Winter always throws my fitness habits off track. The weather gets colder, the holiday treats show up, and the drive to stick to my usual workout routine falls off a cliff. The winter months are hard for the home-gym-goer, with no one but yourself to offer encouragement and accountability. And while I do okay at keeping myself on track for most of the year, once the snow hits the ground, I need to call in reinforcements.
In the past, I’ve used this time to shake things up—trying new workout apps or finding fresh ways to inject novelty into my regimen. One app I experimented with is Zombies, Run!, which immerses users in a post-apocalyptic narrative where they run from zombies rather than just calories. With its engaging writing, voice acting, and sound design, it offers a unique running experience and even features a Marvel superhero expansion.
(Credit: Six to Start)
But here’s the thing: Zombies never did much for me. And I also want to be able to customize my workouts in pretty specific ways, adapting to the equipment I have, the goals I’m pursuing, and the narratives I’m interested in. What if I want to add in some dumbbell exercises, or some jump rope? What if I need to focus on my core as much as my arms or work around an injury?
For a long time, I just assumed that level of customization was too much for any app to deliver. The knowledge of a professional trainer, the creativity of a writer weaving workouts into stories, and the immersive voice acting seemed unattainable for my niche Monday workout.
To some extent, I was right. I can’t replicate the movement tracking, the professional sound design, or the slick app to run it all. But I can get a heck of a lot closer than I ever imagined by using the latest AI tools.
With a combination of AI-powered research, generative writing, and AI narration, I’m creating customized workouts that double as thrilling adventures, set in any narrative I can imagine! Let me show you how I’m using AI to put myself in the story and get fitter while I do.
To create these AI-powered workouts, I use three different tools. They’re all free, though jumping between them takes a bit of effort. Why this combination? Because I wanted a workout that was accurate, engaging, and completely personalized. These tools make that possible.
(Credit: Lily Yeh; OpenAI; Perplexity; Eleven Labs)
For putting my workout together, I’m using Perplexity.ai, a search-focused tool that’s sort of like a mashup of Google search and ChatGPT, where it summarizes real-world search results to offer informed answers to your questions. It’s not perfect, but I find that it’s a better tool for getting fact-based answers with fewer hallucinations than ChatGPT. There are several different AI search tools out there, but Perplexity has found its way to the top of my preferred tool list.
I’m also using ChatGPT to take that workout plan and turn it into an immersive narrative. The brainstorming and creative writing uses of ChatGPT make it a great fit for this, turning a simple 8-exercise routine into an extensive step-by-step guide, and then weaving those exercises into a customized story.
Finally, I’m using ElevenLabs Reader to give voice to my new workout adventures. ElevenLabs specializes in AI text-to-speech, using AI voices to provide computer-generated narration that sounds surprisingly lifelike, with natural cadence and inflection. And the Reader app (available for iOS and Android) lets me do that for free on my phone, making it perfect for this workout project.
Speaking of tools, there’s one more essential item for this AI workout adventure: a good old-fashioned note-taking document. Why? Because juggling information between different AI tools can get messy. A central document lets you easily copy, paste, edit, and refine your workout plan and story without losing track of anything.
This will be helpful as you pull together research, draft workout guides and stories, and prepare the final text for audio narration. For this project I actually recommend using two documents: One for the workout and instructions and another for drafting the final narrative text.
The Walkthrough: From Research to Audio Workout
Open your notes document and jot down any specific thoughts you have before planning anything. Getting your own thoughts clear about your exercise goals, your equipment and resources, and any unique needs or concerns that you have will help you know what you need to discuss before you do any research at all. When in doubt, start with notes.
And my most important advice about doing bigger projects with AI: Tackle things in bite-sized pieces. That means generating outlines before you ask it to write full stories, and do your brainstorming before you’re in the thick of a long narrative script. LLM tools are great at small, discrete tasks (even complex ones!), but throwing multi-step projects at them can lead to frustrating results due to small miscommunications or problems you don’t catch when trying to focus on the bigger picture.
1. Research and Design Your Workout With Perplexity
When putting together a workout routine, I worry a lot about having accurate information. So, while there are plenty of guides out there for using ChatGPT to build a custom workout plan, I actually prefer to use a different tool: Perplexity.ai. Because Perplexity combines LLM capabilities with online search, it pulls from high-quality information sources, and then answers the question, resulting in higher-quality information, drastically fewer hallucinations, and a better overall result.
Perplexity’s basic user interface is also very easy to use: Ask a question, and you’ll get a nuanced answer, complete with cited sources. But many people don’t realize that you can also enter more information in each prompt, letting you specify things like what exercise equipment you have, what parts of the body you want to target, and any additional information, like injuries or conditions that might require you to adjust your workout plans.
