Burn Fat, Boost VO₂ Max & Live Longer — Science of CAROL Bike’s 8-Minute Workout With Ulrich Dempfl

Hey there, I'm Claudia von Boeselager, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, longevity coach, biohacker, and mother of two. Once burnt out and overwhelmed with chronic health issues, I've transformed my life and helped thousands of people do the same. I've even reduced my biological age by 17 years. Yes, I'm 26 again. Now I'm here to share the tools, strategies, and inspiration to help you live healthier, happier, and longer. On this podcast, I interview world-leading experts in health, biohacking, mindset, and performance. And share personal stories and learnings to bring you the latest insights and tips. Think of this as your go-to space for real talk about all things health and optimizing your life. Ready to unlock your best self? Let's dive in. This is the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast.

So welcome back to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm Claudia von Boeselager, and today we are diving into one of my favorite topics, how to get maximum health and longevity benefits in minimum time. My guest today is Ulrich, or Ulrich, Demblin. Ulrich Kempfle, co-founder and CEO of CAROL, the world's first exercise bike designed to deliver reduced exertion HIIT or REHIT outside of a lab setting. Ulrich started his career as a mechanical engineer working with Europe's top automobile manufacturers before moving to London, where he pioneered AI in the UK Health Service. A BBC documentary on REHIT inspired him to co-found CAROL. After 40 prototypes, and we're going to dig into this, they created the world's only Rehit bike, which delivers the benefits of a 45-minute run in under 10 minutes. So I'm very excited to share this with you today. The results have been life-changing. Ulrik will share about this, but he personally improved his cardio health by 50%, lost 10 kilos or 22 pounds, and normalized his blood pressure, which is so important for so many of us. Today, Carol is helping people everywhere optimize their health and longevity. So Ulrik, welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm so excited to be in person with you today.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jumping in quickly, it's Claudia von Boeselager. I absolutely love bringing you these conversations for free each week, and I can do that thanks to the generous support of our sponsors. These are brands I've personally vetted and believe in, and I think you'll love them too. Supporting them means you're also supporting the show and your own longevity journey. Thanks for supporting them. Now, here's today's sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Carole Bike. Did you know that one of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you live is your VO2 max? It's a key indicator of your cardiovascular fitness. The challenge is VO2 max naturally declines by about 10% every decade after age 30. As someone who's always looking for the most efficient ways to optimize my health and longevity, I knew I needed something that fit into my busy schedule. That's where Carole Bike comes in. Backed by published research, this isn't just another stationary bike. Carole uses AI-powered reduced exertion HIIT, or ReHIIT, to deliver the same cardio benefits as a 45-minute jog in under 5 minutes—just 2 short sprints. Studies show Carole can improve your VO2 max by 12% in just 8 weeks. Making you up to 10 years fitter. It's truly a game changer. If you wanna future-proof your health and longevity without spending hours in the gym, check out carolbike.com/claudia for a $300 discount just for you, dear audience. That's carolbike.com/claudia.

So I'd love to dig into your beginning in mechanical engineering. And the automotive world. What drew you from cars to cardio?

So life is a winding river, and sometimes it takes you to places also by chance. What I always wanted to do is design a product, design ideally something you can sit on. At first, that was cars, and as a mechanical engineer from Germany, that's the obvious choice. And I worked for a few years in the automotive industry, and then actually personal reasons really meant I wanted to relocate to London, and there's not many automotive makers, car makers here. And so I transitioned into healthcare and worked a lot with hospitals, which are in some ways factories with humans inside. And our mission there was to make patient care better and more cost-effective. Prevention and preventing disease is really the key. That's the thing where the big bugs are and where you get the big gains. And so we worked with all the big hospitals in London, actually. I know them all, and did some pretty cool stuff around using AI and machine learning to identify which patients would benefit from specific interventions and then designed disease management programs for people with heart conditions or metabolic conditions. And that's all good. And it's cool to do cool stuff to identify who benefits. But there, there is a quite basic fundamental truth, which is that exercise is really one of the, maybe the most powerful intervention for most of us, including our patients at the time. The problem is just people don't do it. In the Western world, if you look, you find that maybe 5% of the population does the recommended amount of cardio exercise each week. So it's incredibly low and people leave massive benefits, massive health benefits, fitness benefits, quality of life benefits untapped. They leave them on the table. When you ask them, so, and that's survey after survey, why the top answer is always lack of time. There's a debate whether that's the real reason or whether there's a bit of laziness, yeah, whether it's an excuse. But then on the other hand, there's trillion-dollar companies competing for your time, the attention economy. So we've chosen to believe people when they say that it's time and lack of time that holds them back from exercising. And when we came across the science of Rehit, we thought that is really a game changer and can shift the needle because it takes away the time constraint and that hurdle because it's incredibly short, incredibly efficient. You need, I mean, you can do it in as little as 5 minutes and you only have to do it 2 to 3 times a week to get fantastic cardiovascular metabolic health benefits. And yeah, it almost sounds too good to be true.

We're going to dig into this.

When we first heard about it, like my initial reaction was just, I want to do this. And yeah, then things grew from there. So exciting.

And I'm going to dig into a bunch of it, but I understand that you saw the BBC documentary on rehit, right? So what made you think this is the solution? People don't have time. I want to make this my passion. Is that, was that an aha moment?

So that was in 2012, a while ago, the late Dr. Michael Mosley presented the science of rehit. He had, um, Dr. Niels Vollard, Professor Jamie Timmons on the show and showcased what fantastic health benefits you can obtain with really minimal amount of time. And now REHIT stands for reduced exertion, high intensity interval training. Many people will be familiar with HIIT, and HIIT is no question, it's very effective. It's a very effective training method. But most HIIT classes first take 20 or 30 minutes or 35. Something. Yeah, exactly. By the time you're done. They're very strenuous. You're definitely sweat-drenched afterwards. And now the promise of REHIT was, and this is specifically scientists titrating down how much sprinting, how much vigorous activity do you have to do to get the benefits of HIIT. And they found that 2 20-second sprints are enough to get the benefits of a much longer HIIT session. Or the benefits and greater benefits than a 45-minute run. And I remember very well, Michael Mosley did the workout in his suit because most people, most people don't even sweat. We don't overemphasize that too much because we anyway have to grapple with it.

So yeah, I didn't, but yeah.

And people at some point, people don't believe it anymore because they say that is too good to be true. If you don't even sweat 5 minutes and you don't even sweat, come on. And it is, you know, some people are really prone to sweating. Everybody's maybe 1 in 10, they will break a sweat, but most people will sweat very little or not at all. No, when I saw that, it was just love at first sight and I thought, I want to do this. And at first I really thought of it just for myself and I went the very next day. So kind of impulsive.

