AI workout plans that adapt to how your body feels

How AI workout plans work

When you set up Cora, you tell it about your fitness goals, training experience, available equipment, and how many days per week you want to train. From there, Cora's AI generates a complete training program tailored to you. It selects exercises, sets rep ranges, determines rest periods, and structures your training week for optimal results.

But unlike a static workout plan from a PDF or a cookie-cutter app, Cora's plan is not fixed. It is a living program that updates continuously based on new information. Every workout you log, every recovery score you receive, and every piece of wearable data feeds back into the AI. The plan you see tomorrow reflects everything Cora has learned about you up to today.

This means your training program gets smarter over time. In the first week, Cora is working with the information you provided during setup. By week four, it has observed how you respond to different training stimuli, which exercises you perform well on, where your weak points are, and how quickly you recover. The program evolves with you.

Recovery-adaptive training explained

Traditional training programs assign fixed workouts to fixed days. Monday is chest day regardless of whether you slept four hours or eight. Friday is heavy deadlifts whether your HRV is tanking or at an all-time high. This approach ignores the most important variable in training: your body's current state.

Cora takes a different approach. Each morning, it checks your Body Charge recovery score, which combines your sleep quality, HRV, and resting heart rate from your wearable. Based on that score, Cora adjusts your planned workout for the day. On days when your recovery is strong, Cora will increase the intensity or volume. On days when your body is still recovering, it will scale back to prevent overtraining.

These adjustments are not random. They follow established training principles like periodization and autoregulation. Cora might reduce your working sets from four to three, lower the prescribed RPE (rate of perceived exertion), swap a barbell movement for a less taxing machine variation, or shift a high-intensity session to later in the week when your body is more likely to be recovered. The goal is always to get the maximum productive training stimulus your body can handle without crossing into overtraining territory.

Heart rate zone training

Heart rate zones are a proven way to ensure you are training at the right intensity for your goals. Whether you are doing steady state cardio, high-intensity interval training, or active recovery, your heart rate tells you if you are in the productive zone or if you need to adjust your effort.

Cora calculates your personal heart rate zones based on your resting heart rate and max heart rate data from your wearable. During workouts, your Apple Watch, Garmin, or Whoop streams real-time heart rate data to Cora, so you can see which zone you are in at any moment. After the workout, Cora shows you a breakdown of how much time you spent in each zone.

This data feeds back into your training plan. If Cora sees that your cardio sessions are consistently too intense (too much time in Zone 4 and 5 when the goal was Zone 2), it will adjust future recommendations. If your recovery sessions are not easy enough, Cora will suggest lower targets. The integration between heart rate data and training programming creates a feedback loop that keeps your training aligned with your goals.

Apple Watch workout tracking and exercise logging

Cora integrates with Apple Watch to give you real-time tracking during your training sessions. Start a workout from Cora and your watch automatically begins recording heart rate, active calories, and duration. When you finish, all of that data syncs back to Cora and informs your recovery calculations and future programming.

For strength training, Cora provides a clean exercise logging interface. You see your prescribed exercises with target sets, reps, and weight. As you complete each set, you log the actual weight and reps performed. Cora compares what you did to what was prescribed and uses the difference to fine-tune future workouts. If you consistently hit more reps than prescribed, it means the weight is too light and Cora will increase it. If you are falling short, Cora will adjust downward or modify the exercise selection.

Beyond Apple Watch, Cora also works with Garmin, Whoop, Fitbit, and Oura Ring for pulling workout and recovery data. No matter which wearable you use, your training data flows into the same intelligent system that adapts your program over time.

Progressive overload tracking

Progressive overload is the foundational principle of strength training: to get stronger, you need to gradually increase the demands you place on your muscles. This can mean more weight, more reps, more sets, or more difficult exercise variations over time. Without progressive overload, your body adapts to the current stimulus and stops making gains.

Cora tracks your performance history for every exercise and uses that data to program appropriate progressions. It knows what you lifted last week, what your trend looks like over the past month, and where you are in your training cycle. When the data shows you are ready to move up, Cora prescribes the increase. If the data shows you are plateauing, Cora can introduce variation through different rep ranges, tempo changes, or exercise swaps to break through the stall.

This is one of the biggest advantages of AI-driven training over a static plan. A pre-written program cannot react to your actual performance. It prescribes the same progression timeline for everyone, regardless of how they are actually responding. Cora makes progression decisions based on your real data, which means you move forward at exactly the right pace for your body.

Frequently Asked Questions