Hey!
I’ve been using Athletica for about 2.5 months now to train for my first 70.3 triathlon. Overall I’m happy with the app and training program! I do have some suggestions / ideas / annoyances that I want to share as I would love to see the program improve! Please don’t take this as negative criticism as it is most definitely not meant that way!
- There are short bike rides in the plan that have me do short (i.e. 10sec or 30sec) intervals based on heart rate. The rest periods are 10sec or 30sec as well. My heartrate however doesn’t shoot up as soon as I start biking faster, and surely doesn’t dive back down when I have the rest period. That always leads to non-compliance with the training.
- Yesterday I changed the training settings, I used to have only a swim on Monday as I had lessons, I changed that to all options open, and I increased the available training time on Wednesday from 1 hour to whatever hours it wants. Now it changed the entire program, suddenly included a Volume Test Week in the current week, while I don’t want that, and also didn’t ask for it. Perhaps it could be possible to include an option the say ‘use previous version of plan’ or something after you’ve made a change.
- For some reasons two trainings that were in the plan last Friday, which I did, don’t show up and suddenly I had a rest day on that day, while both are in Garmin.
- Perhaps an option could be included (or maybe it already is and I haven’t found it yet) where you can put in how many trainings of one type you want at least included in the plan. For example, include at least 3x strength training, I don’t care on which days, as long as it is included.
- Perhaps there could be a limit in terms of time of day for a new training to suddenly pop-up in the plan, just so if you want you can actually still do it instead of finding out at 11pm. For example latest at 7pm or something.
Thanks for having a great product!
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Hi Esther! Glad you’re loving the app, I used it for my first full and it is so much better than the programs / plans / tools I’ve used before. Of course, still growing pains and room but they also take our feedback to heart which is amazing!
On that note, a couple thoughts to get through in the meantime:
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The 30 second intervals on HR: yeah, HR isn’t the best unfortunately. If you don’t have a power meter, Athletica defaults to heart rate but you’re right, it is too slow to catch up. The way around this is to ignore HR (I know, seems weird) and just go on the 30 seconds as hard as you can hold for that 30, and then rest for 30, best to do an easy spin to keep muscles moving but really zero effort. Your Garmin may show noncompliance, but Athletica should show that you hit the % of zones needed.
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Unfortunately, making ANY plan edits currently does, yes, completely redo the plan going forward. I’d rather be able to tweak it, but that’s a future feature… How I handle it now: 1) only make changes on a Sunday so it doesn’t mess a midweek, 2) take a screenshot of the next week’s plan just in case, and 3) check “skip test week” when finalizing the edits to avoid a new test week every time. With the screenshot, I can see how different it is, and maybe modify the upcoming week if I liked the old plan better and to avoid unexpected sudden changes. Then going forward everything should smooth out. Someone else just requested a feature to keep the base plan, so hopefully this will be better going forward.
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This could be a syncing issue. You can either remove and re-add the Garmin connection, or just download the Garmin file and upload to that day.
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There is kind of this feature, but based on percentage. E.g. you can say you want 50% running, 25% swim, etc. This is under Settings → Training, and it includes strength:
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For the last one, you can limit how close to the day workouts are changed. This is under Settings → Profile:
Hope this is all helpful, and let’s enjoy the ride! 
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When you play with your plan, make sure to un check the include test week option to avoid this being included again.
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