How AI is Used in The Fitness Industry

AI is not always the answer and that ‘humans’ should rationalise results, using their skills and experience in a particular area. However, there’s no denying that AI can provide an enhanced experience in most cases, and a few of these are outlined below.

Personalised Training Plans and Workouts

While AI and a computer may not ever replace a personal trainer in terms of their value and support structure, AI has provided some fairly significant benefits from personalised training, plans, and workouts.

You can input certain criteria about yourself and your desired goals and AI then develops a personalised training plan or workout based on the information that you provide. This is effective and can be very useful when working towards a goal, especially if you prefer to do this on your own terms and without a personal trainer.

Wearable Technology and Reporting

AI is used in wearable technology as part of the reporting and predicting processes that are handled. It’s also part of wider data processing, which allows technologies to predict and encourage certain behaviours.

For example, the use of AI and volume data has allowed apps like Strava and the Garmin Connect app to absorb huge amounts of analytical data based on a person’s age, height, weight and number of times they run to give closely aligned calorie counts and other important insights into their fitness and achievements.

It is important to ensure that any information that you enter into your fitness app, wearable technology or workout plan utilises accurate information, so it’s best not to lie, as this could impact your health.

Designing Equipment

AI has been used in the design environment for many years, especially around rendering. However, in modern software solutions, AI has been incorporated to automatically interpret data that is put in a two-dimensional plane into a three-dimensional output, which allows product designers to visualise products much more easily from a 2-D form into a 3-D render.

This can cut down on a huge amount of development and time and speed up the process of designing and creating new fitness equipment. It can also take aspects of previously designed products with their specific goals and add enhancements based on new criteria. This means that there is a positive drive towards ongoing improvement.

Gym Layout Visualisation

Gym visualisations and layouts are great places to use AI technology, because you can input certain items within a gym and see them visualised in front of you. This can help optimise space and zonal use within a gym, which typically struggles for space. It is common now for people to input machines and instructions, to instruct AI software to consider all of the main criteria before rendering visualisations for sign-off or even planning.

Mirafit is a fitness brand renowned globally. Comments: We use 3D renders when developing our commercial Gym Equipment. This allows us to examine products before we create and test live items.

Fitness Apps

Fitness apps have their place, and AI also helps enhance your experience with them. Apps like Strava encourage you to complete badges, and often, you are alerted to badges for particular activities that are recorded on your app. A really good example of this is the Garmin Connect app which suggests badges for you to achieve to encourage you to continue your fitness mission.

Other apps like the Free Fitness App Fitain are free to download and will encourage you to achieve certain goals. They also provide access to fitness videos and classes.

What Are The Benefits of AI in Fitness?

• Increased Engagement and Retention
• Enhanced Customer Insights
• Revenue Generation
• Scalability
• Differentiation

AI has a very strong foothold in the fitness industry, and this has ordinarily provided a fairly significant benefit from designing products using AI to improve your fitness. There are a myriad of benefits to using AI as a predictive engine for different situations. It is always important to note, however, that AI is not infallible and is only as good as the engine it uses and the input from the user, along with the scope of the graphical interface or application that is being used. AI does fall over, and sometimes this comes down to user input.

What Does The Future Hold?

AI will likely continue to develop at an extraordinary rate, and as a result of enhancements in apps, machine technology, product, design and gym layout design, the future prospects for AI in the fitness space are pretty significant.

You can begin to personalise your experience. There are examples where gyms will allow you to use a key fob or card, and the machines will adapt to a prescribed output. This means that your experience is personalised to a level beyond those experienced by a typical gym user other than somebody who is working with a personal trainer. If you imagine prestige car seats adjusting based on the driver specifics, this is what we are talking about with modern gym machines: a way for them to adapt to predetermined weights or configurations in accordance with your plan.

It will be interesting in the next five years, especially when you consider how far AI has come in a very short space of time, how most people are embracing the industry, and what it can bring. As we know from the news, this could include enhancements in hospital processing of scans, images, or results. Gyms can use AI to help predict staffing requirements based on 12 months’ worth of data. This will reduce the amount of overhead and keep them competitive in a space that is seeing growth and business failure due to tight margins.