Changing my exercise program with AI – BionicOldGuy

I recently had fun working with Gemini Deep Research to adjust my exercise program for optimal health. I first asked what the best prescription was for a 72 year old (he’ll be 73 tomorrow) with moderate aortic paravalvular leakage who is also on metoprolol (a beta blocker that tends to limit the heart rate response to exercise). I got some pretty conservative recommendations. This is because, in the absence of more data, max heart rate is calculated from age-based formulas that tend to underestimate my true max, and conservative assumptions are made about how much metoprolol will affect max. Then I added the spice that my max heart rate was measured at 160 while on metoprolol. This changed things and led to this interesting report. The report makes the following comment about 160 bpm: « 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 on metoprolol, this value is a significant physiologic deviation that dictates the entire exercise prescription strategy. »

The recommendations aren’t too different from what I was already doing, except for the suggested intervals, which are meant to be healthy for the heart valve. I was doing a series of very short sprints (15 seconds) followed by a good recovery. I thought this was good for my valve condition because my heart rate doesn’t go up much while doing them. So I specifically asked if this was a good protocol leading up to this reportin which the answer is categorically negative. Even when the heart rate remains low, blood pressure can rise excessively due to the intensity of the sprints. Recommended intervals are 1 minute long with about 1 minute recovery, at a challenging but still aerobic pace. I’ve tried these and I like them better than the sprints anyway.

Another fun thing you can now do with Gemini’s is use its companion Notebook LM tool to make infographics that summarize a document. I’ve done this a few times and found them to be good quality. Doing this for my recommended exercise prescription document resulted in the graph above. Fortunately, I haven’t experienced any of the « red flag » symptoms.