Today, I want to chat about a popular topic in the zeitgeist – AI. I’ve been asked a lot recently about how AI might affect gyms.
Do I think AI is going to have a negative impact on our industry?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: I think AI is one of the best things to happen to people who are serious about their health, and I want to tell you exactly why – and how to leverage it to maximize your progress.
Let’s start with what AI will never do.
It will never be the empathetic ear, or the coach putting a hand on your shoulder when you’re struggling to find motivation to go to the gym.
It will never watch your hips shift on the third rep of a squat and quietly know it’s time to regress the load before you feel it yourself.
It will never remember that you train better on Tuesdays because you’re slammed at work on Mondays.
It will never high-five you when you finally hit a personal best on a deadlift that you’ve been chasing for eight months, or notice that you’ve been a little quieter than usual lately and ask if everything’s alright.
It will never take the thinking out of training or hit your goals for you.
Fitness goals are achieved through repeated, in-person, skin-in-the-game effort, with the support of a coach who actually knows you and tailors your training in real time.
Bodies are built in a room with other humans pushing through the same challenges on a Friday morning.
They’re built through a thousand micro-adjustments that no algorithm can see – the wince you hide, the breath pattern that’s off, the form that’s drifted half an inch in a way that matters.
That is what we do at The FIT Lab. That is not replaceable. Not now, not in ten years.
But here’s the part most people miss: your results don’t only come from the hour you spend with us. They come from the other twenty-three.
And more often than not, improving your fitness is a time management issue, more than a, “ I don’t know what to do” problem.
And that is where tools like Claude (the AI I personally use every day) or ChatGPT can be a quiet superpower in your corner.
A few ways our members are already putting it to work:
Snapping a photo of their fridge at 6:45pm and asking for three high-protein dinner ideas that can be prepared in under twenty minutes.
Pasting a restaurant menu before a work event and asking which entrée best fits their goals. Ballparking the macros of a plate without weighing every gram for the rest of their lives.
Estimating not just the calories burned during a session, but the 48-hour afterburn that follows a hard training day, so they actually fuel their recovery instead of accidentally starving it. Building a five-minute decompression ritual for the walk in the door after work, before the wine and the phone take over.
Using it as a thought partner to help plan for a tough conversation at the office – so stress doesn’t quietly wreck their sleep and tomorrow’s training.
Mapping out mini bodyweight workouts that you can do in your hotel during travel week so they don’t feel like they “completely fell off.”
None of that replaces your coach.
It makes it easier to break inertia in adopting new healthy habits, and helps to remove friction from the life around your training.
And friction is the real enemy of consistency.
So here’s the way I’d put it: let us handle the body and take the thinking out of your training.
Let AI help with the outside-of-the-gym logistics.
You handle showing up.
That combination – a real coach in a real room surrounded by a supportive community, plus a smart tool in your pocket for the other twenty-three hours…that’s the most leveraged your health has ever been able to be. We’re leaning into it, not running from it.
Because your results are the only thing we’re competing for.
Courage.
Greg
P.S. Curious which tools we recommend and how we’re using them inside the studio? Reply to this email and I’ll send over The Top 10 ways to Use AI to 10x Your Gains.
No catch. We just want to help.
