Can AI Replace Your Fitness Coach? An Honest Answer From Real Coaches

0:00know that AI is always in your back pocket and you continue to say no, I I will get back to this when I will I just have to get through soccer season. I just have to get through school just started again. I will get through this thing and there just becomes a new excuse and there's never the ideal time so you don't until you hit rock bottom. This is the Fitness League podcast. If you're new here, we help everyday people get stronger, healthier, and more consistent without needing to overhaul their whole life to do it. Today's question is one a lot people are asking right now. Should you

0:29get coached by an AI or by a human? AI is fast, it's always available, and it can look at more data than any person ever could. A human coach can hear your tone, notice when you're not telling the whole story, and hold you accountable on the days you'd rather quit, as well as relating to your real life. Each one has

0:44real strengths and real opportunities. [music] We run both. Plato is on the TFL side, who we call your personal health intelligence, and one-on-one coaching through Levolution Health. So, today we're breaking down what each one is actually good at and how to decide which one fits you best. Let's get into it. This one has been a debate even among our team for a little while now. Not now, but pre

1:09pre-Thinks, pre-platform. Pre-Thinks. Pre-Thinks. I think it's just a hot topic across the board because AI is obviously here to stay and people are using it and no matter what anyone else says, people are going to use it for certain things. Um I think in many ways it is helpful and I think in many ways it is not helpful and kind of scary and I mean, this can go so many different ways, but um we'll keep it we'll keep it

1:47to the training stuff for today. I honestly think it's maybe not up on on its face, but in actual application once you've been into it for a while, there are two very clear different use cases. I love data. I'm logging all the things in TFL so that I can get all of the trends and correlations and just the the nitty-gritty stuff that it would take hours and hours and hours for a human to

2:15kind of sift through. I think if you can go self-paced, if you can hold yourself accountable, um if if you've been doing this for a while and you know a lot of the things that do work well for you, but you're not sure which are like that last if you're doing if you have an option of three or four different things, which one is 5%

2:36better? Which one's 15% better? Um can I stack certain things? Do some of these go better together and then there's a synergistic effect? That's like AI where and Plato isn't even necessarily AI, he's machine learning built into our platform. I think the two kind of get overlapped as far as terms. But whereas coaching really is all about the relationship, like they are well-versed obviously in real life and when you can team up with a coach who is in a similar position as you, mother, father, former athlete, current athlete, all the things, there's just a different level of relatability and then it's not just theory, right? It's like school versus

3:12real life. There's this ideal scenario where in a blab these things are how it all works together perfectly, but then you get thrown out into real life and it's wait a second, how does I can't actually do that regularly. I can't do that consistently. So you drill the basics, another jiu-jitsu one for you guys. You do your technique in the beginning of class, that's the first maybe it's the first half of class, and then you go to do it in live rolling for the first time and it's like, "Nope. Not going to happen. Can't do that." and then eventually over time you kind of learn what your bread and butter is going to

3:41be. But that's kind of what the point of a coach is. You learn what your bread and butter is and you learn what's going to elevate you to the next level, what can you maintain consistently, and that's the coach's job. The machine is going to tell you these inputs will equate to these outputs if you do them properly. The coach will say, "You're not always going to get these inputs the right way, so you're not always going to get these outputs consistently. So here are some different things we can do to

4:05mediate. Another just kind of like interesting point on this is that how you prompt in AI is everything. And if you don't know how to prompt it correctly, I think about how much AI will just agree with you. We've [clears throat] seen this in lots of different capacities. And I'm I'm imagining someone, you know, trying to get their AI or ChatGPT or whatever to try and coach them. Like, "Okay, I lost 1 lb this week. So, do you think I should decrease my calories more?" Yeah, like and then you could see the AI agreeing, "Yes, you only lost 1 lb. So, now let's make it your deficit

4:47deeper so that it's 3 lb." Or whatever, like AI is designed to have like an agreeing bias toward how you're prompting it. And so, if you only ever had a coach who was agreeing with you, um my guess is you wouldn't get very far. Uh because you don't need someone to just constantly agree with what you're doing. You need someone who's going to think outside the box, who's going to help you step out of your comfort zone, who's going to push you a little bit, who's you know, yes, going to be your cheerleader, but also is going to challenge you or call you out or help fill in those gaps or, you know,

5:25coach you through behavior change of why certain something happened or the kind of real life application of something. So, I just for me, while we do use AI for some things, like for work or, um you know, different projects to help us, you know, streamline or get more efficient on something, I do not see AI and coaching, um at least from a health coaching standpoint, being a good mix. You want to talk about data

