Systematic literature review identifies machine learning's impact on training in endurance sports, highlighting challenges.
In endurance sports, athletes and coaches shift increasingly from intuition-based decision-making to data-driven approaches powered by modern technology and analytics. Since 2018, the field has experienced significant advances, influencing endurance sports disciplines. This systematic literature review identified 75 peer-reviewed studies on intelligent data analysis in endurance sports training. Each study was categorized by its intelligent method (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, computational intelligence), the types of sensors and wearables used, and the specific training application and approach. Our synthesis reveals that machine learning and deep learning are among the most used approaches, with running and cycling identified as the most extensively studied sports. Physiological and environmental data, such as heart rate, biomechanical signals, and GPS, are often used to aid in generating personalized training plans, predicting injuries, and increasing athletes’ long-term performance. Despite these advancements, challenges remain, related to data quality and the small participant sample sizes.
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Rajšp et al. (2025) studied this question.
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