Can AI Be Your Fitness Coach? What It's Good At, and What It Can't Know About You

Let's face it. We're all using AI for everything now.

• Planning a trip? Ask ChatGPT.
• Wondering if that noise your car is making is going to be expensive? ChatGPT.
• Trying to figure out what on earth to make for dinner with half an onion and some frozen chicken thighs? ChatGPT 🤪

And don't get me started on the people using it to write their wedding speeches 👀

So I get this question a lot now:

Do I even need a coach if I can just ask ChatGPT?

Before I get into my opinion, let me clear one thing up, because I think a lot of coaches are being weird about this right now.

I use AI every single day to run my business. The admin, the sorting, all the little jobs that used to pile up and eat my whole morning before I ever got to a single client...it does all of that now.

Which is exactly why I can tell you where it stops.

What is AI good at here?

More than most coaches will admit, and the women in my membership are already all over it. Nancy posted this in the group back in May:

"While I pretend to be anti-AI, it comes in handy when I wanted the macros for only the custard filling of the tiramisu!"

Ask it to build you a week of meals that hit your macros using foods you actually like, and it'll do it in about five seconds. Ask it what a V squat does differently from a hack squat, or what your DEXA numbers mean, and you'll get a clear answer instead of losing your whole evening to a Reddit thread from 2017.

Have you ever heard the phrase "what gets measured, gets managed?"

The reality is, if you have a specific goal that is related to losing body fat, changing your body composition, optimizing performance, or even just improving your overall health, knowing how much, how little, and what type of food you're consuming on a daily basis will help you reach that goal a lot faster.

AI is good at the "knowing" part. Really good, and getting better every day it seems.

Here's where I'd tell you to use it:

• Meal ideas that fit your macros and the foods you like (better than most meal-plan PDFs I've seen...and I've seen a lot of them 😅)
• A place to start when you're staring at a blank week and you can't make a single decision
• Walking you through what a lab number or a scan generally means, decoding the gibberish for you

Keri, a Flex Fam member, used ChatGPT heading into a fat loss phase. She put in her macros and her protein sources and asked for a week of meals:

"It gave me a full plan, shopping list and recipes for each one and fit exactly into my macros. Have others done this? I am amazed by this! :)"

She's right to be amazed!

A tracking app is the same kind of thing. It's a tool we utilize, and the women in my membership all use one of their choice, Cronometer is my top pick but MyFitnessPal works too. Taking the extra 2 seconds to pull out your food scale when you're at home and measuring that handful of almonds or the 6 ounces of steak is going to teach you exactly what certain quantities of certain foods look like, so when you do go out to dinner or over to your friend's house, you'll be able to eyeball your portion sizes MUCH more accurately.

Although tracking your food may seem daunting at first, I truly believe the benefits far exceed the small learning curve.

So if you've never tracked and you've never asked AI a thing about your nutrition...go do both!

Start there. Seriously.

Coach, AI, or tracking app?

So where do I use it?

Sorting, drafting, and the pile of admin I mentioned up top. None of it has anything to do with coaching anyone.

I'm not one of those coaches still insisting it's 2019 (I have a whole blog archive from 2019 and let me tell you, it has some opinions 🤷🏻‍♀️).

And where I don't

Your program, your plan when everything goes sideways, and the answer when you message me at 9pm on a Thursday because you're about to spiral into the weekend. All of that is me. There's no team here and nobody to pass you off to.

Will it ever push back on you?

Rarely. It's built to agree with you.

Ask it whether your plan is fine and it'll find a way to tell you yes. Ask it if you should take the week off, and it'll validate that too, with a nice little list of reasons why you're being too hard on yourself.

And look, sometimes that's exactly what you need to hear!

But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you need someone who has watched you do this for months to say "hey, this isn't working, and here's what we're changing." That tough love, from somebody who actually knows you and has earned the right to say it? You're not getting that from a chat bot. It doesn't know you well enough and it isn't built to risk upsetting you.

Here's the thing though...

Changing your body composition is a lot of science. Ask AI for the science and it'll give you the science, no argument from me there. But there's an art to this too, and the art isn't written down anywhere for it to go find. It's the commonalities, the trends, the things I've watched happen across hundreds of women in 10+ years of coaching that the research still hasn't caught up to.

Rachel, one of the women in the Flex Fam, asked it to settle a V squat versus hack squat question, got a tidy answer back, and brought it to the group anyway:

"I asked ChatGPT about the two and the short answer is as follows...so I guess it's a toss up on which is preferred."

She had her answer...she still didn't know what to do with it.

Okay, so what should you be tracking?

Now you know why the knowing part matters. But is food the only thing worth tracking?

Nope.

Your food is one piece of a much bigger picture...

• How are you sleeping?
• What's your stress level like?
• How's your energy throughout the day?
• What's your exercise performance like, and how well are you recovering from it?
• What's your hunger level at different times of the day, and are you having cravings?
• How's your digestion?

Tracking these metrics is something known as biofeedback and it is arguably the most important thing to track when it comes to getting and maintaining long-term results.