5:55collection or something like that, fine. Um you know, for quantitative uh but the qualitative part of coaching, in my opinion like AI simply cannot replace. So much of our coaching is the relationship that people build with their coach. And that's why I was bummed. Well, I mean, it's been every coaching platform that's dropped AI responses, but to see like the platform we use like it's the it would pop up where I would reply back to any client. There would be a bubble that says reply with AI. So easy to click that bubble. I'm sure so many newer coaches and unqualified coaches do use it. And you know, if they have

6:37hundreds of clients, I'm sure they're using it, but that's not to your point Joel like that's not true coaching. Like you're relying on something else to do the thinking for you. And I just don't see a place for it in that regard whatsoever. Yeah. That to be clear TFL is not the coaching platform we use. TFL right now is currently um group app stuff only. It's not the

7:00one-on-one coaching side of things. Totally separate company we use as a white label for that. It's also so many different angles that one, can you imagine figuring out you were getting AI responses when you're paying for one-to-one coaching? And like Right. that on top of all the social media nonsense and ridiculous watered-down version of health coaching you've seen since COVID, then getting that like this whole industry really is a scam. Like it is so disappointing to see those things being

7:29built in one-on-one. There are plenty of places for AI tools in the coaching atmosphere that will make the coach's job not easier, but faster. They can go through things data again much more quickly, then they can assess and then apply the human application to the answer back to the client. When you create a tool on your platform that's just AI response, you're

7:49encour- you're encouraging malpractice. You're encouraging terrible coaching. to be lazy. Yeah, I just I don't And if I'm a client finding out that I'm spending hundreds of dollars per month and I'm getting AI responses from my coach, I'm out. Goodbye. Quick thing before we keep going, if you've ever downloaded a fitness app and gotten the same generic plan as everyone else, this one's different. Every program in the Fitness League is built by coaches, not generated by an algorithm. When you sign up, you answer a few questions about your goals, your equipment, your experience, and your answers match you to the program that fits. Starting October 1st, that program

8:21comes with an identity: Everyday Athlete, Pump Club, or Hybrid House. All three build muscle strength and fat loss. The difference is how you like to train. So, which team are you? Try it free for 7 days, no credit card, on iOS only at this point. Search The Fitness League in the App Store or grab the link in the show notes. All right, back to the show. Absolutely. But, it's also to that point as well, another another aspect on that

8:46what we just talked about. AI does not understand in as much as you think it can give the proper answer, you can always tell when it's AI versus like when you're sitting down having a conversation with somebody, you can feel the difference. But, the AI response isn't going to give that parental insight, that former athlete insight, that specific perspective that you connected with your client on, which is the reason that they

9:07came to you for coaching. So, this kind of goes back into what I was saying before is like there are two very clear dimensions regarding what you're looking for. If you want a relationship, if you struggle, so let's do it like this. If you struggle with the application, you think you know all the things to do, you have a very hard time committing to it, or you're trying to fit your current life into your previous life, meaning now I'm working, I've got three kids versus I used to train for baseball, and then I'd live at the gym, and then I'd party, whatever. Two different lifestyles, trying to fit this formula

9:40into that box, it doesn't work anymore. So, having someone relate to, "Okay, we can still get great progress out of this new version of your routine. Here's your really things you're going to eat, here's how you're going to meal prep, here's how you're going to get this already with the kids, here's when you're going to squeeze in a workout." So, if you're if you think you know the how, but it's not currently working anymore, you can't be consistent with the how, if you just you have no idea how to completely reinvent in some situations a a lifestyle that that gets you moving on the right track. That's coaching. You

10:11need to work and speak with a human, brainstorm back and forth. It is much different than just having a chat GPT conversation of, "Oh, can I try this? Can I try that?" Chat GPT hasn't gone through that before, and it can give you anecdotes that it's pulled from the internet, but you relate it with the coach or with the team or whatever for a reason, and

10:30that's the person you're working with. Versus, okay, do I just need that better protocol, that specific thing? I'm very good at showing up. I'm in there 4 days a week consistently, 5 days a week consistently, 3 days a week consistently. I'm doing the core foundational movements. I'm trying to build on it. My strength isn't going up.

