen (08:59)

So I mean, I'm so excited because it's now available. We haven't mentioned that, but this is available to you, the user in the new user interface in Athletica. And I'm just so excited for us to release it to the world.

Paul Warloski (09:14)

So I can take my copy and ask of the textbook and ask the AI agent questions and the answers are going to come back. And Marjaanna's got the same textbook. Are we going to be able to understand the training more deeply because of this?

Paul Laursen (09:35)

Well, yeah, certainly should, right? So, again, we are... I was so excited that I had to get on this and get this. This literally got launched five hours ago, so I couldn't maintain myself. I was like, guys, we have to talk about this. And you guys have kindly come on and entertained me here. But yeah, you can just see here, sharing my screen, and I'm testing this, right? And I said, well, can you explain the HIIT science philosophy to me? And it's done a...

Paul Warloski (09:44)

Yeah.

Paul Laursen (10:03)

a really fantastic job, like point number one, individualization and context matters. The HIIT Science emphasizes the effectiveness of interval training depending on the right dose intensity, frequency recovery tailored to your specific physiology, training status and goals. There's no one size fits all. And this is what we say all the time here in Athletica, right? Scientific foundation, and it goes on and on with all these various different features.

Paul Warloski (10:11)

Hmm.

Paul Laursen (10:32)

And so, yeah, we can continue to test this here. And I would encourage you guys to think about maybe a question that we can ask it. But yeah, we should get you, MJ, myself, if you have a question, or the user, they have a question, we put that in there. And it's going to use all these different features to pull out what it thinks is relevant. And it does a pretty good job in my initial testing here.

Paul Warloski (11:00)

Hmm. Wow. The possibilities are endless here. You know, before we get into individual questions, like how is this different than just going to chat GPT and asking for training advice?

Paul Laursen (11:02)

Ha

Well, that's a good question. I see this Paul all the time on forums, because, you know, I snoop, I'm like, I wonder if people are interested in this. I wonder if they're searching for this sort of stuff, right? And I go to slow Twitch and there's various different threads on usage of chat GPT. And many people are saying, wouldn't it be cool if chat GPT could actually look at my training files at the same time without me having to input them in and...

And of course that is what we've built here. And that's why we're titling this podcast. It's HIIT science meets chat GPT. This is kind of what it is. it's here we go. So I've said, how does my recovery look today? And of course, don't forget it's got all my data that's there in, in Athletica, right? My running HRV and heart rate profile. it says,

Paul, your recovery looks good today. Your seven day resting heart rate average is stable at 52 beats, right in your normal range, showing you're not under excessive stress. Your training stress balance is plus 12, which means you've got a positive balance between fitness and fatigue. Correct, correct. Indicates you're fresh and well recovered. Current fitness sits at 46.

recent fatigues 36, you're well matched for handling today's moderate session. So it's looking at today's session, it's seeing it's got a moderate load, it's looking at the recovery and it says at the end, you're in a strong position to complete your plan, strength and endurance bike session, which I've got to do later today. Keep an eye on how you feel. Remember a little fatigue's normal as you build up, but you're managing load and recovery well right now. You want a deeper dive into your weekly trends or advice on recoveries? Just ask.

I love the friendliness, right? And it doesn't get tired like you and MJ, right? And me.

Paul Warloski (12:59)

You

I want to get into some of the questions because I've got a few of them that I've been mulling over with my athletes. if I'm an everyday athlete using Athletica, what are the real benefits going to be? I what's going to feel different for me?

Marjaana Rakai (13:21)

So what's different from this to our AI coach previously is that you can actually chat with this one. Previously, you weren't able to have that back and forth conversation. And some of our very smart athletes have figured out that they can chat.

with the website facing chatbot and have a conversation, but that chatbot is something different and it doesn't know your training data. But this one, the new one, knows your training data. You can actually ask, based on my HRV, my recovery sleep data, what should I do today? And it can give you.

better answers, right? Instead of you waking up, not maybe feeling quite right, and then looking at your data and still wondering what to do. Right. So, yeah, I think, this is a game changer for many of our, our athletes.

Paul Laursen (14:32)

Let's just try that. I'm gonna say, this takes a little while to do, right? We're doing this live and let's just say, so let's pretend, ⁓ say, hey, ⁓ I've woken up and I don't feel very well. What do you think I should do?

