5 Ways to Incorporate AI or Machine Learning into Your Fitness Routine or Business
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming how fitness professionals design programs and how individuals approach their training goals. This guide presents five practical strategies backed by industry experts to integrate these technologies into workouts and business operations. Whether you're a gym owner, personal trainer, or fitness enthusiast, these actionable insights will help you harness AI to optimize performance and build sustainable habits.
Accelerate Planning and Improve Clarity
Speaking personally, one of the main ways I've incorporated AI into my business is through using it as a programming and decision-support tool rather than a replacement for coaching.
I'll use AI to sense-check training plans, explore alternative progressions, or stress-test ideas before they ever reach a client. For example, if I'm working with a busy adult who can only train twice a week, I'll run multiple programme structures through AI to compare volume, recovery demands and movement balance. That helps me spot blind spots faster, but the final decisions are still based on coaching experience and the individual in front of me.
The biggest advantage has been speed and clarity. It shortens the planning process and frees up more time for the human side of coaching, like communication, accountability and adjusting plans based on how someone actually feels week to week. Used properly, it doesn't replace expertise, it sharpens it.
Uncover Editorial Patterns at Scale
Running a startup-focused publication means tracking hundreds of companies across funding rounds, pivots, and market shifts. Manually, this was a 15-hour weekly grind. Honestly, I was drowning in tabs.
The game-changer was integrating ML-powered monitoring into our editorial workflow. AI agents now continuously scan funding announcements, leadership changes, and product launches across the French tech ecosystem, surfacing only signals matching our editorial criteria. What required a dedicated research day now runs in the background, reviewed in under an hour.
The specific advantage goes beyond time savings. The system catches patterns human researchers miss—like identifying that three unrelated seed rounds share the same lead investor, suggesting a thesis worth investigating. Or flagging when a startup's hiring patterns shift before any public announcement.
What I've observed is that the real value isn't automation—it's augmented pattern recognition. The AI handles volume; we handle judgment. This has increased our breaking news velocity by roughly 40% while improving accuracy, because we're no longer fatigued from data gathering when analytical work begins.
On-the-ground reality shows that AI didn't replace our editorial instincts. It gave us the cognitive bandwidth to actually use them.
Personalize Workouts to Reduce Churn
For our fitness app clients, the major challenge is user retention after the first 90 days. We've gone past generic push notifications to an AI-based personalization engine which behaves more like an intuitive coach. The system watches user activity, or inactivity closely over time, and looks for patterns. It knows that if a user is skipping their scheduled run, sending a reminder isn't going to work. The AI model might instead suggest an indoor high intensity cardio workout, based on bad weather data for their location, or the fact that they haven't logged an outdoor run in weeks.
The specific advantage is in turning the app from a mere tracker into an adaptive fitness partner. Instead of making the user feel bad about skipping a workout, the AI comes up with attractive alternatives for them based on their real activities. Fighting apathy with empathy. It's this deeper engagement which reduces churn and creates a sustainable user base for the business.
Predict Readiness and Prevent Burnout
"In my professional life, I lead large-scale automation at Walmart; in my personal life, I've applied those same principles to human performance. I've moved beyond standard wearable tracking to a customized predictive recovery model. By piping raw data from my health sensors into a personalized ML script, I've shifted from 'reactive' resting to 'proactive' training.
Instead of following a static workout plan, I use a gradient-boosted ensemble model that analyzes the correlation between my Heart Rate Variability (HRV), sleep architecture, and previous day's training volume to generate a daily 'Readiness Score.' It's essentially a
Digital Twin approach to my own physiology."
The Advantage: Shifting from Tracking to Decision Support
"The specific advantage is the mitigation of 'functional overreaching' (burnout) through precise load management. In high-stakes leadership, cognitive load often mirrors physical stress. A traditional fitness app might suggest a high-intensity session because it's 'Tuesday,' but my model might identify a 15% drop in HRV coupled with poor sleep quality, triggering a 'Pivot to Active Recovery' recommendation.
This integration has provided a 12-month injury-free streak, which is the ultimate 'business win' for long-term health. It transforms AI from a gimmick that tells me what happened into a decision-support tool that tells me what to do."
About the Author
Navjyot Dhadiala is a Senior Leader of Machine Learning at Walmart Tech, where he leads a team of 20+ scientists in scaling enterprise automation. With over 7 years of prior experience as a Science Leader at Amazon (Alexa AI and Seller Support automation), Navjyot specializes in the ROI of automation and identifying tool selection failures. He also serves as a Mentor of Change with NITI Aayog (Government of India), helping the next generation of technologists prototype the future.
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navjyot-dhadiala/
Secure a Thought Partner for Momentum
As an inventor attempting to single-handedly disrupt an industry with a product that has never existed before, the journey is incredibly lonely. I don't have a co-founder to turn to, or a mentor I can easily connect with—like Sara Blakely, who (in my mind, at least) is the closest to understanding what I’m doing—so AI has filled that void. I view it less as a piece of software and more like a high-level 'Harvard Intern.'
And as an entrepreneur with ADHD, the 'blank page' can be paralyzing. AI helps me break through that resistance, almost magically. I use it to build content calendars and optimize my website copy to better explain our concealing bralettes to visitors who have just found us.
Now, don’t get me wrong—AI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t replace my voice; in fact, I talk back to it quite often—saying things like, 'Dude, that sounds lame,' or 'I’d never say that.' But it structures my thoughts. I honestly don’t know what I did without it—worked longer hours, that’s for sure.
To me, it’s a buddy that stimulates my thinking, pushes back, and gives me 'someone' to bounce ideas off of. It’s even helped me change how I approach my physical health. Naturally, my body craves a break from my rigorous exercise routine in the winter, but my mind usually has a different agenda full of 'shoulds.'
I’ve been using Google Gemini recently, and it has stepped in like a coach. It reminds me that rest is okay, brings up facts like muscle memory, and validates that feeling 'soft' is just my perfectionism trying to convince me I’m failing.
Ultimately, AI has proven to be the long-lost partner I needed to support me, so I don't run myself into the ground. I feel like so many entrepreneurs fail because burnout feels imminent when there’s no one else—and no budget—to do all the things. AI is changing that outlook for me.
