Chasing Consistency: How Building an AI Coach is Refining Our Human Coaching

Mike Collette • April 24, 2025

The Future of Fitness: Human + AI?

Sharing the Build: Our Journey Towards an AI Coaching Co-Pilot

Here at Prototype, we're always thinking about how to serve our members better – how to deliver the most effective, personalized training possible while staying true to our core values of quality movement, community, and helping you live healthier, longer lives. Part of that involves constant learning and evolution behind the scenes.

Lately, a big part of my focus has been on a new, internal project – something I'm excited, and honestly a bit nervous, to start sharing with you as we build it: our experiment in creating Prototype's own AI Master Coach.

Why share this now, while it's still very much a work-in-progress? Because transparency is important, and because I believe the process of building this tool is already teaching us valuable lessons that reinforce what truly matters in coaching. It's also a journey I want to bring our community along on. So, consider this the first of potentially several updates where I'll share the thinking, the challenges, and the potential we see in leveraging technology to amplify what our expert human coaches do best.

"How Can We Be Everywhere, For Everyone?" – A Question Every Coach Asks

If you've trained at Prototype, you know our commitment runs deep. We believe in truly individualized coaching – meeting you where you are, understanding your unique goals, your aches, your crazy schedule, and building a plan grounded in solid principles like "Movement Quality First" and "Training is Additive to Life." That personal touch, that deep dive into your needs, is the heart of what we do, whether it's 1-on-1 Personal Training, Individual Program Design (IPD), or even guiding our Performance Coaching clients through mindset shifts.

But here's the raw truth: delivering that level of detailed, individualized programming takes immense thought, energy, and time. For every hour you spend training with a plan, a coach spends significant time analyzing, designing, and refining. As our Prototype community grows, especially with more remote IPD clients and folks needing specialized attention, I found myself wrestling with a core challenge:

How do we scale the quality and consistency of our unique Prototype methodology without sacrificing the human element that truly matters – the connection, the observation, the in-session adjustments, the mindset coaching?

Honestly, some weeks it felt like I was spending more time building programs than coaching people. My energy was getting fragmented, pulled between the vital 1-on-1 interactions and the necessary behind-the-scenes design work. I started wondering, like many coaches, if there was a better way.

The Experiment Begins: Can Technology Be a Partner?

This wasn't about finding an app to spit out generic workouts – we know that doesn't work for long-term success or specific needs. The question was different: Could we leverage technology, specifically AI, as a tool to help us apply the Prototype method more consistently and efficiently?

It started as a personal experiment. I began thinking about my own coaching process – the "intuitive logic," the patterns I recognize, the exercise modifications I instinctively reach for based on years of experience. How could I possibly teach that to someone else, let alone a machine?

This led me down a rabbit hole. I started documenting my own process – the "brain dump" phase. I began structuring our core principles, methodologies, exercise library, and even our newer Performance Coaching archetypes (like the "Self-Aware Avoider" or the "Talented But Anxious Athlete") into a comprehensive Knowledge Base. Simultaneously, I started experimenting with different AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, even specialized tools like Next Jump's AiCoach in our Performance Coaching) – not asking them to create from scratch, but seeing if they could learn and apply the rules I was giving them.

Humbling Lessons & Unexpected Benefits

Let me be direct: This has been hard. Building our "Prototype AI Master Coach" isn't a quick fix, and it's far from "figured out."

Codifying Intuition is Brutal: Translating years of coaching 'feel' into explicit rules an AI can understand is incredibly challenging and humbling. It forces you to question why you make certain decisions.
AI Makes Mistakes (Based on MY Gaps): Early AI-generated program drafts sometimes missed crucial nuances – mislabeling conditioning, ignoring equipment constraints, or not standardizing warm-ups exactly as I intended. Each mistake, however, wasn't the AI's fault – it was a reflection of where my documented knowledge or instructions were unclear or incomplete.
Iteration is Everything: Just like training, building this requires constant testing, feedback (from myself and my team), and refinement. There's no magic bullet.

But something unexpected happened along the way. This process of meticulously documenting and testing our methods is actually making us better human coaches.

Sharpened Philosophy: We're forced to be crystal clear about why we program certain ways.
Improved Consistency: It helps ensure all our coaches are building programs from the same foundational principles.
Enhanced Efficiency (Goal): The aim is for the AI to handle initial drafting or reporting based on our rules, freeing up coach time for higher-value interaction, analysis, and relationship building.

The Vision: Human-Centric, AI-Assisted Coaching

Our vision isn't automated fitness. It's amplified human coaching.

Imagine your coach having an assistant who can instantly draft a 4-week plan based on your intake form and past progress according to strict PTS guidelines, review your logged data for basic progress trends, or even flag potential areas for discussion based on your reflection notes – allowing your coach to spend their time analyzing the nuance, watching you move, discussing your mindset, and tailoring the critical adjustments that truly personalize your journey.

We're exploring how this "AI Co-Coach" could potentially help:

Draft initial individualized programs faster and more consistently.
Generate insightful 4-week progress reports automatically from TrueCoach data (something I'm actively working on).
Provide coaches with reminders or pattern summaries based on client logs.
Even assist in creating baseline programs or warm-up protocols for our Youth Teams.

Where We Are Now

This is still very much an experiment, a "work in progress." We're using it internally, testing its capabilities, refining its knowledge, and learning constantly. It's pushing us to be better, clearer, and more deliberate in everything we do.

We believe this blend of deep human coaching expertise and smart, methodology-driven AI assistance represents the future of truly effective, personalized training. It’s not about taking the human out of the equation; it’s about elevating the human connection by letting technology handle some of the repetitive groundwork, grounded entirely in the Prototype philosophy you trust.

We're excited (and sometimes humbled) by this journey.

What are your thoughts on using technology this way to enhance the coaching relationship?

Sample program designed and developed with Prototype Ai Master Coach + Human intuition & insight.

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