“Athletica is built on the scientific principles established in the Science and Application of High-Intensity Interval Training (Laursen & Buchheit, Human Kinetics, 2019) — the foundational text on modern HIIT science, with over 60,000 combined citations across its authors.
Athletica Workout Reserve tells you, in real time, how close you are to your performance limit over every duration that matters — from a twelve-second sprint to a full hour. It reads from 100% (fully fresh) down to 0%. When it reaches zero, you have just produced a maximal effort for that duration.
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Load quantifies the stress of a session; it cannot tell you how you will adapt to it. The Banister impulse-response model (Banister et al., 1975) resolves this as the balance of a slow-building fitness effect and a fast-decaying fatigue effect, surfaced as fitness, fatigue, and form. Athletica runs it continuously from your training history, integrates your individual response signals, and holds the prescription inside experience-dependent guardrails.
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Sustainable intensity is governed by duration: the harder the effort, the less time you can hold it (Hill, 1925). Critical power is the asymptote of your power-duration curve, the boundary between the heavy and severe domains, above which no steady state is possible and a finite reserve drains to exhaustion (Poole et al., 2016). Athletica estimates it from your training and anchors your zones, phenotype, and load prescription to it.
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Two athletes with identical thresholds can respond to the same session in opposite directions, because that intensity sits at a different fraction of each one's reserve. The anaerobic speed or power reserve, the span from maximal aerobic to maximal sprint capacity, is a non-invasive proxy for fibre-type dominance (Bundle & Weyand, 2012). Athletica reads it from your training and places you on the speed-endurance continuum, from fatigue-resistant diesel to explosive sprinter.
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Sports science has moved through three phases. The first was foundational: decades of laboratory work establishing how the body responds to training.
The second was technological: wearables, GPS and power meters producing data at a volume no coach could read. Neither phase on its own changed what an athlete does on Tuesday morning.Sports Science 3.0 is the integration of the two. It means running the foundational physiology continuously over the sensor data an athlete already generates, so the models update themselves and the prescription follows. Athletica is a working implementation of that idea.
The principles on this page are not applied one at a time. They run together, continuously, over a single longitudinal record of one athlete. The profiling layer estimates thresholds from training that has already happened. The phenotype reads those thresholds and decides what kind of session fits. The load model sets the dose and holds it inside guardrails. Workout Reserve reports how the athlete is actually absorbing that dose, and feeds it back into what comes next.
The term was set out by Martin Buchheit and Paul Laursen in Sports Performance and Science Reports (SPSR231, 2024). What is described there as an approach exists here as a system.
Athletica Co-founder · Exercise Physiologist · 150+ publications · 25,700+ citations
#ExercisePhysiology #HIIT #TrainingScience
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PhD · Sport Scientist & Physiologist
HIIT Science Co-founder · SPSR Founder · Training Science Podcast co-host · H-index 89 · 35,000+ citations
#SportScience #Football #TrainingMonitoring
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PhD Sports Science, University of Verona. M.Eng. Mechatronics, University of Trento
Workout Reserve inventor · Sport Engineering & AI Mathematical Modelling
#SportEngineering #WorkoutReserve #MathModelling
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OBE · MSc Finance · BSc Sports Science & Physiology
2× Olympic Gold medallist (London 2012, Rio 2016) · Investor in Athletica
#Triathlon #OlympicChampion #Investor
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MSc, Sport Scientist and Engineer
Durability research, Workout Reserve, Athletica platform engineering
#Durability #EnduranceScience #SportsScience3.0
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