10:48It's going up a little bit. Um I'm not sure on the fringes like what's going wrong. So, you want data input and then explanation of that data of, "Okay, well, here are some things that we're seeing, and here are the trends and the correlations." If you can do it on your own and you don't need to have a conversation with somebody about it,

11:05use the AI. Use TFL. If you need that relationship and that accountability, for sure, and you can pretend the robot is going to give you accountability. It's not the same as having a conversation and showing up every week and having a a 30-minute conversation with somebody about what you did or didn't do. Those are the two very clear boxes. And I I used to think there was more in the middle of the Venn diagram of this

11:27conversation. I almost think they're two adjacent rooms and the door is closed. I think it's very clear now. They both do things extremely well, and it is a great thing. And maybe some people will start off with coaching, and then they are able to train chat GPT or Claude, or they come into TFL, and they just want to continue to refine all that data, and that's awesome. I think that is fantastic, and it can give you some incredible insights. It's already done that for me through our platform,

11:51through TFL. Um so, I think this is a beautiful time to be alive, but I don't think one replaces the other. There are very two clear applications for both. I was going to hit on that point too, Josh, of, you know, what we have seen with Level Evolution and TFL is that they each kind of like feed into each other depending on the chapter of life that someone is in and I think a lot of people who actually need coaching sign up with TFL first because they think like if I have the tools I'll be able to do it and they might sign up for TFL join a program but like still

12:28struggle with consistency still struggle with showing up still struggle with the nutrition piece and end up bumping up kind of into coaching or even they're in TFL let's say for training but they have the coach still to kind of you know have as an accountability partner in doing their nutrition alongside the kind of DIY tools within TFL and then by the same token we have people who join coaching and a lot of time when times when they're done with coaching they're then going into TFL cuz they're like oh I have the skills now to execute this on my own and use the more DIY style app because I know how I

13:07should be training I know how I should be eating I know what kind of programming to look for I don't have trouble getting to the gym anymore and so on and so forth so yeah I just think it depends on the the season of your life that that you're in and kind of what you're needing and what level of support

13:23you might need through that. I think it's important to talk about too like I know a few people who have used chat GPT to build out like a marathon training program and it might be a great program on paper but then what happens like if you miss a week due to your kids being sick or you are dealing with a little nagging minor injury or like you know things like that pop up which are inevitable during race training or it's like maybe you're not feeling optimally for the amount of running volume it's giving you for week after week and it kind of just based it off of

14:00what you were doing before but that's maybe skipping a whole phase of building up to like marathon prep so like there are so many pieces that are a part of the puzzle even with something like that and it again it might be like the perfect training program our marathon program on paper and look really great and it's customized as far as it's the number of weeks out from your marathon that you're training for, but there's so many missing pieces to that that just don't add up and won't leave you

14:31performing at your very best. Um So, I think it's important like both of you have already said to consider where you're at, like what you need, where where you need to fill those gaps and like AI can be it's used in almost every app that we have on our phones right now. Um Strava uses it to, you know, see your trends over time and like give you feedback on how your runs are based on your heart rate data and all of that and like that's useful. Um

14:58Macros first. Yeah, even on a wearable tech or Oura will give you insights and summaries of like what all of your data says. Um Macros First has like the the AI feature where you could take a picture of your food and it will estimate the calories and macros. So, there's so like there's a lot of helpful useful things with AI. It's not just ChatGPT we're talking about here. Like AI can be so many different aspects of this, but all of that stuff is more of like the straightforward like quantitative like this is what this is, here's the response kind of thing and it's we as

15:32humans are way more complex than that. I want to paint a couple client pictures and you guys can kind of see where you you fall into this, but basically imagine someone whether they're just starting out now or they're they're getting back into it or they just hit a weird patch of their life and they can't be consistent with

15:49it. AI can tell you all of the right things to do. So, even in TFL you jump in, you take your quick onboarding, it's about 2 minutes and you select specific goals and it'll give you the most effective habits that will get you to that goal, whether it's focus and productivity, better sleep, more energy throughout the day, little things outside of like body composition and strength which is going to happen through the training programs,

16:09but some some trackable recommendations. You can have the most simple and the most effective outline of do these four things every day and you are going to see a benefit in this area. You still may never do those four things. And it's just I will I will I will. You kick the can down the road.