Paul Warloski (14:33)

Yeah.

Paul Laursen (14:57)

All right, so let's just see what it says. I have no idea, obviously, this is all, you can see this kind of live. You can see the AI coach is going in there. Now, one of the cool, one of the things that is really important for us to realize is that our response is not ever going to be as fast as chat GPT, right? Because it says, you can see here, it's gathering your data, right? So it's gotta go in there and actually look at all your data. So that's gonna take a bit more time.

So when you're using this tool, we just have to be mindful that it's never gonna be as quick as ChatGPT, right? But, and you can see here, it's a good user experience. You're analyzing the recent activities. It's going all the way back there and looking at all those activities, right? That takes some time, again. So that's just important to be mindful of.

Marjaana Rakai (15:44)

Also prompting well, right? As a user, you want to prompt their AI coach precisely.

Paul Laursen (15:47)

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's it's

for sure. Yeah, and it's finding patterns. And here, let's see what it says. Paul, if you've woken up not well, it's best to prioritize your health and recovery. The core HIIT Science and Athletica approach for situations like this is listen to your body, feel symptoms just beyond mild tiredness, sore throat, fever, chills, cough, body aches, skip today's workout, or choose a very light, low intensity session, gentle recovery, ride or walk, zone one only. So right off the bat, correct.

Rest is often the best medicine. Missing a session or two when you're unwell is far better than risking prolonged illness or deeper fatigue by pushing through. Correct on number two. Hydrate and monitor symptoms, ensure good nutrition and rest. Absolutely. If you feel much worse, like symptoms below the neck like fever, chest tightness, major fatigue, see a doctor for further advice before resuming training. And I even know the parts, the chapter.

Paul Warloski (16:49)

Wow.

Paul Laursen (16:52)

where it's going into, right? So it's going into Dr. Phil Maffetones, who's a doctor, right, on all these sorts of things, and it's grabbing that important information, so excellent. Take today easy or off, check back in tomorrow, only return to moderate training once symptoms resolve or significantly improve. If you'd like me to suggest a gentle session for today or walk you through a stage return to training, just ask. Your long-term health comes first, right? Now where was this MJ?

when you were going through, you know, before you met me, your various challenges that you've told us all about on this podcast.

Paul Warloski (17:19)

you

Marjaana Rakai (17:28)

I know, right? I actually asked today, asked, so I've recently had a bronchitis. It's slowly getting better, but with bronchitis, like it takes so long to like feel normal again. It's just the systemic inflammation just sits in. And I asked like, how do I get back into training after bronchitis? I'm still feeling heavy and

Paul Laursen (17:30)

Ha ha ha!

Marjaana Rakai (17:58)

you know, not quite normal energetic MJ. And it gave really good answer. And I think it's the million dollar question, like how do I get back to training? How often do we see those questions on forum? Like so many times. And we keep doing the same mistake. We feel the pressure. Now I have a long lead to my Norseman, but

Paul Warloski (18:14)

Hmm.

Marjaana Rakai (18:25)

We feel the pressure to get back into training. We're motivated. We want to get back. And then you have this conversation with AI coach and it's really nice to know that it kind of like reminds you to take it easy that a healthy body will absorb the training instead of pushing and delaying the recovery process.

Paul Warloski (18:51)

Well said.

Marjaana Rakai (18:51)

It's good

Paul Laursen (18:51)

Absolutely.

Marjaana Rakai (18:51)

to

have somebody talking since back to you.

Paul Laursen (18:55)

Totally. again,

just to showcase this innovation, that is wisdom and common sense, but not, I think we all know as experienced coaches, not everyone has that, right? They don't know that. And it's, ⁓ as Andy Bush always tells me, like, it's just, it's not clear and simple to know the way. You are the listener. You don't necessarily know the way. It's, you know, we're all on this journey together through our life. And if we can get some quick,

good insight, that's a positive thing for the world. So pretty stoked with what Andrea and the team have produced here.

Paul Warloski (19:31)

So let's try another scenario. The over ambitious athlete, do they want to add an extra HIIT session on a rest day? What does the AI say and how does that line up with what you'd advise? I mean, I think we all know what it should say.

Paul Laursen (19:47)

Yeah.

Paul Warloski (19:49)

So it's thinking now. So Paul, you've been coaching for years and know, Marjaana and for all of us, what surprised you most when you started testing this?

