MONS Athletics

MONS Athletics is a training app for iPhone and Apple Watch that trains the body as one unit — endurance, kettlebells and yoga — and rebuilds the day every morning around the athlete it finds.

It is a personal project rather than a company. One person designed the method, wrote the coach, and trains on it every morning.

It is for people who want the capacity rather than the single race: a body that can go a long way, and hold together while it does. A marathon is endurance. So is a day between islands, a river paddled, a mountain range cycled. The capacity underneath all of them is the same one, and it is the one MONS builds.

Endurance is running, swimming and cycling, all three programmed in full. Sessions are prescribed in time rather than distance, because your body understands stress and not kilometres — and because forty-five minutes is forty-five minutes whatever the weather did to your pace.

Kettlebells are the structure that holds the engine together when it is tired. Ballistic hip power, postural strength, single-side stability, carries and get-ups. One tool, thirty minutes, at home — which is the only kind of strength training that survives a job and a family.

Yoga is range you can actually use, and breath you can control under load. The breath is the part endurance athletes underestimate: staying calm when the body wants to panic is a trained skill, and it is the one the last hour of anything long will ask for.

MONS does not hand you a twelve-week plan and let you fall behind it. Every morning it reads what you actually did, how you slept and how much load you are carrying, and writes that day.

Miss a session and there is nothing to catch up. The next day is drawn from where you are, not from where the plan wishes you were. Tell the coach in chat when life gets in the way — a work trip, a bad week, an illness — and the week is redrawn around it.

A challenge gives all of it somewhere to go: a marathon, a triathlon and its legs, a brick, an aquabike, and movement challenges like the get-up, the pistol squat and the overhead squat. You choose it. MONS draws the route to it.

Three pillars, not one sport. Most training apps train the thing you are training for. MONS trains the body underneath it, on the pyramid the method is built on: mobility carries strength, strength carries endurance. Drop a pillar and a whole quality goes with it. Roughly half of first-time marathoners get injured in training, and it is not because they are weak.

The day is written, not looked up. A plan is a document. A coach is a decision made this morning with today’s information. MONS is the second one, and it is the part of this a spreadsheet cannot copy.

Time, not distance. Long runs reach a point — around two and a half hours for most people — where injury risk climbs and the training benefit flattens. Distance-based plans walk you straight past it. Time-based training lets volume grow as you get faster, and keeps the load honest when the terrain or the weather change.

Built on one athlete’s whole training year. Not assembled from other people’s programmes. Every part of this method that changed, changed because a full year of training broke the previous version of it, on the founder, in public.

The method is published, in full, for free. The method, the movement catalog and the reasoning behind every piece of it are on this site, readable without an account. If MONS is not for you, take the method anyway.

• First-timers with a date in the calendar and no idea how to get from here to there
• People who used to train, lost years to life, and have not managed to get back
• Endurance athletes who keep breaking down on training plans that only train the sport
• Anyone training at home with one kettlebell, a mat and not much time
• Athletes who want the capacity to last past the race — hikes, islands, mountain ranges, whatever they choose next

I used to train six days a week, sometimes twice on a weekend. Then the pandemic closed the venues and it thinned out. A dog, a house to renovate, a daughter. Five years went by and I never got back.

So late one night in October 2025 I signed up for a marathon. I had not run that distance in the previous three months put together.

I had climbed back before. Military service wrecked my knee — a meniscus with every attachment torn off it, six doctors and two years to find out why, then surgery. Seven months after I could put weight on that leg again I finished an Ironman 70.3. But I was twenty-something then, single, and nothing else wanted my time. At 35, with a back that flares when I ramp up and a family that comes first, doing it that way again would have put me in the injured half.

So I built the coach instead.

The method did not survive the year intact, and that is the whole point of it. Distance-based long runs stretched past three and a half hours and gave me plantar fasciitis, so the training moved to time. A hundred sessions of the stretching the running magazines prescribe did close to nothing, so mobility moved to yoga and a hip problem I had carried for months went away. The gym did not fit the life, so strength moved to kettlebells at home.

On 16 May 2026 I ran the Helsinki City Marathon: two laps of the same route, finishing inside the Olympic Stadium. The 4:15 pacers went past me on the first lap. On the second I caught them in the same corner they had passed me in, and went by. I spent the whole second half passing people, and had enough left to sprint the stadium. 4:22, negative split, first marathon.

A marathon was never going to be the end of it. The method that got me there was not a running method — it was a way of building a body that can go a long way and hold together. That is what MONS Athletics is now, and it is still what I train on every morning.

@niconyberg is where he trains in public. @mons.athletics is the challenges.

You choose a challenge, or none at all, and train daily either way. Each morning the app writes that day’s session and sends it to your watch. You train with it on your wrist, and what you did goes back into tomorrow.

Support goes to the founder directly, through the app or the support page, and usually comes back within a few hours. There is no tier above you and nobody else it could be routed to.

MONS Athletics on the App Store — iPhone and Apple Watch.

Name

MONS Athletics

What it is

A training app for iPhone and Apple Watch

Started

2025

Made by

Nico Nyberg, on his own. A personal project, not a company.

Website

monsathletics.com

Get it

On the App Store

Core offering

Daily training across endurance, kettlebells and yoga, rebuilt every morning around the athlete it finds

Modalities trained

Running, swimming, cycling, kettlebells, yoga

Requirements

iPhone and Apple Watch

Pricing

Subscription from $12.99 per month in the US, priced per region; annual is 20% less

Terms

Monthly or annual through the App Store. Cancel any time.

Method

Published in full and free to read

Support

hello@monsathletics.com, answered by Nico

Social

@mons.athletics, @niconyberg