Tweaking My Exercise Program With AI – BionicOldGuy

I’ve had some fun recently working with Gemini Deep Research to tweak my exercise program for optimum health. First I asked about what’s the best prescription for a 72 year old (it will be 73 tomorrow) with moderate aortic paravalvular leakage, who is also on metoprolol (a beta-blocker that tends to restrain heart rate response to exercise). I got a pretty conservative recommendations. This is because in the absence of more data, maximum heart rate is estimated from age-based formulae which tend to underestimate my true max, and conservative assumptions are made about how much metoprolol will influence the max. So next I added the tidbit that my max heart rate has been measured to be 160 while on metoprolol. That changed things, and led to this interesting report. The report made this 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 male on metoprolol, this value is a significant physiological outlier that dictates the entire strategy of the exercise prescription”.

The recommendations are not too different than what I was already doing, except for the suggested intervals which are intended to be heart-valve-healthy. I was doing a series of many short sprints (15 sec) followed by a good recovery. I thought this was good for my valve condition because my heart rate doesn’t rise too much doing them. So I specifically asked if this was a good protocol, leading to this report, in which the answer is emphatically no. Even with the heart rate staying low, blood pressure can rise excessively due to the intensity of the sprints. The recommended intervals are 1 minutes long with about 1 minute recovery, at a challenging but still aerobic pace. I’ve tried these out and like them better than the sprints anyway.

Another fun thing you can now do with Gemini’s is use its companion tool Notebook LM to make an info-graphic that summarizes a document. I’ve done this a few times and found them to be good quality. Doing that for the document with my recommended exercise prescription led to the graphic above. Fortunately, I haven’t experienced any of the “red flag” symptoms.