The Future of Athletic Performance

Lately, I’ve been helping one of my clients imagine the future of healthcare. Our goal was to identify opportunities to deliver differentiated and transformative human experiences.

We often use a process called futurecasting to envision what the future may look like. We first dive deep into the underlying forces that are shaping the world — from political, to economic, societal, technological and environmental, and from the confluence of these trends, we create a number of potential future scenarios that could come to pass. The purpose of this exercise is not to accurately predict the future. Rather, it is to provoke, lift constraints, and create opportunities that could exist ahead.

At phantastic, we are working towards a particular future of human athletic performance. This future is highly personalized and real-time — supported by data, science, and technology. This is the future we would like to co-create. Today, we would like to share it with you.

Imagine it’s the year 2069…

At phantastic, we typically look at four lenses of human performance: training, nutrition, recovery, and mind. I will hypothesize how each of these will evolve. Let’s start with recovery.

The perfect night’s sleep

Your alarm clock rings at 6am. Forget about the ache of the morning wakeup. In fifty years, you always wake up on the “right side of the bed.” Your alarm is tied to your internal body sensors, and so awakens you when your REM phase has just completed, and your melatonin levels are perfectly suppressed by a smart device in your body; allowing energizing serotonin to flood your cortex. While you were sleeping, the ambient light mask and soothing sounds in your bedroom adequately stimulated your brain, now helping you smoothly transition into the day.

Your optimal time to wake up was decided not just by hormonal levels, but logistical reasons too. Your digital assistant, EMMA, is tied to your biometric data as well as your schedule. Heck, she knows everything you’ve ever listened to, watched or searched for online. She knows you better than you know yourself.

And to decide when to wake you up, EMMA considered dozens of factors. These include: your recovery level, weather forecast, traffic conditions to decide between a morning or evening training schedule, and the time it will take you to get to your training facility. By factoring in all these variables, EMMA has never cajoled you into or out of the right sleep phase.

You are so well rested. Your smart bed adjusted temperature, position and firmness throughout the night as you were moving from one side of the bed to another. Six hours of sleep now feels much like nine hours felt back in 2019.

Being aware of your recovery score

You may ask, how EMMA possibly knows your recovery level? The answer can be found in your own home. Most devices (smart clothing, smart fridge, smart toilets, etc) consistently take your biometrics, resting heart rate etc. Algorithms that combine your stress levels, sleep, nutrition, and blood lactate provide a perfect recovery score for you. These devices can decide how much stress your body can take today. EMMA knows your ideal time for exercise and can reshuffle your day accordingly.

You jump into the shower. Jets in the shower adjust water temperature to help with blood circulation and oxidation. Smartwear regulates the tension of your muscles — effect similar to having a massage every day.

You recover faster than ever before, reducing the time in between training sessions, and ensuring you exercise at your peak so you can give it your all.

Daily nutrition tailored to your genetic profile

With the growing popularity and affordability of at-home genetic testing kits such as 23andMe, Ancestry, Muhdo, FitnessGenes and many others, we will soon know our bodies and our needs better than ever before.

We can easily know which nutrients our body is lacking. What foods energize us the most. What nutritional compounds are best absorbed vs. least absorbed. We’ll even know how long it takes to process specific foods in order to hit the optimal blood sugar levels for our workouts. Based on this knowledge, kitchen robots will prepare the perfect, personalized meals for us, as they will for every other member of our family. Everything will be smart prepared — mixed, blended, cleaned, and served.

Although robots in 2019 are clunky at best, we have taken leaps and bounds in their capabilities in the past 50 years. EMMA is your liaison between your desires and the actions of the machines. You often wonder how they communicate to each other. Do they talk about you in a nice way? You decide to stop thinking about it and just focus on your delicious breakfast.

Daily supplements integrated into your food

Thanks to pharmacogenomics, daily supplements you take are now specifically tailored to you. The “magic” all-in-one supplement pill ensures best absorption, making sure you have all the nutrients you need.

But as opposed to taking cumbersome pills, supplements can now be integrated directly into food; making the adhering to your nutrient intake truly effortless.

Preventative medicine is so extraordinary that it is rare for you to fall ill or feel suboptimal health. However, if need be, your robot can administer you an extra “boost” of supplements, much more powerful than the ones found in specialized health centers today.

Race nutrition that actually works for you

Race nutrition is uniquely tailored to your body’s needs and properties such as absorption, sweat rate, and digestion rate. Carbohydrate utilization science is personalized specifically for you. You won’t get “race stomach” anymore, you won’t “bonk”, you can control your body and how it is fueled much more precisely.

This is again done via biometrics and EMMA will track all data for you automatically.

Real-time adjustments to the dosage

In 2019, we already measure sweat rate based on tests, and then have a prescribed hydration –but this is not taking into account the actual race location, altitude, humidity and other variable factors. What if your smartwear could actually measure your perspiration, and, connected to your water bottle, nudge you to drink just the right amount to replenish your fluids? What if based on the salt levels of your sweat, the right amount of electrolytes could get released into your drink to make sure you are replenishing fully?

Measuring your blood sugar levels can also tell you when to have a gel or a gulp of sugary drink to avoid bonking at your current burn rate, considering your personal absorption. Many athletes have this calculation ingrained in their heads, but in the future, there will be no guesswork.

You will always be nourished with food that has everything your body needs to supplement, with the highest absorption, and that provides the ultimate energy potential during race days.

