Adjust my exercise program with AI – BionicOldGuy

I recently had fun working with Gemini Deep Research to fine-tune my exercise program to optimize my health. I first asked what the best prescription was for a 72 year old (it will be 73 tomorrow) with moderate aortic paravalvular leak, who is also taking metoprolol (a beta blocker that tends to restrict the heart rate response to exercise). I received some pretty conservative recommendations. This is because, in the absence of additional data, maximum heart rate is estimated from age-based formulas which tend to underestimate my true maximum, and conservative assumptions are made about how much metoprolol will influence the maximum. Then I added the information that my maximum heart rate was measured at 160 while I was taking metoprolol. This 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 man on metoprolol, this value is a significant physiological outlier 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 intended to be healthy for the heart valves. I did a series of many short sprints (15 sec) followed by a good recovery. I thought it was good for the condition of my valves, because my heart rate doesn’t increase too much while doing them. So I specifically asked if this was a good protocol, leading to this reportin which the answer is emphatically no. Even if the heart rate remains low, blood pressure can increase excessively due to the intensity of the sprints. Recommended intervals are 1 minute long with approximately 1 minute recovery, at a challenging but still aerobic pace. I’ve tried them and I like them better than sprints anyway.

Another fun thing you can now do with Gemini is use its companion tool Notebook LM to create an infographic summarizing a document. I have made this several times and found them to be of good quality. Doing this for the document with my recommended exercise prescription led to the graph above. Luckily, I didn’t experience any of the “red flag” symptoms.