Coaching Autonomy Through Wearables & AI – Is this the future of personalised coaching?

Overview

Smart Wearables have been around for the last 20 years and the rise in popularity and saturation of owners is on the rise still however, the meteoric rise of intuitive personalised coaching that is delivered via wearables, as well as Mass market training platforms delivered via Apps driven by AI or algorithmic driven plans has been very aggressive in the last 10 years, increased in saturation and appeal when our daily lives was changed fundamentally with the onset of COVID19. Now I’m a fan of wearables and I own a Garmin Fenix, and have done for a very long while, and I’m also a fan of deliverable of health information and positive health and fitness knowledge based upon facts and data to the end users/owner, as long as this data and recommendation is correct so this article is not about the bashing of automation and automated delivery of intelligent coaching through technology, its about delivering information in order to make an informed decision on how to use that technology. for the purposes of this article, I am focussing on the Garmin product offering.

So what is AI Driven Coaching?

AI delivered coaching is the process of looking at the health and performance data over the last say, 45 days to get a feel for the current performance level, perceived fatigue and current training readiness to deliver suggested workouts based upon the above data. So lets take a look at the data AI leverages in order to arrive at training suggestions and workouts recommendations.

Now the above screenshots are from Garmin connect and are an overview of an athletes training file covering the last 7 days. its a significant amount of data covering a plethora of metrics that are reported on in summary that are digestible and informative at the same time. This data forms the basis (or some of it) of the systems intelligent decision making in order to deliver intuitive personalised training. In addition to this, this data can be used in conjunction with a training plan to make self guided recommendations on how and what to train. Now, in my opinion, this data is extremely useful, beneficial and does enhances the athletes learning into the aggressors, stressors and culminative fatigue placed when in regular training, so decision outside of AI can also be made, but for the purposes of this article, well stay with the AI aspect of automated training recommendations.

The two images show the recommended workouts for running (left) and Cycling (Right) based upon the data leveraged from the athletes previous day(s) workouts, workout intensity and culminative fatigue.

Firstly before I scrutinise, its important to say that this is a SUGGESTION, not an absolute but, lets take it as the athlete that is taking the information from the wearable as an absolute.

The Plus Points…

You get workouts delivered based upon your culminative fatigue relative to recovery that’s individualised and leverages via your own data.
You will undoubtedly achieve consistency which is the key pillar of health and fitness through exercise.
Personalised training plan that is based upon the athletes goals, should he or she have one. or by default, daily exercises to maintain ones aerobic fitness and health through excercise.
Its free, and coaches are often expensive.
Intelligent based feedback based upon workout performance leveraged by strain, intensity and past performance accrued to date.
Works on an 80/20 training process which is adaptive to your current readiness and culminative fitness through data leverage and autonomy, taking the complications out of TSS and analytics.

The Negative Points…

Doesn’t take into account (or cannot take into account) Injury or sickness.

The fitness and culminative fatigue assumes you are consistently conforming to the schedule or suggestions. so if there is an abrupt break, and you go back to a regular session it immediately assumes you’re overtraining or overreaching.

Assumes that all athletes progress differently during a training plan.

This is my gripe with alot of purchased based plans relative to retaining the services of an actual coach. There are no dynamics with AI based progression, so its likely that you won’t achieve full athlete potential.

The assumption you are at a minimum pace proficiency.

All athletes are different, start at different performance baselines and need more time to build. There is no minimum performance base for all. (This isn’t the case of cycling plans but a minimum fitness is assumed)

Assumes that you have the time required to the daily schedule ALL THE TIME.

Simple fact. Life can and does get in the way of free/disposable time, and the fust thing to get dropped is personal commitments such as training. Yes, you could compromise buy doing a shorter session, but the Garmin Coach doesn’t take this into account and does not provide any compensation for time to commit over the longer training period.

In the interest of being balanced in this article, I do need to make this clear that I’m not bashing the Garmin Coach, I actually like it. For amateur athletes that struggle with consistency, how to train and progress efficiently and need direction but cant afford a coach, this is an excellent platform to be using and, I’d go as far as to say that when when you are coached, the data provided to more knowledgeable and proficient athletes is extremely valuable and intuitive. Should you live and die by it? No, not in my opinion as there are many different levels to training readiness than mathematical algorithms and predictive digital intelligence.

My Overall Take…

As a tool its really good and does fulfil a valuable gap in the market for low/no cost coaching for runners and cyclists. You’re never going to learn about what works for your own performance or even if its optimising for your best performance as its proprietary and, with any app or software that is proprietary you’ll never get the full story on how it works or how efficient its working for you. Would I recommend this over say buying into a coached programme (I’ll stress to say a COACH, not a static training plan)? Depends on how good the coach is and if you have the money or budget for such an option. Coaching is expensive and often prohibitively expensive and out of reach for some, so the Garmin coach is and could be a fantastic gateway to raising your cycling or running game.

That being said, I’m not going to be worried about my job as a performance coach anytime soon lets put it that way.