You may have noticed many workout apps proudly proclaiming that they use AI to construct your training plan. Some of them even go so far as to put AI in their name. LPR Power does not use AI to tailor its workouts. Want to know why? Then read on…
The state of the art in AI (like chatGPT and others) is nothing more than a computer program that, given a sequence of numbers, guesses what the next numbers in the sequence will be. For example, given the sequence 2,4,6,8, you might guess that the next numbers are 10, 12, 14. This is essentially what current AI programs do: they turn the words of your question into a sequence of numbers (called tokens in the trade) and spit out the numbers that they think* are next in the sequence. These numbers are turned back into words and hey presto, you have your answer. Because these AI’s have swallowed the entire internet, the answers are frequently accurate and most of the time make some sort of sense.
*(I’m using the word “think” metaphorically here; current AI programs don’t think at all)
So how would we use this approach to create AI-driven training programs? Say you have a popular app with thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of sessions recorded. You’ve got a reasonable dataset that can be used to train an AI. Once you’ve trained the AI, you can turn your workouts into numbers. Let’s call a 5×5 100kg squat 01,100,5,5 and a 3×10 70kg bench 02,70,3,10. If we feed that serquence into the AI it might come back with the sequence 03,50,4,6 which, when translated means 4×6 50kg military press (or whatever).
Ok, so what’s wrong with this approach? Here’s two things (there may be more):
People lie
I hate to break it to you guys, gals and theys, but people lie about the weights they lift. Ninety percent of those bros who record all the 190kg doubles they’re doing are, in reality getting nowhere near. On top of that, even if they are getting the weights off the rack, their form is so terrible and with such a lack of depth that they don’t really count as reps at all. Of course the AI has no way of knowing this. All it’s got is the numbers recorded in the app. Do you really want to base your training program off what a whole load of wannabees have posted to make themselves look good on social media? I didn’t think so.
Follow an average program, get average gains
Let’s imagine a perfect world where everyone did lovely deep sets with perfect form and only recorded the sets that they genuinely did (What a wonderful world that would be). The AI in this magical world has a perfect data set which it can use to make its guesses as to what you should do next. What it will do is give you the most likely next numbers in the sequence. So if the average lifter does 4×6 50kg military press after a 5×5 100kg squat and a 3×10 70kg bench then that’s what it will tell you to do. There’s nothing wrong with that. Apart from one thing: you will get an average workout. And if you follow an average training program you will get average gains.
Perfect Rep Strength doesn’t want you to be average
We don’t want you to follow an average workout. We don’t want you to have average gains. Our coaches have reached the top of the tree. They’ve coached the best there is. They know what it takes to get outstanding gains. If you want to go there, their workouts will take you all the way.
That’s why we don’t use AI.