So like mission-driven, you feel like I want to.

To an equipment store, fitness equipment store. Yeah. And got myself an exercise bike and I had paid close attention to what they've said and thought, okay, I need this and that. It needs to be good for sprinting. I got it, tried it at home, and it was nothing like what they had described on television.

Can you explain for people what the difference is? Because some people might be listening or watching and they might be like, oh, but I've got an exercise bike, or, you know, I even own a Peloton as well, and it's different.

The difference, my experience was first, the whole thing wasn't easy. The warm-up, recovery, and cool-down, I went hard, and then the sprints, I tried to go very hard, but it was also difficult to find the right resistance, apply it at the right time. I sweated a lot. It was just an unpleasant experience. Yeah.

You were more stressed trying to figure out, am I doing this right? So, et cetera. Yes.

And, and so that was really, yeah, a big disappointment. But instead of just putting it in the corner and, and giving up, we, we called Professor Timmins, Dr. Vollert, and said like, what's up?

I saw you on TV.

Yes, it does work. And literally the very first thing they said is, well, you need a special bike. Okay.

It's like, now you tell me. Yeah, exactly.

Why didn't you say that on the program? Exactly. Could have saved, yeah, buying a very, very expensive clothes hanger. And so they invited us to their lab and let us do the workout on their equipment. And that was really a completely different experience. It was, uh, I don't wanna say completely easy, but a fairly, a much easier experience. I, I did not sweat and it was something that I thought, yes, that I can actually do 2 to 3 times per week. And now the, the issue was the equipment they used was research equipment. The bikes were around $10,000 apiece. And then the real sticking point was even if you could afford that, you, you needed a second person to operate the bike for you. So you needed a lab technician or kind of a very well experienced trainer or so to operate the bike for you. And that's just not a solution. That's, that's okay for, for a lab study in an academic environment. It's not okay for consumers. And that's where we thought, hang on, why can't we just build an automated bike that just truthfully replicates the workouts as they're done in the lab and make that a product with like a mass market application. Yeah. And that's, that's, that we resolved to do that. We were very passionate about it. And yes, that was a long journey. Yeah.

40 prototypes. So tell us about that. What was, because especially you coming from being a mechanical engineer, so probably no better person to try to figure it out, but what was that journey? What were those 40 iterations? Yeah.

So very, put very simply, having a concept idea to having actually something that reliably works and is a pleasant, good experience just takes a lot of time. Time. And I mean, the, the very early prototypes were actually functioning quite well, but then looked clunky, didn't stay consistent over time. We, when we did trials with real people, they had trouble with them. So there, there was just a lot of iterating until we got to a first package that we launched in 2000, late 2018. And then our second bike that we launched summer '22, which then also looked beautiful and had like all the learnings from thousands of riders. Um, built into it. So it's just, uh, even if you, if you know quite well what you want to do to make a nice product, there's, it takes a while. Exactly.

Yeah. Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say. And I'll share my journey with the Cowboy Bike this morning. I had finally had a chance. It was installed yesterday. I finally had a chance to try it myself. And it's so almost counterintuitive because I'm the type that is always like, I have to push as hard as possible. It was like, Slow down at the beginning, like any of nice music. I did the Tiger program, which is the very first one. So it was all, I was like, oh, why are they calling it Tiger? I'll tell you in a minute. And listening to this soft forest and going very slow and pedaling. And then it's like, but then all of a sudden, so it's like voice that talks to you at the same time. The Cyber Tooth Tiger is there, go as fast as you can. So I'm like pedaling like a crazy person as well, but it's for a short sprint. And as you said as well, it almost feels too easy. I'm like, this is really improving my VO2 max. And I wanna dig a little bit more into that as well. But it's, it's wonderful because as you know, someone with two kids and multiple businesses and so many different things going on, that time factor is like, do I really have time to get to the gym to do the class, to do this or that, or should I do something else today? And what I really love as well is that you don't need to control figuring out, am I doing the right one or not, et cetera. There's just no choice. You just push as hard as you can and you go. So it takes the effort out of it.

As we know, decision fatigue is real, so you still It takes the mental effort out of it and it makes it very easy to get it right. The re-hit works because you momentarily push to your maximum intensity, to your maximum power. And to achieve that, a few things have to come together. So you, you need to have your optimal resistance. Um, it needs to be applied at the right time. And that is after you've accelerated at a low resistance to a very high pedal speed., and then it needs to be applied very quickly, very rapidly. That's what in the lab a coach did, a lab technician did, and which now our bike does in a fully automated way. And, and that just makes it very easy to get the exercise right. And I think one thing where we, um, have a real edge compared to that old lab equipment, and this is by the way why the leading labs in that field do their research on CARO bikes. Yeah, no, we're very proud of that. I think that's quality stamp. Yeah, exactly. Which also means that all the latest research, well, I shouldn't say all, but the leading labs work with our bikes and some of the latest research on rehab is really done on our machines. So you have that additional great validation and reassurance. And that's to get that right on a normal exercise bike would just be very difficult and probably unsatisfying. There's obviously, we have a product that can actually do many things, but that's really optimized for rehab.. And if you want to do rehab, if you want to get like the most efficient cardio, then that is a great way to do it. There are some alternatives. So hill sprints, for example, that's I think a legitimate way to try to achieve the same thing and very low cost alternative. If you have a hill and you can sprint, by all means try it. Yeah.

And there's no traffic in the way or— Yeah.

Most people just like after 30 don't sprint anymore. That just doesn't— No, literally that doesn't happen. People are over the age of 30, if you, if you don't compete in a sport anymore, usually don't sprint. But that is exactly where the magic happens and where you get the greatest benefit in the shortest amount of time. So it's actually a shame that that has fallen away. And that's where, yeah, our product comes in and, and CAROLBIKE and REHIT comes in to basically bring that back.

I'm really excited now to dig into VO2 max and longevity because Perhaps some people will obviously know this, but it's one of the key indicators and predictors of lifespan and healthspan as well. It's actually stronger than cholesterol, blood sugar, or BMI. VO2 max, which is often called the number one predictor of longevity. Why is that? Why is it so important? Why should people really be focusing on VO2 max? Yeah, sure.

So first, it's an observation. There's a little bit of black box in the middle, but we're very clear, and my understanding, it is the strongest correlate for life expectancy. So there's nothing, no other physiological marker that predicts life expectancy more strongly than VO2 max.

So I just want to reiterate that for people listening, there's no stronger predictor of longevity than VO2 max.

