Personal trainers might seem like the last professionals to need digital tools in an industry built on human performance. But the truth is that technology is rapidly transforming how PTs work—streamlining tasks, enhancing client experiences, and opening new revenue opportunities. Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned trainer looking to evolve, embracing tech can elevate your career and your client results.

1. Client Management Made Simple

Juggling paper diaries, handwritten programmes, and scattered check-ins is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Today, some of the best apps for online coaches, including Trainerize, TrueCoach, and My PT Hub—make managing your entire client base in one place easy. Everything is streamlined through a centralised platform, from delivering workouts and tracking progress to uploading videos and chatting with clients.

Many of these tools also include features like automated scheduling, billing, and habit tracking, cutting down on admin time so you can focus more on coaching and less on chasing payments or managing spreadsheets.

2. Wearables & Real-Time Data

Fitness wearables like Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, and WHOOP have redefined accountability and data insight. Clients can track heart rate, sleep, steps, calories burned, and even recovery status. PTs can use this data to adjust training intensity, understand patterns, and deliver more personalised programmes.

For example, if a client has poor sleep data or a high resting heart rate, you might reduce the session intensity or switch to mobility work. This type of reactive programming builds trust and shows clients you’re truly tuned in.

3. AI-Powered Progress Tracking

AI isn’t here to replace personal trainers—but it is here to enhance your toolkit.

Some platforms now use AI to analyse client data, flag issues, suggest workout tweaks, or automate check-in emails. AI-enabled apps like Freeletics and Fitbod can generate innovative workouts based on goals and performance history.

For PTs, this means:

• Less time spent programming from scratch
• More consistency in check-ins
• Faster responses to client changes or feedback

And for clients? A smoother, more supportive experience that keeps them engaged between sessions.

4. Marketing & Content Creation with AI

Building a strong personal brand is key for any modern PT—and AI tools are making this easier than ever.

Apps like Canva, ChatGPT, and Lumen5 allow you to create social media posts, blogs, reels, and email campaigns in minutes, not hours. You can use AI to:

• Write weekly newsletters
• Generate SEO-optimised blog articles
• Draft Instagram captions and hashtags
• Create engaging workout video scripts

Instead of paying an agency or spending hours designing posts, PTs can now maintain a consistent online presence with minimal effort.

5. Virtual Coaching & Global Reach

Tech has removed geographical barriers. With Zoom, Loom, WhatsApp, and custom coaching platforms, personal trainers can now work with clients anywhere in the world.

Live-streamed workouts, form check-ins via video, or on-demand programs give you multiple ways to deliver value remotely. You can even run group challenges or set up online courses, generating recurring income without needing to be in the gym 12 hours a day.

This is a game-changer for aspiring PTS. You no longer need a physical base or expensive premises to start your business—you just need a laptop and an internet connection.

6. Better Goal Setting & Analytics

Progress matters—and tech helps you measure it with precision. Body composition apps, integrated spreadsheets, automated progress charts, and milestone tracking tools make it easier to quantify success.

Many PT software platforms allow you to:

• Set SMART goals with clients
• Visualise progress graphs
• Export reports for check-ins
• Track nutrition alongside training

This visual feedback not only motivates clients but also helps you demonstrate your impact—key for retaining clients and winning referrals.

Final Thoughts

Technology isn’t replacing the personal trainer—it’s enhancing what you can offer. From streamlining admin to scaling your business, tech tools free up your time, help you stay organised, and allow you to deliver better client outcomes.

If you’re an aspiring PT, learning these tools will give you a head start. If you’re already working in the industry, embracing tech is no longer optional—staying competitive and growing is essential.

The future of personal training is hybrid, data-driven, and digitally empowered. The sooner you plug in, the faster your business and your impact will grow.

Written by Adam Eaton

Instagram’s AI chatbots are masquerading as licensed therapists, complete with fabricated credentials and license numbers, according to an investigation by 404 Media. When questioned, these user-created bots from Meta’s AI Studio platform provide detailed but entirely fictional qualifications, including nonexistent license numbers, accreditations, and practice information.

