Strength & Conditioning - How Artificial Intelligence Will Destroy Current Strength Coach Jobs & Create New Ones
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Artificial Intelligence & The Future Of Athlete Development
A college athlete competing at the power five level goes into their university’s strength training facility. The athlete walks up to a lifting platform consisting of the latest Sorinex equipment, sets down their gym bag, and pulls out an iPad. The athlete connects the iPad to a docking station at the front of the platform, turns on the camera, and receives instructions from what sounds like a human voice with instructions on what that morning’s training session will entail: first power cleans at 80% intensity, followed by back squats and bench press, with all work sets and reps listed along with recommended weight by each exercise. The athlete goes through the workout receiving live-coaching instructions from the voice, along with recommended weight changes throughout the workout. It’s important to note, that the voice commands coming from the training program are not from a human, but from a large language model that has been designing the training program, along with determining adjustments to the weight based on the athlete’s velocity patterns for how fast the athlete lifted the weight.
Writing this Training Report several years ago may have seemed out of place, but the previous scenario is about to become a reality for the entire strength & conditioning community. Highschool, collegiate & professional sports teams will no longer be in need of traditional strength coaches. Instead they will be relying on super-empowered individuals who have advanced knowledge on machine learning, statistics, and advanced training on human psychology. Furthermore the above scenario will actually be more cost-efficient than hiring an entire staff of strength coaches, and will be more effective in terms of tracking mesocycle progress. I don’t want to present an argument for WHY this will be a reality, because in my opinion this scenario is inevitable. Instead I want to be efficient and use this Training Report to explain to coaches and athletes what machine learning is, the role it will play in athlete development, how strength coaches can prepare themselves for this future and how athletes need to adjust their expectations for this new generation of strength coaches. Let’s begin by exploring what machine learning actually is.
What Is Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning?
Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably have heard about ChatGPT or Google’s Bard and how they have been impacting society. These technologies are called large language models, also known as a conversational AI or chatbots which are trained to be informative and comprehensive. These technologies are trained on a massive amount of text data, and are able to communicate and generate human-like text in responses to a wide range of prompts and questions. It is important to remember that these technologies are not sentient beings, and they do not have thoughts or feelings. They are tools that can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. Before Google & Microsoft decided to unleash these specific Artificial Intelligence systems and experiment on the public, we’ve all had some type of run in with large language models. If you have ever used YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Twitter, Microsoft Word, Google Maps, or even if your cellphone has been near someone else’s cellphone that uses one of the previous mentioned platforms, than you have interacted with this technology.
ChatGPT & Google’s Bard are the latest large language models that have gained infamy for helping write college student’s essays and passing bar exams for law school. What most people in the general public are not aware of is how this new technology will significantly alter and wipe out many white-collar jobs. One of those job markets that I believe is ill-prepared for this change is the exercise science community. The NSCA has begun some preparations by unveiling the new CPSS certification (Certified Performance & Sport Scientist), but is still not adequately prepared for how the market will adjust to these new changes that are coming in our society. So what exactly will large language models like Google’s Bard do that will render traditional strength training coaches useless? Let’s take a look!
Google’s Bard Program Design Sample
Keep in mind, Google’s Bard has just recently been made available to the public. But I decided to test Bard to see what kind of strength training program it could come up with. Beneath is the exact text exchange between myself & Bard, with no edits:
Me - design me a two month strength & conditioning program for an Olympic weightlifting athlete. This program needs to be able to help that athlete achieve a one rep maximum attempt. please include reps, sets, and the percentages of intensity associated with those work sets.
Bard - Sure, here is a two-month strength and conditioning program for an Olympic weightlifting athlete who is looking to achieve a one rep maximum (1RM) attempt. This program is based on the principles of periodization, which means that it gradually increases in intensity and volume over time. The program also includes a variety of exercises to help the athlete develop all of the strength and power necessary to achieve their 1RM goal.
Week 1
Warm-up: 5-10 minutes of light cardio, followed by dynamic stretches.
Strength training:
Squats: 3 sets of 5 reps at 70% of 1RM
Cleans: 3 sets of 3 reps at 75% of 1RM
Jerks: 3 sets of 2 reps at 80% of 1RM
Cool-down: 5-10 minutes of static stretches.
Week 2
Warm-up: Same as Week 1.
Strength training:
Squats: 3 sets of 4 reps at 75% of 1RM
Cleans: 3 sets of 3 reps at 80% of 1RM
Jerks: 3 sets of 2 reps at 85% of 1RM
Cool-down: Same as Week 1.
