Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Biggest AI Mistake People Make With Fat Loss Over 40 | Ep 481
Transcript
- 0:00Philip Pape: You now have access to more fitness information than any human in history.
- 0:04Philip Pape: Every answer about how to lose fat, how to build muscle, absolutely free just in seconds using AI.
- 0:12Philip Pape: But ask yourself how that's working for you.
- 0:14Philip Pape: You're probably not more consistent than you were a year ago, two years ago.
- 0:18Philip Pape: You're not any leaner.
- 0:20Philip Pape: And today I want to show you why AI, as you're probably using it, is not really much of an upgrade over a Google search.
- 0:27Philip Pape: It might even make things worse.
- 0:29Philip Pape: How to actually use AI so it's helpful and effective for you, and a few specific examples of the right and wrong ways to put it to work for your training and nutrition.
- 0:42Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
- 0:52Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Abe, and this is an episode I've wanted to do for a while.
- 0:56Philip Pape: I think the timing is perfect because everybody and their mother is now using AI for their health and fitness, from Chat GPT to Claude to just random Google searches and everything in between.
- 1:09Philip Pape: There's Buco tools and software being generated that use AI.
- 1:14Philip Pape: You're asking it, how do I eat?
- 1:16Philip Pape: How do I train?
- 1:16Philip Pape: Is my plan any good?
- 1:18Philip Pape: And I think it's really, I think it's awesome that we have technology to play with like this.
- 1:23Philip Pape: And depending on who you are, if you're over 40, if you're navigating perimenopause or menopause, if you're lifting weights, you're trying to lose fat, trying to hold on to muscle, you've probably used AI by this point and asked it a question like, hey, what is the best workout for me given XYZ?
- 1:39Philip Pape: Or hey, build me a meal plan given my macros.
- 1:42Philip Pape: Am I am I right?
- 1:43Philip Pape: Am I right?
- 1:44Philip Pape: And if not, you're probably like, oh, I can do that.
- 1:46Philip Pape: Let me go try it out.
- 1:47Philip Pape: But I bet most of you have done that.
- 1:49Philip Pape: And I want to be totally careful and walk the line on this episode because I am definitely not anti-AI.
- 1:56Philip Pape: Not only do I use it all the time in my business as a power assist to save tons of time, especially on tedious type of work, but I built an AI coaching app.
- 2:06Philip Pape: So I use these tools every single day.
- 2:08Philip Pape: It this is not the, you know, robots are coming.
- 2:10Philip Pape: This is Skynet Terminator taking over the world episode.
- 2:14Philip Pape: And it's also not, hey, I, AI is the best and most amazing thing that will solve everything.
- 2:18Philip Pape: Oh, and the last thing, it's not.
- 2:20Philip Pape: I'm not gonna get into like how much water it sucks up and how expensive microchips are going to be and how the billionaires are gonna take over the planet.
- 2:27Philip Pape: I'm not getting into any of that stuff.
- 2:29Philip Pape: I'm gonna try to keep the focus narrow.
- 2:32Philip Pape: I think AI is a useful tool.
- 2:34Philip Pape: That's it.
- 2:35Philip Pape: Like any other tool, it's tool.
- 2:36Philip Pape: It's probably one of the most incredibly game-changing advances that we've seen in such a short period of time.
- 2:43Philip Pape: And that can be highly dangerous in many of our minds, of course, when there's not appropriate, you know, boundaries on it.
- 2:49Philip Pape: We saw this recently when Claude had to walk back the release of their latest mythos class model.
- 2:56Philip Pape: You don't have to know what I'm talking about, but basically they said, yeah, this is too dangerous.
- 2:58Philip Pape: Like people can create bioweapons or whatnot and you know, hack into banks and if they use it.
- 3:04Philip Pape: So we're gonna turn it off.
- 3:05Philip Pape: So I totally get all of that.
- 3:06Philip Pape: Like I'm pretty educated in what's going on there.
- 3:09Philip Pape: I love tech.
- 3:10Philip Pape: I'm into all of that.
- 3:11Philip Pape: But what this episode today is is about the gap between what AI can do and what most people use it for and how they use it.
- 3:19Philip Pape: And we're gonna kind of explore that gap so you can take advantage of the tool for yourself because ultimately I want you to be able to use the tool in an educated way to help you out.
- 3:29Philip Pape: That's it.
- 3:30Philip Pape: I want you to also stick around to the end of the episode because I'm going to give you a prompt.
- 3:34Philip Pape: It's a one-line prompt that you can paste into any AI chatbot that actually helps it help you better by pressure testing your plant rather than just totally agreeing with you.
- 3:46Philip Pape: A concept called sycophancy, AI sycophancy, which, you know, South Park made a really funny episode about that a while back.
- 3:52Philip Pape: You should look that up.
- 3:53Philip Pape: But a lot of people, a lot of people aren't aware that they can they can train or they can update settings in their AI to help it, help it do better for you.
- 4:02Philip Pape: And it just takes a few seconds to set that up.
- 4:04Philip Pape: So stick around for that.
- 4:05Philip Pape: But here's where we're going today.
- 4:06Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you the bottleneck that has nothing to do with information.
- 4:12Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you four things that AI is genuinely good at that can move the needle for you.
- 4:17Philip Pape: And I'm gonna show you the difference between using it well and using it more like a search engine, like a lot of people use it.
- 4:23Philip Pape: Okay.
- 4:24Philip Pape: So hopefully this is a great episode for you.
- 4:26Philip Pape: And as always, I love to start with hey, what is the conventional wisdom?
- 4:30Philip Pape: What do people talk about?
- 4:31Philip Pape: What do people claim that is true and maybe it's not?
- 4:36Philip Pape: And the information's been out there when it comes to health and fitness and all of this stuff.
- 4:41Philip Pape: It's been out there for over a decade.
- 4:42Philip Pape: I mean, I got into podcasting in my own personal journey because I was able to get access to great podcasts and books and videos.
- 4:49Philip Pape: And this was all before AI.
