TECHOCENE: FITNESS AND FEMTECH

AI FITNESS TOOLS THAT PRIVILEGE "PROGRESS" OVER THE CYCLICAL AND THE REGENERATIVE LEAVE WOMEN BEHIND. HOW MIGHT WE EVEN THE SCALE?

By Hannah Ongley

The other day at the gym, I knocked my headphones off while trying to do overhead cable tricep extensions and opened up a whole new world. Raw-dogging Gold’s feels almost illicit, like tuning into a private frequency of raw human exertion: metal clanking, men grunting, the dull thud of weights hitting rubber flooring. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the best part is the unsolicited advice. There’s one guy who always tells me when I’m doing something wrong. If I’m pretty sure I’m messing up an exercise I just learned on TikTok while hiding in a stall in the women’s locker room, I’ll try to catch his eye, baiting a free form check. The advice is polite and useful, entirely free of the toxic masculinity we’ve come to associate with male-dominated gym environments.

After decades of practice, I’ve mastered the art of pushing myself and wrecking my body in the process, earning two badges you can’t access on the Apple Health app: hypothalamic amenorrhea and secondary hypothyroidism. Since swapping running for weights and letting my Fitness+ subscription expire, my iPhone has been pushing me a series of personalized demotivational insights: You’re doing fewer steps than this month last year! You burned fewer calories over the last 20 weeks! I know I’m actually making progress, because I’m tracking it myself in my Notes app. (The most jacked gym bros use old-school notepads and biros.) Going analog-ish is how I’ve stopped outsourcing my instincts to an algorithm. In an era of AI fitness influencers and slick wearables, it feels like an act of resistance, or at least self-respect.

Meanwhile, AI fitness coaching has crept into almost every major platform. Apps like Nike Run Club and Fitbit Coach use machine learning to adjust training recommendations, guide recovery, and track performance over time. Apple’s new Workout Buddy, announced at WWDC 2025 this month for watchOS 26, organizes your data and repackages it as encouragement, chiming in mid-workout when your stats change. The disembodied voice is upbeat and useless. It can tell you you’re nearing a milestone or that your heart rate is elevated, but it doesn’t know when you’re about to tear a rotator cuff, or about the correlation between your resting heart rate and menstrual cycle.

Many anticipated that Apple would use WWDC 2025 to introduce new FemTech features in Apple Health, particularly around menstrual, fertility, or cycle tracking. Analysts discussed the possibility in the months leading up to the event, it delivered no dedicated women’s health innovations. Instead we got Workout Buddy, a piece of FitTech, i.e., ManTech, that assumes a physiological consistency over the course of a month, and that yelling motivational insights is a helpful way to address the fluctuations in mood that accompany a woman’s performance variability.

I’m reminded of how multidisciplinary artist and writer Jenny Odell describes optimization culture—how it encourages people to treat their lives and bodies as systems to be improved. “In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous,” she writes in How to Do Nothing, her 2019 manifesto on the desire to resist the pressures of capitalist productivity. “Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

Odell argues for a different kind of attention, one that leaves room for fluctuation and stillness. It makes me wonder what women’s FitTech would look like if it worked that way. What would it take to build something that doesn’t see bodies either as systems that need optimizing or symptoms that need to be managed? The typical health app offers some balance and support, but physical variability and physiological complexity are still problems to be smoothed out. You can log your mood or energy level, but the structure stays fixed even when your body won’t cooperate.

Odell’s wariness toward that rise-and-grind productivity mindset is proliferating across culture. People are turning to film cameras, silent retreats, and journaling by hand in an effort to exit systems that promise improvement and deliver anxiety. Analog methods of tracking fitness data, like pen-and-paper logging or, if it counts, using the Notes app, feel like a way to resist health data surveillance and hypochondria. As the author Shoshana Zuboff reminds us in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, wearables and wellness devices generate not just personal data, but behavioral surplus—intimate metrics scraped and sold to shape future decisions. This isn’t just about what gets tracked, but how, and for whom. The more these tools promise personalized care, the more they rely on collecting data users can’t always control or interpret.

Even Apple’s approach, which emphasizes data processing on-device to protect privacy, doesn’t resolve the core issues. Workout Buddy handles heart rate and calories locally, but expanding into deeper women’s health features would likely require sending more data to cloud servers for complex analysis and machine learning. These processes allow AI to access more computing power and aggregate data from many users to improve predictions. But cycle data is not just physiological input. Especially post-Dobbs, these records carry social, legal, and political weight. On-device guarantees might not convince users who know cloud access is often necessary for advanced AI functions, and they might trick users who don’t. Trust would demand more than privacy promises. It would necessitate rethinking what our data is used for and how it is framed in marketing and design.

Female physiology challenges the assumptions built into most fitness tracking algorithms, which expect consistency and often treat hormonal shifts as noise rather than valuable signals. Wild.AI—founded in 2017 by Hélène Guillaume, a data scientist and athlete with a background in finance and quantitative analysis—is one example of fitness tech that sees women’s mood and performance fluctuations as a data goldmine instead of a mess of confounding variables. It takes in cycle data, symptoms, birth control status, and life stage to adjust workout and recovery plans—pulling from wearables like Oura and Garmin, along with manual input, then scoring your readiness based on where you’re at each day.

Similarly, some wearables are starting to acknowledge female physiology with more nuance. WHOOP, for instance, offers cycle tracking that adjusts strain and recovery recommendations based on hormonal phases. Oura introduced insights aimed at highlighting menstrual cycle effects on sleep and readiness. Beyond just registering data, these devices are now having a go at interpreting how performance fluctuates day-to-day in ways traditional trackers overlook. Right now, much interpretation relies on user input rather than fully autonomous AI, but this signals a move away from the male-default model that assumes a flat baseline for all bodies. In practice, it could mean a wristband that actually adapts to the reality of shifting energy levels and mood instead of enthusiastically reminding you that you’re doing worse today than you were last week.

On the privacy front, several new devices aim to give women control over how their most sensitive data is handled. One example is Clue, the period and fertility tracker that has long marketed itself on transparency and security, avoiding third-party trackers and selling data. Another is Eve by Glow, which recently launched a decentralized data vault where users store their health information locally, reducing exposure to corporate harvesting. Open-source projects like Open Humans go further, creating platforms where users can integrate and share health data on their own terms, with an emphasis on consent and privacy. These efforts respond to the heightened stakes for women’s data post-Dobbs and suggest a future where fitness tech can be empowering instead of exploitative.

Amid all these new possibilities, I love Gold’s because it’s chaotic and the interruptions feel human. My personal trainer is a Turkish guy who’s obsessed with white rice and greets me between sets by asking me, in broken English, to confirm that I’m eating it. I have to say yes because it makes him so happy; the fact the rice was pasta is surely having a negligible impact. But outside of my muscle glycogen replenishment strategy, no one is scanning my vitals or asking me whether I’ve ovulated. You lift what you can and try to lift more next time. If something hurts in a bad way, you stop. If it hurts in a good way, you keep going. The feedback is immediate and pretty accurate without an algorithm sorting it into a fancy chart. Maybe the best fitness technology for women won’t be the most advanced, but the kind that listens to our bodies’ signals without translating them into productivity metrics, or at least treats our own insights as essential data instead of problems to fix.