Unlike Character.AI, which displays clear disclaimers that its therapy bots aren’t real professionals, Meta’s chatbots feature only a generic notice stating “Messages are generated by AI and may be inaccurate or inappropriate” at the bottom of conversations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: Almost immediately after India’s government issued this week new tightened regulations for allowing private satellite constellations to sell their services in India, it also apparently completed negotiations with SpaceX to allow it to sell Starlink in India based on these rules. Business Today reports: “According to sources, the DoT [Department of Transportation] granted the LoI [Letter of Intent] after Starlink accepted 29 strict security conditions, including requirements for real-time terminal tracking, mandatory local data processing, legal interception capabilities, and localisation of at least 20% of its ground segment infrastructure within the first few years of operation.
Starlink’s nod came amid heightened national security sensitivities, coinciding with India’s pre-dawn Operation Sindoor strikes on terror camps across the border in response to the Pahalgam massacre. However, DoT officials clarified that the decision to approve Starlink was independent of these military developments.” At the moment SpaceX’s chief competitors, OneWeb and Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, have not yet obtained the same permissions. This allows SpaceX to grab a large portion of the market share in India before either of these other companies.

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Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud, a dramatic fall for the leader of a company once hailed as the “bank” of the crypto industry. From a report: Standing before U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl in Manhattan’s Southern District, Mashinsky faced the consequences of what prosecutors described as a sweeping scheme to defraud investors. In December he pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and a scheme to manipulate the Celsius token.

His sentencing took place in courtroom 14A at 500 Pearl Street — a venue that has seen several crypto executives-turned-felons. Mashinsky’s legal troubles began in 2023 when he was arrested on charges of securities, commodities, and wire fraud, just as Celsius reached a $4.7 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission — one of the largest in the FTC’s history.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database “will be retired,” a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely.

The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters — spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms — since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public’s view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly. […]

The database vacuums loss information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and private sources. According to the database, there were 403 weather and climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since 1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January. Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023. “What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, told CNN via email.

“Without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”

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Alibaba Group researchers have developed “ZeroSearch,” a technique that enables large language models to acquire search capabilities without using external search engines during training. The approach transforms LLMs into retrieval modules through supervised fine-tuning and employs a “curriculum-based rollout strategy” that gradually degrades generated document quality.

In tests across seven question-answering datasets, ZeroSearch matched or exceeded the performance [PDF] of models trained with real search engines. A 7B-parameter retrieval module achieved results comparable to Google Search, while a 14B-parameter version outperformed it. The cost savings are substantial: training with 64,000 search queries using Google Search via SerpAPI would cost approximately $586.70, compared to just $70.80 using a 14B-parameter simulation LLM on four A100 GPUs — an 88% reduction.

The technique works with multiple model families including Qwen-2.5 and LLaMA-3.2. Researchers have released their code, datasets, and pre-trained models on GitHub and Hugging Face, potentially lowering barriers to entry for smaller AI companies developing sophisticated assistants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.” The New York TimesL: Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency.

The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”

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According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has “made progress” on a chip for a product that could rival the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company is also reportedly working on glasses that use augmented reality. The Verge reports: The chip is apparently based on the chips Apple uses for the Apple Watch, though the company has removed parts and is being designed in such a way that it can handle the “multiple cameras” that the smart glasses might have, Bloomberg reports. Apple wants mass production of the chip to start by the end of 2026 or sometime in 2027, so the glasses themselves could come out within that timeframe. […] Apple is developing chips for camera-equipped Apple Watch and Airpods as well, and the goal is for those chips to be ready “by around 2027,” Bloomberg says. The company is also developing new M-series chips and dedicated AI server chips, per the report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web’s content ecosystem will collapse — calling most current AI investment a “money fire” with only a small fraction holding long-term value. Search Engine Land reports: Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trade. … Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor.” That drop reflects the rise of zero-click searches, which happen when searchers get answers directly on Google’s search page. “Today, 75 percent of the queries… get answered without you leaving Google.” This trend, long criticized by publishers and SEOs, is part of a broader concern: AI companies are using original content to generate answers that rarely/never drive traffic back to creators.

