AI will bring fitness and lifestyle coaching to everyone. Here’s why you should care!
Imagine a future where we all have our own personal guides that help us lead our ideal lifestyle within the constraints and responsibilities — and with all the opportunity — of modern life.
To be able to eat healthier without sacrificing the joy of good food, actually get better at the physical activities we enjoy — be it lifting weights, running, climbing, or doing yoga — while still being able to spend with our friends and family, and generally staying on top of our physical and cognitive game to excel at our daily work.
This is the goal for most of us, and it is the main reason why those with the means and motivation often make use of personal trainers, fitness and nutrition coaches, and other professional lifestyle services. But by combining large amounts of data with smart algorithms and smart humans, we can build artificial intelligence that makes such services available to each and every one of us, should we so desire.
This is the first part in a series of four blog posts where we explore how AI could impact the fitness and lifestyle industry, mitigating the steady increase in lifestyle-related health problems and making our lives better. In this post, we take a look at personalized coaching as a way to drive sustainable lifestyle improvements and set the scene for AI to evolve this into something we can all make use of.
The one-size-fits-none
So why coaching, when — as many a layman will tell you — getting in shape and staying that way is actually so very easy?
Anybody can find a pretty good exercise routine and some reasonable nutrition regimen or diet plan on the internet to follow, or simply decide that they want to adhere to government guidelines for physical activity and nutrition. And if you do this, observe positive, sustainable change, and manage to stick with it, you are likely to live a better, healthier, and longer life than you would if you had no regard for your physical health. You obviously don’t need AI or any kind of technology — or even coaching — to improve your lifestyle. If you manage to find your own way to Rome, more power to you.
In practice, though, lifestyle change can be very challenging. If it wasn’t, we would not be dealing with the surge of lifestyle-related health problems that the world has seen throughout recent decades. It seems obvious that this problem will not just go away on its own or solve itself.
While it is easy — and unfortunately very common — to just chalk everything up to lack of willpower, lack of self-control, and other unflattering personality traits, such apathetic attempts to trivialize the problem misses the point that we actually need concrete and effective measures to address it and help people make positive change.
Lifestyle improvements are hard for a number of reasons. The most common reason that one-size-fits-all plans, diets, and guidelines fail to drive sustainable change is that they often don’t compromise. And if they do, they either make the same compromises for everyone or don’t provide the needed support and guidance for a layperson to make their own.
Changing your lifestyle should obviously not be about following some fixed plan for a number of months and then go back to normal (this rarely ever works), nor should it be about following that same plan for the rest of your life. Yet this is usually what most people sign up for when trying to improve their lives with a generalized approach.
Since lifestyle change is fundamentally more about behavior and habits than it is about physiology, one-size-fits-all regimes don’t actually solve the most important part of the equation. We all lead different lives and have different preferences, which means that what works well for you might not work well for me, and vice versa. They also tend to not account for the fact that life gets in the way, and in the absence of a strategy to cope and recover from this, most people just end up feeling like they have failed miserably, move back to square one and try again for the next New Year’s resolution.
The bespoke approach
Personalized coaching presents solutions to these problems. By collaborating with the right professional, any one of us can get help to make the right compromises and optimize our desired health and fitness outcomes in the context of our own lives.
A coach will help you navigate your personal waters of constraints and opportunities, set you up with the best possible conditions for success, and help you recover when you fail.
It is perfectly possible to enjoy all life has to offer, while still taking great care of your health and even excelling at physical activities like running, strength training, or whatever takes your fancy. A coach will teach you how, and make sure you stick with it.
Sounds great, right? The problem is that such services can often be prohibitively expensive and inaccessible for those who want and need them.
And even if the “4-week kickstart” is within the budget and satisfies the (probably massively temporally discounted) cost-benefit analysis, sustainable lifestyle changes usually take way longer than that to solidify. The vast majority of people are likely to benefit from continuous follow-up for longer periods of time. We are talking months, maybe years.
Luckily, this is where AI can come to the rescue and help make coaching services available to each and every one of us. While the full-fledged robot personal trainer that does everything your PT does today is probably a distant goal, there are vast amounts of value waiting to be claimed along the road to that destination, and that is the journey we will start scouting out in the next blog post.
Because like any fitness buff will tell you: fitness is a journey, not a destination!