- 4:51Philip Pape: And if you think about it, everything you need to know, to know, okay, information to lose fat, to get strong, to do all the things we talk about, to improve your metabolic health, has been sitting on the internet for free, even since before some of you started your fitness journey, even going back to like the bodybuilding forums and going back to the early days of the internet.
- 5:10Philip Pape: How to set up protein and get enough, how to structure your lifting, progressive overload, energy balance, like all that stuff.
- 5:16Philip Pape: And if anything, we have more so much information now that it's confusing, right?
- 5:21Philip Pape: Like it's who who's telling the truth.
- 5:22Philip Pape: We have influencers, we have social media.
- 5:24Philip Pape: None of it is secret, I'll say.
- 5:26Philip Pape: And if it is purported to be a secret, they're probably trying to sell you something.
- 5:30Philip Pape: So, so none of it is gated behind a paywall.
- 5:33Philip Pape: You can find all the studies, you can find all the information.
- 5:36Philip Pape: You could have learned every relevant principle even 10 years ago without spending a dime, even though the science continues to get refined, is pretty darn close to what you would need to do.
- 5:46Philip Pape: And of course, we know this because people have been successful improving their health and fitness for much longer than we've had the internet.
- 5:52Philip Pape: And of course, we've now gotten just better and better at it.
- 5:56Philip Pape: So the question that should really bother you here is okay, if information is the thing standing between me and what I want, the body I want to be lean, to be strong, to be healthy, to stop binge eating and to get rid of food noise, whatever it is, you'd already have it, right?
- 6:12Philip Pape: You'd already have it.
- 6:12Philip Pape: You you'd be done.
- 6:13Philip Pape: Like you would have solved the problem, you'd have your plan, you'd execute, you'd be good.
- 6:17Philip Pape: Everybody who has a smartphone, which is like the entire world, would have what they want.
- 6:21Philip Pape: We'd be lean and strong.
- 6:22Philip Pape: They'd they'd be millionaires, billionaires, whatever.
- 6:24Philip Pape: Right.
- 6:24Philip Pape: And you, I know you've heard this argument plenty of times, right?
- 6:27Philip Pape: Everybody has access to the same information today.
- 6:30Philip Pape: Information is as cheap as it's ever been.
- 6:32Philip Pape: It's more democratized than it's ever been.
- 6:34Philip Pape: You know, started with the printing press and it just went from there.
- 6:37Philip Pape: And now we have the internet and now we have AI.
- 6:40Philip Pape: But that doesn't matter, apparently, because many of us are still struggling.
- 6:44Philip Pape: That's why you're listening to this podcast, because you're trying to figure out, okay, what is the secret or what is the thing I need to do?
- 6:50Philip Pape: So information was never the bottleneck.
- 6:52Philip Pape: And that's important because AI, the way most people use it, ChatGPT and Cloud and all of these, is a machine, a highly intelligent, you know, neural network machine learning trained, you know, whatever tech behind it machine for producing more information.
- 7:08Philip Pape: Now you might not like that, that's the case, because that's really what it's doing.
- 7:12Philip Pape: It's taking all of the knowledge that we have in human existence that it has access to and it's processing through that using very intelligent algorithms that are self-learning in many cases.
- 7:22Philip Pape: And I know that scares a lot of us, but it's faster, it's, I'll say, cleaner, it uses better grammar, it's personalized to your exact question.
- 7:30Philip Pape: I mean, now when you go to Google and you search, Google's smart about it.
- 7:33Philip Pape: They use Gemini to just to give you the answer at the top.
- 7:36Philip Pape: In fact, a lot of a lot of businesses don't like it because now there's sponsored results or their links at the top, people don't go to them anymore.
- 7:42Philip Pape: They just get the answer right from Google.
- 7:44Philip Pape: But it's still more information.
- 7:45Philip Pape: And it's still, it's like Wikipedia, it's kind of like what Wikipedia has done in a way, where you guys, you know this.
- 7:52Philip Pape: You go to Wikipedia and you search up something and then you can follow through with all the the references.
- 7:56Philip Pape: So if information was never the problem, then more information, even if it's better delivered, is not the solution, is it?
- 8:02Philip Pape: I mean, you tell me.
- 8:03Philip Pape: It has it solved things for you?
- 8:06Philip Pape: Or is it a marginal or maybe even large upgrade on something that was never really the problem?
- 8:13Philip Pape: So I want to talk about the actual problem.
- 8:16Philip Pape: Okay.
- 8:16Philip Pape: There's a researcher named Pascal Sheeran who did a big review of health behavior studies.
- 8:22Philip Pape: And across studies on exercise, on screening, on all kinds of health behaviors, he found that of the people who had a genuine positive intention to do the thing, to do the thing they wanted to do, they wanted to do it passionately.
- 8:37Philip Pape: They planned to do it, whatever that thing is, the median proportion who then did not follow through was 47%.
- 8:45Philip Pape: 47%.
- 8:46Philip Pape: So almost half of the people who intend to act don't.
- 8:50Philip Pape: And so I want you to sit with that because there's a lot of judgment today about, well, you just gotta do it, right?
- 8:55Philip Pape: You're just, I don't even want to say people get accused of being lazy, but we think of obesity and things like that.
- 9:00Philip Pape: Even if behavior is a part of the equation, okay, okay, let's say it is.
- 9:05Philip Pape: Are you able to follow through on that behavior?
- 9:08Philip Pape: Right.
- 9:08Philip Pape: And and as soon as you judge somebody else, like put point the finger at yourself and think of anything that you failed to follow through on in your entire life.
- 9:15Philip Pape: There's probably millions of things.
- 9:17Philip Pape: Okay.
- 9:18Philip Pape: The constraint was never knowing what to do.
- 9:20Philip Pape: It's that vast canyon between intending to do it and actually doing it.
- 9:25Philip Pape: Not only that, but consistently, especially on the days you don't feel like it, because that's how you get consistent.
- 9:31Philip Pape: The days you feel like it, you're gonna do it.
