Paul Laursen

I’m an exercise physiologist, endurance coach and 17-time Ironman finisher, and I’ve spent about 30 years trying to close the gap between what the research says and what athletes actually do. I led physiology for New Zealand’s Olympic athletes at High Performance Sport New Zealand. I’ve published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, cited over 25,700 times, and co-wrote Science and Application of High-Intensity Interval Training with Martin Buchheit. These days I’m Chief Scientist at Athletica, where I lead the translation of sport science into the platform’s computational models and AI coach, and CEO of HIIT Science, where Martin and I teach it to coaches.

Athletica is an AI coaching platform for endurance athletes. It models each athlete’s training load, critical power or pace, HRV and phenotype from their wearable data, and its AI coach explains what those numbers mean for the next session. HIIT Science is the education company Martin Buchheit and I run for coaches and sport scientists, built around our HIIT book, our courses and the Training Science Podcast.