Athletica.ai long term review

I switched to Athletica.ai as my preferred training platform pretty much a year ago, and aside from a brief absence from the platform (after which I had to start pretty much from scratch) I’ve found it pretty good on the whole. Athletica seems to be well-rooted in the science of training, with a significant reliance on HIIT workouts. A typical workout schedule for me generally has one HIIT workout each week (shown below via intervals.icu below, click the image to enlarge).

How I’m integrating Athletica into my training

I do most of my hard training, and certainly my interval training, indoors. My preferred hardware is a Tacx Neo 3M turbo trainer with a Zwift cog and controllers (which I can no longer see on the Zwift website). I run Zwift on an Apple TV hooked up to an old TV. I have a Wahoo fan which can blow like hurricane but which I usually connect it to my HR sensor to regulate its wind speed. I use a Polar H10 chest strap HR sensor, linked to Zwift and to a watch such as the Polar Vantage V3. Since February, when my indoor trainer bike collapsed under me in a heap of iron oxide, I've been using an old aluminium Trek road bike on the trainer.

I find manual connections between services useful: I download the prescribed interval workouts from Athletica, import them to intervals.icu, make any modifications, and sync them to Zwift. Generally, I find the best time for training is first thing in the morning while the rest of the household are asleep (I’m doing this in the garage).

The Pros

Over the 12 months or so that I’ve been using Athletica, the AI generated Coach provides sensible and actionable advice.

I like how the system brings in resting HR, sleep and HRV metrics and seems to take account of these in setting out the programme. A widening variety of integrations with other services has improved this: in particular an integration with intervals.icu brings in the HRV data I collect each morning after rising via the HRV4Training Android app.

Unlike TrainerRoad, I get a sense of a system that’s truly responding to my feedback, especially to verbal  feedback in my workout reports, rather than just the numbers. The AI coaches come across as quite human! TrainerRoad says it uses an AI approach, and it probably does, but I never really got a sense of it.

My training through autumn 2024 and the winter of 2024-2025 seemed to prepare me well for the 2025 season. Circumstances then  negatively affected the later part of the summer!

There’s an active, friendly and constructive discussion forum.

...and the Cons

There is a definite lack of variety in workouts prescribed. Each week I get an HIIT workout (Tuesday), a low cadence strength workout (Wednesday), a threshold workout which is always 4m intervals (Friday), and a workout of long tempo intervals (Sunday)- supplemented by a number of endurance aerobic workouts (usually slated to be ridden on the road). Through the season I've done some rearrangement as I usually ride a midweek '10', and recently I’ve been adding a bit of diversity from workouts I’ve accumulated in intervals.icu over the last few years. Athletica does have a wide variety of workouts in its library, but browsing these isn’t terribly user friendly. Editing or designing workouts isn't straightforward either, but I am getting to grips with it.

One major gripe is that the Athletica system has been set up so that races can only take place at weekends. These are the key events, graded A, B or C, around which the training schedule is set up. This really a surprising limitation that does require a bit of user intervention.

The forum no longer has a ‘Bug Report’ category. One’s tempted to suggest this is because so many reports don’t look great on the public forum, but in any case it’s a shame you can’t easily see when others are having similar issues and what their solution is.

And here’s the big caveat.  Over the year I’ve been with Athletica, it appears as though Athletica is perpetually undergoing development in the live version - it’s a web app, so updates take place often without real notice. 

The latest problem I have encountered is with manually uploading fit files. I do this manually rather than automatically, and I usually download the activity file as a zip format from Garmin Connect. Yesterday evening I rode my club’s evening time trial. I got home fairly late, and didn’t try adding the data to Athletica until this morning. When I tried this, Athletica seems to have decided that (a) zip is not an acceptable file format (it has always accepted this in the past) and (b) it won’t upload the fit file. I tried uploading the fit file from that zip file, and I tried a fit file downloaded from intervals.icu, but to no avail: the data don’t seem to be transferred.

It’s this sort of thing that irritates me about Athletica. Normally, I just wait for Athletica to resolve the issue, but this has come as I near the end of my subscription with about 5 weeks left. Maybe I’ll return to TrainerRoad or try another platform.

As usual, I managed to find a workaround - in this case I can upload the zip file downloaded from Garmin Connect via the ‘Import Data’ function, seemingly really intended for bulk upload of workouts in a zip file. But why should changes like this suddenly manifest themselves on a live site without warning or explanation, leaving the end user scrabbling to fix the situation.

Update: upload of fit files now works, though not the zip files. yet.

What would improve the platform?

I have been tinkering with designing my own workouts and adding them to my library. This is a bit fiddly - it might be easier with a graphical system as you get with Zwift, or a semi-graphical system as with intervals.icu - but in any case a visual representation of the designed workout would be helpful. 

My future with Athletica

My subscription is due for renewal on 3rd October, which gives me a few weeks to decide whether to stick with Athletica. Should I just return to TrainerRoad (I have a suspended account there), or perhaps try another platform? On the one hand, my training from atumn 2024 through to the spring of 2025 with Athletica went really well, so I reckon the system works well. Circumstances took me a bit off the boil in the summer, but I think I've turned a corner there in time for the return of the Duo Normand.

I think I'll stick with Athletica for the time being.