- Therabody has announced Coach by Therabody, an AI tool
- The tailored coaching program uses data from other fitness apps
- It’s also announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with Garmin
Therabody, maker of some of the best massage guns, is gunning for personalization in 2025 by importing our fitness data from apps like Garmin Connect, Strava, Apple Health and Google Fit, and using that data to offer tailored recovery plans.
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Announced at CES 2025, the Coach by Therabody tool is an AI tool available to Beta testers right now. Using fitness data from the services above and based on input from you regarding to your wellness goals, the coaching algorithm can automatically generate plans to theoretically improve your recovery, providing you have a compatible massage gun: either the Theragun Pro Plus or Theragun Prime Plus.
The video below shows a few brief examples, including a rock climber getting recommended to use a Theragun on her forearms for one minute. Presumably, this pulls through in the app automatically, based on your daily recorded activities.
Watch: Therabody announcement video
While the feature is compatible with multiple services, its connection with Garmin runs deeper than the others. In a blog post, Therabody announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with Garmin, writing that the best Garmin watches “can provide insights into stress levels, Body Battery energy levels and overall cardiovascular performance.
“Therabody scientists will leverage this data to measure the impact of recovery on athletic performance, including how Therabody products and routines affect positive outcomes, changing the face of performance for athletes at all levels.”
It seems as though, in addition to the guided coaching tool, Therabody will be able to improve its AI algorithm in future by feeding it data collected from Garmin smartwatches.
Analysis: AI for AI’s sake?
On the surface, it seems like this isn’t necessarily a useful tool: if you’ve already bought a Theragun for this purpose, it shouldn’t take too much prompting to use it on your sore quads after a heavy squat session. However, Therabody’s top brass seem keen to emphasize its usefulness.
In the same blog post, Therabody CMO, John Solomon says: “It’s important to note that Therabody is not doing AI for AI’s sake.”
“As with all our products, we looked at how AI could solve a problem for our consumers. And over time, feeding it with the rich data from Garmin will allow us to really understand how recovery impacts performance at a scale that’s not been achievable until now.”
There’s also the underlying issue of recovery and percussive massage. While there is evidence that percussive massage can improve range of motion and reduce perceived muscle soreness, there’s still not a lot of hard evidence that massage guns improve or speed up muscular recovery.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