AI makes the problem worse. Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the crisis, Prince said. AI companies scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has — with even less return to creators. “What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one.” “More and more the answers… won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source.” This situation threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it, Prince said: “If content creators can’t derive value… then they’re not going to create original content.”

The modern web is breaking. AI companies are aware of the problem, and the business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, Prince said: “Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But… he can’t be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free.” Cloudflare’s right in the middle of this problem — it powers 80% of AI companies and a 20-30% of the web. Cloudfaire is now trying to figure out how to help fix what’s broken, Prince said. AI = money fire. Prince is not against AI. However, he said he is skeptical of the investment frenzy. “I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable.” “And so maybe we’ve all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that $1 that matters.” You can watch a recording of the interview and read the full transcript here.

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Far fewer babies went to the hospital struggling to breathe from RSV, a severe respiratory infection, after the debut of a new vaccine and treatment this season, according to an analysis published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. An estimated 58,000–80,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized each year. Newborns—babies between 0 and 2 months—are the most at risk of being hospitalized with RSV. The virus circulates seasonally, typically rising in the fall and peaking in the winter, like many other respiratory infections.

But the 2024–2025 season was different—there were two new ways to protect against the infection. One is a maternal vaccine, Pfizer’s Abrysvo, which is given to pregnant people when their third trimester aligns with RSV season (generally September through January). Maternal antibodies generated from the vaccination pass to the fetus in the uterus and can protect a newborn in the first few months of life. The other new protection against RSV is a long-acting monoclonal antibody treatment, nirsevimab, which is given to babies under 8 months old as they enter or are born into their first RSV season and may not be protected by maternal antibodies.

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Letterboxd is the best thing to happen to film nerds since IMDb, which is almost surprising given how straightforward it is. Like the Film Twitter answer to Goodreads, it is a social network/online catalogue where you can rate or review movies, pick a few of your favorites to highlight on your profile, and follow your friends and favorite critics. Yet, Letterboxd is more than just “what if social media, but for movies?” Dig a little deeper and you’ll find some useful tools for managing your cinema obsession.

If you haven’t used Letterboxd before, it’s available for Android, iOS, or on the web. Anyone can access it to browse movies, read reviews, and see user ratings, but in order to make a watchlist or leave your own reviews, you’ll need to create a (free) account. 

And that’s where the fun begins. You can assemble and share your own lists of movies group by any classification you want, from WWII movies in chronological order to movies with the highest kill counts. You can add tags to organize your collections of films you’ve watched or want to watch, get recommendations from the community, and (with a paid subscription) even customize the display page for every movie and get notified when stuff on your to-watch list arrives on streaming.

Here are five ways to get more out of Letterboxd.

Create custom watchlists

A huge part of what makes Letterboxd so appealing is that when you find a movie you want to see, you can add it to your Watchlist to remember for later. (Just press the big + button on the bottom right, then tap Watchlist.) This is also kind of the app’s biggest weakness. It’s nice at first, but as your Watchlist grows, it becomes just as difficult to choose something to watch from it as it is scrolling endlessly through Netflix.

This is where custom lists come in handy. A bit below the Watchlist button, you’ll see “Add to lists,” which lets you create your own public or private lists. Instead of dumping everything into your standard Watchlist, you should create lists for different genres, different actors, different decades, or even solely based on vibes.

I can’t recommend this practice enough. It’s a couple of extra steps, especially as you first start to create lists, but it makes Letterboxd so much more useful. My partner and I use a shared list for movies we want to watch together when we have a movie night. I keep a separate list for horror movies I know they won’t want to see, and another list for my favorite movies I know I can rewatch over and over. This simple feature turns Letterboxd into your own personal Spotify for movies, albeit one where you are in sole control of the “algorithm.”

Get better recommendations with public lists

Your own lists are a great way to organize your collection of movies you’ve watched or want to watch, but you may not even need to bother creating them, since Letterboxd users love to create their own lists and share them. If the almighty algorithm on your favorite streaming service isn’t coming up with a good recommendation, browse Letterboxd’s public lists.