Paul Laursen (19:49)

So I'll enter that in. Yeah, you go ahead, Paul, sorry.

For me, number one, the accuracy. And this was actually demonstrated in the paper. So if you actually go into, we'll include the link to the show note, but there's this really cool image that Andrea puts on there. he basically, he tested this. So he asked me a question and he asked the book, book, Large Language Model, a question. And it's...

basically this whole retrieval of the information. showed how I was like, theoretically in my brain, I was retrieving information from one thing to the next over a long-winded answer that I gave back. And then he showed how the book was going back and doing that same thing that it's doing right now for us, And then, so that was the first one, just the accuracy. And then second of all, the thing that blew me away was the fact that it could, using those agents,

It could go back in and actually look at all of my own data. It was specific to me. And not just me today, but for the last six weeks, that was remarkable to me that it could go back and do that. I was just blown away.

Paul Warloski (21:14)

MJ, what about you? What surprised you?

Marjaana Rakai (21:18)

I don't know. I've been playing around with this so long now that I've forgotten what was my first aha moment. think I was blown away when I read Andrea's article back in April and then Paul, what you just said, like how it retrieved the information similar to you as the author of that book.

⁓ That was pretty cool. so I tested also one topic that is important to me and it's perimenopause. And it gave a pretty good answer. I just asked like, what do you know about perimenopause? And it was a great answer that gave me.

Paul Laursen (22:02)

That's really cool. So

the AI coaches come back and says, Paul, here's the advice I'd share with an over ambitious athlete considering the extra HIIT work on a scheduled rest day. for us as coaches, this is nice to know that we've got this information here at our fingertips too as coaches, right? So we can also use this as coaches, leverage this as a tool, the information that we need.

to then potentially transmit that to the athlete in the way that we want to do if an athlete themselves don't want to go through the hassle of prompting these things. But it says that rest days are an essential part of effective training, especially when including HIIT. HIIT's demanding, creates a lot of stress on the muscles, nervous system, metabolic pathways. And yeah, rest isn't just a break from mental refreshment. It's the key period when the body repairs, adapts, and actually gets fitter. And that's correct.

So yeah, and adding HIIT on a rest day undermines that recovery window, right? And it goes on and then yeah, the best outcome from HIIT comes from respecting that plan, And this is what I tell my athletes all the time. We know this from, you know, many of the best case studies on the world's best athletes. So yeah, the most...

successful athletes balance hard work with smart recovery. So I think it gave a very, very good answer.

Paul Warloski (23:22)

Yeah.

Marjaana Rakai (23:24)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Warloski (23:24)

And reason to answer.

Paul Laursen (23:26)

Indeed. Indeed.

Marjaana Rakai (23:27)

Yeah,

Paul Warloski (23:27)

Hmm.

Marjaana Rakai (23:29)

I have another example. So in the settings, I have long distance triathlon, which we call Ironman. But ⁓ my long distance triathlon is Norseman. I educated the AI coach. Also, I gave it a name. My AI coach is called Thor.

Paul Warloski (23:51)

Thor! I love it!

Marjaana Rakai (23:53)

So Thor told me, I prompted Thor, ⁓ instead of Iron Man, my main goal is Norsemen. And here are some of the facts of Norsemen. 5,500 meters elevation gain on bike, marathon.

1800 meters elevation gain, finishing up on Gaustatoppen, which is a mountain in Norway. How should I adapt my training? And it gave me straight up answer. was great. Like, okay, for this challenge, it's a different beast and you need to incorporate more strength endurance and long hill workouts ⁓ in your

in your weekly plan, which was great. And also a challenge because I live in the flat Texas. So a lot of treadmill runs in my future, but it was great. Like you can give it the nuance that your individual race, what you're going to face in your individual race. Like give it a little bit of a context and it can advise you.

Paul Laursen (24:45)

Yeah!

Yeah, that's exactly. I was in the sauna and I was talking to an Athletica user. I just ran into him. I had no idea he was using it, but he was and he did really well on an Ultra. And he said the one limitation a little bit in Athletica is that we need to kind of work towards was actually implementing Hills into some of the Ultra sessions and training. And he said, would it just been great if I could have asked the AI coach?

on how to modify a couple of the sessions with respect to that knowledge. And now you can do it. So now you can actually let that AI coach know that that's what you're doing. And it can give you these little nuanced guidelines for the slight tweaks and modifications that you need to get that training stress right for yourself, whatever context you're in.

