Groundwork
CTO
engineer
researcher
Overview
Training youth athletes
Mission
Groundwork
What we're building
A web app where a 15–18 year old athlete who trains seriously for a sport answers a short questionnaire and gets back a training plan and a nutrition framework built for their own body and training load — grounded in published youth-sport guidance, never generic adult gym advice.
The engine is deterministic and runs entirely in the browser: the same answers always produce the same plan, with no AI generating advice at runtime. Nothing about the athlete is sent to or stored on a server.
Some answers stop the plan rather than changing it. An injury or medical condition, pain that isn't settling, wanting to lose weight, skipping meals or disliking their body, and a girl of 15 or over whose periods have not started all produce a signpost — see a doctor, a registered dietitian, or a parent, guardian or coach — with no training plan and no energy or macro numbers at all. A warning stapled onto a normal-looking plan is the failure mode we are designing against: if we are not confident the numbers are right for that athlete, they do not appear.
The periods panel keeps the refusal but is worded per age — 15, 16, 17 and 18 each get their own copy. 15 reads as "get this checked — usually it's just your timing"; 16 and 17 are progressively more direct and no longer tell her it is probably just her timing; 18 reads the same direct wording as 17 with her own age in it. No age threshold is printed anywhere.
Where numbers are withheld for an athlete on a size-based trigger, only the training structure prints: no energy figure, no macros, and no weight-scaled hydration millilitres either — since those would let the athlete's body mass be worked back out of the one page built to avoid it. The hydration card falls back to urine colour and thirst on that path.