I have a love–hate relationship with artificial intelligence. It’s probably been the biggest thing during the past year that has made me re-evaluate my career, my hobbies and even writing articles like this one.
I was asked recently if I could think of any job that couldn’t be impacted by AI. The person asking me was then surprised when I replied, “Impacted? ‘Replaced’ is the word I would use.” But what about sports coaches? Could the way we train in sport - and the way we are psychologically, physically and sociologically supported - be totally replaced by artificial intelligence?
Now naysayers will scoff and say that the human touch is a necessary component of effective coaching. While I agree that the human touch is crucial to effective coaching and mentoring, I would challenge this view by saying that you don’t need to have the 'human touch' - you only need to be able to provide the illusion of it. I know this because I had a fascinating debate with ChatGPT yesterday about what was wrong with a waistline-busting cheesecake I lovingly crafted last week...
How good are AI training plans?
So, if we accept that AI is here to stay, how is it being used in sports coaching now? There are several AI-based coaching tools already on the market. These involve semi-“intelligent” coaching apps that adjust your training prescription based on the training data you feed into them.
The AI is often a reflection of the owner’s personal ethos or philosophy, so different companies have a slightly different slant on the suggestions they produce. Some simply adapt standard well-known training modalities, such as traditional periodisation. Others utilise a different training ethos, such as an emphasis on high-intensity interval training. Yes, the AI is flexible, but for now it operates within the information that both the designer and its users program into it.
As for more informal use of AI, I’ll give you an example. I recently turned [sigh] 50. Our late 40s/early 50s are a hugely transitional time for athletes. As a result, I'm aware that my training needs to change to meet the challenges of a body that has a few decades of mileage on it and physiological aspects such as VO₂ max that are in decline.
Earlier this year, I asked ChatGPT how I could optimise my winter training to stimulate my VO₂ max without creating a premature peak. It didn’t end well - I ended up with poor suggestions and a cookie-cutter response I could have got from any men’s health magazine.
I then fed into it my last 10 years of training logs, my needs and my specific targets for next year, and I got a much better result. That gave me ideas I hadn’t considered… oh and that all took around 10 seconds. By the time I’d come back from the fridge with a drink, it had set me up to win Olympic gold by the time I’m 65. This is a game-changing tool.
Part of the reason AI can deliver poor results comes down to the prompts you use or how well you’ve trained it. “Prompt engineering” is crucial and is behind why many people have a poor experience with AI. Prompt engineering is the activity of writing instructions for an artificial intelligence program to influence the content it creates. There are some great videos on YouTube to help you improve the quality of what you can get back out of AI and that applies to your sport, your training and your equipment.
What comes next?
Given this experience, I feel strongly that the lower levels of current sports ‘coaching’ (you know the ones I mean - the ones that only provide training plans) will all be obsolete shortly. However, coaches with practical real-world experience or those who can offer a level or type of support that has a unique selling point - or, in reality, provides marketable value - may survive.
That value may well be empathy, event support and the human relationships that we know affected us negatively during the pandemic when we became reliant on digital forms of communication. Can these be simulated? Given there are accounts of people forming relationships with chatbots, such evidence suggests possibly.
Either way, the smart coaches are learning to work with AI rather than fight it, and recent studies are beginning to provide strategies for doing that, and they're investigating athletes’ needs to give them a more tailored AI-centric approach.
The use of AI doesn’t mean that our results in sport or training will become more certain. AI can only draw on the information from the internet that's currently available.
Most AI systems you can currently access are known as “Artificial Narrow Intelligence” (ANI). This type of AI is designed for a specific, narrow task. Examples include voice assistants (like Siri and Alexa) or self-driving cars. However, the next level is “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI). This is a type of AI that would have the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, with a human-level of intelligence. That would be enough to provide a hugely knowledgeable sports coach - one that weaponises all existing knowledge but can also make novel creative leaps like a human.
No examples of AGI currently exist, but it has been hypothesised that we’ll see it within the next few years (I asked my AI and it told me by 2030!). After that, you’ve got “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) and that’s what generates the somewhat scarier ‘Terminator’ analogies by offering a level of intelligence that would surpass us in creativity, problem-solving and emotional intelligence.
That’s what could take sports performance to the next level because it would be aware of tradition and science, but not restrained or influenced by them. It could process a wide range of biometric and training information to offer a fully tailored outcome with a decent degree of statistical confidence. I’m not too concerned as I could be racing wheelchairs round my retirement home by the time that arrives.
So what does this all mean for you? My advice is to have a play with AI now. Get into the mindset of using it as your research assistant or employee (but not as your boss) and set it tasks or ask it to suggest solutions to problems in your training. Work with it - but don’t let it become a rod up your back.
Note: This article wasn’t written by AI. I did get it to do a spellcheck for me but I’m not willing to hand over all aspects of my life to Skynet just yet!
