Why your Ai running programme is holding you back…

I get it, it’s cheap, it’s convenient, it connects to your watch… truthfully though i’m sick of fixing injuries that come from Ai running app’s. In theory they should work, they tailor progressions across the 3 main runs any runner should be doing; An easy, a speed and a long and they take into consideration your goal pace and they deload your volume and they plan for you to progress up until the set day of your race. So what’s going wrong?

In the past 2 years i’d say i’ve probably rehabbed over 50 clients with running related injuries. The process at Nutrifit for any client has always and will always start with a movement screening. I don’t need to dive into this too much because it is pretty self explanatory but very few online coaches actually do it. I’m basically looking to see basic everyday movements and how your body performs them. If you can’t squat in your own home, how is a coach supposed to tell you to go in and barbell squat at max effort. The key thing I find in 75% of gen pop we coach is their inability to fire their glutes.

Glute amnesia is real people, it’s come from the lifestyle the modern person lives. We lie in bed for 8 hours, sit in a car to commute, sit at a desk for 8 hours and come home and sit on the couch till it’s time to go lie in bed again… and you love it you filthy little couch potato.

The issue comes when your training doesn’t support what life is taking away from you. In the same way if you got an iron deficiency, you’d take a supplement to replace what you’re missing but with movement it’s unheard of. You’ve seen the predicted posture of a desk worker in 50 years time and it’s because if you are someone who manages to fit in training inbetween all that sitting around, training biceps is a lot more appealing than doing chin tucks to strengthen your suboccipital muscles. No one has ever said ‘ your suboccipital muscles are looking pumped today

So to bring this back to running programming, your Ai app is not designed to fix movement problems you don’t even know you have, it’s designed to tell you to run fast here and run slow here.

and that’s before we’ve looked at the fact it’s not helping you manage your nutrition enough, it's not asking about your sleep, it's not factoring in the fact you've had the most stressful week of your life and your cortisol has been through the roof since Monday. It just sees a scheduled run and reloads it for next week.

Nutrition for runners is a conversation that needs to happen and it almost never does properly. You are not eating the same on a day you're covering 16 miles as you are on a rest day. Or at least you shouldn't be. Fuelling around your sessions, managing your protein to actually support the muscle repair that hard running demands, not bonking at mile 10 because you had a coffee and a Nakd bar before heading out the door. These aren't minor details. They're the difference between a session that builds you up and one that slowly breaks you down. Your app has no idea what you ate today. It just knows you ran.

And then there's recovery. Nobody wants to talk about recovery. The hardest thing to get runners to accept is that the run isn't where you get fitter. You get fitter in the time between runs when your body adapts to the stress you've put it through. If that window is compromised, whether it's poor sleep, under eating, sky high stress or all three at once which is most people reading this, the next session isn't landing on a recovered body. It's stacking load onto a depleted one. Do that enough and you've got yourself an injury and a reason to Google 'can I run through IT band pain' at 11pm.

This is where a real coach actually earns their place. It's not just handing you a plan and disappearing. It's the conversations. How did your legs feel Tuesday? Are you sleeping? Are you sore anywhere new? And then actually adjusting things when the answers tell you to. A training plan is a guide, not a contract, and guides need updating when life happens.

The AI app built you a plan and left the room. A good coach stays in it.

If you've been following a programme and you keep picking up niggles, plateauing or just not arriving at race day feeling the way you expected, that's not bad luck. That's a gap in what your programme was actually built to address.

At NutriFit every runner we work with starts with a proper assessment because you can't build on what you haven't looked at. The plan always comes second.

Your watch can track a lot. It just can't coach you