Coaching in the Age of AI: Why the Best Will Always Lead With People

Over the years, I’ve seen trends in strength and conditioning rise and fall like the tide. We’ve gone from the excitement of “movement pattern training” and rotation outside the sagittal plane, to the endless supplement-of-the-month club, to the wearable explosion. Some ideas had staying power. Most fizzled.

Now the new elephant in the room is AI.

Some coaches run from it, convinced it will take their job. Others run to it, believing it will solve all their problems. Both are missing the point. AI isn’t the coach. It’s the stopwatch. It’s the clipboard. It’s the barbell. Just another tool. And like every tool, it matters less what the tool is and more how the practitioner uses it. Even a barbell can be misused.

The best coaches won’t get replaced by AI. They’ll use it to multiply their impact—because it frees them to focus on what coaching has always been about: people.

The Tool vs. The Practitioner

I’ve had coaches tell me, “AI will never replace my coaching eye.” They’re right. But if your “eye” is all you bring to the table, you’re already behind.

I think back to my conversations with Boyd Epley and what it was like back in the day with Husker Power at Nebraska. His success wasn’t because he invented magic exercises. He was the first to get paid to put structure around chaos—measurements, evaluation, progress tracking. That structure made performance development predictable. Coach Devaney made it very clear: “If they get slower, you’re fired!” The coach didn’t ask for him to manage asymmetries, didn’t ask for extra neck work. He just wanted them faster—one metric to create a decades-long infrastructure of training and development to achieve on-field results.

In our industry today, our chaos isn’t a lack of structure. It’s too much data.

Force plates. Oura Rings. GPS units. Hormone panels. Daily surveys. TeamBuildr logs. In-game stats. The firehose never stops. The problem isn’t whether the data matters. It’s whether a coach can actually keep up with it all and come up with a plan to fix it.

That’s where I think AI plays a huge role in the future of the industry. Properly trained, an agent doesn’t forget to check if a force plate was zeroed. Properly trained, an agent can see that a value is wildly outside of the normal range and flag it for review before it gets to the coach. In short, the repetitive work that has stolen so many holidays, birthdays, and Sunday dinners can give us that time back and let us focus on the human in front of us.

This is something Dr. William Kraemer and I have talked about often. He has spent his entire career emphasizing the point that training and the adaptation that follows happen at the cellular, hormonal, and systemic levels. You can’t shortcut those processes. But you can lose track of them if you’re buried in spreadsheets. His point—echoed in our conversations—was simple: don’t get buried in the noise. AI helps you filter the noise so you can keep those principles intact.

Farming Out the Repetitive to Focus on the Human

At Newman HP, we use a rule: if you do something more than six times, it should be farmed out to an agent.

• Checking if the Oura Ring synced? Agent.
  
  
• Flagging outliers in force plate data? Agent.
  
  
• Comparing training logs to performance trends? Agent.
  
  
• Digitizing your old Excel file workouts in TeamBuildr? Agent.
  
  
• Finding premade meals in the next road game city? Agent.

That last one may sound trivial, but sourcing food for an MLB player on the road used to take us weeks of planning. Now it takes an agent minutes. And that means we can spend our time where it actually matters—building trust, adjusting lifts, walking an athlete through the mental prep for a start.

That trust is what coaching is built on. Boyd is famous for preaching: “If you can’t show an athlete they’re improving, you’ll lose them.” That stuck with me. AI helps us show those improvements more clearly, but it’s the conversation—the coaching moment—that makes the data meaningful, not the other way around.

The Game Hasn’t Changed. The Scale Has.

Even high-performance systems with huge staffs struggle with silos. The UFC Performance Institute, in their most recent report, put it best: “Integration is the whole game. Silos kill development.” That line stayed with me.

It doesn’t matter if you’re training UFC fighters, MLB pitchers, or high school volleyball players—when strength, nutrition, recovery, and skill coaches pull in different directions, the athlete pays the price.