- 9:33Philip Pape: But there are probably more days you don't feel like it than there are that you do.
- 9:37Philip Pape: So knowing and doing are two completely different problems.
- 9:41Philip Pape: And AI, especially when it's used as a fact retrieval machine, only really solves that first problem, the knowing part.
- 9:49Philip Pape: And that's not really the problem that you have.
- 9:51Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
- 9:52Philip Pape: So, and okay, by the way, we have good data on the doing side as well, like actually following through.
- 9:58Philip Pape: There's a famous diet study by Danzinger, where they put people on four completely different popular diets: Atkins, Ornish, Zone, and Weight Watchers.
- 10:09Philip Pape: Now we're going back in the time machine, aren't we?
- 10:10Philip Pape: Okay, let's see.
- 10:11Philip Pape: I've tried two of those, Atkins and Zone.
- 10:15Philip Pape: And so they're completely different diets, different mechanisms, different macros, whatever.
- 10:19Philip Pape: And what they found is no meaningful difference between the diets.
- 10:23Philip Pape: What predicted whether someone lost weight was not the diet they were on, it was whether they stuck to the diet.
- 10:29Philip Pape: Adherence.
- 10:30Philip Pape: Okay.
- 10:30Philip Pape: Broken record, guys, if you ever, if you've already been following my podcast, you know this is a tenet of what we talk about is adherence.
- 10:37Philip Pape: That is the key.
- 10:38Philip Pape: It's not the mechanism, it's not the plan, it's the doing, the doing, the doing.
- 10:45Philip Pape: Okay, do it, just do it.
- 10:47Philip Pape: Okay.
- 10:47Philip Pape: So if you've been treating AI, I don't know why I'm in a good mood today, but if you've been treating AI as the thing that finally gives you the answer, I want to gently suggest to you that you're solving a problem you don't even have and you're ignoring the problem that you do have.
- 10:59Philip Pape: So we're gonna get into that now.
- 11:01Philip Pape: All right, so if information is not the bottleneck, behavior change is the bottleneck.
- 11:05Philip Pape: Let's talk about why this matters for how you use AI, because this is where I think it gets interesting.
- 11:12Philip Pape: AI is really, really good at some of the behavior change stuff, but it's not what a lot of people use it for.
- 11:19Philip Pape: All right, and I'm gonna piss off a lot of coaches, a lot of behavior change specialists who think you have to have a human in the mix all the time to help people change their behavior.
- 11:27Philip Pape: That's absolutely not true.
- 11:28Philip Pape: Okay, well, follow, follow me on the logic.
- 11:31Philip Pape: There's a study out of out of a team at Google.
- 11:33Philip Pape: Now take that with a grain of salt, a team at Google where they took a large language model, so that would be like a chat GPT type software, and they they directed it at activity coaching.
- 11:44Philip Pape: So activity coaching, coaching for activities.
- 11:48Philip Pape: And they tested on things like is the advice actionable?
- 11:50Philip Pape: Is it realistic?
- 11:52Philip Pape: Is it empathetic?
- 11:54Philip Pape: Does it motivate?
- 11:56Philip Pape: And what's so telling is that the model itself got significantly better at being actionable and realistic when they set it up well.
- 12:05Philip Pape: Okay.
- 12:05Philip Pape: In fact, big jumps in those two areas, but on empathy and motivation, the gains were not even statistically significant.
- 12:14Philip Pape: So the machine got better at the practical translation stuff, and it stayed pretty weak as a model or as a tool at the human stuff.
- 12:23Philip Pape: And so from that point, we can say, okay, so there are things that need to be kept with a human.
- 12:32Philip Pape: Like I just said, empathy and motivation.
- 12:34Philip Pape: There are now, having said that, there's a way to marry the two and kind of amplify the two.
- 12:38Philip Pape: We're gonna get into that, but first we need to understand the AI side of the equation.
- 12:42Philip Pape: So what's it what's AI good at?
- 12:43Philip Pape: I think there are four things.
- 12:45Philip Pape: Four things.
- 12:45Philip Pape: And a lot of you aren't even using it for any of these things.
- 12:48Philip Pape: Number one, and I think this is the big one, is it can recognize patterns in data.
- 12:53Philip Pape: Makes sense, right?
- 12:54Philip Pape: It can take a lot of the more data you give it, the more it can act on it.
- 12:57Philip Pape: It's really powerful for that.
- 12:59Philip Pape: So instead of when we think of food, not what should I eat, it's here's what I actually ate.
- 13:04Philip Pape: So here's my food log, macrofactor, whatever.
- 13:06Philip Pape: And I've given it to you for the last three weeks of data.
- 13:09Philip Pape: What patterns do you see in my eating to help me decide what to eat?
- 13:14Philip Pape: Now that's a very different question, isn't it?
- 13:16Philip Pape: Because now it is working with your reality instead of giving you a generic answer.
- 13:20Philip Pape: So it's using data, which makes a lot of sense.
- 13:23Philip Pape: And this can be used for a lot of things, like your lifting, right?
- 13:27Philip Pape: You can put in your workout logs, you can put in your biofeedback data, you could you could do everything that I have clients do as a coach, everything that they track, body measurements, weight, like you name it, you can give it that data.
- 13:40Philip Pape: In many cases, these tools are now integrated with Apple Health and whatnot, and it makes it even easier to do that.
- 13:46Philip Pape: And a lot of tools are being developed to take advantage of that as well, right?
- 13:50Philip Pape: Same thing with something very specific like your protein intake and looking at the patterns and saying, oh my goodness, it looks like my protein falls off here and here, and here's why.
- 14:00Philip Pape: Because if you're just tracking it in a food log, like let's say Macrofactory, you can kind of see that visually and figure it out on your own.
- 14:06Philip Pape: But what if there are things you can't really see as easily?
- 14:09Philip Pape: And I think the AI is great for that.
- 14:11Philip Pape: It can catch it in you know milliseconds or seconds.
- 14:14Philip Pape: So finding a signal out of the noise, as we say, in a pile of data.
