Planning, tracking, and optimizing workouts with AI

If you want to start using AI in your workouts immediately, jump to the how-to. If you want some background on how to think about applying AI to workouts, keep reading. 🙂

Why should you listen to me?

I've been training for ~10 years — years of powerlifting followed by bodybuilding, but focused throughout on strength and lifting. I've spent years working with great coaches who built awesome programs for me, and years building my own programming around my goals and circumstances (time, gear, location). I'm very comfortable building my own programming, and right now that's what I'm doing: I write the program, and my coach reviews it and gives feedback — a second set of eyes and a form of accountability. By all accounts I'm pretty comfortable building decent, good-enough programs for my training discipline.

You know how to program a workout. Why do you need AI?

Frankly, I don't need it. It's a fantastic tool that I can oversee, pressure-test, and iterate with to make sure my workouts are progressing. AI lacks my ego, which makes it a great sounding board. My coach still reviews the final output — but AI is fantastic for helping build and refine my workouts based on my actual data.

There are three phases of my workouts where I apply AI: plan, feedback, and refine.

Plan

You're building a workout plan and want a starting point. I'd begin by getting clear on the disciplines, movements, and goals for your training — then hand all of that over at once.

Feedback

This is the gap from plan to execution. At the most basic layer, it looks at your last workout, compares it against your plan and your goals, and tells you how it went. Are you hitting all your numbers? Are you missing reps? Are reps getting slower? Any movements not hitting?

This gets more interesting the more data you have. That includes telemetry from wearables (sleep score, activity score), intelligence from smart trainers (speed of movements, pace), and even glucose and nutrition data.

Refine

Leveraging the feedback phase, we then refine your next workout and your plan. Adjust weights, adjust movements — based on what you're actually doing in the gym. The AI can look at that data, give you a proposal, and let you make the adjustments you want to make.

Refinement can reflect both your actual workout and your actual circumstances. Low recovery score on your wearable? Maybe we pull back a little. Really high one? Take advantage of it. Or just: "I only have 20 minutes today — what should I do?"

What this looks like

Here's the whole loop, end to end. It starts with the prompt above.

A chat assistant answering a request for a 3-day, 45-minute strength plan for a tennis player, explaining that rotational and lateral work is spread across all three days and that shoulder health work lives on Day C. — Give it your constraints and your sport, and you get reasoning — not just a list.

The generated plan document: a 3-day full-body strength plan, tennis-focused, with a weekly schedule table listing Day A (squat, overhead press, lateral stability), Day B (hinge, bench, unilateral pull) and Day C (full-body power, split stance, shoulder health). — The plan it wrote: three days, each hitting a squat, a hinge, a push, a pull, and a tennis-specific stability piece.

Then you have to actually run it

AI makes it really easy to create a plan. You then need a way to actually train against that plan. That's what I built Eccentric for — a way to log your workouts and see your progress over time, all of it reachable by your AI assistant.

If you've already connected Eccentric to your assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any compatible AI chat — it's as easy as asking it to create the plan for you.

The assistant creating the plan in Eccentric: it adds the custom exercises, populates all three workouts with planned sets, and summarizes the twelve exercises now live under the Tennis Strength Plan. — One sentence — “add this as a new plan” — and it builds the whole thing out.

And then you go into Eccentric, and your workout is there.

The Tennis Strength Plan in Eccentric, active, with Day A expanded to show Back Squat 4x5, Overhead Press 3x8, Lateral Lunge 3x10 and Half-Kneeling Dumbbell Chop 3x12, plus collapsed rows for Day B and Day C. — The plan in Eccentric — every set the assistant wrote, ready to edit or push to your trainer.

From here you log your workout. This part is similar to any other workout app you've probably used.

Logging Day A in Eccentric on a phone: a running session timer, an End session button, a sets-checked-off progress bar, and the first Back Squat set with reps and load steppers. — Check sets off as you go. Nothing exotic — it just has to be honest about what you actually did.

Close the loop

Once you've logged the workout, go back into your AI chat and ask for an analysis. The session below also included data from Oura, plus velocity data from the Voltra smart trainer.

The assistant analyzing a logged session: 42 minutes, 6 exercises, 18 working sets, readiness 85, HRV 123, 7 hours of sleep, five personal records, then an exercise-by-exercise read including how far bar speed dropped within each set. — The read-back: what you hit, what you set a record on, and where speed fell off inside a set.

From there you can ask about potential improvements, and let it send you proposals — suggested changes to your plan that you accept or decline one by one.

This is what really unlocks regular use of all the data you're already collecting. Lifts, PRs, sleep scores — you have a lot of it. The goal is making it actionable for a lifter.