Introduction. Sailing is a sport that places high demands on the physical fitness of an athlete. Despite the fact that this sport has been practiced for a very long time, experts have not paid due attention to assessing the impact of the athlete’s load during training on his physical fatigue. The use of mathematical modeling methods at the stage of training athletes to select the optimal load will make training more effective. In order to determine the modeling method, which will allow quite simply and easily to find the dependence of the optimal physical load on the physiological indicators of athletes, a review of the most popular modeling methods in sports was carried out. The purpose of this article is to study the problem of modeling the optimal training load in sailing in order to find an effective method for building models of the dependence of the athlete’s fatigue indicators on the indicators characterizing the athlete’s condition. Results. A number of indicators characterizing the choice of optimal physical activity in sailing are given. An approach to the construction of a mathematical model for choosing the optimal physical load for yachtsmen during training is proposed. Conclusions. The article explores approaches to modeling the processes that occur during the selection of a training load in sports. Based on a review of existing methods, an inductive approach was chosen to build models for choosing the optimal load in sailing. It is planned that with the help of this approach, models of the dependence of indicators characterizing physical activity on indicators characterizing the state of athletes will be obtained, which will be given in subsequent works.