AI has already changed how we work, travel, and communicate – but we’re still finding new uses for it every day.

Over the past year, I’ve used it to help tweak my fitness goals, and it’s made me realise just how incredibly useful a tool it would have been when I first started out. If you’re jumping into fitness for your New Year’s resolution (whether for the first time or not), I’ve outlined a few key ways that AI can massively help you reach success.

From helping you lose weight to improving your cardio or gaining muscle (or all of the above), your chances of success will be amplified, with far less stress in the process. 

Planning meals, structuring workouts, working around injuries, and staying consistent have always been the hardest parts of getting fitter. What should I eat? How much? What exercises are safe? Am I doing this right? It’s a lot to take in and consider, especially when life’s other responsibilities – work, kids, bills – are all still demanding your mental and physical energy.

AI can help answer all these questions and more,  lowering the barrier to entry, and preventing burnout from taking on too much at once.

Here’s to an all-new you in 2026…

Nutrition is everything – and AI finally makes it simple

The single most important factor in losing weight and getting fitter isn’t hours spent at the gym or on a treadmill – it’s diet. What you eat, and how much you eat, will determine your success more than any workout plan.

Calories in versus calories out is king. If you eat fewer calories than your body burns each day, your body turns to stored fat for energy. Maintain that deficit consistently for 12 weeks, and it’s entirely realistic to lose 5–7% of your bodyweight. No extreme dieting required.

The problem has always been execution. Meal planning works – especially bulk prepping a week’s worth of food in advance – but calculating calories, balancing macros, and coming up with meals that don’t require chef-level effort used to be an absolute pain.

AI has changed that completely.

Using an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, you can generate realistic, repeatable meals in seconds. For example:

“Please provide me with super easy to make, minimal prep, bulk meal recipes. They should be centered around a lean protein, with mostly vegetables and healthy fats, sticking to around 500 calories maximum.”

The result is a set of meals with known calorie counts and nutritional breakdowns – food you can prep on Sunday and rely on all week. Even locking in just one meal a day, like lunch, removes a huge load from your busy brain, and saves you from going for the quick, store-bought, unhealthy options on your regular workdays.

The best part? You can tell it what you like and what you hate, and it can tailor the recipes and meals based on your preferences. You’ll be surprised at the sheer amount of tasty, nutritious, low-calorie meals on offer. It doesn’t all have to be unflavoured turkey breast, broccoli, and brown rice, you know. 

Ultimately, AI can help you stop guessing, and prevent you from getting overwhelmed and burned out in the process. And you start winning the most important battle in any fitness journey – consistency in nutrition.

AI as your confidence booster in the gym

Public – and even home – gyms can be intimidating places, especially for newcomers. Big machines, heavy plates, unfamiliar movements, and the feeling that you don’t belong can be enough to put anyone off. There’s no shame in that.

It took me years to finally join a gym, and it remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. AI would have helped me get there much sooner.

AI takes the sting out of uncertainty by helping you create routines that fit your time, confidence level, and physical limitations. You can ask it to avoid intimidating equipment, work around injuries, and keep sessions short enough to fit into real life.

A prompt like this does a surprising amount of heavy lifting (pardon the pun):

“I would like you to create a simple full-body gym routine that I can do three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). I can’t afford too much time, so something that doesn’t take more than 30–40 minutes. I’d rather not start off with intimidating or busy equipment like the bench press or squat rack, but still want to hit my whole body efficiently. I also have knee pain at the moment, so please take that into account.”

From there, AI can build a balanced routine using approachable movements – pushups paired with pulldowns, upright rows with hamstring curls, dips alongside gentle squats or leg presses. Three full-body sessions a week, plenty of recovery days, and zero guesswork.

More importantly, it gives you permission to start small – and starting is the hardest part.

Smarter recovery, not just harder training

Fitness gains don’t happen during workouts. They happen during recovery. Give your body enough time to solidly rest in between sessions, and your muscles will repair themselves, growing in the process, ready to tackle the next set of challenges coming their way. And this is another area where AI is becoming invaluable.

While the gold standard will always be guidance from qualified professionals like physiotherapists, AI can still be useful for everyday maintenance – especially for people managing desk-job stiffness, tight hips, or recurring lower-back issues.

I regularly use AI to generate mobility routines for problem areas. Something as straightforward as:

“I have tightness around my lower back and glutes – can you suggest some daily stretches and exercises to help loosen things up?”

The output is often enough to build a five-minute daily routine that can keep niggling issues from developing into debilitating problems further down the line.

Can AI replace a personal trainer?

Not entirely – and it shouldn’t. A good personal trainer offers things like real-time correction, accountability, and emotional intelligence that AI can’t replicate. At least, not yet.

What AI can do, however, is provide instant, easy access to good guidance. It removes cost barriers, and massively reduces the mental load, while offering reassurance in the process.

For beginners, that’s beyond powerful. For experienced gym-goers, it’s a planning and optimization tool. For everyone else, it’s a way to stop overthinking and start moving.

No matter what your goals are, I hope you’ll look back on this time next year feeling glad you took the plunge, and proud of yourself for what you’ve achieved.