From Boston marathoners to New York fighters, athletes are using AI to escape the plateau trap without adding more hours
Why your training stalls – and how AI is helping athletes break through
NEW YORK – The most frustrating thing in sport isn’t losing. It’s training like you mean it and getting the same results back.
A runner in Boston can do four weeks of clean mileage, hit the same loop by the Charles every morning, and still be stuck at the same pace. A Brooklyn boxer can sharpen timing, add rounds, clean up nutrition, and still fade in the third. A rock climber can hangboard religiously and keep stalling on the same grade. Different sports, same disease: the plateau.
Coaches will tell you it’s normal. They’re right. The body adapts fast – and then it protects itself. If you feed it the same stimulus, it learns to survive it. If you pile on stress without enough recovery, it learns to conserve. If your technique is leaking efficiency, you can get fitter without getting better.
The classic fixes are simple on paper: change the stimulus, manage recovery, tighten nutrition, refine mechanics. The problem is execution. Most athletes don’t have a staff. They have a job, a calendar, and a phone full of numbers they don’t know how to interpret.
That’s where 2025 quietly changed the game.
1) The real cause of plateaus: training stops being individualized
In research, the plateau isn’t treated like a mystery. One narrative review lays out a blunt idea: to prevent and overcome plateaus in both muscle and cardiorespiratory performance, athletes often need subject-tailored variability – changes in training inputs that match the athlete, not the template. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
This matters because plateaus are rarely “one problem.” They’re usually a stack:
Too much monotony (same pace, same lifts, same weekly pattern)
Too much intensity for the recovery you’re actually getting
Too little intensity to force adaptation
Nutrition drifting low when training load is high
Mechanics breaking down under fatigue
AI does not magically remove these issues. What it can do is spot patterns sooner than your ego will.
2) Readiness and recovery went from vibes to daily decision support
A big leap has been the normalization of readiness-driven training – adjusting intensity based on signals like heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and reported well-being.
This isn’t brand-new science, but 2025 put sharper tools in more hands. A 2025 Scientific Reports paper evaluated cycling programs guided by vagally-mediated HRV, well-being, and resting heart rate, explicitly testing how different guidance inputs affect performance outcomes. Nature And the broader sports physiology literature has discussed HRV-guided approaches where athletes push intensity when recovery markers normalize, and back off when they don’t. Frontiers+1
For endurance athletes, that can mean fewer “junk hard days” that bury you and steal tomorrow. For strength athletes and fighters, it can mean recognizing when your nervous system is cooked and shifting from max output to technique, mobility, or lower-risk volume.
3) Apps started translating data into action – not just charts
In 2025, major platforms moved from tracking to actual coaching. Fitbit introduced a Gemini-powered “personal health coach” concept that turns fitness and sleep data into conversational guidance and recommendations, rather than leaving users to interpret dashboards alone. WIRED+1 Garmin also added AI-driven “Active Intelligence” inside a new subscription tier, aiming to deliver tailored insights based on user trends. The Verge
The important shift is not the brand name. It’s the direction: apps are trying to answer the question athletes actually ask – “What should I do today?” – with something better than guesswork.
4) Plateaus in skill sports are increasingly treated as efficiency problems
In running, a plateau is often capacity. In boxing, martial arts, and climbing, it’s often efficiency under fatigue. You can raise conditioning and still waste it with flawed mechanics.
This is where modern tech helps even without a lab. Video-based analysis, wearable motion signals, and training logs can now highlight where performance is leaking: pacing that starts too hot, footwork that gets sloppy late, climbing attempts that fail at the same movement pattern.
AI-powered systems are increasingly used to summarize those patterns and suggest adjustments that fit the week you actually have – not the week your training plan assumes you have.
5) Nutrition and recovery finally got linked to training load in a practical way
A plateau can be a fuel problem disguised as a training problem. If you’re under-eating while adding volume, you might feel disciplined while your body is quietly hitting the brakes.
The new advantage is coordination: apps that pull training load and recovery signals can nudge athletes toward better timing and consistency – not just calorie totals. For endurance athletes, it’s about keeping output stable. For strength athletes, it’s about having enough energy availability to actually progress.
The “10%” that matters: apps like Nutrinaut and Bevel
A growing category of apps is built around a simple premise: your iPhone or Android already holds a mountain of performance-relevant data, especially when it’s connected to wearables and health hubs. WIRED Bevel, for example, positions itself as an AI health companion that uses Apple Health data to provide insights across recovery, sleep, strain, stress, and biomarkers like HRV and VO2 max. App Store+1 Apps in the same lane – including newer coaching-style apps like Nutrinaut – are betting that the breakthrough is not another device. It’s turning the data you already generate into clear, daily guidance you can follow.
What breaking a plateau looks like now
In 2025, the athlete who breaks through first is often the one who trains smarter, not longer:
– The Boston runner who stops forcing speed on tired legs and hits quality on the right days
– The New York fighter who uses readiness cues to prioritize technique when the body is drained
– The climber who stops repeating the same failed attempts and fixes the specific weakness pattern
The plateau isn’t going away. It’s part of sport. The shift is that athletes finally have tools that can detect the stall early, explain why it’s happening, and suggest a correction before months of work turn into a flat line.