TEMPO

Coaching

TEMPO isn't only for training on your own. Any account can also coach other people — for free or for a fee — and any account can be coached by someone else. This page covers both sides: what it looks like to have a coach, and what it looks like to be one.

Becoming a coach

Coaching is in closed beta, so you can't switch it on yourself — the TEMPO team turns it on for your account. There's nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for; ask us, and once it's on you'll see a Training ↔ Coaching switch appear in the header. From there you can add a short headline and bio (shown to athletes you invite) and toggle whether you're currently open to new athletes.

If we ever turn coaching off for your account, any athletes you're currently coaching stop being yours straight away, and they're told why.

Proposing a contract

Flip the header switch to Coaching, then hit Propose contract on the roster and enter the email address of the person you want to coach. Everything about being a coach lives in this workspace; Settings → Coaching is the other side of the relationship, where you manage the coaches who train you. Set:

  • A title and a short description of what you're offering.
  • A start date, and an optional end date. Leave the end date empty for an open-ended relationship, or set one for a fixed engagement (a 12-week block, a single season).
  • Exactly what you'll be able to see and do. By default that's everything short of touching their account settings: their profile, health, activities, plan and chat history; changing their plan and leaving them notes; pushing workouts to their Garmin; and talking to their AI coach on their behalf. You can narrow this down to only what you actually need.

The person you invited sees the offer — including the exact list of what you'll be able to see and do — in their own Settings → Coaching, and decides whether to accept.

Accepting or declining (if you're being coached)

An offer to be coached shows up in Settings → Coaching under your pending offers. Read it carefully — it spells out exactly what the coach is asking to see and change — then:

  • Accept it and it's active immediately.
  • Decline it, and nothing happens — no access is ever granted.

During the beta every contract is free: TEMPO isn't taking payments yet, so a coach can't put a price on one.

Once accepted, the contract shows up under your active coaching relationships, and you can end it at any time — no waiting period, no confirmation email to your coach required. The moment you end it, your coach's access stops. Nothing about your training data changes; you simply stop being on anyone's roster.

The Coaching workspace

Once you have at least one athlete under contract, a Training ↔ Coaching switch appears at the top of the app, next to the TEMPO logo. Flip it and you're in your Coaching workspace instead of your own training — a separate view built for managing other people's training, not yours.

Your roster is the heart of it: every athlete you coach, shown as cards (or, if you prefer, a dense table). Each one shows their readiness, fitness numbers, race predictions, today's and tomorrow's sessions, how their week is tracking against plan, and anything worth flagging. It refreshes on its own, so you don't need to reload to see the latest sync.

Opening an athlete's card drops you into their whole TEMPO — Home, their AI coach, their Plan (including the draggable weekly calendar), their recent activity — exactly as they'd see it, with a breadcrumb at the top reminding you whose data you're looking at and showing when your contract with them ends. Anything you change here follows the same rules the athlete's own edits do — a plan change still respects their limits and safety checks — but it's recorded as coming from YOU, not from their AI coach.

Groups

If you coach several people, Groups let you organize your roster — "Team Triathlon", "Marathon block", whatever makes sense to you. By default a group is purely a private label for filtering and messaging: it doesn't change what you can do with any individual athlete, members have no idea the group exists, and a message you send to the group still reaches each athlete as its own private message, the way it always has. You can only add athletes who are already under an active contract with you.

Each group also has a Team chat switch, off by default. Turn it on and the group becomes a real shared conversation — members see the group's name, see each other's messages, and can post into it themselves. That's the right setting for an actual squad training together; leave it off for a private category like "Injured" or "Needs a check-in", since turning it on is what lets the members in it see one another.

Deleting a group always asks you to confirm first, and what it warns you about depends on that switch: with team chat off, a group is only ever a label, so deleting it just removes the label and its membership — every athlete keeps their contract and every message they've exchanged with you. With team chat on, deleting the group also deletes its whole conversation, for everyone in it — there's no undo. To close a room down without losing what was said, turn Team chat off first; the group can still be deleted later, safely, once it's back to being a private label.

Messages

A notification bell sits in the header on every page, whichever side of a contract you're on. It shows how many things are waiting for you, split into two tabs:

  • Updates — contract offers, acceptances and payments. Mark any of them read or unread, dismiss one, or clear everything in one tap.
  • Chats — as a coach, one thread per athlete you coach, plus one per group you've turned team chat on for; as an athlete, one thread per coach who coaches you. Each row shows how many messages are unread and a preview of the last one. Open a thread and it's marked read immediately — you'll see "Seen" once the other side has read your last message ("Seen by 3/5" in a team chat, once three of the five members have).

Messages arrive live — send one and it lands in the other side's inbox right away, badge and all, with nothing to refresh. A reply you send as an athlete goes straight to your coach's own bell and unread count, the same way it works in reverse. In the Coaching workspace, the Messages page is this same inbox full-screen, with its own unread badge on the tab. And on your Home screen, the Coach feed points you straight at any unread message instead of making you go looking for it.

Bulk actions

Select several athletes from the roster (checkboxes, or "Select" on the toolbar) and a bar appears at the bottom with group actions:

  • Copy a plan range from one athlete onto several others — useful for a team following a similar block. Every session lands through the same checks a normal plan edit does, athlete by athlete, so something that isn't safe for a given athlete (an injury flag, an overloaded week) is skipped for them specifically, with a reason, rather than silently forced through.
  • Push to Garmin for several athletes at once — a dry run shows you exactly what would be sent before you confirm anything.
  • Message a whole selection, or add them to a group, in one step.

