Ask Your Assistant About Your Training: the Athlete's Guide
Simma reads every session your Garmin records, scores it against your own history, and keeps the result as one record. Once it is connected to your assistant, you ask about that record in your own words. You never call a tool by name; the assistant picks what it needs and reads Simma's numbers rather than working them out again from laps.
This guide assumes Simma is connected. If it is not, start with the setup page for Claude or ChatGPT. The exact list of what your assistant can reach, with every description as the assistant reads it, is the connector tools reference; this page is about what to ask.
Everything here is about you. The connector signs in as you and reaches what you see in the Simma app and nothing else.
Start with how it is going
The first question is the one Simma was built for:
"How is my training going?"
The assistant reads your coaching context: three weeks of sessions bucketed by week with volume per sport, training load with its seven-day change and trend, a training status per sport, your goals with days to the event, the plan you have linked, and the flags Simma has raised. Each flag carries a severity, the sentence a coach would say, the values behind it, and sometimes a context line that changes the reading. A load jump after a fortnight off is a return, not an overreach, and Simma says which.
The status words are explained in Training Status Explained. If the assistant hands you a label without the reason, ask:
"Why do you say I'm overreaching? Show me the flag and the numbers behind it."
Progress over weeks
For the longer view, ask about progress. Simma returns your fitness, fatigue and form history over the window you name, with form day by day for the last sixteen weeks and week by week before that, plus your totals and sport-specific statistics. Totals are lifetime, not the window, and the response says so.
"Chart my form over the last twelve weeks."
"How does this month's swim volume compare with my usual?"
The series is shaped to be drawn, so an assistant that can build a chart or a table will do it from the data without asking you for anything.
One session, and the sessions that fade
Any session can be listed or opened. Ask for a window rather than a count, and name the sport when you mean one.
"List my runs from the last six weeks."
"Walk me through Saturday's long ride."
The detail of a session carries every lap and the split structure, with the long series such as GPS traces and heart-rate graphs summarised rather than pasted in. Values come back metric. If you think in miles, say so once and the assistant converts; it can also read your preferred units from your profile.
Pacing has its own question. Simma records the shape of every session when it is saved: negative split when the back half is faster by more than two per cent, even within minus two to plus three, faded from three to eight, faded hard beyond that. It judges the main set separately from the whole session, because a swim with a warm-up and a cool-down often reads as faded across the whole while the main set was even, and it recognises a set with two paces or an opening burst rather than calling a deliberate structure a fade.
"Which of my swims faded in the main set this month?"
"Am I negative-splitting more often than I was in August?"
Sleep, HRV and resting heart rate
If your watch is worn to bed, Simma holds your nightly HRV, sleep duration and stages with Garmin's sleep score, resting heart rate and all-day stress, one row per day, with a summary that compares the last seven days with your own recent window. Garmin reaches back about thirty days, so that is the span. Ask the assistant to read the coverage line first: a watch left on the charger produces an empty night, not a bad one.
"How has my sleep been this week against my usual?"
"Is my HRV down, and did it move with the big weekend?"
These are measurements against your own days. The assistant is told to report them that way and not to diagnose.
Goals
A goal is an event with a date and one target per discipline, a time or a distance. One target makes a single-sport goal; more than one makes a triathlon.
"Add a goal: Busselton 70.3 on 3 May, 1.9 km swim, 90 km ride, 21.1 km run, aiming for 5:30."
"My 10 km moved to March. Update it."
"Mark the Rottnest swim as completed."
Mark a goal completed or archived when it has happened or been dropped. That keeps the history your context is built from; delete is for mistakes, and the assistant confirms before doing either.
Your plan
Link a Google Doc or Sheet and Simma reads it each time your context is built, so the planned week sits beside the week that happened. Link a Google Doc or Sheet as Your Training Plan has the sharing step and what Simma reads. Then:
"What does my plan have me doing this week, and what have I done so far?"
The plan is written by you, your coach, or your assistant in a document you own. Simma reads it and never writes it.
Your coach
Ask who coaches you and the assistant lists them, with their specialty and when you connected. Until you have a coach of your own, Simma's house coach account holds you, and it appears in that list because it can read your training the way any coach can.
To join a coach, give the assistant the invite code they sent you. If you already have a coach, Simma stops and names them: joining a second code almost always means changing coach, so the assistant puts it to you plainly, that the current coach loses access and their notes and any plan they linked go with them, and only switches when you say yes. Leaving a coach works the same way and cannot be undone from the assistant; rejoining needs their code.
"Join my coach with code COACH-7KX2PQ."
Messages from your coach arrive by email, and the assistant can read the thread:
"What did my coach say last week?"
You can answer from the assistant too. The message lands in the same thread your coach reads in Simma, beside the emails they sent you. This is the one action that puts your words in front of another person, so the assistant reads the exact text back and sends only on your yes; where it can, it also shows you the message in a prompt of its own, and declining there sends nothing. Sending cannot be undone.
Settings
Your thresholds are what every load number is scored against: swim and run threshold pace, cycling power or, without a power meter, cycling speed. Changing one reshapes your whole history, so the assistant reads the current value, tells you the old and new figures, and asks before writing. If a threshold came from a test and you want it kept, lock it and Simma's own estimation leaves it alone.
"Set my swim threshold to 1:38 per 100. Show me what it was."
"Lock my cycling FTP at 265 watts."
Date of birth is worth setting. Without it every heart-rate zone is derived from a default age of forty.
"My date of birth is 12 March 1984."
Units, pool length, ability levels, body mass and name change the same way.
Getting good answers
Give it what Simma does not have. The race you entered, the week you were ill, the fact that Thursday's pool was short course. The assistant combines that with Simma's record, and that is the point of having it in an assistant rather than a dashboard.
Ask for the reasoning. "Why do you say that?" pulls the flags and values into view, and it is how you catch an assistant that is confidently wrong.
Push back when it re-derives. If it starts averaging lap times to decide whether you are tired, stop it. Simma already did that against your own history, and the assistant's version will not be better.
Say your units once. Then it stops asking.
What it cannot do
The connector reaches your training and nothing else. It cannot upload files, change your password or email, delete your account, or see another athlete. It does not write your plan. To sign out, or switch to another Simma account, ask and it hands you the steps and the link.
What should your assistant be able to do next?
Today it can read, compare, and send a message to your coach. Tell us the next step: a week-by-week table of planned against completed sessions, a chart of form against your race date, or a planned session sent to your watch. Email coaching@getsimma.com with the tool you want and we will build it.