16:25You kick the can down the road. And it's been a year, 2 years, 5 years and you have all of this compounding negative attribution happening in that meantime. Versus if you are let's say it's with a friend or with a coach or you know, a personal trainer at the gym, I keep trying to do these four things, these three things. I can't wrap my mind around why I can't just do this with just one good day. And maybe I get one day and now with I can't get to two or to three or one week. And these are so simple. And they're saying it to themselves like that. This is so simple

16:59because they're not overwhelming. They're if they're following the rule of two we talk about in here all the time. It could be one of those things as broken down as that, but there is this mental logjam that happens and it just completely breaks momentum, completely halts inertia. Whereas if you go and talk to the friend, to the trainer, to your coach, this is why I'm stuck. And you guys sit down and you have a 30-minute conversation, hour conversation. You work through and there's a little bit working in person back in the day there was we were basically referred to as a psychiatrist. They they will talk to you

17:32more than they will go see or go speak to the psychiatrist. You know everything about their life. So you sit down and you have these conversations and you figure out root cause a lot of the times. Like it's not about, you know, the 4-minute walk. It's about how your evening ended and then you woke up feeling like X Y and Z and all of these other factors. So when you word vomit, which you're you may or may not do into AI and it's not going to give you the same response coming back. It's not the same as having that relatable conversation with a human. But when you

17:59can go through that like, okay, I know that makes sense. That makes sense. Here I went through something similar. Here are a couple things that work for me. Can we pick one of those? Can like can we start with this thing instead? Just that initial start happens with a real person working with you, friend, personal trainer, coach,

18:18online coach, it doesn't matter. You know that AI is always in your back pocket and you continue to say, "No, I I will get back to this when I will I just have to get through soccer season. I just have to get through, you know, school just started again. I will get through this thing." And there just becomes a new excuse and there's never the ideal time so you don't until you hit rock bottom. We've talked about this before. You don't make change until it hurts bad enough. In those situations, especially on your own, you don't make the change unless it you just it doesn't feel it feels so bad that I just cannot

18:54continue to move forward like this. And now you might do that and look okay, AI gave me these four things or this this app gave me these three things. I can I can start with that and I'm going to start moving forward and you may at that point. But you don't have to hit rock bottom. You don't have to keep waiting and having some sort of human accountability. We can throw we're throwing this into the coaching side of the conversation, but coaching, trainer, friend, accountability buddy at the gym, whatever that looks like, those are the different segments. So, if you relate to one side versus the

19:23other, those are the two clear rooms, the two clear boxes of AI I'm sorry. Uh trainer, friend, coach, accountability buddy versus can I use AI? Can I do a follow along app and do it yourself? Go at your own pace. And for some of you, you might be able to stick with the basics. Like we built we designed The Fitness League with a free version, by the way, to you don't have to be following 6-days-a-week program or 5-days-a-week program or any program at all. We designed it to continue to show value

19:52just showing up with the basic habits. Like we said, there's that quick start in the beginning with your we call them outcomes. What are you looking for outside of, you know, the physical improvements? Like what do you want your life to improve? What areas? What are some things you're struggling with? And here are the most effective things to do that. And if you're in a place to just let's dive in. I'm going to I'm going to knock these out and then I'm going to start watching trends and I'll play with some new habits. I'm going to see what correlations come through and what different areas improve. That stuff is

20:17cool and I've done that with our app. I we've been using our app for about a year longer than it's been live. So, we have crazy amounts of data. Plato, for those of you who don't have it yet, if you're in TFL, he's pilot he's in the pilot version. He's being rolled out slowly, um because he is a brand new thing. It's not a chat GPT plug-in. Um it's machine learning that our development team built directly into our platform. Uh so, we're not really sure how that data scales yet. So, it's being rolled out slowly. But, but having these conversations with him for a while, I've

20:47okay, all right, find these trends, find these He's found, you know, random likely root cause of injuries that I've had in the past from like just trends in my data as far as tracking time outside and sitting and steps and just make uh making those connections that I never would have made. So, for someone like me who's been doing it for 15, 20 years at this point, we're old. I just

21:11I just heard myself say that. Um we've got a lot of the systems down. We're not perfect and there's always time to to bring real people back in. But, I know a lot of the things that have worked for me and just kind of recalibrating certain things, adding new thing things in, taking certain things out,

21:28synergizing a few of them together. Like, I am the ideal person for the Fitness League right now. I'm not the ideal fit for coaching. So, just kind of seeing where you land, which of those stories really resonates as far as what your personal needs are. And you might think your needs are one thing and they're actually the other. But, you dive into something and that's again why AI is it's a great tool. You can see this is

21:49low barrier to entry. Oh, wait, this didn't work for me. What else do I have available to me? Listen, if you're tired of the all or nothing cycles, the diet starts Monday, the I know what to do, I'm just not doing it feeling, we should probably talk. Our one-on-one online coaching isn't just about workouts and meal plans. It's about building something that actually fits your life. No cookie-cutter templates, no guilt, just real coaching and real results. Plus, we've got a pretty big team, so we can even pair you with an expert who actually understands your lifestyle because they've gone through it, too. If that sounds like what you've been

