Month: September 2025

Why Human Trainers beat AI Workout Robots

There has been a flood of workout apps many of which provide some level of AI support. They tend to have a slick user interface, fancy graphs and sometimes even let you chat with you personal AI.

Using AI is shockingly easy to use and can be surprisingly effective at creating plausible workout programs. I tried this in my favorite AI bot Claude:


3-Day Strength & Fitness Program for 50-Year-Old Beginner | ClaudeDownload

However, I think the main reason people, especially older unfit gym novices, look for a coach is not have a written program but for the motivation and feedback. When I decided to get healthy I made a couple of tries to get a fitness program started. I bought the indoor bike, the dumbbells, dusted of the old Concept2 rower that I bought out of college nostalgia, but I just couldn’t get into it. I tried various apps like Calibre and Hevy and that gave some structure and tracking, but training never became a habit.

After this frustrating experience I decided I needed a human coach to help me teach exercises and “proper form” (i.e. not injure myself) and most importantly enforce accountability. Ultimately I found a great trainer on the Future app and things immediately changed. I started working out consistently 4 times a week at home. In the following months we have bumped that up to 5 times a week (one of them in the gym in my office building).

It’s not even that my trainer gives me a hard time – the pressure to disappoint him is just so much higher than disappointing some AI algorithm..

If you want to make training a habit I strongly recommend enlisting a human to help. Whether you have a friend/relative who is a gym rat or a professional trainer. If you are intimidated by the idea of a public gym (as I was), use one of the online programs. It will make a huge difference.

What Company to Work for before retirement

Petter Attia has introduced the concept of the “marginal decade”, the last ten years of your life, when your health is typically at its worst. All his longevity work is focused on improving the experience during that time.

A similar idea applies to work life. Being in my fifties I have been thinking a lot about how I want to spend the last ten years of my productive work life before retiring.

This profile of Nintendo in Bloomberg shows a lot of aspects of a company that is cool to work for. It draws the picture of a company that has a clear vision and focus and is careful in building up a cash war chest for tougher times. It has clear values and it has execs that don’t frantically react to all news stories or competitors’ announcements. I have worked at companies that were the exact opposite — every day was a frantic panic about changing product plans and marketing strategy — it was exhausting and ultimately not very successful.

Nintendo sounds like company that would be great to do cool work in your marginal decade. Try to find a place like that before retirement.

Xi, Putin and Kim pursuing immortality

According to this Bloomberg article Xi, Putin and Kim had a chat about immortality, repeated organ transplants and people living to 150.

Chinese President Xi Jinping commented on the possibility of people living to 150 during a hot-mic moment with his Russian and North Korean counterparts, a rare glimpse of an unscripted chat between three of the world’s most prominent strongmen.
[…]
A translator then appeared to relay the Russian leader’s remarks, saying in Mandarin: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.”

I am excited about interest in (funding even) longevity but these three guys might not be the best proponents. Who knows what happens in their respective labs.

The Guardian has an interesting take in Brainless bodies and pig organs: does science back up Putin and Xi’s longevity claims?

In typical Grauniad fashion they go a little bit of the rails:

Major efforts are afoot to solve the organ shortage problem. One route involves using organs from pigs. The procedure, xenotransplantation, remains experimental but doctors in New York have performed pig kidney and pig lung transplants into brain-dead people to see how they fare.
[…]
“There’s an ick factor,” says Carsten Charlesworth, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. “For a lot of people, an arm’s fine, a liver’s fine and a kidney’s fine. But when you have everything except a brain, it feels more human-like and people worry.”

I like longevity as much as the next biohacker, but a pig’s brain might be a step too far…