AI doesn’t integrate for you. But it does make the integration process more feasible. One agent monitors force plate outliers. Another tracks nutrition logistics. Another cross-references game stats with training logs. None of them cares about titles, egos, or who “owns” the data. They just return the signals you trained them to watch for.

That’s what makes the difference. You still need a coach at the center who can connect those signals to the context and develop a coherent plan—and deliver it with trust.

Coaching Is Still About Trust

Let’s be real: the sports science pendulum is beginning to swing back to center. Traffic-light systems that claim to prevent injury, or proprietary algorithm scores that magically predict performance, are beginning to fall out of favor. Athletes see through it.

Injuries are part of sport. Always will be. No algorithm eliminates them. The best you can do is manage them, mitigate them, and help athletes keep performing.

And their belief in your program takes trust—that must be earned.

When I sit across from a pitcher, I’m not talking about deviations or z-scores. I’m saying: “Every time you front squat heavy before a start, your horizontal break gets better. Let’s keep building on that.”

That insight only came because an agent flagged the trend. But the athlete doesn’t care about the agent. They care that I cared enough to connect the dots for them and provide them with an individual’s insight that hopefully gives them a competitive advantage the next time they are on the mound. That’s coaching. That’s how relationships grow.

First Principles Still Rule

Mel Siff wrote in Supertraining that adaptation follows stress–recovery–supercompensation. The NSCA laid out the foundations of periodization and load management. Husker Power showed us the power of standardized testing to prove improvement. Kraemer paved the road for an entire industry of researchers looking to better understand how training variables—volume, load, rest—interact with the body’s myriad biological systems.

None of those first principles will ever change.

What has changed is the environment. We’re no longer in a world where testing three times a year and logging workouts on paper is enough. Today, every rep, every sleep cycle, every travel schedule, every meal can be tracked. The old excuse of “we don’t have enough staff” is gone.

AI is the new manpower solution to the industry’s never-ending program. The stopwatch that never sleeps. The staff member who never leaves. The non-carbon teammate you didn’t know you always wanted.

Lead by Example

This is where coaching is headed. You either bury your head in the sand and pretend the data doesn’t exist, or you train your agents and reclaim your time for what matters.

I’ve been lucky in my career to sit with Kraemer, Epley, and many other pioneers and hear their takes firsthand. They don’t all agree on everything, but they share a core belief: the fundamentals of coaching will always matter most. Technology can support that mission, but never replace it.

At Newman HP, every athlete has agents assigned: one to monitor force plate data for outliers, one to track meal prep across cities, one to cross-check sleep metrics with training loads. None of those agents coach. They don’t inspire or console. But they give me the clarity to show up fully human when it counts.

And athletes feel that difference. They don’t care about the hours saved. They care about the confidence that their program is personal, not generic. And they have a personal army of carbon and non-carbon coaches monitoring their program for every possible advantage.

The Future: Smaller Staffs, Bigger Impact

The lesson is clear. The future doesn’t belong to the programs with the most gadgets. It belongs to the ones who can integrate technology without losing the human connection.

The staffs that understand this will punch far above their weight. Small staffs will operate more quickly and more agilely than larger ones. Athletes will finally get the individualized support they’ve been theorized to receive for years. And our profession will move forward—not because of AI, but because of the coaches who learned to use it wisely.

Final Word

If you’re a coach reading this, I’d challenge you: write down five tasks you do every week that drain time without directly coaching an athlete. Then ask yourself—why are you still doing them manually?

That’s your starting point.

Farm those out. Train your agents. Reclaim your time. And get back to what coaching has always been: helping people get better.

References

• Epley, B. Boyd Epley Master 12-Week Plan & Basics of Strength and Conditioning
  
  
• NSCA. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning
  
  
• Siff, M. & Verkhoshansky, Y. Supertraining
  
  
• Kraemer, W. J. Research on hormonal responses, progressive overload, and hypertrophy
  
  
• UFC Performance Institute. Cross-Sectional Analysis of the UFC Athlete – insight on silos and integration