- 14:18Philip Pape: And the more, and the bigger the bigger the pile of data, the better.
- 14:22Philip Pape: So that's what's great is you can feed it so much data, lab work.
- 14:25Philip Pape: I mean, just dump it in there.
- 14:27Philip Pape: All right, number two is accountability and a check-in structure.
- 14:31Philip Pape: Now you might say, well, isn't that the human part?
- 14:34Philip Pape: Well, no, again, we're talking about activities.
- 14:36Philip Pape: We're not talking about like empathy or motivation per se, although I'm going to argue that a lot of our motivation is intrinsic motivation that does come from checking in and accountability.
- 14:47Philip Pape: So let me get a little more precise on this part, on the accountability part, because it there's nuance here.
- 14:53Philip Pape: AI can scaffold a check-in, let's say.
- 14:57Philip Pape: Let's use the word scaffold, right?
- 14:59Philip Pape: Like a scaffolding around a building.
- 15:00Philip Pape: It can ask you the right questions on the right cadence.
- 15:04Philip Pape: What it cannot do, it doesn't care whether you lied to it, it doesn't know.
- 15:09Philip Pape: There are no stakes, there's no aspect of like empathy to it.
- 15:14Philip Pape: It's just cold calculated.
- 15:16Philip Pape: And it's like, if this is the check-in you want to do it.
- 15:18Philip Pape: And let me let me elaborate on this because there's there's a a data set in the research where they had 65,000 people using a coaching app and they compare people who had AI coaching alone versus people who had AI plus a human coach.
- 15:32Philip Pape: The group with a human with the AI lost over 74% more weight than the group that just had the AI coaching.
- 15:41Philip Pape: And it was the same app.
- 15:42Philip Pape: The only difference there was a human in the loop.
- 15:45Philip Pape: And the mechanism here is that the people with a human coach, they actually logged their food and their weight more often.
- 15:53Philip Pape: And it's not like the human had secret knowledge, the human just created stakes that made them actually do the thing.
- 16:01Philip Pape: So that's that's what's kind of interesting.
- 16:02Philip Pape: That's a motivation piece.
- 16:04Philip Pape: That's pretty cool, right?
- 16:05Philip Pape: That's why humans are gonna be important for a long time, hopefully for the rest of eternity.
- 16:10Philip Pape: But I wanted to talk about that difference, right?
- 16:13Philip Pape: So, in other words, AI can be incredibly useful, humans are incredibly useful, and men put them together and you have a very powerful combination.
- 16:22Philip Pape: Number three is a customized application of a general principle to your specific situation.
- 16:29Philip Pape: Anyone take physics, right?
- 16:31Philip Pape: Or, you know, you've heard of Einstein, where we talk about general relativity versus special relativity.
- 16:36Philip Pape: So think about that.
- 16:36Philip Pape: All the principles you read about or hear about on podcasts or this show, they're general principles.
- 16:41Philip Pape: At least I hope they're talking to you in terms of principles and not telling you this is the answer, the one answer.
- 16:46Philip Pape: Because there is no one answer.
- 16:48Philip Pape: There are principles, and then you have your specific situation.
- 16:51Philip Pape: So, like the principle of eating around 0.7 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight, everybody knows that.
- 16:57Philip Pape: But what's your body weight?
- 16:59Philip Pape: What's your goal?
- 17:00Philip Pape: What is your schedule?
- 17:01Philip Pape: What are you capable of eating?
- 17:02Philip Pape: Are you vegan, vegetarian, blah, blah, blah?
- 17:04Philip Pape: You know, are you dairy-free?
- 17:06Philip Pape: Like, how do you hit that number?
- 17:08Philip Pape: You know, all those things are the you parts of it.
- 17:11Philip Pape: Are you in fat loss or not?
- 17:12Philip Pape: This and that.
- 17:13Philip Pape: That's where a real person gets stuck.
- 17:15Philip Pape: That's where people get stuck.
- 17:17Philip Pape: Okay.
- 17:18Philip Pape: The translation, the translating that principle to your messy, chaotic real life, AI is great at.
- 17:25Philip Pape: It's actually great at because it's not just retrieving a fact, it is taking all the data that you've told it, finding the patterns like we just talked about, and then translating it to you.
- 17:37Philip Pape: And you actually don't need a human for that per se.
- 17:39Philip Pape: Okay.
- 17:40Philip Pape: Now, that's like there's a caveat on that because obviously if the AI is not asking the right questions or you're not feeding it all the data it needs, it can give you a garbage answer.
- 17:48Philip Pape: Whereas a human might say, Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I need to know this and this as well.
- 17:51Philip Pape: But that doesn't mean AI can't do it.
- 17:54Philip Pape: Okay.
- 17:54Philip Pape: Understand the difference.
- 17:56Philip Pape: It has to be good enough to do it and you have to use it the right way.
- 17:58Philip Pape: And then number four is AI is good at asking the questions that you don't know to ask because you don't know what you don't know.
- 18:08Philip Pape: So, as an engineer, I come from the world of requirements for a product, and there's things that you know, there's things you know that you don't know, and there's things you don't know that you don't know.
- 18:18Philip Pape: So instead of like, hey, what's the best exercise to get bigger glutes?
- 18:23Philip Pape: Because I want a big butt, you say, Hey, what am I not considering about my training or my protein as I go through menopause and given my program right now because I want a big butt, right?
- 18:35Philip Pape: Or something like that.
- 18:36Philip Pape: Like giving it that context and then have it give you what the blind spots are.
- 18:42Philip Pape: You know, notice what I just said.
- 18:44Philip Pape: What am I not considering about dot dot dot?
- 18:46Philip Pape: Great prompt right there.
- 18:48Philip Pape: What am I not thinking about?
- 18:50Philip Pape: Right.
- 18:51Philip Pape: And so that would turn AI kind of like into a coach that asks you questions that you wouldn't think to ask of yourself.
- 18:57Philip Pape: So those are the four things pattern recognition in your data, an accountability structure, applying principles to your specific situation, and then uh kind of surfacing up these blind spots that you're not thinking of.
