The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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September 2025 was the month when I really leaned into using ChatGPT as my coach.
Every day I enter my workouts for the day and the symptoms I registered in my hip during the workouts and afterward. "I back squatted 175 for 5 sets of 5, I went to about 80% depth and stopped as soon as I felt any hip discomfort, I only felt any minor hip discomfort near the bottom of the range of motion. Afterwards, my hip actually felt better than when I started. What does this indicate about my recovery process?"
While I've used ChatGPT for medical diagnostics before, but it seemed like only a minor improvement over Google symptoms => WebMD. But here I'm seeing the value in talking to it constantly about a medical problem. Even if a free LLM is not exactly a doctor, but I coul dnot find a doctor around here who understood an athletic concept like "back squatting 50% of 1rm to 80% depth" or "rolled two five minute rounds in BJJ, starting from bottom De La Riva, I felt a minor twinge when I rotated my leg into single-leg X but I was fine working from guard. My hip hurt a little bit after but was mostly better in the morning." And in order to get the kind of treatment for a minor injury where I could bug a doctor with that every single day, I'd have to be playing for the Lakers, and on a big contract at that. ChatGPT can interpret individual exercises relative to the injury, can analogize it to my knowledge of professional sports injuries ("An NBA player with this injury would be out for 3-6 weeks").
Now where I pull back is that it has very rarely told me not to do anything, or that anything was stupid, and that it's just telling me what I want to hear, or that it's a low-cost version of Voltaire's aphorism that "medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature heals the illness" and that my hip is getting better for simple reasons and that I would do the same things anyway and it's just a yes-man in the background. So maybe I shouldn't drink too much flavor-aid.
But it's nifty.
I'm more torn about how I've been using chatgpt as a coach to help be improve my bicycling. On the one hand, it's super neat and super easy. "Hey, why is it that it seems like I'm going faster and smoother on a road bike, but when I check Strava data I'm going the same speed as on the hybrid?" It gives me answers really easily and in depth. But, idk, shouldn't I be joining my local bike club or bugging my neighbor who is super into bikes or something? It's nifty that I can find this out without interacting with anyone else, but one more nail in the coffin of the requirement for social interaction.
I picked up a knockoff chinesium Oura ring on Amazon. My dad has been going through some cardiac issues, and tracking all his various blood pressures and pulse and Blood-Ox and between the feeling that one ought to track one's own metrics and health and a general curiosity I wanted to pick up a cheap tracker. I'm finding it to be kind of an abusive relationship, the ring says mean things about me and I thank it. "Wow I am really stressed, I better not do anything, thanks ring!"
Lastly, question, are there any alternatives to Strava out there? When I was using it much more occasionally, I didn't care about the subscription features, but now it's kind of annoying me that it's constantly advertising gated features I don't need and being sort of annoying about it. I'd pay $20 up front for something like that, but I don't want a subscription.
For social, no idea. For tracking/logging, I like intervals.icu.
I don't think any wearable measurement that includes the word "score" (stress, sleep, recovery, readiness, ...) is worth a thing after the cost of potential nocebo is accounted for (see e.g. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/bad-bedfellows), for what that's worth.
Interesting, I have the opposite experience with sleep trackers. Rather than feeling wracked with guilt for feeling energetic despite my low sleep score, I feel confused because unless my sleep score is >90 (Garmin) I feel at drowsy and a little sluggish.
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