Hi all!
I am a 55 yo athlete new to Athletica. Made a 5k plan and the plan builder prescribes too hard sessions. For example, the day before a 2h long l have a hiit session with 5 sets of ten 30/30. In fact l asked ai coach and it told me that was high injury risk, recommended me to reduce the volume to half. So why athletica is recommending me such excessively hard sessions in first place? Why there is such contradiction between the plan builder and the coach?
Hi Jose, without seeing your plan itās hard to tell. Were those workouts for this/next week or in the future, as they would likely change if so.
Also what past data have you fed into the coach? Do you have a history of running that maybe has led it to believe you would be OK with this?
Hi Jose-Manuel,
Same here, without seeing the plan and knowing anything about your athlete history;
Iād argue a 2h long run for a 5k sounds excessive on it is own. Doing ten 30/30 5 times is also tough on its own. I personally would not build those back to back.
I would make sure that the thresholds are set correctly ( pace, HR, [running] power) .
Iād also double check the historical data that has sync to athletica from your training platform.
LLMās do hacculinate sometimes
Thanks for your answers. Finally Athletica adapted the workout to only 2 sets of 8 30/30s that now seems too easy 
those are manageable ā¦ looking forward to hear how āeasyā those sets were in the end
Not too easy bc I overshoort the targetsā¦and at the end added 12 min at LT1. My logic is that since near LT1 is when we push lactate recycling to its maximum and the muscles were floaded with lactate just after these 30/30 adding a relatively short LT1 interval can be useful to optimize all the machinery to use lactate as a fuel. Didn`t see this though in athletica hiit workouts.
Well done, 30/30s are adaptation workouts. Iād look at a trend of multiple 30/30s and its trend ( whatever your goals are). Hard needs to be hard and easy needs to be easy.
@Prof @Marjaana have discussed benefits of 30/30s in the podcast a few times.
My take away is that it give enough of a stimulus for tease different energy systems, build strength and speed without compromising on a need for extended recovery period.
I find 30/30s very versatile, I use them when I do not have time for a longer run, I sometimes use them at the end of a aerobic bout if I do not have hills etc.
From my point of view there is something not working well because also 2 sets of 8 are very hard. There should be something not declered correctly but i noted athletica still not organizes session in a logical way, it seems it puts workouts just to cover a load with out thinking to what we have done before and what we have after. An example: i am in test week and I have 3 maximal test in row. Today my ai coach said ācongratulations now take rest for 2 daysā¦ā while it puts the hardest just tomorrow. Often i should revolute all the week because not sustainable at least for me.
Yesterday (Sunday) I did a strength long endurance run in the mountains and today I was pretty sore. Informed my ai coach about it in my easy run of today (which turned out to be not easy) and was glad to see that Wednesday HIIT was replaced by an easy run, and Thursday threshold was cut to half. Regretfully after a few minutes Wednesday hiit not only came back but augmented in the form of a 2h 54min hiit lit mit workout with +59% ai load increase (besides of the easy run which is still there). I immediately erased this nonsense augmented workout but it comes back stubbornly.
Amazingly thereās a danger symbol warning me about an excessively high training load in the augmented HIIT workout.
Please note @Jose-Manuel that AI coach is not currently making changes to your training calendar, only advising you based on your prompts. you will then have to make those changes in your training calendar yourself.
So the changing workout could be a bug and should be reported via support.
MJ
Thanks @Marjaana. Please, understand my frustration. Iāve been listening to many of the Athlete Compass podcasts and I made myself an image of Athletica which does not correspond to the actual reality
Dear @Jose-Manuel I appreciate your engagement, and am truly sorry you are having difficulties.
We have been quite straightforward communicating that AI coach will not make changes to your calendar - and Iāve mentioned Dr. Andreaās podcast in Training Science Podcast where he explains the entire process and thinking why AI Coach is not currently making changes to your calendar. Itās not to say we are not working towards it. I think there is a general interest and clear need from our athletes, and we are doing R&D to be able to develop this in the future. But we are just not there yet.
IF you are having any issues with your plan, please use the support channel so I can log your issues properly and can follow up as needed with you and our tech team. I cannot do it using forum threads, and we risk losing each other on diverse threads here. Sorry about that.
Marjaana
This was because you were first on a marathon plan with relatively high fitness level already before you switched your plan to 5K plan. Remember the system only sees your data, and in the beginning of your subscription is still learning what you can handle. If something feels too hard, then absolutely use your common sense and shorten it. Machine learning truly kicks in after a few weeks of feeding the system workouts. It is good you are using AI Coach chat to give more context.
Test week for triathletes is hard, please spread the tests out over two weeks if they are too hard for you.
I like the idea of active recovery and aerobic extension, but 30/30 isnāt meant to be a lactate-flooding workout. If youāre flooded, intensity is probably too high. A Zone 2/LT1 add-on after is fine as a cooldown extension, but itās not a core āmissing pieceāāthe key lactate-management feature is already baked into the 30/30 recovery structure.ā** 30/30 isnāt built to āflood the muscles with lactate"
In the HIIT Science framework, short intervals (like 30/30) are often used because the recoveries let you reload Oā (incl. myoglobin), which reduces anaerobic glycolysis and lactate build-up in the next rep. Translation: done correctly, 30/30 is less about lactate carnage and more about accumulating quality work (often near VOā kinetics) without detonating.
If you are āfloodedā after 30/30, odds are the āonā intensity is too sprinty, and OFF intensity is too high. turning it into a glycolytic session that defeats the point.
But if you like doing it, please by all means, add that extension.