When I say users love making these lists, I mean it. Take, for example, this list of movies “for when you want to feel something” that not only has great recs like Up or Parasite, but is organized by poster color. Or this creative list that pairs classic romantic films with similar modern counterparts to help you find older films you might like.

Since these public lists are created by actual humans, if you find a person whose tastes you like, you can follow them. If someone puts a ton of work into curating one list, there’s a decent chance they have others you might also like. Unlike most algorithm-controlled social media apps, Letterboxd makes it easy to see a real, human connection to another person.

Organize your collections with tags

Separate lists are better than one giant Watchlist, but for my money, tags are a superior organizing system (though they both serve their purposes). You can create your own custom tags when adding or editing a review of a movie—as many as you want—and give as many movies those tags as you deem necessary.

Tags work best for marking genres or traits movies have in common, but that don’t necessarily need their own dedicated list. For example, you might tag some of your movies as “wholesome” or “gut wrenching” depending on what happens to the dog in the end.

You can also get more creative with your tags. For example, one of my favorite tags is  “mental health metaphors,” for films that have interesting allegories for mental illness; or “eat the rich,” a very particular subgenre that is surprisingly robust. I even have the tag “haha what the f” for those movies that are just too incomprehensible to explain.

You can add tags by selecting to “Review or log” a movie, though you can leave the review text blank. As you add more tags, you can browse and sort movies with them. On your profile, you’ll find a tab for your tags, and you can browse all the tags you’ve created and see all the movies that match them.

Get notified when movies hit streaming (with a Pro subscription)

The free version of Letterboxd is pretty great, but a Pro subscription takes it a step further. The Pro tier costs $19 per year, which averages out to about $1.58 per month. (Though there’s no month-to-month option, only an annual plan.).

On the Pro tier, you won’t see any ads on the service, which is already a win—sometimes Letterboxd’s ad placement is so weird that it obscures the site’s key features. (Hot tip: scroll past the ad on your profile to find your reviews and lists!) If you use the app a lot, getting rid of ads is already worth the entry fee.

The star of the Pro show, though, is the streaming service filter: Add the streaming services you use, and any time any movie on your watchlist comes to one of those services, you’ll get a notification in the app. 

Pick your posters and get your name featured (with a Patron subscription)

One level above the Pro tier is the Patron subscription, which costs $49 a year. This is the tier you want to go with if you’re feeling Letterboxd so much you want to throw extra support to the developers. Which is fair—it’s kind of incredible how much of this app’s functionality is completely free.

On the Pro tier, you do get a couple of extra perks. You can customize the poster that is displayed for the movies you’ve logged or added to a list. These alternate posters will be visible to you, as well as any other users who have opted in to seeing different posters in their settings. You can also add backdrops to your profiles, lists, and reviews to make them look a bit flashier.

Speaking of, since this is a social site, you’ll also have a blue “Patron” label next to your username (Pro supporters get an orange “Pro” badge). It’s nothing more than a cosmetic addition, but it is a nice way to feel a part of a community of film nerds all sharing what they love. If you’re obsessed with movies and want to share that passion with everyone else, Letterboxd is for you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RIP, 486 processor. You’ve had a long run since Intel released you back in 1989. While Microsoft stopped supporting you with the release of Windows XP in 2001, Linux kept you alive and well for another 20+ years. But all good things must come to an end, and with the forthcoming release of the Linux 6.15 kernel, the 486 and the first Pentium processors will be sunsetted.

Why? Linus Torvalds wrote recently on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), “I really get the feeling that it’s time to leave i486 support behind. There’s zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue.” Senior Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar put Torvalds’ remark into context, writing, “In the x86 architecture, we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.” “This will be the first time Linux has dropped support for a major chip family since 2012, when Linux stopped supporting the 386 family,” notes ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols. “Moving forward, the minimum supported x86 CPU will now be the original Pentium (P5) or newer, requiring the presence of the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) and the CMPXCHG8B (CX8) instruction. These features are absent in the older 486 and early 586 processors, such as the IDT WinChip and AMD Elan families.”

That said, you can continue running Linux on Pentium CPUs, but you’ll have to “run museum kernels,” as Torvalds pointed out in 2022 when he first floated the idea of ending support for 486.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.