- 19:10Philip Pape: Now, what does every single one of those have in common?
- 19:13Philip Pape: Well, they all require you to bring something to the equation.
- 19:17Philip Pape: That is your data, your plan, your situation, your context.
- 19:22Philip Pape: I mean, until the day that AI is like hardwired into our brain, God help us all, you have to bring that stuff.
- 19:28Philip Pape: Now, I just I mentioned before, sometimes it's integrated with Apple Health or Aura rings or whatever.
- 19:33Philip Pape: And granted, that is kind of an automated way to do that.
- 19:36Philip Pape: I'm not saying it doesn't have to be automated, just you have to bring that stuff.
- 19:39Philip Pape: And so the good uses of AI, in my opinion, are a conversation about your actual life and getting some help on the blind spots and structure accountability, all that stuff.
- 19:49Philip Pape: Whereas a bad way to use AI would just be a generic search, a generic question, using it as kind of like an advanced Google.
- 19:56Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
- 19:57Philip Pape: This is honestly right now the perfect place to mention the thing that I've built that's out there that I think takes advantage of all of these in a very thoughtful way, where AI is the application layer.
- 20:09Philip Pape: It's not an information fire hose.
- 20:11Philip Pape: It just dumps information at you.
- 20:12Philip Pape: It really is the this intelligence or interpretation on top of your data.
- 20:18Philip Pape: And that's called Fitness Lab.
- 20:19Philip Pape: This is my app.
- 20:20Philip Pape: I'm giving you a shameless plug for it because it does exactly what I've thought through AI can do well, that can help in the fitness and training world, that also is pre-trained with lots and lots and lots of good evidence-based data, as well as my entire podcast, all my guides, all that fun stuff.
- 20:38Philip Pape: It's all trained into there.
- 20:40Philip Pape: Exercises, you name it.
- 20:42Philip Pape: What I've found is that people are kind of sick of just having more trackers, more tracking apps, right?
- 20:49Philip Pape: For training and nutrition, what do we need?
- 20:51Philip Pape: Well, we need a way to track our workouts, a way to track our nutrition.
- 20:54Philip Pape: And then we probably want to track some other measurements, right?
- 20:58Philip Pape: Our weight, our measurements, our photos, things like that, body fat.
- 21:01Philip Pape: And most people are tracking with a few of these apps.
- 21:04Philip Pape: Some people have app burnout.
- 21:05Philip Pape: That's what I find a lot.
- 21:06Philip Pape: But even when you're doing all that, you don't have a way to bring it all together unless you have a coach.
- 21:12Philip Pape: And we've talked before about human coaching, right?
- 21:14Philip Pape: It's expensive, it's hard to get a good coach.
- 21:16Philip Pape: It's getting more and more where it's, it's, you know, it's a tough industry, let's just say, for on both sides.
- 21:21Philip Pape: Okay.
- 21:22Philip Pape: And yet if I said, hey, I just want to use another yet another app, here's another tracker.
- 21:27Philip Pape: You're just tracking, tracking, tracking, tracking.
- 21:28Philip Pape: Even if you're tracking in a notebook, how are you using that information?
- 21:32Philip Pape: Even if you're doing something like starting strength and you're using a notebook and tracking your lifts, do you truly know what decision to make at your next session based on that data?
- 21:40Philip Pape: That's what Fitness Lab does.
- 21:43Philip Pape: It is not trying to be your tracker, it can definitely track lots of things.
- 21:46Philip Pape: It integrates with Apple Health, all that good stuff.
- 21:48Philip Pape: We tried to reduce as much friction as possible on that side.
- 21:51Philip Pape: But if you still are tracking in other apps like MacroFactor or a workout app, it can work alongside it in a really cool way.
- 21:58Philip Pape: And it does what we talked about before.
- 22:00Philip Pape: The more data you have, the better it can actually use that data to help you do what you need to do.
- 22:05Philip Pape: So, what it does is the four things I talked about.
- 22:07Philip Pape: It look at your patterns, it looks at your biofeedback, like sleep and hunger, et cetera, at things like your protein.
- 22:13Philip Pape: If you've been feeding it meals, not like a tracker, but more like an analysis tool.
- 22:18Philip Pape: Your training, it tells you what's going on.
- 22:20Philip Pape: It tells you here's what, here's the pattern, and here's the questions I want to ask you to make sure you do the right thing next so that you don't have to stress about it.
- 22:28Philip Pape: So basically gives you daily coaching.
- 22:29Philip Pape: It gives you activities each day.
- 22:31Philip Pape: It adapts to you.
- 22:32Philip Pape: You can talk to it anytime and it can adjust any of those activities based on what you need.
- 22:36Philip Pape: If you're like, man, I'm burnt out.
- 22:37Philip Pape: I don't want to track, it'll say, okay, let's just limit it to one or two activities a day and we're still going to make progress.
- 22:43Philip Pape: All right.
- 22:43Philip Pape: Right now, we're running a summer special from June 23rd through Friday, July 3rd.
- 22:48Philip Pape: If you're hearing this afterward, I want you to reach out to me.
- 22:52Philip Pape: I can probably get you a secret discount.
- 22:54Philip Pape: But during the promotion, it's 20% off going to our link witsandweights.com slash app.
- 22:58Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
- 23:01Philip Pape: As of this episode dropping, you've got about five days left.
- 23:04Philip Pape: And if you've been listening to all of this, you're like, okay, I get it.
- 23:07Philip Pape: I need that application layer to do something productive with the data.
- 23:11Philip Pape: I don't need more information.
- 23:12Philip Pape: I want to lose fat.
- 23:13Philip Pape: I want to get rid of that belly fat.
- 23:15Philip Pape: I want to know how to train.
- 23:16Philip Pape: I want to progressively overload and get stronger.
- 23:19Philip Pape: I want to deal with my sleep issues.
- 23:21Philip Pape: I want to deal with my food noise.
- 23:23Philip Pape: All of that, it's going to help you with that.