Greater focus and mindfulness

Not only are you always well rested because of perfect night’s sleep, and your mind is well nourished because of your comprehensive nutrition plan, but you also have all the tools at your disposal to learn to control your mind and become its master.

Via devices like electric brain stimulation, you will be able to achieve mindfulness and extreme levels of focus on demand. Focusing on the task at hand and increasing the specificity of your training will result in much higher quality of your training sessions. You will cut out junk miles when you switch off, as you will learn to always be on.

During workouts, EMMA will know what music to play to motivate you to work your hardest, as well as track your data in a way that engages and motivates you to continue your training plan. Your augmented reality goggles can be worn during workouts in order to turn any exercise into a “game”. You can hop over obstacles on a run, or ski through holographic markers on the slopes. Working out has never been more fun.

Greater influence over your body

Mindfulness will help you better connect with your body, understand it, and react to it. You can better manage mental and physical fatigue by exerting the power of your mind to overcome your body. This will go beyond the meditation apps of 2019, but will be linked to brain sensors and biofeedback systems. From a young age, children will be taught how to center themselves and will know their bodies like never before. Via systematic mind training, visualization etc. you will unlock the levels of performance of elite athletes.

Your mind will remove any barriers standing between you and what’s humanly possible.

It’s training day, and EMMA has a plan for you

AI and Machine Learning algorithms adapt your training based on your current fitness level, recovery, and nutrients that you have consumed. Gone are static training plans and coaches that take days to review your last session. Everything is set for you, but not by you. It’s all personalized from how you react to training, which is measured via thousands of data points your body is sending.

All training data is accessible via EMMA whether verbally or visually on your training app. You can share this data with friends and competitors in order to motivate you even further.

Social and immersive

Training is more connected and social, especially when cycling at home. A lot of this will happen in Augmented Reality worlds, where you can ride anywhere, whether Stelvio pass, Alp d’Huez or the Tour de France Peleton. With streaming workout classes, anyone can access excellent fitness anywhere. Pro teams can even recruit new talent through online communities of cyclists based on rider stats.

You can replay any race, with the actual power metrics of the pros to see where you stack up. Friends can be virtual training partners, which can be modelled off their historical performances and latest statistics to challenge them to a ride. This can now be done asynchronously, when most convenient to everyone.

During training: Real-time metrics and analytics

In 2019, you can measure training zones based on one-off heart rate and lactate testing. In the future, we’ll be able to measure this data through sensors in our bodies, no longer having to rely on once-per-year tests. We will have real-time visibility into lactate level accumulation and be able to adjust the pace on the go as soon as we near the threshold. This is similar to current continuous sugar monitoring and insulin release for diabetics.

As all this information is processed real-time in the cloud — you receive haptic feedback from your smartwear that tells you when you are going too easy or too hard and nudges you to hit perfect pace to optimize your training results. Your AR glasses provide real-time analytics on your heads-up display, so you no longer have to switch between the screens of your watch to see your cadence, HR, and many other metrics. You can also see the pace and performance metrics of everyone else around you — how fast you are approaching them, when you are expected to pass them etc., taking out the internal guesswork and calculations.

During training: Improving technique

When training, your smartwear (including shoes) measures muscle tension, posture, and, models your running position. You can receive haptic nudges for posture corrections, and you can replay and review your performance when you finish your workout. Based on this data, EMMA can recommend a set of drills that will improve your form, and bake them into your training schedule automatically going forward.

Gene-editing replaces steroids

Taking things even further, CRISPR and “designer babies” might include modifying genes to make us more resistant or sensitive to pain, or improve certain qualities that will increase performance. Gone are the days where doping meant blood transfusion. Soon we will be able to modify blood cells to carry more oxygen, or the brain to feel less pain. In 2019 Chinese officials confirmed the first gene-edited infants. You can imagine a secret government funded program leading up to 2032 Olympics that transforms into a general trend, as the cost of gene-editing is now under $1,000.

Training will be dynamic and personalized to your next optimal workout — maximizing the return on workout time invested. Real-time feedback will help us get the most out of our bodies in every single session.

The future is bright. At phantastic, we are betting on many of the above technologies to play a major role in helping us achieve the next level of athletic performance. You will see that our innovative products will keep bridging the gap between today and the future above.

Of course, it will take time. There are technologies and behaviors that need to come to fruition to make this future a reality, and not everything is within our grasp. To lift some of these big rocks, we need to collaborate and co-create with others, not only in the sports industry. We certainly want to be part of this exciting future that will allow humankind to achieve next levels of performance.

Final note from the author

When doing contextual research with seniors to talk about Virtual Care, many of them refer to it as the “Jetsons’ future”. While a lot of this may similarly feel like the Jetsons’ future to you, many components of this future are already upon us. Some are niche and not widely available, some are in testing, some are not yet affordable to the masses. Yet, while reading, I hope that for a second, you forgot about smartwatches and activity trackers.

Did we miss any major developments? Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.

About the author
phantastic is a superhuman performance lab, on a mission to help athletes reimagine the possible and realize their potential. We are a team of athletes, coaches, and scientists. But more importantly hackers, tinkerers and experimenters, obsessed with chasing faster.

About the illustrator
Rune Fisker is one of our all-time favorite illustrators, based in our favorite Copenhagen. We frequently admire his unmistakable work in The New Yorker and WIRED, and we have been dreaming to collaborate with him on this piece. Well, our dream’s have come true.