So, right, we have to listen to this. And, and now what is VO2 max? VO2 max is your ability to metabolize, to burn oxygen while exercising, and it's your maximum ability to burn oxygen. And to achieve that, Many things have to happen and be right. So there's, there's two sides to it. There's, there's oxygen consumption on the one side, and that is about mitochondrial function, mitochondrial health. Mitochondria are the parts in your cells that help you burn oxygen. So that's how many, how big, how functional mitochondria do you have to help you metabolize oxygen? And then the other side is around oxygen delivery. That's your lungs, your heart. What's your peak flow, your stroke capacity, what's your capillarization of your muscles, your plasma levels. So there's really very many things that have to come together to have a high VO2 max. And altogether, they, that's just the observation and the, what we see. It means if you have a high VO2 max, you have, yeah, if you increase your VO2 max, you really do something great for life expectancy, for longevity. There's some shocking statistics around that. They're big studies. So very, very highly powered studies with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of participants. So the science of that is absolutely clear. That tracked people over many years and looked at real endpoints. So like avoidable deaths. And you've mentioned some statistics. One I really like, and even though it sounds a bit macabre, but so low cardiorespiratory fitness. Low VO2 max leads to more avoidable deaths than smoking, diabetes, and obesity combined. Wow. And those are, those are big things when we think about our health, when we think about longevity, those are things that we would think of and try to improve. But low cardiorespiratory fitness leads to more avoidable deaths than those three combined. And yeah, that sounds a bit like macabre, but there's a really positive side to it because VO2 max is a marker that you can work on, that you can improve, and that you can improve dramatically in even a relatively short period of time.

And that's the good news. Exactly. Because some people might say, well, I missed the boat, or maybe I'm sort of late 40s, I haven't gotten started on time. It's applicable across the board, any age, would you say?

No, there's first VO2 max declines with age very clearly. So we see all of us on average, a 10% decline in VO2 max per decade. Decade. Okay.

I was like, per year would be dreadful. No, decade.

Okay. Per decade. But the good news is you can, with, yeah, with tools like the CAROL bike and with workouts like Freehit, with very little time investment, offset a lot of that. So research has shown, and we see this in our data, that over an 8-week period, doing 3 very short workouts per week. So 8 minutes, 5 to 8 minutes spending, so 15 to 25 minutes per week, you can improve your VO2 max and you can expect to improve your VO2 max by around 12%. Wow. That's very substantial. So there's more than a decade of aging that you'd offset. And for the average person, that would translate into 2 years additional life expectancy. That's a phenomenal ROI in terms of what you put into it and what you get out of it. It also doesn't stop there. So if you continue the improvements, most people see that further, further improvements. In my first year, I improved my VO2 max by 50%.

So one year. Yes. And obviously the baseline was maybe not so great, but that's— yeah, but still, that's a huge jump. Exactly.

Exactly. And that's not everybody. But seeing 20, 30% improvement is entirely plausible, and that's, that's common. And so it does, yeah, it offers really fantastic benefits in very, very little time. In terms of why this is so effective, there's—

how good to be true, like what, such a short space of time, how is it possible? So exactly, can you explain a bit the science and also what the research is saying?

That would be really helpful. So one thing that we emphasize is, and this is true for, for any workout, you don't really get fitter while working out. You get fitter in the recovery. Between your workouts. So what the workout has to do, it has to provide a training stimulus, an adaptation stimulus. And with REHIT, with those two 20-second sprints, you can trigger a very powerful training stimulus in exceptionally little time. And the secret there is intensity. So you push to your max intensity. Then, um, if we want, we can go a little bit deeper into this. So, so you, simulate an emergency situation, like the tiger coming after you. And that's sort of very probably picked as like some motivation while you're doing the workout. And the energy demand in your muscles increases by a factor of 100 compared to rest. So you cause momentarily a really severe energy crisis in your muscles. They respond they try to mobilize lots of energy, get you ready for, yeah, for a situation where you have to run for your life. And there your body has to tap into the fastest acting energy systems. And so that's first phosphocreatine. And then after about 10 seconds, it's glycogen, which is a storage form of sugar that's, that's locally stored in your muscle. And your body mobilizes lots of glycogen. So it mobilizes about 25 to 30% of the glycogen stored in your thighs within seconds. Within seconds. Wow. Okay. And from an energy perspective, that would sustain you for a much longer period and for a much longer workout. So, so you don't burn through all of this, but your body mobilizes it. It takes it out of the stores and bound to the glycogen are important signaling molecules, AMP, that get activated. And that get activated to AMPK and then trigger a whole cascade of biological signaling, activating what's called PGC-1α, which is your body's master regulator for mitochondrial biogenesis. And so through those very, very short sprints, you can send a very powerful signal to your body that it has to get fitter and stronger. And that's something you achieve Yeah, just if you go to maximum intensity and that you achieve in so little time only with maximum intensity. With long exercise, you, you actually end up with the same endpoint. So you also activate PGC-1α, but through a different adaptation pathway. And that requires 45 to 60 minutes of steady state or steady contractions. Then you, you activate what's called the calcium channel pathway. So C-A-M-K. But we, and with Carbo Bike, with Rehit, you activate the AMPK pathway in seconds. And so we get the same and better results in, yeah, a fraction of the time. And you know what's really very curious and really very much unlike any other workout, unlike any exercise, is Rehit is one of the, to my knowledge, is the only workout where more doesn't give more benefits. It's like the minimum effective dose. Yeah, but not only that, the data is quite clear that if you do more sprints, you don't get more benefits. And the data suggests even that if you do more sprints or longer sprints, you get less benefits. So if you did, oh, I do 6 sprints and they're 40 seconds, much more, much better. No, it's not true. You seem to get less benefits. And that our academic partners is complex biological processes, but the presumption is that if you do more and longer sprints, psychology, your mind kicks in and you pace yourself. You try to get through the workout. You try not to collapse before the end. You're at your best and you're not operating at your max, but you're at 80%, 90%. And then you just don't trigger that cascade, that signaling pathway, whereas REHIT, it's just long enough so the pathway does get activated and triggered, and it's short enough so that you can actually go all out in those 20 seconds. Yeah. 2 20 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you can actually push to your limits. It's short enough. I like to compare it to, it's a very short tunnel. Almost as soon as you enter it, you can see the ends.

I know they have a countdown time on the screen at the end of everyone. So I was like, okay, this is great.

I can tell. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And also the machine counts you down when to start. And so it takes a lot of the mental load. And so that's how we can kind of that really, yeah, like hack of rapid glycogen depletion. That is the secret of, or not the secret, that's why it is so efficient and how you can get, yeah, really quite fantastic benefits. Not just VO2 max, it's much, much wider. So there's really many things happening in your body. So cardiorespiratory fitness, VO2 max, but also metabolic health, muscle gain. The forces are so high that it's meaningful for, for muscular strength. Wow. Okay. There's, there's a great deal of, of brain benefits and mental and cognitive benefits. BDNF production. Exactly that. Yes. So there's this relatively recent studies that have shown that you get a much greater BDNF release from short, vigorous sprints compared to a longer steady-state exercise. So 5, 6 times higher. And BDNF is really important for brain health, for neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, memory formation. It has lots of things. It does lots of things for your neurotransmitters, for serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. So there's a raft of benefits. Some of it is reflective that exercise is just so important. And and so powerful. And that rehab just takes all these benefits from exercise and compresses them in a really short period of time.

