Imagine you’re interviewing a potential strength coach about his credentials. He says that he educated himself partly by reading pirated books and free academic articles, but mostly by reading the forums on T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Let’s Run, Slowtwitch and TrainingPeaks. Elaborating, the coach says, “I’ve absorbed a lot of contested or plainly wrong ideas that circulate in fitness culture. I can’t always distinguish which is which.” You ask for clarification: “To put it bluntly, you may bullshit me, but you won’t know if you’re bullshitting me?” “Yes. That’s a fair and accurate way to put it,” he responds. Those are direct quotes from a conversation with Claude, an AI chatbot. I asked Claude about its fitness knowledge because locals have been coming into my gym, Minerstown Strength Conditioning, with some questionable ideas. Usually, those ideas come from AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Large language models, the neural networks powering these AIs, are helpful tools. I use them to gather peer-reviewed research about fitness topics. However, putting CoachGPT in charge of your health and fitness is a dicey idea, especially if you have a complicated injury history or a chronic issue like back pain.  Claude explained that most large language models are trained on Common Crawl (among other things), a continuously updated dataset of publicly accessible web content, which relies heavily on Reddit and, in the case of fitness content, the forums mentioned above. Those forums are notorious for spreading bro science, or as Claude put it, “a fair amount of confidently stated misinformation.” The problem is the nature of large language models: They are pattern matchers. Compared to PhDs in academia, the ‘roided-up meatheads, teenage trolls and self-serving influencers on fitness forums are much more talented at making bad ideas look popular. No matter how you prompt AI, there’s a decent chance it will reflect the uninformed opinions of the fitness internet’s loudest morons because they are overrepresented in the training data. Even if AI were a reliable source of fitness information, that wouldn’t make it a coach. Coaching in any field is an art and a science. The greats of fitness share their programs (the science) for free because they know that few coaches have the artistry to use them effectively. Elements of the coaching relationship, like trust, open dialogue, adaptability, observation and accountability, matter much more than reps and sets. AI has no experience building high-quality relationships. The coaching relationship is especially important for athletes with chronic injuries, a specialty of Minerstown. Imagine your back suddenly “went out” one day while you sneezed. Months later, it still hurt, so your doctor ordered an MRI, which showed degenerative disc disease. Your doctor now believes that’s the cause of your pain. You feed this revelation to Claude.  AI’s default is to agree and suck up. If your doctor encourages the usual routine of injections, physical therapy and surgeries, AI will either withhold opinion or agree with the doctor for legal reasons. Ask it for a fitness routine to rehab your back, and it will program around the MRI report. Just because your MRI shows disc degeneration, that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with your pain. A well-known meta study looked at spine imaging of more than 3,110 people who were asymptomatic, meaning they had no back pain whatsoever. Over 50% of people in their 30s had disc degeneration. That went up to 88% for people in their 60s. You can also bias AI into agreeing with your worst ideas. Tell it to write a back pain program that involves rucking in the mountains and doing brutal HIIT workouts, and it’ll comply.  A coach’s default is to ask questions and run tests that get to the root cause of your problem. We strive to get around biases and assumptions, including those from your MRI report. If your back went out following a stressful life event, like getting fired or divorced, no amount of PT, injections or surgeries will fix it. We have to change how you’re processing and acting on pain. That might be difficult to accept. But unlike AI, a coach knows how jarring it is to find out that the way you live and train is no longer working. The coach cares about earning your trust and achieving your goals because they have empathy and because their reputation is on the line. When AI fails, it doesn’t care, and neither do its developers. It’s your fault for trusting AI. Claude told me that “I don’t experience uncertainty the way you do. A human coach who’s unsure will often feel unsure. I generate confident-sounding text regardless of whether the underlying claim is solid or not.” Good coaches not only experience but welcome doubts and uncertainty, which motivate us to hunt for new explanations and run experiments that lead to breakthroughs. You get one body in this life. Are you sure you want to entrust it to AIs that will confidently bullshit you, mirror your biases and validate your worst fitness ideas?  Ben Van Treese is the owner of Minerstown Strength Conditioning. The post Don’t trust CoachGPT with your fitness appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less