The Future of Fitness
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Everyone should have their own coaching staff. A personal trainer, maybe a therapist. Today having a personal trainer and therapist is something for the wealthy, and is lightly mocked as self-indulgent. With the advance of fitness trackers and intelligent software assistants, soon everyone will have their own set of coaches, giving them rich data and personalized advice whenever they need it.
Technology tends to make information more abundant and accessible. It makes it easier to get a clear picture of what’s going on, with good data, and to act on that information. Fitness is especially well suited to quantification and active management. It’s tangible and measurable. 10,000 steps a day has already become a common goal thanks to everyone having devices and software that encourage tracking steps.
Eventually, we will get a better handle on fuzzier things like mood and social connection. The ideal is to have high-resolution, continual data on all important aspects of your life, along with continual personalized guidance based on that data.
The Cutting Edge of Personal Training
A remote personal training service called Future provides a glimpse of where we might be headed. In a fascinating fusion, Future combines continual data from Apple Watch with remote coaching from personal trainers, at a lower cost than you might pay for a local trainer. It could actually leapfrog traditional personal training by simultaneously lowering cost, broadening geographic reach, and improving quality.
Future’s founder emphasizes that no chatbots are involved at all. It’s all real human coaches. But we’ll probably see a mix of AI and a human touch that will lower the cost further and make fitness coaching more mainstream. A better personal health coach than anyone has now should be the baseline in 5-10 years, with slightly better products and services for people with the extra money to spend. This will be similar to the way smartphones have progressed. Today, Elon Musk doesn’t have an appreciably better phone than the average American. Soon we’ll all be getting better training than professional athletes get today.
The Big Picture
This is how health will be massively improved over the coming years, not through political reform. Health will be consumerized and will be much better for it. We will shift from sick care to proactive health care, from disaster response to continual optimization, from confusion to clarity.
Increased health data plus great consumer software will directly drive improvements in outcomes by enabling positive behavior change. Improving software will drive the adoption of devices that collect data (Fitbits, Apple Watches). More data also enables more studies, which also improves outcomes. There are even ideas of incentivizing health data sharing with digital perks or cryptocurrency payments.
Taking it all together, we’re looking at a revolution in health. Health tech could lead the way to an age of tech-assisted human thriving.