I know it's like magic, honestly. It's too good to be true. And I'm curious, I want to pick up on the mitochondrial health. So is it triggering mitophagy? So the clearing out of old mitochondria and creating new mitochondria, what exactly is happening at the mitochondrial level? Because we know it's like the energy packs of the cells for people maybe unfamiliar. What is happening there during these short sessions?

Yes, by autophagy and the renewal. Yes, I attributed more to fasting, which is a great thing and people should fast. There's many good things we should do. What we do know for reHIT is the mitochondrial biogenesis leading to more larger and more efficient mitochondria. And that is triggered through because you have a very robust PGC-1-alpha release and activation. From the sprints. And so in our view and the academics that we work with, this is first very effective and definitely the most efficient way to improve mitochondrial health. A little bit of arguments are other people who, who claim that, oh, for mitochondrial health, you should be doing zone 2 training and the bike is wonderful for zone 2 training if you wanted to do longer sessions, which apparently is better for men than women, by the way.

So.

Yeah, that's what I've heard too. Yes, exactly. But there's very clearly some of the very leading researchers in this field tell us, and, and there's also new papers written about that, that that seems to be really not the case, or at least there's no evidence for that. And then when it comes to efficiency, if you compare 3 times 5 to 8 minutes for rehab per week versus 4 to 5 times 90 minutes on lower intensity zone 2 training. There's just no question about it. It's, so zone 2 training, we don't want to poo-poo it at all. It's a great addition if you have lots of time or you're really ambitious. And professionals, very clearly, like pro cyclists do lots of zone 2 training as well. But for most people, if they have to think about what do I do with my limited time, the highest ROI clearly on VHIIT. And this would be kind of the the foundation, or we would recommend to make that the foundation in your stack because there's lots of good things that you can do for your health. And if you, if you want to be a health optimizer, if you want to be a biohacker, you could do this all day, every day and see results, but you wouldn't be doing much else.

And so life is, you know, people want to live a variety in life and not just focusing on optimizing.

Then yeah, do the things you love. And if you, if you love Zone 2, Fine. Also great. But if you, if you want results, then Vhead is really, would be our go-to recommendation. Amazing.

And I'd love if we could link the research in the show notes then as well. So if you want to go down those rabbit holes, that would be brilliant. So I'd like to touch on metabolic health in particular, right? So we know that this is a huge issue. 93% of US adults, 93%, have at least one marker of poor metabolic health. So it could be blood sugar. Blood pressure, cholesterol, waist circumference. And as we know, poor metabolic health accelerates aging and disease. So how does reHIT impact insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility, two key factors in healthy aging? Yeah.

So first, a bit like VO2 max, there's, we, we know the input and the output. We know that metabolic health is incredibly important for longevity, life expectancy, quality of life is a risk factor for many other diseases. So clearly something people should take seriously and sadly is in a very, very poor state in the West, almost around the US, but it's getting more and more countries. And the other thing we know is that exercise is an incredibly powerful way to improve your metabolic health there. So again, those are proper scientific studies that have shown that in 8 weeks doing HIIT workouts 3 times a week, you could reduce, or you can expect to reduce your risk of developing metabolic diseases by 62%. Wow. 62%. Wow. 62%. Yes. There was a control group that did 150 minutes of moderate intensity. Now they also saw a significant risk reduction. They saw a risk reduction of 26%. That's just good news, folks. So, so that shows exercise is really powerful more broadly, but with much less time, you got more than twice the risk reduction with REHIT. That was exactly as you described. So that was measured by a score, it's called the MetS score. That is a clinical compound score of things like cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides, waist circumference, and then a fifth one, I think blood pressure. And the reduction that was observed was the same as you'd expect from taking prescription medication like metformin. So it's a very, very meaningful risk reduction with minimal time involved. You get all the other benefits. So given how, like, what a massive public health, like, both on a population and on a personal level, what a big problem this is. Here's a solution that can dramatically improve your metabolic health in very, very little time. Now, why is that so effective? So as I said, complex biological processes, but insulin, one of its functions is to regulate how we access energy, how we store energy, how we access energy in our fat stores, how we access energy in our blood, in our muscles. And once we, if you empty out your glycogen stores and deplete your emergency energy reserve, you send like your body wants to replenish that as quickly as possible because it wants to be ready for the next, it needs a buffer, an emergency. Exactly. It wants to be ready for whatever. Yeah, if there's an egg. Yeah, exactly. There might be another tiger. And so that process of accessing and forcing your body to access sugar glycogen very rapidly and then replenishing them, that's thought to improve your insulin sensitivity and help with the other metabolic health markers. And so that's one thing. And the other thing is also if if you deplete your glycogen stores and you then consume sugar, you actually have somewhere to put it. Don't have to— your body's not in a position where it doesn't know where to put that stuff, and then it gets turned into fat and goes onto your hip. But you actually have somewhere to put it. That's part of the reason. Yeah, there's— the human body is a complex machine, and there's many things happening. Yeah, indeed. And it's actually quite exciting. Every couple of months I get emailed by our academic partners and they say, oh, look, we've found this and that improves as well. Wow. The list gets longer and longer. Just a brand new thing was that some— so IL-6, interleukin-6, a compound that's really important for fighting and preventing cancer, gets a very robust release from that. So this is a very powerful way and the benefits are yeah, wide and, and offer many things for many people.

And not that time-consuming as well, which is so magical. So yeah, I think it's so exciting. And I'm thinking also for like all the diabetics and, you know, people with prediabetes, investing those few minutes each week to do this is amazing. And as my audience will know, I'm a huge advocate around brain health and just maintaining it at peak performance. Maybe you can explain also why metabolic flexibility, so the ability to switch between burning carbs and fats, is so important for longevity as well. So people hear a lot metabolic health, people have poor metabolic health, but the key is to have good metabolic flexibility.

So can you, can you explain that a bit? Not everything and in every, in the depth that some others might be, but as I understand it, one key benefit of being metabolically flexible is like first your ability to switch between energy sources. And to also being able to access energy stored in your adipose, in your fat tissue. So one thing I attribute to doing refeed rides is I find it easier to get through fasting periods with, without feeling so hungry. Hungry. I can go, so I don't do water fasts or so, but sometimes I do like 5-day fasts with very low calorie consumption., and I feel that this personal opinion.

