From Passive to Proactive: How LLMs Can Step Up as a Fitness Coach

Tags that this post has been filed under.

The other day, I was chatting with a mate who’s seriously into fitness—especially resistance training. He’s way more experienced than I am, so he's pretty much my go-to guy for advice. We usually end up talking about this stuff for hours, and I often mention how much I use ChatGPT for everything from knowledge to my training plans. I described how ChatGPT helps me set up all my training routines based on my goals, feeding info like:

  • My profile: height, weight, age, body fat percentage
  • Individualised training plans and goals like building muscle, gaining strength
  • The type of training and volume I need based on my experience
  • Nutrition advice, recovery tips,
  • Plus, the more scientific bits like protein synthesis, the role of testosterone and hormones, the importance of resting and sleep, etc.
  • Tracking and metrics

During this conversation with my friend, I mentioned that I’d like to eventually work with an actual fitness coach. You know, someone who can give me hands-on feedback, check my nutrition, keep me motivated, and push me when lagging behing. Someone that can give me that extra kick in the butt when I need it. That’s when he said, "You know, that’s the one shortcoming with ChatGPT. You having to ask every time” And he’s right.

Imagine if ChatGPT wasn’t just something we had to keep asking for stuff, but instead, it acted like a coach, keeping tabs on us. It could check in on what we’re eating, send reminders about protein intake, or even ask how much we lifted today. Based on our performance, it could give recommendations for next steps, suggest diet tweaks, or offer tips on things we might be missing.

ChatGPT Fitness Coach

I haven’t seen anything on the market quite like this—not just for fitness but for anything any other area of your life (I can think of a number of specific things, but I’ll keep it focused on the fitness topic). Imagine if ChatGPT could connect with apps like WhatsApp to provide you updates and being one of the tools you only need to use to manage things, and, have GPT connected to Google Sheets or Airtable to manage training plans with charts and progress visuals. It could log everything in the background, building a database of what we’re doing without us having to think about it.

I’m already doing all this stuff manually and as mentioned, I need to be proactively asking GPT to provide and output things for me, but it’d be brilliant if ChatGPT could handle it all and providing the request for inputs from me and me providing the outputs. It’s got me thinking about the future of AI, where it's less about us prompting and sitting idle until we need it but more about AI proactively helping us achieve our goals and pushing us further to be better.

If anybody knows of something like this already working, please reach out and let me know.