AW promotion: New training platform uses the latest AI technology to help ease the load for athletes and coaches

As an athlete, finding the right training plan to suit your precise needs can be a difficult and lengthy process. For coaches, writing those training plans can also eat up time which might  be better spent on other aspects of a job which never stops. 

The new US-based online training platform, Zihi, has been designed to lighten the load. 

Using the very latest Artificial Intelligence (AI technology), it takes each athlete’s individual circumstances – goals, targets, training environments, etc – and calls on a breadth of sports science and coaching expertise to produce a bespoke training plan. 

 “The way it works is very straightforward,” says co-founder Revere Greist, a keen Ironman triathlete himself. “In many ways it emulates the best practices of a good endurance sports coach.

“We will ask people about the time they have available to train and the facilities they have available to train at, plus we’ll get some performance-based information – what’s your age, your gender? What goals do you have for your season and what would you like to do? What’s your level of experience in the sport? That’s the basic information we need to build a training plan.”

And that’s where the AI comes in. Using an approach called reinforcement learning, Zihi will call on its “neural network” to come up with a solution to fit the individual. As athletes then complete workouts and enter data from a wearable device like a GPS watch, as well as subjective information about perceived exertion and recovery, Zihi learns how the athlete responds to training and adjusts the training plan accordingly.

“The coach can also tailor Zihi to his or her group of athletes,” adds Greist. “The coach can use Zihi to generate training plans and then use what we call exception rules to really tailor the plans to their own expertise, what they want and specific things they know about their athletes.”

What is Zihi?

Zihi is a training platform for endurance coaches and athletes, which combines the best of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap between human coaching on the one hand and static, off-the-shelf training plans on the other.

Why use Zihi?

Athlete benefits: 

Coach benefits:

Sign up to Zihi at zihipro.com