(Credit: Perplexity / Brian Westover)
You can also ask for information in different formats, and when dealing with lists and detail-rich data, I often ask for the response in table format. In this case, I can ask for a list of recommended exercises, but also add columns for the muscle groups worked, the equipment used, and more.
(Credit: Perplexity / Brian Westover)
Finally, you don’t need to settle for whatever the first answer says. You can engage Perplexity in a back-and-forth conversation, tweaking and refining answers to your needs, or expanding on things if you need more information. A little back and forth goes a long way when the AI can also pull in research materials, making it really easy to zero in on exactly what you need. I spent some time tweaking things to my liking, but the end result is a simple but effective workout, tailored to my equipment and needs.
(Credit: Perplexity / Brian Westover)
Once I’m happy with the workout plan, I copy it into my notes for future reference. There’s no need to reinvent that wheel once it’s done. And as I go from one tool to another, I can pull that info from my notes and feed it to whatever other tool I’m using.
I will also ask for instructions on how to perform each exercise properly. This information is especially helpful for moves I might not be familiar with, but even the moves you know well should get some attention paid to correct form, and the information will come in handy shortly. This is also another instance where Perplexity’s search-based AI is best, since you don’t want a hallucination about exercise technique leading to an easily avoidable injury down the line.
(Credit: Perplexity / Brian Westover)
I paste the workout, the individual exercises, and the exercise-specific instructions into a document and save them for use in our next step, which uses ChatGPT.
2. Script Your Guided Routine With ChatGPT
Next, I’ll switch to ChatGPT, since I’m more comfortable using it to generate content in different styles. For this, I’ll attack the workout piece by piece, focusing on one exercise at a time. The first exercise will get the most time and attention, because it will be where I define what I want in terms of tone and format.
Here’s the prompt I used, with information pasted in about each specific exercise:
Turn this exercise information into a guided workout, as if I had a personal trainer walking me through the exercise. Start with an explanation of the proper position and movement, add any notes about maintaining proper form, and then count me through 10 reps, with brief words of encouragement between each rep.
Here's the exercise:
After which I simply pasted in the relevant workout instructions.
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
It took some revising and refining to get the cadence right for an exercise that’s done fairly quickly, but it wasn’t hard to make those tweaks.
Making corrections to either the first or second part of the text also makes it easier to iteratively adjust the phrasing and flow to something you think will work during your workout.
Here’s the script section I got after just a few tweaks:
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
Now, all that you need to do is paste in the information about the next exercise, and ask ChatGPT to follow the same format. Doing all of this in the same conversation makes it very simple to get consistent formatting across each exercise.
Paste these sections together into a document, and you’ll quickly have your workout written out, with guidance and counted reps. If a guided workout is all you wanted, you can skip step 3 and jump right to step 4, where we’ll use AI to narrate your workout. But don’t skip it, because this is the fun part.
3. Craft Your Immersive Experience With ChatGPT
So far we’ve researched a workout and generated a script to walk you through your routine. That’s cool, but it’s pretty basic in terms of generative AI. Here’s where things get a little more interesting.
Instead of doing a standard workout, with nothing but boring instructions and monotonous reps, I wanted my workout to be a little more fun. That’s where the fiction-writing capability of ChatGPT really shines. With your workout already mapped out, with instructions and rep counts, it’s simply a matter of adapting that information to fit into a larger narrative.
To do this, I used a two-step prompt, first to prime the concept of the exercise-within-a-story idea, and then followed up with the rough idea, asking ChatGPT to outline a story for the setting I imagined, which in this case is a secret agent mission to sneak in and out of an enemy compound.
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
The second prompt is story-specific, and can be adjusted to whatever setting or adventure you want. And ChatGPT, once it understands what you’re asking for, will easily generate that story outline as many times as you want, with as many variations as you want. And changing a detail here or there is pretty simple in the outline stage, when the content is short and easy to digest.
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
With a rough outline in hand, I have the foundation for a story-driven workout that can be adapted to whatever exercises I want to do. Using a mix of my own creativity and ChatGPT, it wasn’t hard to come up with in-story actions that matched each exercise. My planks became the action to crawl under some barbed wire. My offset overhead march with dumbbells? Carrying surveillance equipment. In short order, I had transformed my exercise list into a series of actions that fit within the frame an espionage mission.
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
Since I already have a basic workout script written, all I need to do now is ask it to adapt each set of instructions into the story outline and in-story explanations that we’ve already discussed.
Giving ChatGPT the scenario, the exercise descriptions, and the explanation of how each movement would fit into the story made it easy for ChatGPT to craft a story around this sequence of moves. But if you aren’t feeling like doing the work of coming up with these specifics, you can always ask ChatGPT to do so – it’s great at brainstorming!