Yeah, sure, exactly.

Kind of one, but that I actually, I'm not starving myself because, because I have energy. My brain can access energy that I'm carrying around with me and therefore find it easier to get through that times. If you're insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible, you will find that much harder. And then your brain is really screaming that it's starving and that you need to feed the beast.

Sugar.

It's okay. Yeah, exactly.

And so that makes it much, much harder. Yeah. I'm curious because when you switch into ketosis and you produce the ketones, which your brain absolutely loves, and people with dementia, they really recommend to be on a ketogenic diet. I wonder, does it help to, to flip that switch into ketosis quicker?

So has there research been done on this? I'm not aware of specific research on that point. Yeah. But, um, the key to getting into ketosis is to basically deplete your sugar stores. And that's a big part of why CAROL and REHIT is so effective because it's so effective at depleting glycogen stores. My understanding is that the people who advocate fasting don't necessarily advocate a very vigorous exercise at the same time. So, so this is not a recommendation. Don't try that at home. When I do a fast, I still do REHIT in a 5-day fast 2 or 3 times and also to kick it off. Because it seems plausible to me that that would be a complementary approach. Yeah. That if you want to get quicker into ketosis, yeah, that basically emptying out your sugar stores through such a short and vigorous exercise is actually a good thing.

But this is personal opinion. Opinion here, everybody. But I do think it's really interesting. Have you ever tested your MolyMars?

So the, the tester? I haven't.

Boom. Test kit at home from previously when I used to do the keto diet more often. Yes. I will try it and I'll let you know as well.

I'm curious to see if it goes quicker and deeper. On some of our, so our users is a very broad range. We have completely, you know, normal people, everyday people, everyday people who just want, and you know, usually you asked about ages. Our users are generally more 45 to 65, but that's the people who who realize change is happening. Yeah. Who, who approach exercise and working out with some more intent. So they have clear health improvement goals. They have clear fitness goals that are not a six-pack, but it's, it's really about health. It's about longevity. It's about healthspan. Yeah, exactly. And, but we also have biohackers who do all sorts of things and who, who very closely watch their blood sugar levels when they do the exercise. And, and so we, we've got various reports, but exercise can induce a spike because you're releasing so much glycogen from your muscles that you actually see a transient spike in blood sugar levels after the exercise. But obviously that normalizes then very quickly. I think should help with metabolic flexibility and, and help with fasting and with helping with getting into ketosis if that's your objective.

So we discussed this a little bit before, but just so people understand the statistics that the WHO recommends 150 minutes of cardio per week, yet fewer than 1 in 4 adults, I think you said 5%, um, actually achieved this. Yeah. And obviously CAROL condenses those benefits into 5 minutes, 3 times a week. And as we were discussing at the beginning, you know, time is a real barrier. But do you think for people that are trying to combine different types of workouts, the weight training, and then I need to focus on my grip strength, how is the ideal protocol in a week, would you say, combining CAROL But what else would you combine in terms of exercise to really help people who are hearing different messaging and wanna get it right?

So our recommendation would be, yes, you have to cover more than just cardio. So there's, there's several pillars to physical, good physical health and, and getting most of exercise. So it's cardio strength and to some extent also mobility, flexibility in terms, because VO2 max is this most important marker, I think if, if I just I just had to prioritize my stack. I would say yes, that's very important. Yeah, exactly. Wherever you want to, that's where I would start. So if I have so much time per week, that's a really high ROI activity. 3 times a week, 3 carol rehit sessions, or if you wanna do hill sprints, do hill sprints, but to, to, to sprint 3 times a week. Then before doing any zone 2 or other forms of cardio, I would very clearly lift some weights. And it depends a bit what you have available. But you can also do weightlifting with actually quite reasonable time investment. My recommendation and understanding would be to do like big compound movements that involve multiple joints. For example, maybe just a little squats, deadlifts, press-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, overhead press. So, so 3, 3 push, 3 pull. That's, that's how I, that's what I do. Which remember, And if you have little time, I would do single set to failure, just relatively heavy weight, do one set of each exercise, but with intent and really as much as you can. Again, rather prioritize intensity than, than volume. Some, if you have training, there are machines out there that can deliver fantastically effective workouts where really one time a week is enough. If you don't have that, if you have weights, then I would do that also 2 to 3 times a week and I would just alternate it with with the cardio. And then the third pillar is like some form of yoga, Pilates, stretching for mobility, stability. Like first, it's, it's, it's, it's just part of a well-rounded routine. One thing that like accidents, falls, things like that, they can really put a spanner in the works. I broke my collarbone last winter skiing and it really set you back.

Yeah.

Of course, even if you have the best intentions, and that unfortunately with, with, um, I saw that with my mother as well, a fall can really lead to a step change. And in a, in a certain age, it's really hard to recover from it fully. And so anything that avoids that risk is very helpful. And so I think that has to be also part of a well-rounded package. That cardio, strength, mobility, stability, that rounds off exercise. And then of course, many other things, nutrition, sleep, maybe some mindfulness. Meditation also.

But so there's a lot you would want to do.

Social connection, very important. Ah, friendships, of course. There's a lot you'd want to do. And because you want to cover all of those bases and have a life and do stuff you enjoy at the same time. Read a book. Yeah, exactly. We think it's important to do it all in a fairly time-efficient way. Otherwise, it's really hard to get it all together. Yeah.

You were mentioning before the attention economy, right? And there's so many things pulling at us. With some of my private one-on-one coaching clients, what we always do is to look, how do you, coming from the sort of tech world, like how do you set it up to win? You put it in your schedule and it's automated. You don't even need to think about it. So one less decision to make. And as if it's in the calendar and you pick your days of the week when you do your rehab session, your cardio session, you do your weight training, you just do it. It's like brushing your teeth. You don't think about it. Okay. And it gets done and you know you're taking care of your health as well.

So yeah, really powerful. And Yeah, super important. So we strongly believe that habit formation and just reducing the barriers and make it as easy as possible to actually do it is the key. Because one thing that is unfortunate, exercise is not a one-off hit. You can't just expect to, you know, work out for 6 weeks and then that lasts for the next 6 years. And no, that's just not how exercise works. Exercise like nutrition, like sleep, is something you, you have to do right all the time. Yeah. Therefore, you, you have to find something that fits into your life, not, not just in moments when you're like super motivated or so, but that always fits into your life, whether you're busy, you're, you're relaxed on holidays or not. Something that fits into your life and that you can stick to. And that, that is so adherence is in fact more important than anything else when it comes to exercise. So, um, and, and we believe that, and we see this with our users because we get really high adherence rates, but that taking that time constraint away is a powerful way to, um, to achieve adherence. And then if you, if you lower the barriers, if you have a carobike at home and you can do it in a semi-automated, I mean, yeah, in a very like roll outta bed. Put the shoes on, sit on the bike. Like your winning morning routine and have Carol part of that, have rehab being part of your winning morning routine, then that's really a big, big win and something that helps people stick to it.

