A fitness studio featuring AI-guided workouts opens in Chattanooga

You can’t read the news without seeing an article explaining how important artificial intelligence is for self-driving cars, factory automation, fraud protection, medical analysis, letter-writing in businesses, essay-generation in schools and in virtually every sport. Professional sports such as football, basketball and baseball use AI to analyze player data to help improve individual and team performance. And one local gym has decided to put it to use in the fitness realm by allowing personal trainers to use AI to help clients target performance issues, such as improper exercise technique, to reduce injury risk and to speed recovery from a workout or event.

Chattanooga’s new AI-based workout facility, The Exercise Coach, incorporates the best qualities of a gym, the benefits of working with a personal trainer and maximum time management. The facility is located in a strip mall off Lee Highway and is both inviting and professional. The walls are a warm pumpkin and soft gray, and the floors are sealed concrete. Clients arrive for scheduled appointments one to two times a week with their trainer rather than simply walking in to do a workout on their own. Why are the appointments scheduled and a trainer included? Because although many of the machines look like what you would see in the machine section of your average gym (leg press, chest press, hamstrings, for example), some come with a screen. Each AI machine offers a variety of exercises and manages the individual user’s personal limitations and goals, as well as the pace and sequencing of the workout. The trainer helps the client interface with the workout program crafted for each visit.

Like weights in any gym, The Exercise Coach’s machines operate on the basic principle of muscle strengthening by incorporating concentric and eccentric motion. The concentric action is the weight lifted back to the space between the shoulder and bicep in a bicep curl, for example, and the eccentric contraction is the controlled lowering of the dumbbell away from the bicep. Inexperienced users can underextend or overextend or use too little or too much weight. But AI is there to guide you.

The Exercise Coach’s machines prevent workout errors because, according to the organization’s literature, each program measures the individual user’s “unique muscular and metabolic makeup” and “prescribes workouts that are perfectly appropriate” for that user. The AI machine requires a standard set of eight reps of each specific exercise to establish the baseline for the client’s first workout to create a strength protocol. Each workout is approximately 20 minutes, with a mix of AI machines and non-AI options and a short cardio session to finish the workout.

The Exercise Coach is a gym without loud music, noisy weights or long wait times for equipment. It’s true that the business model envisions an older clientele, but it doesn’t exclude anyone. The owners, Ken and Sheena Meyer, who are originally from Chattanooga and have returned after years living elsewhere, describe their ideal client as someone who is 40+ years old who wants to maximize their time — “boomers with discretionary income.” They add that the machines are perfect for anyone rehabbing from surgery or injury, and users of any age will benefit from the controlled strengthening program.

    Staff photo by Olivia Ross / Sheena Meyer uses the Cross Fire machine at The Exercise Coach.
  

Those concerned about AI — and who doesn’t expect their email to include a letter from a healthcare provider or credit card company telling them that their data has been hacked and some percentage of personal information has been stolen? — need not worry. The Exercise Coach stores all information for its clients on a local server. This means that each location holds your data at that location. If you go to an Exercise Coach facility in another city or country, you must request that your data be made available beforehand.

Fitness is just the next realm to be infiltrated by AI, but as in most other areas, it does have its advantages. These computer-assisted workouts can help you improve your strength, balance and overall well-being, regardless of your age, current fitness level or technological savvy.