The coach who never flatters you.
UpGreg in full: what it does, what the others don't, and why the difference lies exactly where they gave up.
UpGreg is an AI-powered sports coaching app. It gathers your sessions from six brands of connected watches and scales, analyses them, then produces a personalised training plan — rebuilt after every session and bounded by safety rules that can order you to rest. The coach is called Greg: honest, never flattering, available around the clock.
Six brands, one athlete.
A Garmin on your wrist, Strava on your mind, a scale in the bathroom and a phone counting steps: that is the real life of an athlete. UpGreg is where all of it becomes a single, coherent story again.
Six connectors, one per athlete
Garmin, Strava, Polar, Huawei Health, Apple Health and Withings. A connection that belongs to your account alone, tokens encrypted at rest and revocable in one click. Never a shared login, never an exposed token.
Weight and body composition
Your connected scale feeds the engine: body fat, muscle mass, resting heart rate. Not a decorative number — it recomputes your energy expenditure, your zones and your training load.
File import, with duplicates made impossible
.FIT, .GPX, .TCX and whole .ZIP archives. Every session gets a stable fingerprint: import the same folder ten times and your history does not move an inch.
Live sync and manual entry
Strava pushes a session the second you publish it. And for the watchless run, the improvised hike or the group class, manual entry creates a full session, metrics included.
Elsewhere
Garmin Connect only reads Garmin. Apple Health never leaves the iPhone. Strava aggregates everything — and stops there: it looks at what you did, it has never told you what to do tomorrow.
Here
Switch watches next year and your history stays put. UpGreg has no wristband to sell you: it is independent by design, and that is precisely what makes it trustworthy.
« Your gear changes every three years. Your progress deserves better than starting from scratch. »
GregThe session taken apart. Never dressed up.
Chronic load, acute fatigue, freshness, risk ratio: the metrics coaches have used for twenty years — computed properly, and shown only when they actually mean something.
Fitness, fatigue, freshness
Chronic load, acute load, the balance between them and the acute-to-chronic ratio, as exponential averages that follow the state of the art. You watch your base fitness rise, you see fatigue coming, you know when you are sharp.
Heart-rate zones that are finally right
Anchored to your real maximum heart rate when you know it, estimated with the Tanaka formula when you don't — not the old “220 minus your age”, which is routinely off by ten beats.
Power, records and splits
Record power curve, best efforts over the reference distances, and automatic splits when your watch supplied none: every kilometre running, every five kilometres on the bike, every hundred metres in the pool.
The rule that changes everything: emptiness keeps quiet
A metric that cannot be computed honestly is not displayed. No zone at 0%, no power at zero watts, no flat chart making you doubt yourself over a missing data point.
« A chart at zero is not information. It is an admission that looking good beat being true. »
GregGreg proposes. The guardrails decide.
Plugging an AI into a training plan has become trivial. What has not: bounding that AI with a deterministic engine allowed to say no, and keeping every decision explainable months later. That is where UpGreg leaves the category behind.
A goal judged without flattery
Your dated goal gets a verdict on five levels — including “out of reach”. No consumer app dares to use that phrase. It saves six months of programmed failure.
Your real level, sport by sport
Volume, frequency, availability and history measured against a threshold grid: five profiles, four age brackets, per sport. Beginner or semi-pro, the plan does not start from the same place.
A rolling plan, never frozen
Generated over a horizon matched to your tier, then re-evaluated on every imported session. Skipped two runs? The plan knows before you do, and realigns.
The right to refuse a session
Freshness on the floor, load turned dangerous, injury or illness declared: the engine orders rest or caps intensity, whatever the AI proposed. A safety rule does not negotiate with a well-turned sentence.
The “why” is kept
Every decision keeps its reasoning, readable exactly as it was made. Ask in November why Greg rested you in August — and get the real answer, not a rewording.
A 0-to-100 score you can take apart
Consistency, volume, load, intensity: four weighted components, kept over time. Not a magic number from a black box — a figure you can argue with, line by line.
A real conversation, not a form
Greg talks — in English, French, German or Spanish — with your full context in mind: your notes, your injuries, this week's constraints, what you did yesterday. Ask him to move Thursday's session: he moves it, and tells you what it costs.
Built for real life
Strictly validated AI output, a safe fallback plan when the model fails, a global kill switch and a spending cap. The AI can go down: your coaching keeps running.
« I can tell you no. That is the only reason you can believe me when I say yes. »
GregA nutrition plan that knows you are running tomorrow.
Calorie counters ignore your training. Training plans ignore your plate. UpGreg holds both in the same hand — and draws health limits few dare to write down.
A verdict on your target, decided server-side
Accepted, counter-proposed, or refused as dangerous. Weekly loss capped, a floor on body mass index, a bounded deficit: these rules are deterministic and cannot be talked around.
A lock against eating disorders
A screening questionnaire, a reading of your past requests, and a lock when the signals add up. A feature that touches health is not granted on a doubt: when in doubt, it closes.
Allergies are a hard constraint
If an allergen shows up in a generated menu — in a title as much as in an ingredient — the whole proposal is rejected and replaced. No filtering after the fact, no “please double-check”.
Two weeks, meal by meal
From breakfast to the post-session snack, tied to the workouts in your plan. Aggregated shopping list, one-tap tracking, and a weight log that suspends the deficit automatically if you drop too fast.
Elsewhere
A counting app will let you enter an unrealistic weight-loss target without blinking, then congratulate you for hitting it. It has no idea you have a long run tomorrow morning.