I'm really excited now that I have it up and running to do it. And I also wonder for my kids. So I'm someone with ADHD. And so I'm all about, you know, how do you optimize brain health to set you up to win? How do you get that median F? I have the trampoline. Had the Peloton, and now I've got the Carobike. So I'm really excited about this as well because of that time constraint. And I have an 11-year-old as well. When she was going for exams, she's like, you know, what can we do? So is this also okay for children?

Has this been tested on kids as well? So there's no lower age limit. The only constraint is they need to be tall enough to fit on the bike. Okay. But yes, children can and do use the Carobike. The only thing that we say, and we have to also, please, so for children with adult supervision, that's kind of part of our terms. It's a common sense thing.. But yes, if they're tall enough, they can use the bike.

Absolutely amazing. Because I feel I'm very passionate about like, how do we get that generation to already be doing these things? Can you imagine we like don't wipe out the whole pandemic and issues and all these different challenges that come later by teaching them a bit younger? So yeah, I wanted to check with that with you as well. Now, biohacking data and integration, I'd like to dig into a little bit. Carol is AI-driven. Now, some people might be like, well, It's a bike. How is it AI-driven? How does it work? Yeah. So how does the bike personalize resistance and adapt to each user?

Yeah. So, and that's exactly one thing where we've, um, yeah, I would say like really meaningfully improved what our academic partners had in place before. So our first objective was just to truthfully replicate a lab-grade workout in the real world. But then what our algorithms, what our AI does So when you, when you first start, it just looks at, we ask you a few things, you tell us a few things, your age, your height, your weight, your gender, your activity levels, and so on. And based on that, we can set an initial estimate of what your optimal resistance would be. But then as you do the workouts, we can look at your performance. And the key thing is how quickly you fatigue throughout the sprints.. And because we have a lot more data than anybody else on that. So the typical academic trial would, would have 20, 30, 50 participants for 8 weeks, 10 weeks. So you, you get like hundreds of rides, readings. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We have millions of rides from tens of thousands of users, so we can just run more sophisticated algorithms over this. To identify what the optimal resistance level is for somebody just like you, literally just like you. And then not just now, but as you get fitter and stronger, we can adjust the workout to make it as challenging as it has to be, to make it optimally challenging, not too hard, not too easy, to get you reliably achieve your maximum intensity. And that's, that's a very cool benefit or feature of our bike. That, and that helps us create an optimal workout every time for a very, very wide variety of users. So we can then optimize and personalize a workout that's suitable for my mom, who's now, she's 82 and she does it every other week. So that's one thing. To top athletes who really at the peak of their fitness and who get amazing scores. So now that's not human. And we can create a personalized optimized workout for each of those and keep adapting it and adjusting it as you get fitter and stronger. And I experienced that earlier in the year. If you had to take a break because you had an injury or you were traveling or something, it happens. Yeah, people do fall off. Life happens. The bike will then very, very rapidly also adjust to you again to your new fitness level and make it easier and help you to perform an optimal re-hit level, even if you had to deal with like some setback.

Which is amazing. And again, it takes away that bandwidth of trying to figure out. So can you explain what users will actually see in terms of metrics? So some people love data, myself included. What will they see? What does it mean?

Can you walk us through that? Sure. So when you do a re-hit ride, you will get a handful, a basket of metrics that show you your current fitness levels and your, that, that are really useful to track your progress. So you get your peak power, you get, and that's, that is just what it is. Like what's the maximum force that you exerted during the sprint? Simply that, that's a good measure for strength. You get your fitness score. Now fitness score is very good to track your VO2 max. Mm-hmm. It's, it's not your VO2 max, but it's been designed to track your VO2 max. So you look at the trend over time. Exactly that. You get calories burned. Both directly while you're on the bike, but also with the afterburn, with the what's called EPOC, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Because there's even, even if you don't sweat and even if it's so short, you get actually a very meaningful calorie burn out of it because you have for like 90, 120 minutes after the exercise elevated metabolism and just burn more calories. Yeah.

So, so just to ask a question on that, is it estimating what you will burn just during the few minutes of the ride? Side or within the next sort of 90, 120 minutes?

So it depends on, on the ride you're doing because for the rehab rides, and there's another type we call fat burn rides, we have actually worked with academic partners where we, yeah, proper scientific studies to quantify what the level of afterburn is depending on what your workout looked like. Sure. So for the 20-second rehab rides, we can,, we, we measure the energy you burned on the bike, and that's literally kind of the, the, the, the power and the time you, you, that, that gives us the energy you burned on the bike and estimate the afterburn based on solid scientific data. And yeah, it is meaningful. So when I do like even 5, 5 to 8 minute ride, the total calorie consumption is something like 200, 220 calories. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. For somebody Like me, that's 10% of my, more than 10% of my baseline calorie consumption. And so if weight management is one of your objectives, it's a meaningful contribution. Now, for weight management, nutrition, nutrition is number one, but it's a meaningful contribution. It contributes. It supports calorie consumption, energy output, peak heart rate. You get it all nicely graphed out. We also give you something we call the habit score. You try to reach 100, that, that shows you how well you adhered to the program. And you can track all those metrics nicely over time and see your progression, which is this quantification. Gamification is an important motivator for some. For others, it's enough to, to feel fitter, and you will feel fitter because it's so meaningful. So those are the metrics you get after each rehab ride. And because It's almost like a controlled experiment. It's a very nice way of tracking. The bike can do many things. It also has VO2 max testing protocols that you can do either with like a gas exchange analyzer. That's like in commercial studios. They, some of our commercial gyms have that and you can do that periodically. I have one of those, but it's not, most people wouldn't have that at home to precisely measure your VO2 max. But we also have programs that just follow the gold standards for estimating your VO2 max. A bit similar, if you have an Apple Watch or Garmin or so, it will give you an estimate after some workouts. If you've worked long enough, then it sees, the watch sees how your heart rate responded to the exercise, and it can then basically estimate what your, what your energy consumption was during the workout. And it sees the heart rate response, and from that estimates VO2 max. We're one level more precise because we don't have to estimate what the power and the energy was. We measure that on the bike. We see your heart rate response and can therefore estimate more directly your VO2 max. So this is something you could do. That's not the part that gets you fit, but that you could do every few weeks, every few months to check and see where you stand, to see where you stand compared to, your, your peer group. And is, yeah, because it's so fundamental, it's actually a nice thing that many people would like to know. And so that's another thing you can measure and quantify and track.