- 23:25Philip Pape: Go to witsaweeits.com slash app and grab that 20% off discount.
- 23:29Philip Pape: I would recommend signing up for the year subscription because you'll save even more doing it that way versus the shorter one.
- 23:35Philip Pape: Go to witzawaits.com slash app for fitness lab today.
- 23:40Philip Pape: Okay, let's get back to it and talk about okay, how do you use AI?
- 23:45Philip Pape: I think the fastest way to fix this is with a few examples, right?
- 23:49Philip Pape: A bad use versus good use of AI.
- 23:51Philip Pape: So a bad use of AI is opening it up.
- 23:54Philip Pape: And again, any AI I'm talking about.
- 23:56Philip Pape: Heck, even my own app, if you just ask it this way and you say, like, what's the best workout for a woman over 40?
- 24:02Philip Pape: Or weight loss for women in perimenopause is a super common search.
- 24:06Philip Pape: Well, you're gonna get a perfectly reasonable, totally generic plan that you will not end up doing.
- 24:11Philip Pape: That's that is the honest answer.
- 24:13Philip Pape: You'll just see it, you'll say, like, okay, that's nice.
- 24:16Philip Pape: Kind of like an article in the newspaper.
- 24:17Philip Pape: That's nice.
- 24:18Philip Pape: You see this, honey?
- 24:18Philip Pape: Okay, moving on.
- 24:19Philip Pape: I'm gonna go have my uh oatmeal now.
- 24:21Philip Pape: All right, now why aren't you gonna do it?
- 24:23Philip Pape: It's because it has nothing to do with you, your lifestyle, your equipment, your dieting history, your particular issues, right?
- 24:30Philip Pape: We've we've kind of nailed this or hammered this to death, but you know what I mean.
- 24:34Philip Pape: It's an answer to a question that unfortunately has a thousand correct answers, kind of like the infinite universes, the multiverse, right?
- 24:41Philip Pape: Spider-Man, the multiverse.
- 24:42Philip Pape: Anyone watching Nick Cage and Spider-Noir, awesome show on Prime.
- 24:45Philip Pape: Uh, when do I find time to watch TV?
- 24:48Philip Pape: I I'm only one episode in.
- 24:50Philip Pape: So anyway, it's a thousand permutations of an answer, and it's not going to help you.
- 24:55Philip Pape: That's the information fire hose.
- 24:57Philip Pape: That's more plan, but no more progress.
- 24:59Philip Pape: We don't want that.
- 25:00Philip Pape: A good use of that would be pasting in your current program, the one that you're actually running right now.
- 25:06Philip Pape: So it could be a screenshot from your workout app.
- 25:08Philip Pape: You can type it in, you can take a photo.
- 25:10Philip Pape: There's lots of ways depending on what you're using.
- 25:11Philip Pape: Like if you use Fitness Lab, you can go into the chat and you could do audio or what you could do video or files or text or whatever.
- 25:19Philip Pape: And you say, okay, here are my constraints.
- 25:22Philip Pape: I train three days a week.
- 25:23Philip Pape: I only have dumbbells.
- 25:24Philip Pape: I don't have any micro plates, my knees are cranky.
- 25:27Philip Pape: Like, what's the weak link here?
- 25:29Philip Pape: That's a great way to question, ask it.
- 25:30Philip Pape: Like, what are the blocks?
- 25:31Philip Pape: What am I missing here in my plan?
- 25:33Philip Pape: I mean, you could say, hey, just give me a better plan, but I love to start from finding the weak spots.
- 25:39Philip Pape: Right.
- 25:40Philip Pape: So now that helps you learn where the plan doesn't stack up and improve what you're following for the things you just told it are your constraints.
- 25:49Philip Pape: And that's super powerful.
- 25:50Philip Pape: And you could have all sorts of constraints, right?
- 25:53Philip Pape: The days of the week that you can do it, like anything, you know, you hate doing this exercise, whatever.
- 25:57Philip Pape: So, do you see the difference between those two?
- 25:59Philip Pape: In the first one, you get a generic answer based on information, but the second one is diagnosing you and giving you the blind spots and how to improve.
- 26:08Philip Pape: And by the way, you're gonna learn in the process as a human.
- 26:10Philip Pape: You're not hopefully not just blindly following it and moving on, but it's like, okay, now I understand why it's working.
- 26:16Philip Pape: And again, my app, Fitness Lab, is is kind of cool because it it talks to you like I would, if you will, for better or worse.
- 26:22Philip Pape: And it kind of tries to explain it in an accessible way.
- 26:25Philip Pape: Here's another, here's another bad example, right?
- 26:27Philip Pape: Or bad versus good.
- 26:28Philip Pape: You say, is creatine good for women in menopause?
- 26:31Philip Pape: I don't know why I keep hammering on the women in menopause, but it's probably because I hear a million questions in about that.
- 26:36Philip Pape: So is creatine good, right?
- 26:38Philip Pape: And and honestly, that's a question I get, I get that question over Instagram or people had just found the podcast.
- 26:44Philip Pape: Hey, is creatine, should I take creatine?
- 26:45Philip Pape: I'm like, really?
- 26:46Philip Pape: That like that's your question.
- 26:47Philip Pape: Sorry, I don't mean to judge people, but like we need to, we need to put more effort into our questions, but I get it, I get it, because maybe you've never heard of creatine you just heard about, you're like, what is this creatine thing?
- 26:57Philip Pape: Is it good to do?
- 26:58Philip Pape: I would say a good use of AI or asking a question would be, hey, I'm I'm thinking of starting taking creatine.
- 27:05Philip Pape: Here's my goal, here's my routine, here's my other supplements, how much do I take, or how do I remember to take it every day, or how do I know it's working?
- 27:14Philip Pape: Like there's a lot of ways.
- 27:15Philip Pape: I'm not telling you that there's one right way to ask the question, but almost pretend like it's a coach in front of you that you're picking their brain.
- 27:22Philip Pape: That's really what you're trying to do.
