“You can turn me on
By remote control
You tell me love
Is just a chemical
And if this is true
Then I don’t need you
I don’t need anyone
I don’t need anyone”
Technological progress is inevitable. Human ingenuity guarantees it. I am not yet a Luddite, so I don’t inherently react negatively to this advancement. I own an iPhone, I use the Internet every day, my business relies on it, I watch Netflix, and I really like the touchscreen in my car! All that to say, I don’t have a lot of room to complain.
I do have something in particular to complain about here though. I will try to be specific. First, what am I not objecting to? I’m not objecting to individuals utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to create programs for themselves. I am not objecting to a business using AI to create programs for a group fitness class of some kind. I am not objecting to the professional fitness coach utilizing AI to collect and/or organize data for themselves.
I am objecting to the professional Fitness Coach utilizing AI to design training for the individuals clients in any way shape or form.
A quote I am quite fond of, one I believe is attributable to Thomas Sowell, is that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs”. This is a very astute observation. While technological advancement has obviously been beneficial to humanity, there have most definitely been things lost in this process. As a society, we believe the balance is positive, which is why you may hope we continue the way we are.
As an example, for someone who lives in the snowy northern country of Canada, the technology of a snowblower seems like an innocent purchase. What’s the downside? It is a great tool. I can now remove snow from my driveway or any surrounding area quite rapidly and with much less physical strain. The process has now become faster and physically easier. But what has been lost is the art of shovelling snow by hand. You may not care about shovelling snow by hand, but it is something that has been lost in the process. You can create innumerable examples of this.
The situation is not so indifferent when it comes to Coaching. If you use AI as a stand in for yourself, you are hollowing out what it even means to be a Coach. You are substituting“productivity” for meaning.
Delegating the practice and art of program design to a machine defeats the purpose of you being a Coach. By offloading the creative process to a machine you are tarnishing your purpose. If you remove the artist from the art, what do you have left?
Let’s say you are wanting to travel down the middle of the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The purpose of that journey is not simply to cover the 1.9km. Not to count the steps and add more to your daily count. The point is to experience it. To immerse yourself in it. To enjoy it. That is what really matters. The meaning is in there, and no where else.
Imagine you are taking a train ride from point A to point B somewhere in the world. Let’s say, the scenery, the signs along the track, the landscapes in the distance, the little towns and villages you pass, the tunnels you go through, the turns you make are all extremely important aspects. Things you need to know. If you take a normal train ride here in Canada, it won’t be going very fast, and therefore things will be going by at a rather comfortable pace. You just need to pay attention.
Let’s say, for some reason there was a bullet train option for you, and it would reduce the transit time substantially. Sure, you have arrived faster, but what happened to the learning? Did you learn anything during that train ride or have you simply reached your destination in a shorter time? Can you recall the lovely little village beyond the river? Or, did yo miss that beautiful waterfall in the distance? Has your recollection of the scenery improved or significantly decreased due to the increased “productivity”? AI is doing that to your cognition. It is not only removing the artist from the art, it is speeding up the process of making the art. If you can even call it art. Worse still, with this increased speed, you’re not just losing something. The very thing you seek to master, is worsening.
If everyone knew The Pieta was created by a AI machine, not a human being, would millions of people from around the world fly to see it? Of course not. More importantly, how did Michelangelo master the art of sculpting? How was he able to produce this masterpiece at the age of 24 or 25? Practice. Passion. Love.
Here’s a neat little study to provide some insights on this process. It comes specifically from researchers studying the coding ability of software engineers. What they did was have one group perform a task and then perform a test without using any help from AI. The other group was allowed to use AI as they liked. So what happened? (1)
As you might expect, the speed required to perform the task was slightly improved when using AI. The reason for this is because the software engineers asked the AI to write the code for them. But what happened when it came time to take a test involving novelty? Well, what happened is that the group that utilized AI performed significantly worse on this test as compared to those that did not use AI (1). When their skill set was actually needed, it proved to be suboptimal.
What the researchers suggested here was that the use of AI reduced the problem-solving ability relevant to the task for these people. It impaired both their ability to notice problems and to solve the problems. Some of the software engineers commented that they felt like they had done the work, but they didn’t really understand it.
From the paper, “we hypothesize that using AI tools to generate code in the development process effectively amounts to taking a shortcut to task completion without a pronounced learning stage” (1). For a Coach, especially a new one, this is bypassing the most important part for your long-term success… learning.
There was also an important caveat with regards to ability or experience. Individuals who were newer to Software engineering, benefitted most from the use of AI. Particularly when it came to productivity, the AI really improved the speed to complete the task for the less experienced engineers. These individuals are novice for a reason, they don’t know how to solve a lot of problems. The researchers commented that, with this group, it would likely be harmful to their development if they were to rely on AI for significant amounts of their work. Also, from that research article (1), as soon as the AI was taken away from the novice individuals, they had a huge reduction in performance.