SuperCoach and @mentions

At the bottom of the Coaching workspace is a chat dock — your own AI assistant for the whole roster, separate from any individual athlete's chat. Type a question or an instruction and mention who it's about with @:

  • "@Andrea, what did he do yesterday?"
  • "Reschedule Marco's week — he's traveling with no bike, keep him moving otherwise."
  • "Anything I should look at across the team this week?"

Typing @ opens a picker of your roster so you never have to remember exact names, and once you've mentioned someone the chat keeps track of who you're talking about. The dock keeps separate conversations, like your own coach chat: the name next to SuperCoach switches between them or starts a new one, and more than one can be answering at the same time. SuperCoach only ever acts on athletes currently under an active contract with you, and only within what that specific contract allows — if you've only agreed to read someone's plan, SuperCoach can tell you about it but won't change it. If a change it makes isn't safe (the same checks that protect every plan edit), it tells you why instead of applying it anyway. This chat runs on your own AI connection and your own settings, separate from any athlete's. It can also see any coaching playbooks an athlete's own AI coach has picked up for working with them — the same reading it already does for that athlete's plan and history.

SuperCoach talks to you as a professional and cites the same doctrine your athletes' coaches use: when it recommends or changes a prescription, a taper, a load or a readiness call, it names the TEMPO doctrine card it rests on (say, Multi-race seasons — A/B/C races, mini-tapers and race-to-race recovery) and says "coaching judgement" when no card covers the case. It always says which athlete each statement is about and never blends two athletes' numbers into one answer; it compares athletes only when you ask it to.

Resources — teaching SuperCoach your own method

The Resources tab in the Coaching workspace is where you build your own coaching corpus — the protocols, methods, and race-day notes you actually use, separate from TEMPO's own science library. Paste text, drop in a link, or upload a PDF, .txt or .md file (up to 5 MB, or 200,000 characters of pasted text); it's chunked and indexed the same way any other TEMPO knowledge is.

What you add here is visible to your own SuperCoach immediately, and to each athlete's own AI coach for as long as they're under contract with you — so if you've written down how you structure a taper or how you coach through an injury, every athlete you're currently coaching benefits from it without you repeating yourself in chat. The tab also lists TEMPO's global library alongside your own material, and you can Mute for my coach any document there you don't want your SuperCoach drawing on — the same reversible toggle athletes have in their own Library, scoped to you. Your own uploads can't be muted against yourself; delete them instead.

When it ends a contract, TEMPO forgets nothing you wrote — an athlete simply stops being able to reach it the moment the contract does, the same way their access to the rest of their data stops.

Talking to an athlete's own AI coach

From an athlete's card (or their nested view), Ask coach opens THEIR AI coach — the one that knows their full history, memory and context — so you can ask it questions or have it make changes exactly as the athlete would. Anything said in that conversation is saved to the athlete's own chat history, clearly marked as coming from you, so they can read it later. It is never a private or hidden channel.

The name at the top of that panel lists the conversations you started with their coach — pick one up or start a new one. You never see the athlete's own chats there; they see yours in their list, marked Coach.

Ending a contract

Either side can end an active coaching relationship at any time — the coach, from an athlete's card menu, or the athlete, from Settings → Coaching. The moment it ends, access stops: the athlete disappears from the coach's roster, and any attempt by the coach (including SuperCoach) to read or change that athlete's data is refused immediately, with nothing left to clean up first.

Ending it also closes what the coach's AI had remembered about the athlete. While the contract runs, SuperCoach keeps its own notes on each athlete — how they respond to a block, what they under-report, what to watch. Those notes are the athlete's data, and they are handled as such:

  • They close the moment the contract ends. The coach's assistant stops seeing them from that instant. The same happens when a contract reaches its end date, or if TEMPO revokes a coach.
  • They are in the athlete's data export, under coaching_memory_about_me.json, so the athlete can read exactly what was written about them.
  • They are deleted with the athlete's account, along with the coaching conversations that were about them.

Privacy — what a coach can see, and what you see of a coach

Before you accept any offer, TEMPO shows you the exact list of what that coach will be able to see and do — nothing is ever granted beyond what you were shown and agreed to, and you can end it whenever you like.

If you accept, your coach can:

  • See exactly what the contract says — anywhere from just your basic profile up to your full training history, health data and chat history.
  • Read your coach memory — the private notes your own AI coach keeps about you (injuries, constraints, and things it worked out from your chats) — but ONLY if the contract includes Read my coach memory. That one is never ticked for you: an offer that says nothing about it does not grant it, and existing contracts signed before this option existed do not have it either. Leave it off and that memory stays yours alone.
  • Comment on activities you have already done, and correct how one is categorised, if the contract allows notes.
  • Change your plan and leave you notes, if the contract allows it — and every such change is recorded and shown to you the same way any other plan change is, so it's never a mystery why something moved.
  • Push workouts to your Garmin calendar, if the contract allows it.
  • Talk to your AI coach on your behalf, if the contract allows it — and every one of those conversations is saved to YOUR chat history, clearly labelled with the coach's name, so you can always see exactly what was said.

Your coach's own conversations with their SuperCoach — the assistant that manages their whole roster — are theirs alone; you don't see those. The notes that assistant keeps about YOU are a different matter: those are your data, and they are in your export, closed when the contract ends, and deleted with your account (see Ending a contract above). What you DO always see is anything that happened to YOUR data: every plan change, every note, every message, and every turn of a conversation held on your behalf, all attributed to your coach, right alongside everything your own AI coach does.