Smarter training starts here. Athletica’s newsletters deliver science-backed insights, expert tips, and AI-powered training updates for endurance athletes of all levels. Catch up on past editions and subscribe to stay ahead in your training journey.
From Insight to Impact: The Journey of Integrating Speed and Endurance in Athletic Training
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Hello Reader, As co-founder of Athletica.ai and someone who has dedicated a significant portion of my career to understanding and enhancing human performance, I’ve had the privilege of exploring the frontiers of athletic training. Today, I want to share a part of this journey that has fundamentally shaped our approach at Athletica.ai: the integration of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and prolonged endurance training to unlock peak performance. Rewind to 2010, when I penned an invited review article that would illuminate a path previously less traveled in the world of endurance sports. This wasn’t just another study; it was a synthesis of insights aimed at understanding how both aerobic and anaerobic energy systems contribute to optimal training for intense endurance events like Olympic rowing, triathlon, running and cycling. The crux of my argument was this: to enhance endurance performance, an athlete must engage in both HIIT and prolonged, lower-intensity endurance training. Why? Because each method signals the body’s powerhouse, the mitochondria, to ramp up its efficiency through different molecular pathways — both targeting a signalling pathway termed the master switch, or PGC-1alpha. This paper was important, providing a physiological rationale for what would become known as the polarized training model, advocated by renowned sports scientist Professor Stephen Seiler. According to this model, optimizing performance means training in a way that about 75% of total volume is low intensity, while 10-15% pushes the boundaries at high intensities. At Athletica.ai, this principle isn’t just a footnote in our training manuals; it’s the foundation of how we design your training. Reflecting on that 2010 article, I’m reminded of the power of curiosity and the importance of challenging the status quo. It wasn’t just about proving a point; it was about paving a way forward for athletes to reach heights they hadn’t imagined. As we continue to push the boundaries at Athletica.ai, I invite you to join us on your own journey of continued personal discovery and excellence. The Athlete's Compass Podcast
This weeks episode, Endurance Nutrition: Exploring Low Carb, High Fat Diets, just came out. We discuss the evolving, if slightly controversial subject of endurance athlete nutrition. Listen or watch on your favorite platform and give us feedback and questions in our forum thread. Best regards, Paul Laursen, PhD |
Athletica AI Coach and Training Science
Smarter training starts here. Athletica’s newsletters deliver science-backed insights, expert tips, and AI-powered training updates for endurance athletes of all levels. Catch up on past editions and subscribe to stay ahead in your training journey.
Hello Reader, The new Athletica Training Experience is now live. This update brings together a refreshed interface, a conversational AI Coach, and Athletica U into a single, integrated training environment. The best place to begin is by taking the Tour. Start with the TourFrom the left-hand panel, navigate to Learn → Tour. This guided walkthrough will orient you to the new experience and show you how the key parts of the platform fit together, including the Calendar, Dashboard, Roadmap, Plan...
Hello Reader, As we prepare to launch the next chapter of Athletica, I wanted to take a moment to speak directly to you and to recognize the people who made this release possible. This update has been a long time coming. It represents years of work across science, engineering, design, and coaching, all with one goal in mind: to build the most effective and trustworthy training system possible for athletes and coaches. Before outlining what is coming, it is important to acknowledge the team...
Hello Reader, As our team at Athletica puts the final pieces in place for the launch of our new platform, including the new UIX, conversational AI-Coach, and Athletica U, I wanted to pause and share a broader perspective. There is a lot of noise right now around “AI coaching.” Much of it is well intentioned, but some of it risks distracting from the real work that matters: helping athletes and coaches make better decisions day to day. The piece below is longer than a typical email, but it...