- 27:23Philip Pape: All right.
- 27:24Philip Pape: You're not just trying to get a generic fact, you're trying to find out how it's gonna work for you.
- 27:27Philip Pape: And again, the more data you give it, the better.
- 27:29Philip Pape: I hope this episode isn't going too long, but I do have one more.
- 27:32Philip Pape: This is this is for all of us here.
- 27:34Philip Pape: Why am I not losing weight?
- 27:36Philip Pape: Okay, well, it's an interesting question, right?
- 27:38Philip Pape: Because some people say, Why is my metabolism too low?
- 27:40Philip Pape: Why am I not losing weight?
- 27:42Philip Pape: One of the most common questions.
- 27:43Philip Pape: And as a coach, I would say, Well, I need to learn a lot about you right now, based on that.
- 27:47Philip Pape: In fact, people sign up for coaching calls with me just to dig in and kind of figure the heck out of this stuff.
- 27:53Philip Pape: Because last I counted, there are at least 13 specific reasons for a plateau.
- 27:58Philip Pape: And I've built them into like the tools that I create to help people understand where your plateau is coming from.
- 28:03Philip Pape: But then even to get to one of those 13 answers, you need like 1300 pieces of information.
- 28:09Philip Pape: I'm I'm I'm exaggerating, but you know, you need data indicate data out.
- 28:13Philip Pape: So if you just ask the question generically on Google or AI, you're gonna get all a list of all the things.
- 28:18Philip Pape: Now you have to go figure out, okay, which of those lists apply to me?
- 28:21Philip Pape: Calories, sleep, stress, right?
- 28:22Philip Pape: The usual suspects.
- 28:23Philip Pape: Or you're gonna get fear-mongering, like, oh, it's your hormones, it's cortisol, right?
- 28:27Philip Pape: It menobellies called by cortisol caused by cortisol or something like that.
- 28:30Philip Pape: So it's generic, it's useless.
- 28:32Philip Pape: And look, you already know a lot of those, don't you?
- 28:35Philip Pape: Yeah, I think you do.
- 28:36Philip Pape: Or if you listen to the show, you do.
- 28:37Philip Pape: Maybe maybe you don't.
- 28:38Philip Pape: That's fine.
- 28:38Philip Pape: Basic information's cool, it's good education, but it's not gonna help you.
- 28:43Philip Pape: A good use of AI for this, if you're not losing weight, is take three weeks in a row of your data.
- 28:50Philip Pape: Now you're like, oh crap, I don't actually have data.
- 28:52Philip Pape: Well, listen to my podcast for a while, folks, because you're gonna learn how much I love tracking.
- 28:55Philip Pape: And if you feel like tracking is a chore, there are easy ways to do it that are low friction.
- 28:59Philip Pape: It's a problem we deal with all the time.
- 29:01Philip Pape: Okay, but if you don't track, how the heck can you tell what's going on?
- 29:04Philip Pape: You've got to track something, right?
- 29:06Philip Pape: You've got to track something.
- 29:07Philip Pape: So, and maybe this will motivate you to do it.
- 29:09Philip Pape: Knowing that you can get an answer may motivate you to do it.
- 29:12Philip Pape: So take three weeks of your food log, your training, your weight trend, your biofeedback, like your sleep, and then you paste it all in.
- 29:18Philip Pape: Maybe you have lab work too, but I would keep lab work to the side initially unless you really suspect something.
- 29:23Philip Pape: And then ask the AI, hey, what patterns do you see?
- 29:27Philip Pape: And what would you change first if my goal right now is to lose weight or to lose fat?
- 29:32Philip Pape: Okay, and if if you're using Fitness Lab and you ask it, it might even push back and say, hey, we're not trying to lose weight, actually, we're trying to lose body fat.
- 29:38Philip Pape: It's gonna, it's gonna mansplain to you, but actually in a general uh gender neutral way, I guess.
- 29:43Philip Pape: But I'm joking, kind of.
- 29:45Philip Pape: It will then help you understand.
- 29:47Philip Pape: Ah, okay, here's the thing that's the most important for you right now.
- 29:50Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
- 29:51Philip Pape: That's pretty amazing.
- 29:53Philip Pape: Like if you all you have to do is have data, and I get it takes work and effort to track data, but really not that much, guys.
- 29:59Philip Pape: Not that much.
- 30:00Philip Pape: Okay, just a few things can be very powerful.
- 30:03Philip Pape: So the through line on all of these, I've heard the word through line lately.
- 30:06Philip Pape: It's like jargon buzzword I hear everywhere.
- 30:09Philip Pape: Maybe it's because of AI.
- 30:10Philip Pape: I don't know.
- 30:10Philip Pape: The through line on all of this is that every good use of AI or a human coach, but we're talking about AI today, starts with you giving it some good data.
- 30:21Philip Pape: Your plan, your goals, your data, your constraints, all of that fun stuff.
- 30:25Philip Pape: The the incorrect use of AI is without that.
- 30:29Philip Pape: It's just asking questions, but not, and it's lazy.
- 30:32Philip Pape: It's a lazy use of AI that's gonna give you a lazy answer that's gonna result in you not getting any progress.
- 30:38Philip Pape: Okay.
- 30:39Philip Pape: So I am I am not saying that AI is useless for fitness.
- 30:43Philip Pape: I clearly don't believe that.
- 30:45Philip Pape: I built an entire tool around it, Fitness Lab.
- 30:47Philip Pape: We talked about it.
- 30:48Philip Pape: I'm not saying information doesn't matter.
- 30:50Philip Pape: It doesn't, it does.
- 30:51Philip Pape: If you are genuinely like at a zero out of 10, you got to learn stuff.
- 30:55Philip Pape: You gotta learn the principles.
- 30:56Philip Pape: Go ahead and use AI to learn them.
- 30:57Philip Pape: That's fine.
- 30:58Philip Pape: Be a little bit cautious and careful on where the data is coming from, right?
- 31:01Philip Pape: Again, that's where if you had Fitness Lab, you can learn as part of the process.
