Frequently asked questions

Vivengo is an adaptive sports coach. It builds a personalised training plan and adjusts it to your form, day after day. Not feeling great today? You cut the duration or the intensity in one tap. Good day? You step it up. Whether you simply want to stay fit, prepare your first 5K or aim for a marathon, you progress at your own pace.

But Vivengo isn't only for athletes training on their own. The platform is built for four audiences:

• Athletes, with their plan, their sessions, their races and their team.
• Clubs, to manage their members and follow the group's activity.
• Companies, to bring their teams together around sport.
• Coaches, to follow more athletes without spending their evenings on it.

Anything that concerns a group rather than a person happens on Vivengo Sync.

They are two products that work together, with the same account and the same data.

• App Your day-to-day training. The plan, the guided sessions, the adjustment to how you feel today, the Coach tab, connecting your watch.
• Sync The collective and the season. Your race plan, your team, clubs and organisations, and far more detailed statistics.

Some things are deliberately not in the app: we'd rather it stayed focused on the essentials, your training. Anything that needs a large screen, or that concerns a group rather than a person, lives on Sync.

No. One account gives you access to both. You log in with the same details and find the same data, in either direction. You move from one to the other without reconfiguring anything.

No. The plan starts from your real level, whatever that is. If you are starting out, the first sessions are deliberately cautious, and the load builds progressively.

If you find your first session too easy, that's normal and deliberate: Vivengo doesn't know you yet, and coming back too hard is the surest way to get injured or give up.

Today, Vivengo is dedicated to running. Other sports will follow.

That said, the app isn't limited to running sessions: you'll also find training advice, recovery recommendations and strength work.

From your level, and what you want to do with it.

Your level is first estimated from your MAS (maximal aerobic speed), whether you entered it yourself or Vivengo estimated it. It then refines itself as your plan goes on, as you work through the sessions: your real paces and your recovery say far more than a starting questionnaire.

On top of that come two pieces of information from your profile:

• Your goal: 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, or simply staying fit.
• Your schedule: how many sessions a week you can hold, and which days.

You set them under Profile › Training goals & schedule.

If you have added a race to your plan, it is built backwards from that date, with the build-up and the taper falling at the right time.

MAS, or maximal aerobic speed, is the fastest pace you can hold for around five minutes. It is what the paces of your sessions are calculated from.

If you don't know it, that's not a problem. Vivengo estimates it from what you give it, and your plan includes regular test sessions to reassess it as the weeks go by. If you have no MAS on file yet, your first two sessions are exactly those two short tests: they are not formalities, they are what sets the rest of the plan at the right level.

If you already know it, you can enter it directly under Profile.

This is exactly the situation Vivengo exists for. Before your session, the app asks where you stand on six points: sleep quality, fatigue level, motivation, injuries, stress level, and time available.

Vivengo then recalculates the session: a shorter duration, a lower intensity, or an easy run in place of the intervals. You train anyway, at the right dose for today.

No. A missed session is not force-fed back to you the next day: that is precisely how people get injured. The plan adjusts slightly and carries on.

At this stage, Vivengo does not rebuild your whole plan around one skipped session, it adapts at the margin. If you miss several in a row, the simplest thing is to go back to your profile and review how many sessions you can realistically hold.

Yes, with one button from your calendar.

And if you connect your personal calendar under Profile › Connect calendar, Vivengo takes account of what is already waiting for you that week. Your sessions then appear next to your appointments, in their place in your week. It sounds trivial, and it's often what makes the difference between a session planned and a session done.

Four families, each with a specific job:

• Endurance, to build the base.
• Tempo, to hold a strong pace.
• Intervals, for speed.
• Recovery, to absorb the rest.

In your calendar, a coloured dot tells you which one is waiting. Every session also explains why it is there: its intensity zone, its duration, and what it develops.

Yes. Easy run, hills, intervals, long run, tempo, race simulation, or entirely bespoke: you pick the type, and Vivengo adapts the distance, the pace and the duration to your level.

Open the app, go to Training, then tap “Start training”. The app guides you from your phone, intensity zone by intensity zone.

No watch is required: you can head out right now.

Garmin and Apple Watch are supported today. Coros and Suunto are coming soon.

It is a one-time setup. It happens in the app, on your phone: Profile › Tracking app.

You can do it during sign-up, or later at any time.

It is not automatic, and that is the point that surprises people most often.

Open your upcoming session under Training, then tap “Send to watch” at the very bottom.

With a Garmin, the session lands in Garmin Connect first. For it to reach the watch itself, you still need to run a sync.

After your run, a sync normally brings your data back on its own.

If it doesn't, you can fetch it by hand: go back to Training, choose “Import activity”, then select the run concerned from the list. It then joins your history and your statistics as if it had come back automatically.

Yes. Your sessions show up in the app, and you can record how you felt after each run. The adaptation will be a little less fine-grained, but it works.

As long as your watch isn't connected, Vivengo is working partly blind: it can hand you a plan, but it doesn't know what your last session cost you.

Once connected:

• Your sessions show up right on your wrist.
• Your sessions take account of what you actually did, not of what was planned.
• Your statistics fill in automatically: distance, pace, VO₂max, records.

That's normal: Vivengo doesn't use passwords.

You enter your email address, we send you a one-time code, you type it in, and you're logged in. Nothing to remember, nothing to invent, nothing to lose.

It works the same way in the app and on Sync, with the same address.

In order, the three most common causes:

• Check your spam folder. That's the explanation nine times out of ten. Mark the message as legitimate and the next ones will arrive directly.
• Check the address you entered. A typo, or a different address from the one used at sign-up, and the code goes elsewhere.
• Give it a moment, then request a new code. If you have requested several, only the last one received is valid, the earlier ones no longer work.

Still nothing? Write to us with the address concerned and we'll look into it from our side.

Either place, as you prefer. In the app, under Profile › Training goals & schedule. Or on Sync, under My profile, which gathers on a single screen your goal, its deadline, your number of sessions a week, your available days, your level and your MAS.

And if your situation changes, a new goal, a different schedule or an injury, come back and update it. The plan follows the profile, not the other way around.

In French, German and English.

You change language under My profile on Sync, in the Language field.

No. The address chosen when the account is created is permanent, because it is what identifies you: it is where your login codes arrive.

Everything else can be changed freely under My profile on Sync: name, username, town, language and your training information. Don't forget Save at the top of the page.

You have control over it, under My profile on Sync. Two independent settings:

• The Vivengo newsletter, our news and our advice.
• Team event notifications, when something happens in your team.

You can also unsubscribe in one click from the link at the bottom of any of our emails.

You can do it yourself, straight from your profile. The “Delete my account” button is right at the bottom of My profile on Sync. There is nothing to ask us for.

It is used to build and adjust your plan, and to feed your statistics. The members of your team see your recent activity and the races you have added; what you display publicly stays under your control from your team's settings.

The detail is in our privacy policy, available from My profile on Sync, alongside the terms of use. That is the document that governs: it sets out which data is collected, why, and for how long.

You will also find there the setting by which you decide whether your data may be used in pseudonymised form for research purposes. It is a choice, not a requirement, and you can change it whenever you like.

A question it doesn't answer? Write to us.