{"id":100595,"title":"HYBRD - agentic coaching for athletes","tagline":"get faster and stronger","body":"Hey YC! We’re the team behind HYBRD - Ruiters, Shoe, Ben, Michael and Mats. \n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=100595\u0026key=user_uploads/1315661/b570d491-7243-4a3c-8660-ca425a646339)\n\nWe’re excited to share that today **HYBRD is becoming a coach in your pocket.** It’s like having a $500/month private coach on call 24/7. We provide a world-class training plan, then adapt it based on your life, progress, and recovery to keep you on track. \n\n\\\n[LINK TO DEMO VIDEO](https://youtube.com/shorts/PgPKkJqbYs0)\n\nASK: [TRY IT NOW ON THE APP STORE](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hybrd-get-faster-stronger/id6670271875)\n\n\\\n**Introducing HYBRD Brain**\n\nHYBRD Brain is our AI-powered coach built on top of HYBRD's structured training plans. Tell Brain about your schedule, sport mix, travel, or injuries — and it restructures your entire plan accordingly.\n\n## **⭐ Why HYBRD is different**\n\nThese aren't ChatGPT-slop training plans.\n\nWe've partnered with Alex Viada (creator of the term \"hybrid athlete\") and his Complete Human Performance team to use their world-class programming as HYBRD's foundation. Our agent adapts those plans to you while preserving best-in-class athletic methodology.\n\n(Alex also bought an iPhone just to use HYBRD)\n\n**HYBRD Brain can coach you to achieve anything**\n\n* Training for a marathon but also playing soccer twice a week? HYBRD Brain adjusts your running volume.\n* Tweaked your Achilles and need to back off temporarily? HYBRD Brain rebuilds your training block.\n* Traveling for work and missed three sessions? HYBRD Brain recalculates what comes next so you don’t lose momentum.\n\nInstead of forcing you to follow a plan that breaks on contact with reality, HYBRD Brain builds a plan that adapts to you. \n\n**HYBRD actually does things**\n\nChatting with your health data is cool, but not useful. Most apps just regurgitate your charts back to you (you know how to read a graph) and recommend the CDC's 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week.\n\nThese tools feel disappointing because they don't know your actual goals and constraints, like upcoming races, equipment and your schedule, so they can't do anything meaningful with the data they collect.\n\nHYBRD understands your goals and proactively proposes adjustments that fit your plan. Unplanned workouts, missed sessions, fatigue, cross-training, new PRs… HYBRD recognizes these moments and reorganizes your schedule around them.\n\n**HYBRD uses ALL of your workout data**\n\nEvery workout you do is a puzzle piece in a broader picture of performance. But fitness tracking data is siloed across multiple domains. You might track your running data on a Garmin, your sleep/recovery on WHOOP and your strength training in a spreadsheet. \n\nIt kinda works if you’re _just_ a runner or _just_ a lifter.\n\nBut more and more people are becoming “hybrid” athletes who focus on strength _and_ cardio, so they’re left stitching together multiple data sources to see the full picture.\n\nDo it wrong and you risk “cardio killing your gains”\n\n**HYBRD is adaptive to your history, current level and progress**\n\nHYBRD integrates with all leading wearables and data sources, pulling in your full workout history and deduplicating it. From that data, we give you a holistic view of your strength and cardio fitness, normalized for age, gender, and weight, as a single score you can track over time.\n\nCycling, running, rowing, lifting: we interpret it all to model your physiology and personalize your plan.\n\nSay you want to train more like Alex Viada. You probably aren't deadlifting 700lbs and logging 15+ hours a week (yet?). We scale the fundamentals of his programming down to exactly where you are now.\n\n**FitBench**\n\nOk, it wouldn't be an AI launch without benchmarking.\n\nWe built **FitBench**, a benchmark that evaluates an AI coach across four dimensions: Scientific accuracy, athlete safety, recommendation actionability and conciseness across 25 common coaching scenarios. We used Opus 4.6 as an LLM-as-a-judge to score HYBRD Brain against current ChatGPT and its predecessors.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=100595\u0026key=user_uploads/1315661/c6e545d7-114b-4cc5-9e1f-806f7197e7d2)\n\nBut how does that compare with human coaches?\n\nWe had HYBRD sit for the **Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS)** exam, which is the gold standard in coaching. You need 70% to pass (half of all human test-takers don't make it). HYBRD scored 77%.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=100595\u0026key=user_uploads/1315661/4cfa2415-0d8f-4106-850b-f15fcf307d54)\n\n\\\n**Our Story**\n\nBen, Mats, and Shoe all met while working on getting WHOOP to PMF. At the time, outside of work, Mats was training on the US national rowing team and Ben + Shoe were making their first forays into Ironman training.\n\nWe realized that fitness hardware was getting really good, but also was being commoditized. (Just take a look at Coros brutally undercutting Garmin prices)\n\nFor all the data being collected, existing products weren’t providing real coaching to multi-disciplinary “hybrid” athletes like us, partly because none were built to handle strength + cardio data, and partly because models weren’t good enough. \n\nMost athletes are still following static PDF plans they found online, or \"adaptive\" apps that fall apart the moment cross-training enters the picture.\n\nWe teamed up with our co-founder and CTO Ruiters (a senior AWS engineer at the time) and Michael (our founding engineer) to solve that with HYBRD. \n\nIf that problem resonates with you, [try a 7 day free trial of HYBRD!](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hybrd-get-faster-stronger/id6670271875)","slug":"QAV-hybrd-agentic-coaching-for-athletes","created_at":"2026-04-30T14:42:21.007Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T00:15:42.311Z","total_vote_count":7,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QAV-hybrd-agentic-coaching-for-athletes","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=100595\u0026key=user_uploads/1315661/b570d491-7243-4a3c-8660-ca425a646339","company":{"id":30064,"name":"HYBRD","slug":"hybrd","url":"https://www.hybrd.com/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/4d43a2e4ad2a1d85682aa3ad5a84240ff8cd7dca.png","batch":"Fall 2024","industry":"Consumer","tags":["Health Tech","Consumer","Fitness","Digital Health","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30064"}}