Here
Versioned, revocable consents, in line with the rules for health data. And if your tier changes you keep read access to your plan: health is not a feature you switch off at renewal.
« I would rather disappoint you in March than break you in June. »
GregHe doesn't wait for you. He comes and gets you.
Most sports apps are passive: they open an empty screen and wait. Greg turns up with a proposal — concrete, dated, and close to home.
The right race, within 100 km
A catalogue of real races, kept up to date automatically, matched against your level, your sport and your calendar. Greg suggests a start line three to six months out: exactly the time it takes to prepare without getting hurt.
Goals that are more than finish times
A time over a distance, a personal metric, a specific segment, a whole season broken into steps — with weekly milestones and an alert when the trajectory slips, while there is still time to fix it.
A debrief after every session
Gaps in duration, load and intensity against what was planned, turned into a score and a comment. Encouraging, but honest: that is the whole difference between a coach and a notification.
He speaks up when it matters, not constantly
In-app messages, email, SMS, phone notifications: every channel exists, and each one is governed by anti-spam rules and a per-athlete memory. Good news announced twice stops being good news.
« A goal without a date is a wish. Get a race number, and we'll have a serious conversation. »
GregA platform, not an app.
This is the chapter nobody gets excited about in a demo, and the one that makes the difference two years into using the product.
Web, iOS and Android in step
Three apps, one behavioural contract — and automated tests that fail when the platforms drift apart. Parity is not an intention here, it is a shipping condition.
Four languages, right down to the coach's voice
English, French, German and Spanish — in the app, the emails, the notifications and Greg's own answers. Not a half-translated interface wrapped around an English-only coach.
A subscription with no traps
Payment in euros, dollars or francs depending on your country, in-app purchases reconciled with the web subscription, pro-rata refunds when you move up, downgrades at the end of the period. And cancelling takes one button.
Your record really is yours
A full export in one archive, account deletion that actually deletes, encrypted data and automatic purging of login traces. Privacy is wired into the product, not promised on a legal page.
« A coach who is missing on Sunday morning is no use. Mine runs, and we check it every hour. »
GregWhere the others stop.
None of these products is bad: each is excellent in its own box. The point is elsewhere — there is no shared box, and living with four subscriptions that never talk to each other is the daily reality of every serious athlete.
| Capability | UpGreg | Strava | Garmin Connect | TrainingPeaks | AI plan apps | Recovery bands |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent from the watch manufacturer | yes | yes | Garmin only | yes | varies | own sensor |
| Advanced training analysis | included | subscription | yes | the reference | partial | recovery |
| Plan rebuilt after every session | automatic | — | limited | via a human coach | yes | — |
| Health guardrails that can refuse a session | deterministic | — | advice | coach's judgement | rarely explicit | recommendation |
| Decisions explained and kept | yes | — | — | coach's notes | — | — |
| Nutrition coupled to training | built in | — | — | separate module | — | — |
| Proactive race suggestion near you | location-aware | directory | — | — | — | — |
| Interface and coach in your language | 4 languages | yes | yes | partial | often English only | partial |
Comparison of publicly documented scopes, August 2026. These products evolve: this table describes features, not overall quality.
💬 What it actually looks like
The same Greg answers inside the app, with your data in front of him.
Excerpt of a typical conversation with Greg in the app.
What's coming — and what we are not selling yet.
Greg would hate to be credited with features he doesn't have. So, honestly: here is what is under way but not yet in your hands.
Coaching during the session
Bluetooth heart-rate straps and live cues during strength work.
Clubs and partner offers
Turnkey seasonal preparations, distributed by a club or a partner brand.
The scale that talks to the plate
Weight measured by your scale already feeds your profile; soon it will trigger the nutrition guardrails directly.
New disciplines
Parkour and pole sports: skill sports without GPS, which need a different way of measuring progress.
FAQ
Which watches and apps does UpGreg support?
Garmin, Strava, Polar, Huawei Health, Apple Health and Withings, plus direct import of .FIT, .GPX, .TCX and .ZIP files. You can connect several sources at once: duplicates are detected and dropped automatically.
Does UpGreg work without a connected watch?
Yes. Manual entry creates a complete session — sport, duration, distance, how it felt — and the coach uses it exactly like an imported one. A watch sharpens the analysis; it is not an entry requirement.
How is UpGreg different from Strava?
Strava records and compares what you did. UpGreg tells you what to do tomorrow, why, and when doing nothing is the better call. Two different jobs — and they coexist happily, since UpGreg reads your Strava sessions.
Can the AI make me do anything reckless?
No, and that is the core of the product. Every AI proposal goes through a deterministic rules engine that checks your load, your freshness and your declared health. If rest is needed, rest is imposed, whatever was proposed.
Does UpGreg handle nutrition too?
Yes, with Nutri'coach: a nutrition plan tied to your sessions, with strict health limits. A weight target judged dangerous is refused and replaced by a counter-proposal — this is not a calorie counter.
How much does it cost?
Signing up is free and your first week runs on Greg+, everything unlocked, no credit card. After that the account returns to Starter, which is free, and moving to a paid tier is entirely your call.
« The market sells you data. I give you an opinion — and sometimes you won't like it. »
The market sells data. UpGreg gives an opinion.
Strava tells you what you did. Your watch tells you how you did it. Coaching software will tell you better, if you pay someone to interpret it. UpGreg tells you what to do tomorrow, why, and when doing nothing is the smarter move. That is a different job — and the only one that changes anything about your November.