Training with an agent

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the past months, I have been training with an agent. I expected the agent to do well on traditional weightlifting and be plain on the rest. The insights I got on my Calisthenics program really impressed me.

To set the stage, I am a fairly active person. Bouldering twice a week, Calisthenics on the side, working on my levers and hoping to land a planche one day, Snowboarding in the winter.

Interested in sports, training and performance. I don’t read much, yet, Overcoming Gravity and the New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding are among my readings. I have been paying attention at how I train for a while now. I don’t have professional training but I like to think I have a good understanding of the fundamentals.

I got exposed to the idea of an agent coach. It didn’t strike me as something I was into. I like managing my workouts, understanding the exercises and progressions, figuring out the good position and tension for a better performance, the corrective exercises to compensate the muscle imbalance that could be impeding progress. Working through the reporting, note taking, and doing the agent suggested program. Delegating a lot of this to an agent takes away part of the fun.

Boy, was I wrong.

One day, I figured I could try a Claude project where I’d feed in my training profile. I also detailed my weekly exercise program. Then, I logged a few feedback from my sessions. Finally, I went for asking suggestions to improve my routines, along with some observations about what could be hindering me.

I was pretty impressed when it picked up on my tuck planche hold times, started suggesting that I was actually around the transition point to the advanced tuck planche. Overall, most of the feedback was very aligned with what I was thinking. Now, here comes the kicker, when trying to work towards the progression to the next level. The agent makes it easier to bounce ideas and select my next set of exercises. It cuts down my research and integrates variants I had totally forgotten.

The same way I code heavily with an agent, the agent has been a great coaching partner to help structure my workouts. So much that I found myself giving out notes to the agent about my sessions after them on a daily basis. As usual, context is key. My notes are also focused that way, rather than expending on everything I did, since the program is known. I can focus on high level effort perception, hone in on specific weaknesses or new found improvements. This led to identifying a weaker posterior chain and the corrective program. I haven’t worked on a planche in a couple of month, yet, coming back to it, I could feel it improved from the correction.

Fast forward a few month, circumstances made it so that I was full time snowboarding. This meant having to trying to maintain my upper body strength while I lost access to most equipment and that my focus and energy would shift entirely. With the agent, I designed a plan to maintain upper body stimulus while I would, in practice, mostly doing leg work. After a few month of low intensity, I am glad to say that I feel the strength loss has been minimal and I enjoyed the planning aspects.

In the last month, I started to get a sense of what information made sense, what goes into a profile, some of the interaction flow. Also ideas about how to reduce some of the friction.

Free text program is more ambiguous. Structure is lacking, precise references are harder to anchor. I was mostly on my phone, typing markdown or structure isn’t the best. When discussing one set in the middle of a program, and how to adjust it, at times, it felt like we were talking past each other. If only I had a structured way of iterating on my programs with the agent.

One side project I attempted a few times was a tool to manage my session and assist me while doing them. At the time, I was doing a lot of HIIT, most of the progression was time based exercise and timed rest more than target reps. So this structure just made it easier for a stream with a timer, exercise and hint about the upcoming exercise. What if I revived this structured model and use it as a base to work on the program with the agent.

With the help of my favorite agent, in a different context, I put together a quick database model, api, MCP server to populate the structure. I wired the MCP server into the context where I have been discussing my workouts and asked the agent to populate my session. It got 90% of the program right. The errors were actually the friction points I have been fighting for a month. I corrected the session, told the agent to look again. Boom, we’re both aligned, for the first time in a while.

One project of my playground is slowly taking form. Agent assisted coaching, low key, help me manage my workouts and plan their evolution according to my current form, goals and time. I am not missing out on the fun, I am coming out swinging stronger than ever.

More to come.

Training on my.pgnd.dev

Training with an agent