And for people probably wondering, how do you figure out the heart rate? So just to clarify, there is the heart rate monitor that is put on. So otherwise it's like, how are you gonna figure that out as well? And just, you were discussing fitness level and VO2 max. It's correlated, it's estimated to be, it's not your VO2 max score, but just it's, you measure it over time and it's a good indicator.

So people should. That's correct. So, so VO2 max measures your aerobic capacity. So you, you do aerobic exercise to higher and higher intensity levels until you, you reach your aerobic limits. The REHIT sprints are anaerobic sprints. So it's really, it's like almost different category. And we look at your heart rate response to those anaerobic sprints and then calculate the fitness score based on that. It's really, it's different, but we've designed one to track the other closely. And if you have a 10% improvement in fitness score, you can be very confident that you also had a 10% improvement in VO2 max. So it's a one-to-one correlation. Okay. Not, not the absolute numbers, but the improvement. And of course there's like, at least over a group of people, yes, very much. They track each other very well. Then for individuals, I'm sure there's some variation, but it's a very good indicator. That you get every single time you use the bike.

And so it's a great way of tracking. And I just wanna make a point 'cause we were laughing about this before. I did my first session today and, you know, I'm not a big runner, but I have done like a half marathon and 10K, whatever it is. And it told me that I was in the lowest 30% for my age range and for my fitness level. And I was like, oh no. And I've done other VO2 max things and I was like telling me I was in the top strange, but you reassured me that the first one is not the baseline.

So there's, there's two things that play into that. Okay. Um, one, the first few rides, the, like our bike and our AI gets to know you and will then calibrate to get the optimal workout for you. So that's one thing. The other thing is you will get like the first ride, just you're figuring things out.

Exactly.

I didn't expect the tiger was coming, so I was like, what would this look like? So you'll get better at it. So there's, there's both sides come to it. And so yeah, the first ride wouldn't be our baseline. Our baseline would be once you've completed, so you do 3, what we call ramp-up rides. You start with 10-second sprints to just first see, you know, what am I doing? Feels like, yeah, exactly. And they're a lot gentler. Then go to 15, then to 20 seconds. And once you've been at your 4th ride, the algorithms have found your, or very, very close to your optimal resistance. You will have gotten used to it. You know what to do. Okay. And then that's when we, what we would take as your baseline, it. And from there you would see an improvement and you can expect to see an improvement.

Yeah. So I will report what the actual baseline is and not the, like, I can't go to our conversation now and let you know I'm in the bottom 30%. How did that happen? For biohackers tracking their health, I'd like to hear if you have statistics around broader wearable protocols like for HRV or people, you know, we talked about insulin sensitivity before, even around biological age testing. So is this improving HRV? Is it Is it decreasing resting heart rates?

Is it helping with biological age risk? So we, we, we know obviously very much about the things that, where we, where we have data that we collect. So that's, that's our data and that have been scientifically validated and established through proper trials, randomized controlled trials. And that is these very fundamental things like VO2 max, and we see our fitness scores following that very closely. Metabolic health with those markers we've discussed. The, the impact on things like HRV, I'm, I'm just not familiar. I don't think there has been research on this. So, so I can't go and say, oh, this and that happens. There's many things that we're still learning and that we are expanding and that people people, try with n 1 and see what happens. And you can. There are very big and very meaningful improvements in markers that we know are important. Yeah, very important ones. Exactly. And then there's anecdotal things around things that, like, other things. But HIV, I've not seen a study on it that says, yes, this improves your HIV. I just, I don't think that exists. Not yet. And we sponsor some research. We provide bikes to universities and it gets broader and broader what we know. And the, the impact is really, I mean, yeah, quite almost too good to be true.

But no, HRV, I, I'm sorry, I don't know. Not yet. Have you, or is that maybe in the pipeline? I'm gonna ask you also about some of the pipeline things, but incorporating things like the Apple Watch to have more data or the Oura Rings or what?

Yeah. Garmins, et cetera. Yes. So that's a development priority for us at the moment. Be, so, so yes, the, you, you can sync your workouts to like Apple Health and Fitness and, and Android Health and Fitness. Okay. And yeah, we'd love to bring out a wearable or have appropriate integrations to take that personalization to the next level. This is things we're working on. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it's also, yeah, we, we, we'd be competing with some very formidable competitors if we want to launch an own wearable. Integrating with Apple is also not always super easy.

So yes, this is a high priority for us, but that's also things we're, we're still working on. Okay. Amazing. I'm just curious, cuz I'm like, okay, if we can figure out the HRVs going up the things, and obviously as you can see, they're horrible.

So, so one thing, and you, we've, we've covered zone 2 a little bit, um, earlier. One thing that we're quite close to is using HRV to optimize zone 2 training apart from any other controversy about zone 2, um, getting the right level of intensity for that is actually also very difficult. And, and there's, there's like 5 different ways how you can kind of try to figure out whether you're in zone 2, and they all, all have their weaknesses. And one very promising new approach is to use HRV as an indicator whether you're at the right intensity for zone 2 training. And, um, there, we're very close to launching a workout that will guide you exactly to the right level of intensity for zone 2 workouts. So if that's what you choose to do because you have the time and you want that additional kind of come to mitochondrial health and mitochondrial function from another angle, then we will have, I'm yeah, pretty certain the most advanced way to help you optimize that.

Very exciting. I know with the science and AI and everything that's coming exponentially, it's a really exciting time in this space. Space as well. Ulrik, I want to touch a little bit on your personal journey. So you improved your cardio health by 50%, 5-0, lost 10 kilos, 22 pounds, and normalized your blood pressure.

What was your biggest surprise during this transformation? Just how meaningfully the fitness improvement felt in everyday life. So how you, you really feel like, oh, I'm flying up the stairs now. So mood or ability to be more agile or energy? So, so physical function, being able to play soccer at a different level with my kids. Like professional. Yeah.

Yeah.

They're, they're almost there, but no, just to have enough energy to, to yeah. Enjoy life. And that's, it's, it's really, it's a, it's not subtle. It's something you, you will feel very clearly that all the things that, you know, require physical energy. I love hiking. Skiing. That's, that's one of the things I could do for days. And that is just so clear that if you're, if you're in better, if you have greater cardiorespiratory fitness, it's just so easy and you're so much more able to, to do that. So you want bouncing up the mountains? Yeah, kind of. My, my kids are still like slightly ahead, but absolutely, yes, it does make a very, very appreciable difference.

So you get to enjoy the things a lot more as well. Beautiful.

Beautiful. Outside of Carol, what are some of the other health or longevity practices you personally swear by? So I think number one, sleep is just so fundamental, so immediately important to your cognitive performance, to your mood, recovery, everything, everything. So sleep is ultra important. I wish I was a little bit better still.

So this is work in progress.

