Customize my exercise program with AI

I’ve been having a lot of fun lately working with Gemini Deep Research to tailor my exercise program for optimal health. First I asked what the best prescription is for a 72 year old (turning 73 tomorrow) with moderate aortic paravalvular leak who is also taking metoprolol (a beta blocker that limits the heart rate response to exercise). I got some pretty conservative recommendations. This is because in the absence of more data, maximum heart rate is estimated based on age-based formulas that tend to underestimate my actual max, and conservative assumptions are made about how much metoprolol will affect the max. So I added that my max heart rate was 160 while on metoprolol. That changed things and led to this interesting report. The report made the following comment about the 160 beats per minute: “A critical data point in this case is the patient’s measured maximum heart rate of 160 bpm. In the context of a 72-year-old man taking metoprolol, this value is a significant physiological outlier that dictates the entire exercise prescription strategy.”

The recommendations are not much different from what I was already doing, except for the suggested intervals designed to keep heart valves healthy. I did a series of many short sprints (15 sec), followed by a good recovery. I thought this was good for my valve fitness because my heart rate doesn’t increase too much when I do them. So I specifically asked if this was a good protocol, which led to this reportwhere the answer is emphatically no. Even if the heart rate remains low, blood pressure can rise excessively due to the intensity of the sprints. The recommended intervals are 1 minute long with approximately 1 minute recovery, at a challenging but still aerobic pace. I have tried these and think they are better than the sprints anyway.

Another fun thing you can do now with Gemini’s is use the companion tool Notebook LM to create an information graph that summarizes a document. I’ve done this a few times and found them to be of good quality. When I did that for my recommended training document, the image above emerged. Fortunately, I didn’t experience any of the “red flag” symptoms.