- 31:05Philip Pape: In fact, in Fitness Lab, every day there's a briefing that teaches you something.
- 31:09Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
- 31:10Philip Pape: So that helps you level up on your knowledge.
- 31:12Philip Pape: I'm not saying you should trust AI blindly.
- 31:14Philip Pape: That absolutely you shouldn't, because the tools tend to want to agree with you and like give you a pat on the back and say, like, hey, great thinking there, even when it's terrible thinking, I'm sorry to say.
- 31:26Philip Pape: And there is good research showing that they still have a strong tendency to just go along with what you say, even when you're wrong, because they're built to be that way.
- 31:36Philip Pape: So they're not a substitute for an actual human coach who's gonna give you, I'll say, tough love, something that you don't want to hear.
- 31:42Philip Pape: Now, caveat on that, we're gonna get back to at the end of the episode.
- 31:45Philip Pape: Can you train your AI to give you some tough love?
- 31:47Philip Pape: Yes, you can.
- 31:48Philip Pape: So hold on.
- 31:49Philip Pape: I'm also not saying AI replaces a human.
- 31:52Philip Pape: I mentioned that 74% improved results when you had the human with the AI.
- 31:56Philip Pape: And I get we can't all afford a human or whatnot.
- 32:00Philip Pape: So pick the best combination of tools for the job that you could afford that fits within your life.
- 32:04Philip Pape: That's what I'm saying, right?
- 32:05Philip Pape: The bottleneck for almost everyone is not the information, especially who listens to this podcast.
- 32:10Philip Pape: You got the information.
- 32:11Philip Pape: It's applying it and doing it consistently.
- 32:14Philip Pape: And AI is a phenomenal application tool, but it's like a mediocre information toy.
- 32:21Philip Pape: I mean, it's great for information, but what I mean is it's not going to do anything for you just by having the information.
- 32:28Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I did promise you a one-line prompt that can train your AI and turn it from a yes man into something that will help you more.
- 32:36Philip Pape: I'm gonna give you that in a second.
- 32:38Philip Pape: But if if this episode has surfaced all the things you've been thinking about and wondering about AI, and you're like, yeah, now it makes sense that, you know, I've got all this information, I follow so many people, but I don't have the results.
- 32:52Philip Pape: That is the gap Fitness Lab was built to close for you.
- 32:56Philip Pape: I am so passionate and supportive of what we did here.
- 33:00Philip Pape: I think it's a fantastic tool.
- 33:01Philip Pape: People are using it, love it, and they keep renewing because it's helping them.
- 33:05Philip Pape: Those who actually use it, it's helping them.
- 33:07Philip Pape: It is that layer that looks at your data and it coaches you on those patterns and it helps you keep consistent instead of just handing you more information.
- 33:16Philip Pape: And again, we have a summer special right now.
- 33:18Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app, 20% off.
- 33:21Philip Pape: When you go to that link, you take a very short two-minute quiz and it gives you what your plan would look like if you decide to use the app and you don't have to then use the app if it's not right for you.
- 33:31Philip Pape: So it's a really great zero risk way to check it out.
- 33:33Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash app.
- 33:37Philip Pape: Link will be in the show notes.
- 33:39Philip Pape: Okay, here's the one-line trick that changes how AI will talk to you.
- 33:44Philip Pape: So if you ask AI, hey, is my plan good?
- 33:47Philip Pape: Or what do you think of my plan or spot check my plan, it's basically gonna agree with you.
- 33:52Philip Pape: It's kind of the default setting.
- 33:54Philip Pape: Depending on how you ask it, it might go a little bit deeper than that, but you have to force it out of that.
- 33:58Philip Pape: And this is where prompting is very important.
- 34:00Philip Pape: Now, in some tools, depending on your account, what you have access to, like Claude or Chap GP or whatever, you can go into your profile, into your settings, and you can give it instructions that it always looks at.
- 34:12Philip Pape: In other words, it's like global instructions all the time.
- 34:15Philip Pape: And I actually have some of those.
- 34:17Philip Pape: But even if you don't use that and you just want to type it right into the chat, what I would do is, you know, paste your data in and then you add, put your question and then put the following act as a skeptical coach.
- 34:30Philip Pape: Argue against this plan.
- 34:32Philip Pape: Tell me the three things most likely to fail and why.
- 34:37Philip Pape: That's it.
- 34:37Philip Pape: Now, if you guys want to know what I use in my instructions, I have a very detailed uh set of instructions on like, hey, don't sugarcoat it, don't tell me what I want to hear.
- 34:46Philip Pape: I want you to push back.
- 34:47Philip Pape: Like, I have all this stuff because I've learned over time how to make it more and more tough on me so it's a more realistic.
- 34:54Philip Pape: But just in the chat, do what I just said, go back and listen.
- 34:57Philip Pape: I'll repeat it right now, actually.
- 34:59Philip Pape: Act as a skeptical coach, argue against this plan, tell me the three things most likely to fail and why.
- 35:05Philip Pape: That's it.
- 35:06Philip Pape: That instruction turns it from this sycophant, this cheerleader, into a critic, like in a good way.
- 35:14Philip Pape: It's gonna give you helpful critique, and that's where the gold is, right?
- 35:18Philip Pape: That's where the gold is.
- 35:18Philip Pape: That's what you need to hear.
- 35:20Philip Pape: Okay.
- 35:20Philip Pape: So I hope that was helpful.
- 35:21Philip Pape: I hope this whole episode was helpful.
- 35:23Philip Pape: I know I pitched my app in there a lot because I truly believe in it and I think it does what we are talking about.
- 35:28Philip Pape: It's why I made it.
- 35:30Philip Pape: I hope this tool, this episode helped you in even just day-to-day use of AI.
- 35:36Philip Pape: And just go forward and conquer and get those results, please.
- 35:39Philip Pape: I'm rooting for you.
- 35:40Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
- 35:43Philip Pape: And remember the answer was never the thing you were missing.
- 35:46Philip Pape: The doing is.
- 35:47Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pate, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.