AI Personal Trainer: Designing the Perfect Exercise Regime Using ChatGPT

Key Takeaways

• You can prompt ChatGPT to create a workout routine as a starting point, being clear about your body type, goals, and equipment.
• For safety and the input of a true expert, always ask a personal trainer for advice about and alongside ChatGPT’s output.

Have you been meaning to start exercising regularly but aren’t sure where to get started? You can easily use ChatGPT to create a workout routine. While its suggestions may not be tailored perfectly to everyone’s needs, they serve as a good starting point for anyone wanting to improve their fitness.

ChatGPT Can Create Workout Routines. They Just Need Some Work Themselves

Before you ask ChatGPT to create a workout routine or exercise regimen, you first need to form a clear idea of what kind of activity you want to do and what you want to achieve. That’s because entering a general command such as “create a workout regime for me” is only going to result in ChatGPT asking you something like the following:

You can therefore either reply to the above questions, or you can go ahead from the outset and specify the kind of workout regime you’d like. For example, you can write something along the lines of, “Create a gym workout routine intended to build upper body strength. I’m a beginner and am able to work out three times a week.”

ChatGPT will then outline a routine for you, with each active day usually comprising five or six different exercises. Of course, if you’ve asked for a routine focused on a more cardiovascular exercise such as running or cycling, for example, then your days will look a little different.

If there’s any particular activity you don’t like or can’t do (perhaps because you lack the necessary equipment), then you can always ask ChatGPT to create a new routine with the offending exercise removed or replaced.

It also needs to be stressed that you should make sure to state how experienced and fit you are, while providing your age, height and weight is also a good idea. If the routine ChatGPT produces seems a little too hard (or maybe easy), you should probably start again and make it clear that you want something slightly different.

Always Ask a Personal Trainer First

In my own personal experience, ChatGPT’s workout routines are perfectly sound in terms of how they’re structured. They mirror the kind of stuff I’ve previously done in gyms, incorporating valuable rest days and also providing advice on how you may want to increase weights (or reps/sets) as you become stronger.

However, beginners using ChatGPT to create their first-ever workout need to proceed with some degree of caution. This is for a couple of important reasons.

Firstly, ChatGPT’s descriptions of exercises are clear yet relatively minimal, so anyone who has never encountered side planks, Russian twists or dumbbell rows, for instance, may struggle to perform them properly. They should therefore always ask gym staff to show them how to execute each part of their workout, including a demonstration of ideal forms.

Secondly, and more generally, they should also ask trainers whether the routines provided by ChatGPT are actually suitable for their needs. In my case, I created a workout routine for myself centered around upper body strength, and the member of staff I spoke to at my gym pointed out how it could potentially benefit from at least one more exercise focused on the chest.

More importantly, while ChatGPT did nothing wrong in itself in terms of outlining a helpful routine for improving upper body strength, it often lacks the context and bigger picture that could provide people with more useful advice. This became clear when the same trainer I spoke to also suggested that I shouldn’t focus only on upper body strength, and that I should also be looking at improving my core and leg strength.

So while ChatGPT did create a decent enough upper body workout, if it were comparable to a qualified professional it would have also recommended a more holistic approach. This becomes particularly important if you’re entering the gym because you’re recovering from a health condition or injury, with experienced trainers likely to ask about such factors and advise accordingly.

A Hybrid Approach Works Best

As with many other applications of AI, most people are better off using a combination of ChatGPT and human advice. ChatGPT certainly provides a convenient starting point for creating a bespoke workout regime, yet it often misses things and doesn’t see the whole person in a way that a qualified trainer would.

Having said that, the routines I created—and used—with ChatGPT were just as effective in improving my strength and fitness as anything else I’ve tried in recent years. At least, they were once I tuned them to my particular needs and worked out how exactly to perform some of their more unfamiliar exercises.

Want to get more use out of ChatGPT? From playing games to writing code , there’s no shortage of surprising things you can use OpenAI’s famous bot for .

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