Finally, for an added bit of polish, I added the idea that all of this was being said to me through an earpiece, instructions from a handler that was observing me actions through satellite footage and hacked surveillance cameras. With their guidance and encouragement, I made my way through the mission.
Recommended by Our Editors
(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)
Is it a little goofy? Yeah, but so is exercise. If I’m going to crank through 30 minutes of repetitive motions, I much prefer doing it this way. And there’s so many different stories I could insert myself into!
Maybe spies and secret missions aren’t your thing. But you could put yourself into pretty much any scenario you can imagine. An astronaut on Mars. A pirate on a ship at sea. A vampire hunter in a monster-infested city. A superhero in battle. A certain Italian plumber that stomps on turtles while saving a princess. If there’s a game or movie or other scenario you can imagine, ChatGPT can write it, or even help you brainstorm new settings and adventures you’ve never seen elsewhere.
And since it’s building these stories and actions around the workout you already put together, the story can change, but the exercise is still tailored to your workout goals and equipment requirements.
As you finalize your story workout, just copy and paste into a new document, until you’re happy with the overall narrative. Once you’re done, save the document as a PDF on your phone.
4. Generate Your AI Workout Audio With ElevenLabs Reader
We’ve got one more ingredient needed to take this imaginative exercise routine into the gym with you, and that’s audio. Now, I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t have the budget to hire voice actors to read stories and workout instructions to me. But AI has a solution to that problem too!
With an app called Reader by ElevenLabs, we can get audio narration of whatever text we give it, including our guided workouts and crazy ChatGPT-written stories. When using the phone app, you can generate audio for as much text as you want, all for free. (If you opt for a premium membership, you can even customize voices, use multiple voices, and record and save audio.)
To feed your document to ElevenLabs Reader, you’ll need to save the document to your phone. The app supports multiple file formats, but I’ve had the most success with PDF.
(Credit: ElevenLabs / Brian Westover)
Hit the big plus button at the bottom of the main screen, then select “Import File” and select the saved document from your Google Drive or your phone’s file storage. Once it’s uploaded, you’ll be able to find the document in the Reader app library.
(Credit: ElevenLabs / Brian Westover)
Select the voice you want from the app’s library of voices (which has options for gender, accent, and general tone), and you’re off to the races. Or the recon mission. Or the dragon’s lair. Or wherever your immersive audio workout takes you.
Now that all the work is done, you can listen to that same workout anytime you want. And since it’s all saved into a document you can edit, you can easily make changes to adjust the flow and pacing of instructions, fix irritating details in the story, or rewrite it in a new story entirely.
Who knew that AI could transform my home gym into a thrilling spy adventure? But this experiment revealed that with a little creativity, today’s AI tools can not only help you make an effective workout, they can turn it into an immersive, game-like experience that can be endlessly customized.
Any one of the tools I talked about above opens up all sorts of clever uses. Perplexity, for example, is an incredible tool for research and learning, with applications ranging from homework and study to professional fact-finding and upskilling. The combination of search and an LLM chat interface is surprisingly powerful, and I barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Everything I did in this story uses the free version – a premium membership unlocks all sorts of advanced capabilities.
ChatGPT’s text generation is more well known at this point, but OpenAI is adding new functions and capabilities all the time. As of this writing, the company just announced that Canvas, a drafting tool for writing and programming, is now available to all users, including free accounts. With multimodal capabilities that include image generation, machine vision, and conversational voice interactions, ChatGPT is a powerful collection of tools on its own, and growing more powerful at a rapid clip.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that AI is a lot more than just text and image generation. ElevenLabs has created some really sophisticated AI narration tools, giving people access to quality spoken language that used to require voice actors and an expensive recording setup. That means that regular users can use it for everything from reading articles and papers, while creators can use the same voices to bring life to game characters, narrate videos and presentations, and more. One new feature in the Reader app lets you generate podcast-style discussions of the text you upload, similar to Google’s NotebookLM.
Perplexity, ChatGPT, and ElevenLabs each have unique strengths, but together they can do even more. And all of this was done using the free versions of these apps. No paid premium accounts, no expensive features.
This same combination of tools could be used for all sorts of applications beyond creative fitness routines.
-
Personalized bedtime stories for kids
-
Engaging study materials and customized review
-
Personalized news briefings
-
Customized guided meditations
From fitness to parenting, academics to personal development, there are myriad uses for AI when you start combining one tool with another.
How do you use AI to make your life easier? Share your best clever tricks in the comments below.
Get Our Best Stories!
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links.
By clicking the button, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy.
You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.