“The AI is designed to take away our ability to reason” (3). Worse still, it will harm the Coach’s ability to appreciate what is relevant, what is meaningful (4). As a Coach, “relevance realization” is imperative. Learn to recognize the signal, ignore the noise.
Being new to something by definition means you are not yet at your best. The struggle and toil associated with attaining your best is not an inconvenience, it is a requirement. This is true for both athlete and Coach.
There is no shortcut to mastery. The path to mastery is long and must be willingly endured.
I often talk to coaches about prescribing training as if you were providing someone a recipe. You want the client to be able to take that training and perform it with the intentions you had in mind. You, the Coach, need to go through the growing pains of learning how to do this. If you love it and are persistent with it, you will learn. If you try to fast track this, you will lose in the end. If you stop caring about this process, you are finished.
I will try to parallel our discussion on AI back to coaching. An important finding in skill development research is that coaching strategies have a very meaningful impact on long term performance (i.e. learning). Do we (the Coach) want to try to speed up the learning process by being more involved OR do we want to aim for a slower, less involved and ultimately a more autonomous process? How should we provide our feedback? When? How frequently?
“Feedback is available as a natural consequence of performing an action, often referred to as intrinsic feedback. For example, a performer will be able to see, feel, and sometimes hear the consequences of a pass in soccer without receiving any extrinsic or augmented feedback from the coach.” (4). Presence is important if you are seeking to truly get everything out of your training. Real time feedback is also available to the Coach while they are designing the training, having to think, adjust, remember, care. Bypassing this step via AI will not come without a very negative trade-off.
“…providing augmented feedback on every trial has a beneficial effect on performance, but a detrimental effect on skill learning. Providing feedback on every practice attempt can lead to an overload of information, resulting in an over reliance on augmented feedback, and prevent a learner from becoming adequately involved in the problem-solving process. The key issue is that the learner should be encouraged to rely on their own intrinsic feedback mechanisms rather than on information provided by the coach. Learners must eventually perform without augmented feedback, and unless they are encouraged to become active problem solvers during practice, they will be unable to adequately draw on their own intrinsic processes to guide performance when augmented feedback is removed” (4).
In this scenario, what the Coach is doing to the athlete by “over coaching” is analogous to what the AI is doing to the Software Engineer (and to the Coach). Opportunities to learn are being squandered (see the train ride discuss).
There is evidence to suggest that individual skills developed via highly prescriptive coaching “are less resistant to the effects of psychological stress and more prone to forgetting over time than skills learned through guided discovery. Moreover, while prescriptive instructional approaches are likely to produce faster performance gains initially, they may result in less efficient and reliable performance in the long term” (1).
What that means in practice is that it is not actually good to be a dictatorial coach, to consistently cue and to provide unlimited feedback to athletes while they are performing or if they’re performing something new. You want to allow the athlete to experience the movement and learn to have their own understanding of how things are and how things feel. You don’t want to take away from their learning. You want the athlete, looking inward most of the time, not looking to you for feedback. Their first source of understanding is themselves. You want them to nurture that and make that as good as possible. This is not to say the coach has no role, it’s just that the coach has less of a role than we may think in terms of an athletes progression.
The athlete becoming dependent on the Coach and the Coach becoming dependent on the AI, are both undesirable outcomes.
What the skill research is suggesting here is to centre the athlete, allow them to take ownership of the learning process. The same can be said about the Coach, they have to take control of the learning process. Shortcuts cannot be taken. The shortcuts will not be progressive, they are indeed regressive.
I will end with this, “our main finding is that using AI to complete tasks that require a new skill reduces skill formation”, leading to “the erosion of conceptual understanding” (1). Meaning that when having to approach a new scenario, your abilities will have been harmed from continual use of AI.
So how does this affect Coaching exactly? Each time you sit down with a new client, you are presented with a new scenario. Something novel. If you are unable to transfer your knowledge to each new scenario, then you are in big trouble as a Coach. Even as each new client is the new scenario, each client themselves will present new scenarios to you if you work with them long enough. I have worked with many individuals for well over 10 years, and the way we have to approach their training has changed and changed and changed and changed. It won’t stop changing. All the while, I am learning from this process.
In the end, it’s important to remember, that neither Michelangelo nor any of the great Coaches you look up to or admire used this technology in their practice. And you know what, you don’t need to either.
1 – Shen and Tamkin. How AI Impacts Skill Formation. Anthropic.
3 – Paul Kingsnorth. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.
4 – John Vervaeke – https://podmarized.com/episodes/impact-theory/the-truth-about-ai-s-impact-on-meaning-and-democracy-john-vervaeke?utm_source=chatgpt.com
