{"id":920656,"date":"2026-07-18T02:11:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T07:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/18\/i-tried-googles-new-health-app-it-cant-replace-a-real-trainer\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T02:11:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T07:11:54","slug":"i-tried-googles-new-health-app-it-cant-replace-a-real-trainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/18\/i-tried-googles-new-health-app-it-cant-replace-a-real-trainer\/","title":{"rendered":"I tried Google\u2019s new health app. It can\u2019t replace a real trainer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Tim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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The Fitbit faithful began expressing concerns almost immediately when Google announced it had acquired the brand in 2021. Many of their fears became a reality last month when the tech giant completely supplanted the Fitbit app with its new Google Health, an AI-focused vitals-tracking suite that removed the final vestiges of Fitbit-ness from the software.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Google has been ramping up to take on a new breed of AI fitness products from the likes of Whoop<\/a>, Oura and Ultrahuman<\/a>, which appeal to athletes looking for insight into their performance but are also trickling down to regular consumers.<\/p>\n

With its new Whoop-like Fitbit Air band (Google is keeping the branding for some hardware products, at least for now) and a revamped $15-per-month fitness-tracking subscription, the tech giant is hoping to stake a claim as the go-to for AI health insights before Apple gets to the market. I\u2019ve been testing it for a few weeks, and it does effectively pull a lot of information into one place. Whether the output is ultimately going to be useful for you is a bit less clear.<\/p>\n

The Google Fitbit Air is a comfy, screenless band that costs $200. <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Meet your Google Health coach<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Anyone with a Google wearable using the Google Health app gets some basic tracking. Depending on your band\u2019s capabilities, you\u2019ll get step, distance, heart rate, sleep, breathing and blood oxygen tracking, and the app will use it all to score your daily readiness so you can adjust workout plans.<\/p>\n

But if you pay monthly for the subscription, you get access to the large library of video tutorials previously called Fitbit Premium Workouts, as well as the new AI coach experience. In the app, it\u2019s just called Coach, but I think of it as the regular Google Gemini wearing a baseball cap and a whistle. It sounds like Gemini, it\u2019s just as verbose and misleadingly confident as Gemini, but it has quick access to all the data collected about your vitals.<\/p>\n

Google sells this as the ability to \u201cask personalised health questions 24\/7 and receive science-backed answers and evidence-based insights\u201d. The idea is that if you tell Coach you\u2019re recovering from a broken arm or are struggling to get a fitness routine going because you get puffed out too easily, it will tailor exercise plans to you with that in mind. It also takes into account the readings your band has taken on your vitals, any information imported to Google Health from other apps, your local weather forecast, how well you slept and more. I know this, because Coach mentions all of these details constantly.<\/p>\n

Using Google Health took a bit of getting used to, primarily because of the AI. Instead of waking up to a quick sleep score or exercise reminder, I\u2019m now waking up to notifications that can only show the first few lines of massive Gemini waffle-dumps that talk about the implications of my sleep on my body\u2019s ability to work, and make suggestions about activities for the day. I also get these sermons before bed (maybe put your runners by the door so you don\u2019t forget!) and after workouts. If it was a real trainer sending me these texts, I would tell them to chill out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The AI coach is very talkative. You can chat to it at any time and view a history of your conversations.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Based on what I told Coach about my fitness goals, it created two tasks for me in the first week \u2013 walk for a total of nine kilometres, and complete two strength-focused workouts. The system\u2019s good in theory, because rather than asking me to set a fitness goal, it just tells me what to aim for, and it gets automatically adjusted the following week.<\/p>\n

The app\u2019s \u201creadiness\u201d metric also seems to work generally well. Coach noticed that an unusually high amount of activity on a weekend (I was unexpectedly roped in to assist at a Scouts camp) resulted in my heart rate staying high overnight. It told me to skip physical activity and drink lots of water on Monday, and my vitals had snapped back to normal by Tuesday.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t used the system long enough to say whether it\u2019s helped me get in shape, but I am starting to have a couple of concerns about how the coach operates. It almost never pushes back on anything I say, and is highly suggestible to changes I want to make to its routines. It\u2019s not consistent. I\u2019ve occasionally caught it making mistakes and then removing its posts. Like all generative AI, it\u2019s difficult to tell if it\u2019s right or if it just has the semantic markers of being right.<\/p>\n

The Fitbit Air does a good job of tracking sleep, though the coach can be a bit jumpy about messaging you the second you\u2019re awake, even if you\u2019ve just had to get up at 3am to soothe a child.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Coach in the machine<\/h3>\n

Aside from general AI issues, the app also has a specific problem that will probably improve over time; the new Gemini coach isn\u2019t particularly well integrated into what is still largely the same old app. When I received my strength training goal, the coach suggested a few options for workouts, but it looked like a lot of reading and explaining so I asked if strength workouts from the video library counted. It said they absolutely did. However, as I completed them, my goals didn\u2019t update.<\/p>\n

Coach promised to remember that I had in fact done my weekly strength training, but it still consistently nagged me about it in its morning missives.<\/span>Tim Biggs<\/span><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I asked the coach about this, it said that it only gets information on my vitals from which it deduces I\u2019m working out. It doesn\u2019t get information from the Fitbit videos about what I\u2019m actually doing. I told it which videos I\u2019d done and asked it to update the checklist, which it promised to do, but later admitted it couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

When pushed, the coach told me that real progress and doing the work was more important than ticking boxes (which is true enough) but that if I wanted the boxes ticked I would need to agree that I\u2019d done the specific activities it described in the plan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From a certain perspective, you might view this as a benefit. At least I got an explanation as to why the app hadn\u2019t behaved as expected. But on the other hand, what reason do I have to trust its explanations? It was wrong about its own capabilities at least twice, despite saying things that sounded plausible. Is that also the case when it tells me something about my body\u2019s vital signs?<\/p>\n

As another example, at one point after a long walk, the coach congratulated me and said that I had \u201clikely\u201d completed half of my weekly distance goal. That struck me as odd, so I checked the workout summary and saw it had the walk listed as zero kilometres. When I asked the coach, it gave me a plausible explanation; that I may have location permissions disabled, or maybe I had selected \u201cwalk\u201d instead of \u201coutdoor walk\u201d so the system didn\u2019t activate GPS tracking.<\/p>\n

I knew this was bogus, because the summary had a detailed map of where I had walked. I pointed this out to the coach and it replied \u2014 somewhat bizarrely \u2014 \u201cthat is definitely a classic ghost in the machine moment\u201d. What? I guessed the distance and logged it manually.<\/p>\n

As a method of summarising all your fitness data and helping you plan your activities, the new Google Health is effective enough. But as a stand-in for a coach or trainer, it\u2019s exactly like using Gemini as a stand-in for an artist, editor or counsellor. Uncanny.<\/p>\n

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.<\/a><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"TimTim Biggs<\/a> is a writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games.<\/span>Connect via X<\/a> or <\/span>email<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Fitbit faithful began expressing concerns almost immediately when Google announced it had acquired the brand in 2021. Many of their fears became a reality last month when the tech giant completely supplanted the Fitbit app with its new Google Health, an AI-focused vitals-tracking suite that removed the final vestiges of Fitbit-ness from the software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":920657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,267],"tags":[6308,7419],"class_list":["post-920656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-googles","category-health","tag-googles","tag-health"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}