A chat window isn't going to ask you about any of that unless you think to bring it up yourself. And when you go quiet for a couple of weeks? It doesn't come looking for you. It just sits there waiting to be opened, same as your tracking app sitting there with the streak broken and the last entry dated two weeks ago 🫠

What does accountability actually mean?

I wrote about this back in 2019, after a stressful year where I'd put on some weight and could not get myself going again:

"As a nutritionist and fitness professional, it's hard to admit to myself (and especially others) when I've 'fallen off the wagon.'"

"And although I may have all of the knowledge, tools, and experience to 'get back on it'...it's not always that simple."

I had all the information...I'm the one who teaches it! What I was missing was an "outside person looking in" to keep me accountable, bounce ideas off of, and most importantly, help me get out of my own way.

So I hired my own coach. Was it cheap? No. Was it worth it? More than I can tell you.

Every woman in the Flex Fam gets a personal tracker she shares with me. It has all of her daily biofeedback metrics, macros, steps, workouts, etc. Because it's shared, I can see what's going on week to week, hold you accountable, and point out things that you probably didn't even notice.

Julie, one of the ladies in the Flex Fam, said it in one line when I asked her what had changed:

"I feel so much more accountable and not out there on my own."

And with my 1-on-1 clients, I go through your tracker and your check-in myself every Monday and record a video walking through what I'm seeing. One of my clients wrote this to me in week three, right in the middle of a bad week:

"I don't have a coach to try to be perfect for. I have a coach to help me through all the trials and obstacles that get in the way and make it so difficult to do it on my own."

- Teryn, weekly check-in (you can check out her full transformation here.)

No chatbot is giving you that. That's human to human interaction.

Do I still track macros if I work with a coach?

Usually yes, but not always at the same level.

Tracking isn't one-size-fits-all, and there are tiers to it: full macro tracking, tracking just protein and calories and letting the rest fall where it may, or simply gathering data on where things are right now. What I teach depends on where you're at, what you're comfortable with, and where you want to go. More on macro tracking tips are here if you want them.

Where I fit

I'm Rachel Gregory. Board Certified Nutrition Specialist, CSCS, master's in Nutrition & Exercise Physiology, published researcher. I coach women 40+ to build muscle instead of shrinking and finally feel confident in their own skin.

A lot of coaching businesses run as one main coach with a team of coaches hired under them. Not here. You get just me. 😊

The Flex Fam is a group of women 40+ in your corner who are going through the same things you are, and you get your training and nutrition coaching from me right alongside them. There are live coaching calls with me, where you can ask about your training, nutrition, or the week that just went completely sideways. The first thing we'd do together is work out which phase you're actually in. To learn more about The Flex Fam and hear from current members, click here!

1-on-1 coaching with me is the most personalized thing I offer. Your program is built for you, and you get direct access to me plus that Monday video every single week. I keep my 1-on-1 roster deliberately small. Commitments start at 6 months, pricing depends on the length you choose, and I share all of the details when I respond to your application.

Moral of the story: keep using AI. Keep the app. Use every tool you can get your hands on.

But if you've done the "knowing-what-to-do" part more than once now, and you can feel that same thing starting up again, it's probably time to ask for help 🥰

Quick answers

Can AI be my fitness coach? For information, yes, and it's really good at it. For everything else, no. Accountability isn't information. Neither is having someone in your corner who knows what this actually costs you, who remembers what you were dealing with last month, and who is actually invested in you getting there.

A chat window can hand you a plan...it can't care whether you follow it.

Can ChatGPT write me a workout program? It can write you a program. Whether it's the right program depends on things it doesn't know: your injury history, what you did last block, how you recover, and what you'll realistically stick to. And it isn't going to change anything in week three when your shoulder starts bothering you and you feel like crap because you're not fueling your workouts appropriately. 

What can a coach do that AI can't? Notice. I notice when you've gone quiet and I come looking for you, I notice the thing you didn't think to mention, and I notice the difference between when you need a push and when you actually need a break, which look almost identical from the outside and completely different up close.

I remember what you were going through in March when you're panicking about it in September, and I'll sit with you in the week where nothing went right without letting you spiral. I'll say the hard thing when it needs saying, which only really works coming from somebody who's earned the right to say it.

What happens if I fall off for two weeks? With AI or an app, nothing happens. With me, we look at what actually got in the way, we adjust the plan around it, and we make sure the same two weeks don't take you out again.

Do I need AI, an app, or a coach? The best results I see come from using all three. The app teaches you what's in your food. AI answers the questions that come up along the way. And I'm the one analyzing it all and deciding what changes. They're doing different jobs.

Which tracking app do you recommend? As of right now, Cronometer is my top pick, but anything works. Whatever you feel comfortable with.

I used to be with Stronger U. Where should I go? I wrote a separate post on the best Stronger U alternatives.

What if I keep losing the weight and gaining it back? Then the missing piece probably isn't information either. I wrote a separate post on why you gain the weight back, and the plan for after the plan.