Someone needs to say it. Someone has to speak up in defense of being mid. I am a mid runner. Most of us are, as that is the definition of being mid. I work out every day, but I have a full-time job, two kids, a dog, and a spouse. I volunteer, and I have dinner with my parents. I’m aging. I’m not going to knock anyone’s socks off with a crazy 100-miler anytime soon.
So what do you do if you don’t want to collapse into a bag of dust, but you have no time or incentive to work with a personal trainer? One option is to do what Atlantic CEO and incredibly fast runner Nicholas Thompson does, and use a custom GPT. Or, you can use Google’s new AI health Coach in the Fitbit app, which is a part of the $10/month Fitbit Premium service.
Per Google’s instructions, I used Coach (which is in public preview—a beta, of sorts) for three weeks. I’m a coach for Girls on the Run at my daughter’s school, where she has become running friends with a kid competing in the Junior Olympics. I made it my mission to beat two children in the November 5K—so, a 7:30 mile pace. I was feeling pretty good about it, actually, until multiple people told me that I should stop talking to a computer and that I need to talk to people in real life.
First Things First
You can access Fitbit’s Public Preview if you meet a few requirements—you have to be an active Fitbit Premium subscriber, have an Android phone running Android 11 or higher, be located in the US, and use English for both the Fitbit app and your phone. (You can check the full list of requirements here.)
You can also switch back and forth between Public Preview and the regular app version, which you might want to do because several important features are currently missing from the app version with Coach. For example, menstrual health logging and blood glucose logging are unavailable, as are Cardio Fitness scores and advanced running metrics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users.
I used the service with the Pixel Watch 4 on a Pixel 9. (Fitbit wants to make the experience available for iOS users soon.) I had a so-so experience with the Running Coach that Fitbit launched last year, but I was more optimistic about the health coach because it promises to be both more comprehensive and more flexible.
Many runners who are much smarter and more experienced than I am (please see the mid comment above) have noted that running requires being able to answer a lot of binary yes/no questions correctly. Can I do my long run on Saturday if I’m busy on Sunday? Should I run with a sniffle, or wait until I’m well? A little more guidance is always helpful. I answered a 10-minute questionnaire about my goals and what equipment I had available (Fitbit hopes to eventually be able to incorporate multimodal actions, like taking a video of gym equipment, and use AI to offer suggestions) and waited for results.
Bumps in the Road
My first impressions were not promising. Coach seemed to think that I was at a work conference, which I was not, and I told it so. I didn’t mind, though, as it was easy enough to adjust treadmill runs and hotel room workouts to outdoor runs and easy weight-lifting sessions in front of the TV.
You can track live metrics via the Fitbit app, or you can just use your watch to track your workout and sync the completed workout to your program later. I really like this feature. A lot of people like live-tracking workouts; I find it stressful and not terribly accurate, especially since I do not run on a track and find getting exact time/distance intervals to be difficult while running around my neighborhood.
Also, Fitbit’s running workouts appear to loosely follow Zone 2 training, where you improve your cardio fitness by staying within 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate for most of your training. God bless these people, but I’m a foot shorter than everyone who loves zone training, and I can spike my heart rate out of Zone 2 just by listening to Rihanna.
Again, I consulted Running Evolution coach Beth Baker, who suggested using other metrics like whether I can talk while running, looking at my VO2 Max, and tracking my recovery time after runs to see if my workouts were hard or easy enough. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but that’s just common sense,” she said.
In my first week of training, I made the mistake of telling Coach that I was sick; it offered helpful advice that if my symptoms were above my neck, then I could keep working out. (I parroted this to my daughter when she tried to get out of going to school.) It also adjusted my workouts down to annoyingly slow 1.5-mile or 2-mile workouts and wouldn’t stop, even when I told Coach I wasn’t sick anymore.
The Fitbit team noted over email that in “the iterative Public Preview, we expect the coach to experience some trouble with memory expiration and persistence, which might cause some unexpected workout adjustments, and we are actively working on improving this.” I had to go back into the Coach Notes—where there’s a record of everything that I asked Coach—to delete any statements where I said I was not feeling well and restore my old fitness settings.
Talk to Me
After several weeks of tinkering with Coach, I finally started to see results. Coach saw a pattern in that I like to go to a yoga class on Sundays and rock climbing on Wednesdays, and it seamlessly incorporated other types of workouts into my weekly plan.
As far as my lifting goes, I get recommended kettlebell swings and glute bridges a lot, which is great, since those are invaluable exercises for runners. That seems like a promising indication that Coach is drawing upon reliable information sources for recommendations. Google has partnered with NBA star Stephen Curry and other outside experts to keep Coach’s advice grounded in reality.
I did notice something strange, though. Coach asked me what had happened during my day to affect my sleep, and it was hard not to tell Coach about the different problems that might be affecting my health and willingness to work out. While Google does not use Fitbit data for advertising, I would still be wary of disclosing too much sensitive health information to a corporate entity that is not a doctor and not bound by HIPAA regulations.
My spouse and IRL friends started edging away when I mentioned conversations with Coach. I told my husband that I was asking Coach what I should eat for breakfast, and he looked at me askance. “Doesn’t everyone know that you’re supposed to eat carbs before and protein after?” he said, tentatively. When I told another friend that I’d asked Coach to help me work on my macros, he said, “Maybe you need to … start talking to more people.”
I discussed my AI-generated training plans with Baker, who had another suggestion. “There’s a sneaky way of getting faster, and that’s by running with people who are faster than you,” she said. “There’s a whole, weird feeling of barely hanging on when you’re running with somebody. You’re uncomfortable for the first month or so, but it works every time.”
A lot of people like running because you don’t have to make plans or schedule dates or tee times with anyone. You can just put on shoes and shorts, sprint out the door, and squeeze in a workout whenever you have a spare hour. But a big part of what motivates us to stick with exercise—of any kind—is being with each other. I started this project because I wanted to be able to keep up with my daughter and her friend. The faster I get, the more appealing it is to run with other people than with a computer program.
As satisfying as it is to link up those daily exercises and check in with Coach every day, I started to get the sensation that the real people in my life—the ones that I actually did yoga, rock climbing, and running with—were beginning to stage an intervention.
Other people might feel differently, especially if you’re super busy and just trying to squeeze a workout in. But there’s still value in getting real-time feedback from real people. Unlike a large language model, a friend can tell when you’re sick, or if you’re running at an easy conversational pace, or when you’re sucking wind. A real person can also tell you, gently, when you’re getting kind of weird because you’re mostly talking to a chatbot and you need to stop.
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The post Instead of Fitbit’s AI Health Coach, You Could Just Have Friends appeared first on Wired.
