Should You Allow AI to Coach You?

In case you haven't been paying attention, the AI revolution is here. But should you allow an AI to be your coach? Running coach Matt Fitzgerald explores the role of AI in coaching and how you can make the most of it.

The AI revolution is here (in case you haven’t noticed). ChatGPT and similar tools are transforming every aspect of human existence, including endurance sports. Growing numbers of athletes are getting their training prescriptions from AI-powered apps such as Tridot and CoachCat AI. But are these tools as reliable and effective as a human coach?

I believe the answer is both yes and no. The better AI training apps do some things as well as a competent human coach, but they’re no match for humans when it comes to the all-important relational aspects of coaching. This is good news for both athletes and coaches, as it enables athletes who don’t want to spend money on a human coach to get reliable and effective training prescriptions from an app. At the same time, it enables coaches to focus on the parts of the job that humans excel in.

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I’m certainly no expert on artificial intelligence, but I know more about it than the average layperson, and I’ve been expecting AI to transform endurance coaching for many years. Here’s how I see it: When coaches make decisions about an athlete’s training, they base these decisions on certain types of information and a consistent set of rules and principles. With today’s technology, it’s not difficult to train an AI application to use the same information, rules, and principles to make decisions that closely match those an experienced human coach would make. I happen to think I’m a pretty good coach, but I have no problem admitting that a well-designed AI app can do this part of my job as well as I can.

If planning workouts were the extent of the coach’s role, I’d be contemplating a career change. But the most effective coaches aren’t necessarily those with the most knowledge of their sport. More often, they’re those with the best people skills. This isn’t just my opinion—it’s a proven fact. In 2009, Jeffrey Frost of the United States Sports Academy conducted a scientific survey aimed at identifying the qualities most closely associated with coaching effectiveness. “Knowledge of the sport” ranked fifth among them, well behind relational qualities including “communicating with athletes” and “motivating athletes.” Not every coach is good at these relational elements, but the best coaches are infinitely better at them than any computer program.

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“To be a technically good coach is one thing,” wrote Loughborough University psychologist Sophia Jowett in 2016 paper on relational coaching in sport, “but what gives the coach the ‘edge’ (i.e., the extra effectiveness) in this unforgiving and relentless competitive sport environment is the connection developed between the coach and athlete. It is this connection that makes a difference to technical coaching because it supplies coaches with the key to opening the door to their athletes’ capabilities, capacities, and potential.”

My crystal ball is currently in the repair shop, so I can’t predict how AI will change endurance coaching and training in the future. But I can easily describe the future I’d like to see, which is one where coaches utilize AI prescriptively so that they can double down on people skills. That’s why I created Dream Run Club, an online training group where runners are trained by artificial intelligence and nurtured by human coaches. After surveying the market, I chose an app called Athletica AI as the engine for Dream Run Club. What sets it apart is its creator, Paul Laursen, PhD, an experienced endurance coach and exercise physiologist. A training app is only as good as the humans who design it, and in my opinion Athletica comes closest to matching the decisions a top-notch human coach would make.

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The human component of Dream Run Club has a number of elements. These include continuous monitoring of each athlete’s training by myself and my assistant coach, Ruby Wyles, an online forum where athletes can ask and get answers to questions, and weekly “office hours”—video calls where I make myself available to chat with club members. My hope is that this combination of AI-guided training and human interaction will give athletes an overall experience equaling that of full-service human coaching in both quality and effectiveness but does so in a way that is far more scalable for Ruby and me.

According to surveys, only 5 percent of adult runners have a coach. What excites me about artificial intelligence is its potential to bring coaching to more runners—and more runners to coaches.

Three tips for anyone contemplating giving AI-guided training a try:

• Don’t be afraid of AI. There’s quite a bit of hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence, but making training decisions for athletes that closely match the decisions an experienced human coach would make is the type of job it excels at.

• Do be selective. Not all AI training apps for endurance athletes are well designed, and not all that claim to be AI-powered are. Do your research before choosing one.

• Don’t overestimate the power of AI. A well-designed training app can choose good workouts for you to do, but there’s much more to fulfilling your potential as an athlete than doing good workouts. Human coaches remain better suited than technology to guide athletes through the other important aspects of the development process.