When a Human Touch is Needed

I’ve been using my AI swim goggles for almost a year. The experience is amazing! I set my goals and objectives for my workouts. Instantly, the goggles adjust the workouts to accommodate. Distances are lengthened or shortened, skills emphasized, sets constructed… all customized for what I need to get better.

Recently I used a new feature to create a customized workout plan. Within seconds the goggles created an 8-week plan designed to help me improve my fitness. Each workout provided me with challenges and sets targeted to the skills that need correction. For example, the many different head movements the goggles track is surprising. They measure how far I roll my head when taking in air, how long it takes me to return my head to neutral after breathing, and my head placement in the water when doing freestyle.

The goggles expose me to new aspects of technique, maybe even some that would be difficult for a human to observe. Other than telling me, and physically positioning my head, I don’t know if a human would be able to track the position of my head so accurately every lap. However, a human might be able to pinpoint why I can’t ever improve my head roll when I breathe to the right side. I suspect it has something to do with some old shoulder injuries on that side, but I can’t figure it out!

To teach me how far to roll my head, the goggles provide me with some guidelines while I’m swimming. It looks something like this:

When I’m swimming, my head is the tiny dot in the middle. As I breathe to the left or right, the dot moves towards the dotted lines. If I roll my head too much, it goes past the dotted line and flashes solid. The idea is to teach me where the sweet spot is for rolling my head to maximize my stroke. However, the right side almost always goes out of bounds. I’ve tried all kinds of adjustments, even only breathing on my right side to get more practice. And yet, I consistently go out of bounds.

The results look like this. Mine are always in the yellow.

I could always breathe to my left doing this exercise and cheat, but I would prefer to figure out how to improve. There are some things even the goggles can’t track enough.

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