Paul Warloski (25:39)

world.

Marjaana Rakai (25:57)

Note that it will not make those changes to your plan, but it will advise how to do it.

Paul Laursen (26:01)

That's right. Yeah. but you can, this was one of the, one of the key features he loved was workout, workout wizard. So he, if he knew that workout wizard was there and the ability to kind of flick it and switch it over, ⁓ then, it, know, we do know that workout wizard is there. So I believe AI coach will be making recommendations on workout wizard.

Marjaana Rakai (26:09)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Warloski (26:25)

So you mentioned Paul that coaches will be able to use this as well to work with their athletes. So if I just had a long conversation with one of my athletes about kind of her past season and her goals coming forward, I can ask AI agent, the AI coach about her season and what were some of the highlights and lowlights?

Paul Laursen (26:52)

Well, you would actually have to have access at this point, Paul. So that is certainly coming, but for all those coaches out there, absolutely. But at this point, you would have to use a little bit your either her profile or your own profile to kind of ask these questions. yeah, that's coming at the next phase that is earmarked for 2026 in terms of the work.

Paul Warloski (26:58)

Okay.

I can, or I can, yeah.

Paul Laursen (27:18)

Well, it should everything is in place though. It won't take us too long to bring that up. That's a really good question actually, Paul, because there'd be a lot of people that are interested in that.

Paul Warloski (27:19)

Whoa.

Yeah, but I can tell her to do that. Yeah, or suggest it to her. Okay. All right, do we have time?

Paul Laursen (27:30)

Yes, you can. You can.

Yeah, so this is,

if you're watching on YouTube, this is, we're showing you here the new user interface, so welcome to that, and we're really proud of it. ⁓ Marjaana and myself and the team have been working so hard, and again, a huge thanks to all of the individuals, our Athletica ambassadors and special groups that have been providing feedback, you've been doing an incredible job, we've been taking it all on board.

and the team is implementing changes very quickly. You can just have a look here at my nice looking dashboard with my, what I have to do today, how long I have to go to my race, my fitness readiness and recovery, all the various cool things about discovering and learning that are on the way, including Athletica U, it's all coming down there. So we're super pumped about this. ⁓ And yeah, that's a...

Lots more of these show and tells coming in the future, no doubt.

Paul Warloski (28:34)

Yeah, the new interface is really nice and clean and easy to use. It's going to be a blast for people to get into. Do we have time for one more scenario?

Paul Laursen (28:46)

why not?

Paul Warloski (28:47)

this. So Race Week Nerves, the athlete had one bad taper session and wants to change the plan. How does the AI approach that?

Paul Laursen (28:58)

All right, let's see.

Paul Warloski (29:01)

All right, so Paul, every new technology needs guardrails or there's things that it can't do. What can't this AI do yet or now? And what will always remain the coach's job or the human's job?

Paul Laursen (29:16)

Yeah, so keep in mind always, this is great question, and I was reviewing some, you know, I go and I search, I see what people are saying about Athletica, and I was in this Low Twitch forum, and you know, there's folk in there that are saying, Athletica didn't work for me, I regressed, you know, and if that's you, I would say, you know, it's...

One thing that's really important to know about the the experience the training experience with Athletica is that I it is a tool it's a tool for you to use It's a training experience you get to educate yourself And it's you know, you have an AI coach that's there to in in support and you have all these other guard or various different tools like the workout wizard to switch things up in your context like

the workout reserve that shows you how much you've gone towards your best in terms of maximal mean powers or maximal mean paces since the last six weeks. And you've got this loading monitoring as well, and you've got this ⁓ HRV recovery tool. So it's a tool, and it's a combined synthesized tool.

It's still and never will know everything about your context, but it's there for you to leverage as you want. So you can't, yeah, that's sort of how you need to think about it. It's there with you along your journey, but it's never God and you gotta kind of be working with it. It's the same as a self-driving car that Andrea tells us about, right? Would you?

necessarily completely take your hands off the wheel if your Tesla is going off the road. No, you got to self correct it and that'll always be the case. yeah, I think that's and then if you've got a human coach even better because now you've got another, you know, experienced individual with wisdom that can help you drive alongside. And I believe it's the coaches that are leveraging this technology that are going to be, making that next step.