Week 3
Warm-up: Same as Week 1.
Strength training:
Squats: 3 sets of 3 reps at 80% of 1RM
Cleans: 3 sets of 2 reps at 85% of 1RM
Jerks: 3 sets of 1 rep at 90% of 1RM
Cool-down: Same as Week 1.
Week 4
Warm-up: Same as Week 1.
Strength training:
Squats: 3 sets of 2 reps at 85% of 1RM
Cleans: 3 sets of 1 rep at 90% of 1RM
Jerks: 3 sets of 1 rep at 95% of 1RM
Cool-down: Same as Week 1.
Week 5
Deload week. Reduce the weight by 10% and do 3 sets of 5 reps for each exercise.
Week 6
Return to the regular training program from Week 3.
Week 7
Warm-up: Same as Week 1.
Strength training:
Squats: 3 sets of 1 rep at 90% of 1RM
Cleans: 3 sets of 1 rep at 95% of 1RM
Jerks: 3 sets of 1 rep at 100% of 1RM
Cool-down: Same as Week 1.
Week 8
Peak week. Reduce the volume of training and focus on rest and recovery.
This is just a sample program, and you may need to adjust it based on your individual needs and goals. Be sure to listen to your body and take rest days when needed. With consistent training, you will see improvements in your strength, power, and endurance.
Here are some additional tips for achieving your 1RM goal:
Get enough sleep. Sleep is essential for muscle growth and recovery. Aim for 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
Eat a healthy diet. A healthy diet will provide your body with the nutrients it needs to recover from training and build muscle.
Be patient. It takes time to build strength and power. Don't get discouraged if you don't see results immediately. Just keep training consistently and you will eventually reach your goal.
To the well trained strength coach, this programming is very basic. But there are core periodization principles that Bard incorporated into its’ program design that make this response impressive. It even factored in a two week taper towards the end of the program which is actually fairly advanced. The more that we train large language models like Bard with more data sets, the more ruthlessly efficient it will become. It is my position that if you have a standard trained Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialists (CSCS) paired with Bard, that coach will immediately become a super-empowered individual and could SINGLE-HANDIDLY run an entire power five athletic department’s strength training programming for ALL athletes in ALL sports. Without Bard, this would be impossible to do. But the speed, organization and efficiency of programming significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to design and deliver programs to athletes, and can be efficiently tracked and altered when necessary. This model of a human-AI team approach will be too tempting for teams not to adopt. So what can strength coaches entering the field do to adapt, and what should athletes start to expect from the exercise science community with these changes on the near horizon?
The New 21st Century Strength Coach
If you are a strength coach and ALL you do is design programs, you will be out of a job within the next 5 to 10 years. This task can handed off to a large language model and efficiently be managed without predictable human error. So what purpose will strength coaches serve at this point if they are no longer designing programs? Furthermore, if athletic departments cut down on staff size, what exactly will they be looking for in these new positions? In my opinion, in order for the strength coach to maximize on this human-AI team approach there are three characteristics that must be present in order to become the modern day strength coach: possess elite people skills; have basic strength training knowledge to fact check programming; have advanced knowledge of large language models and computer systems in order to make sure that delivery of programming to athletes is actually happening. We can think of this role as part sport psychologist, part handyman and part personal trainer. Of those three roles, the sport psychologist role will be most critical.
Artificial Intelligence has not reached the point of being able to actually interact with humans in a way that is indistinguishable from human to human interaction. This means that athletes will still need psychological support during training from humans, and if you are a strength coach that possesses those traits than you will win the future. But if you are a strength coach that has trouble emotionally connecting with athletes, has difficulty demonstrating empathy, if you are impatient or are not a professional at being able to efficiently listen to your athletes, this new technology will obliterate you from being able to work in this field. Not only do strength coaches need to adapt, but athletes as well.
Because this approach will be more cost-effective, there will be fewer interactions with people. What this means is that athletes need to maximize on their social interactions with teammates, friends, and will need to secure additional emotional support from other individuals outside of their team/organization due to the fact that there will be far fewer coaches to interact with. Some people reading this may think that this issue of the Training Report is negative and bleak, but I think it is important that we look at the future and adapt accordingly. Furthermore what I hope we take away from this is that human to human interaction will become far more of a valuable commodity and that human social interactions are not only worth preserving, but need to take more of a center stage in our lives than it probably has over the past several decades. Let’s adapt, and learn how to live with these tools rather than reject them!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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