22:22missing, check out the a in the show notes to apply for coaching. Then, we'll send you the link to book a free, no obligation consult call with our team. There are no hard closes. We won't even take your credit card over the phone. You'll get the details to sign up on your own time. And more good news, we are in fact qualified for HSA FSA reimbursement. One last thing, we even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose. What are you waiting for? Spots are limited, so apply today. All right, let's get back to the

22:50show. I would also love to just clarify that right now, beyond Plato, I think when people [gasps] Right, everyone knows AI is useful, but they're also like weirdly allergic to AI. I think more so when it's like not used correctly, or just I don't know. It's It's so interesting because, like you said, there's so many great AI tools, and we know everyone's using them, but then people are also like they hate when they see AI, but I'm like,

23:18"But you're using AI." Um but something that I do want to clarify, because now like there's AI in our app via Plato, I do want to clarify that none of our programming is written by AI. Like that is something that we strongly believe we should be writing that programming, that fitness professionals, exercise physiologists are writing the programming in there. Um and you can reliably know uh that the training is not written by AI. The training is written by yours

23:48truly. And to clarify, he is he is ML. He isn't AI. Did he try It's It's There's a weird middle gray area, but he is he is machine learning learning off of our platform. Yes. Um and you can confirm that because we all do our own programming, so Right. I mean, we're not going to go do an AI program as people who have degrees in

24:10this. We put in the work with the same programs you're doing. Um so, I think we'll let that speak for itself, too.

24:22My job. All right. Well, this was just a quick clarify episode. Um Um We're in a weird time. A lot of cool things, a lot of scary things. Uh a lot of watering down of things. I think uh we're seeing the marketplace, whether it's content, whether it's apps themselves, it's all flooded with There's a lot of crap out there. I'll just I'll put it at that It's a lot of stuff people just throw up in Claude and they walk away

24:55from. It's done. It finishes vibe coding and then they go plug it in somewhere. And there are a lot of big companies doing it, too. I don't know if we talked about it on air, we talked about it off air with some people that we definitely respect. But you look at that and go, "Huh, Claude [snorts] built that in an hour." And you probably And you were telling people we spent

25:132 years building an app. 2 years, all the money lot more money than asking Claude to do it. Than asking Claude to do it, but no, we've spent These guys [clears throat] 10 years in development and millions of dollars. I can I can most definitely see that is the same Claude box with the single gradient down

25:33the left side, shadow box. The text, the size of the text, the font Size of the text, the plugin prompts. You You put this thing in, you could literally put the same thing in a chat GPT. You just trained it with three scripts. Like it's disappointing. It is disappointing. Um I will say I continue to be proud of every product that our team has put out on the coaching side, on the app side. It's uh we've got an incredible team beside us on on all

25:57sides of this. And uh that's not gloating, that's not It's just I'm proud. I'm proud that we're still doing it the old-fashioned way, the authentic way. And for those of you who have been a part of this journey with us, we are extremely, extremely grateful for you. But it is a confusing time. So, we use it on both sides. We obviously have the personal relationships. We obviously have uh we're rolling out Plato, which is um an ML feature that does some really cool things that people may look at and

26:27sneeze at because oh, it looks like AI. You guys are just doing another thing with everybody else. We're not. And as soon as you use it, the people we've had get their hands on it, they they understand the difference. Um but in a general context, whether that's with our stuff, with anyone else's stuff, like these are typically the boxes that you're going to fall in when you're analyzing what's going to help me the most in my life. Like can I go use There was a podcast I was listening to on an app called Tolan, which is like your personal super intelligence. I don't think it's for

26:54productivity. I think it's just like a life buddy. Um So, they're all over the place. They're in They're in every They're in every field. So, it's coming. It's here. It's going to keep getting better. It's going to keep getting worse. But uh just be cognizant of when it's going to be useful to you and when you need to look somewhere else. All right, with that, we're going to ask for if you're beyond that three-episode rule, just a quick five-star review. You guys have been great since we started asking for that again. That just helps us

27:21expand the reach of the show. It's free content, free stuff we put out on a weekly basis. It'll also make our our parents really happy if we can get to 1,000 reviews here in the next couple months. So, please want to make our mama's proud. Just want to make our mama's proud. [music] Uh with that, we'll we'll wrap up this conversation with the reminder that

27:38change doesn't come in one big moment. It's built in the ways you keep showing up. So, take what you learned today and build the best version of yourself for tomorrow. Where can they find you? I'm at Alyssa Anders Kutnick. At Joel Samantha. At Josh Kutnick. And everything else is linked in the show notes.