Paul Warloski (31:07)

you

Yeah.

Paul Laursen (31:29)

And that's why I'm getting, you know, invited around the world to talk to Olympic programs, right? Many know I've been to Norway, Belgium and Japan, and they're all curious and interested in how they're gonna leverage these for their Olympic athletes. So whether we like it or not, we're in this evolution towards this technology and it's there for us if we want to use as a tool. So that's my key point there, Paul.

Paul Warloski (31:55)

Mm-hmm.

Marjaana Rakai (31:55)

I would add and maybe ⁓ take a little bit of that criticism as a little bit of a kernel of truth. I feel like we haven't done a good enough job to educate the user. There is a lot in Athletica and I feel like with this new UI we've taken the step up a little bit with the...

educating and bringing everything, the whole experience that is Athletica inside the new user base. So I'm hoping that we get lots of feedback, positive and negative, because the negative is really a potent way for us to improve. And that's what we want to do. We want to improve the platform for every user. So if you do have a negative experience, we want to hear from you.

Paul Laursen (32:51)

Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's get back to the AI coach and remember the question we, what do we do with a, we had a bad taper last time and what's the recommendation for this anxious athlete? so it's, it's Paul calm down. It's completely normal to experience nerves and self doubt during, during race week, especially after a taper session that didn't go as planned. Here's the evidence-based perspective and practical guidance. Number one, bad session and the taper doesn't define your race readiness.

Marjaana Rakai (32:51)

Let us know.

Paul Warloski (32:52)

Yeah.

you

Paul Laursen (33:21)

taper periods, introduce rest, reduce fatigue and can make you feel sluggish or off before the sharpness returns. This is normal physiology. Resist the urge to overhaul the plan and add extra intensity. Overcompensating often leads to excessive fatigue or risk just before race day. Trust the process and the months of work that you've banked. And it goes on and on and on, right? So stick to the plan and yeah.

So it's very reassuring and once again, it's giving me the correct recommendation, correct guidance for this next round. So pretty solid.

Paul Warloski (34:01)

So to wrap up things, if listeners want to try the AI coach today, how do they get started?

Paul Laursen (34:09)

Yeah, so we are very shortly going to be opening up the new user interface for all new users. And we'll be slowly turning off the old UI. We'll keep it on there for a bit, because some people want to kind of go back and forth. Also, it will include some more updates on our socials about things, including video instructions and where things have moved.

And there will be the ability to flick back and forth, especially for users that are more familiar with the old user interface. And that will want that for a bit. But we'll slowly be phasing it out ultimately. MJ, any other thoughts?

Marjaana Rakai (35:01)

Yeah, when you sign up, you can click on the AI coach button and then ⁓ you'll find the AI coach chatbot there.

Paul Warloski (35:11)

It's always a little meta. think it would be a good way of doing is when I look at my AI coach and it's me and then I'm asking me questions about me and it's all very strange. Although sometimes the coach is looking like Paul, so I'm asking Paul questions. So it's great. it feels like you're asking Paul questions. And that's what we're all about is trying to make this

Paul Laursen (35:29)

Ha ha ha

Paul Warloski (35:38)

platform accessible and build your performance.

Marjaana Rakai (35:43)

That's a good point. You also can define in the AI code settings the level of ⁓ detail, how detailed or simplified the answers are for you.

Paul Laursen (35:43)

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, that's right. So yeah, I'll just go on to there right now. So yeah, can have it as a floating button or in a navigation bar, and then you can click on the coach personality. And I'm just there right now. So the coach can be either professional or casual, can be the explanation style, can be either plain language or educational coach style in detailed or to the level like a sports scientist, right? So if you want like

Dan Plews or name your sports science coach. I guess I'd be in that. It's totally up to you, right? It can be simple or complex. So kind of cool to have that personalization as well for you.

Marjaana Rakai (36:31)

Polar sun.

Paul Warloski (36:33)

Yeah.

Cool. Lots of new things coming out and lots of things happening ⁓ in Athletica. You know, stay tuned. So thanks for listening today to the Athletes Compass podcast. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together. Improve your training with the science-based training platform, Athletica, the seriously N-A-I-based training platform. We've learning so much today and join the conversation on the Athletica forum.

for Marjaana Rakai and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass Podcast. Thanks for listening.