I have my phases, I know, but I know how important it is. And I mean, talk about something where people don't have enough time. That's literally, people don't have enough time to sleep properly. Sleep. And I think one of the Netflix CEOs over the years once said that our, our main competitor is sleep. Yes, I heard this. And that's terrible. I know. That is really, really terrible. Yeah. And not having time for exercise, you get a creeping disbenefit. So things are worse if you don't exercise and it deteriorates over time. With sleep, you get immediate feedback. You feel horrible the next day and still don't, people don't seem to have the time to sleep. Or prioritize. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just, just don't take the time to sleep. So, so I do think that the time component is super important and there's the, this attention economy and having all these distractions is a real thing. It's not just something that, that you can say, oh, people are lazy. No, it's, it's like there's this like crack cocaine pulled in every direction. Like potency-type distractions that prevent us from doing that. And so, yeah, with exercise, we say, okay, let's at least make it as easy as possible for people to still do it. With sleep, that's less possible. You just need those 8 hours.

It's hard to compress sleep into a pill. And they say actually you need 1 hour more in bed to get the full amount of sleep.

But what have you done to improve your sleep, Ulrik? I'm curious. Okay. What's your secret? Well, first, I'm not perfect at it. I'm actually quite good at sleeping. The key is being disciplined about going to sleep and actually switching off the light. And that is a work in progress, but that's the key thing. You see me without my Oura Ring today. I do have one, and it's certainly, I found it a useful thing to understand sleep better. Yeah. But after a while of wearing it, I think I can read my body well enough to just know. Yeah. I don't need an app in that, even though I really appreciate it. I think it's a great product. Yeah. Give it to other people as a present. But so it's a good thing. I recommend it. But that's something I used to understand and basically kickstart that effort.

And I think it's really helpful. Yeah. Amazing. And I think it's having the routine in place. I know some people who are religious, like no matter what, you get up at the same time every day. There's like children around that. They do. My girls actually sleep. So, I have to wake them up. I have other friends whose kids wake them up and they don't have a choice. So I have a bit of a choice there, but yeah, it's been consistent. Just coming over from the US now here again, jet lag and stuff like that too. That was a bit tricky, but just whatever we can do, right, to do it.

And obviously exercise during the day actually helps to get better sleep. Yeah, exactly. And that, in fact, exercise has been shown to have also really positive effects on sleep quality. So how much deep sleep you get, on sleep routines, to regularize sleep patterns, it helps to exercise at the same time. You don't have to do it each day, but if you then do like strength and cardio on alternating days, then you can actually do it each day and just have that, that quite regular pattern. I exercise in the morning. That makes it easier. You should leave about 2, 3 hours before bedtime otherwise, because you pump up your metabolism.

Otherwise, no, exercise does have qualities or a positive effect on sleep as well. Yeah. So I know so many people struggle with sleep as well. So it's amazing. So Ulrik, if you could put a Carobike in every household, what impact do you think it would have on global health?

That's our ambition, really. It is our ambition. And then that's what we started with. I recognize this as, or I recognize now it's not so easy to get a Carobike into every house, but no, I think it would make a very, very meaningful dent in our inactivity epidemic because it is really, it's the couch is the biggest killer and our sedentary lifestyles have a very, very negative effect on our health, physical health, mental health. And yeah, our ambition would be, and we have tried to make the Caro bike and that's, that's really our ambition that it's a mass market product. We, we recognize the biohackers are the first to adopt it, but our intention is really we want this to be very much a mass market application. And I wouldn't actually mind if there, so at the moment we're still, as far as I can see it, the only ones who do this. And we have some patents and protected this and that, but to some extent I wouldn't mind if some big name came into the game and we had some healthy competition first to get the message out.

And yes, it's just to make it then. Yeah. I like your collaborative approach. As they say, all boats rise with the tide. So it's exactly that, spreading the word, getting it out, whatever form as well. Yeah.

Amazing.

Do you have time? Do we have time for some rapid-fire longevity biohacking questions? You can try. So what's a surprising biohack or tool that's had the biggest impact on your health?

I think you're going to say the carrel bed. Have to. Yes, exactly. So that, that will be the one biggest thing. The other thing comes back to what we discussed earlier, just recognizing and realizing that no, you can't sleep when you're dead. You have to sleep now. And that sleep is important. And like this mind shift that sleep is somewhat a necessary evil that you can optimize away. Like Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep. I don't know whether that's a biohacker Or not. If you have any doubt, read it. It's a great book. I think that, that has changed my mindset around sleep and really opened my eyes there.

Yeah. Super helpful. If you could only keep one longevity habit for life, and I'm going to say besides the carob bike and maybe besides sleep, what would it be?

I think that nutrition is the next one. Not eating things in shiny wrappers, eating whole foods. I mean, I tried over the years types of diets, intermittent fasting, 5-day fasts. I think, I think the key thing is eating real foods and, and yeah, not, not processed foods. That's super important. And then yeah, if you, if you wanted just a general behavior change, I do like these fasting mimicking diets. Like Prolon has, for example. Yeah, that's the only one I know actually. And that's the one I, you use, you know, every now and then, not, not like every 3 months, but once a year or so. I think it's a really powerful tool to get, well, first to lose weight if, if that's what you want. And to, yeah, also improve things like metabolic flexibility and metabolic health. So that's, yeah, I think it's a very solid and good thing that I would recommend.

Yeah. I mean, it's the medicine we feed our body every day. And finally, to be, nutrition is going to be introduced into medical school, which sounds like totally obvious, but it hasn't been done. Exciting times ahead. What's been your most exciting purchase in say the last 6 months that's under $200 or so? Could be anything.

Doesn't need to be health-related, but we love specifics. I actually don't know in the last 6 months whether I bought anything that's so good. If I had like another thing, this is slightly longer ago, but the Muse band. Have you tried the Muse bands? I think that's around that price tag. If you want to meditate and you're not quite sure how to go about it, I find it's very, very nice tool that makes meditation a lot easier and to practice mindfulness. And it has around the head, right? Yes, exactly, exactly. And so I got that for myself. I gave a couple of them to friends because I think it's a great, yeah, more than gadget, that's actually really helpful and opened the world of meditation to me that I didn't know existed or kind of how to approach it.

So I think it's very clever. Yeah, brilliant. And especially a lot of people who have the monkey mind, they really struggle. So that's That's great. What's a book that you recommend over and over again?

Is it Why We Sleep? So that's a really great book and transformational in terms of how I view sleep. Yes, read it. Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep. Fantastic. Another one that I recommend that I give away to friends is The Better Angels of Our Nature from Steven Pinker. This is about the history of violence in the world and how it's actually been reducing. And I think in terms of it has really a positive outlook on human history and how we've developed and helps just shape a more optimistic mindset. It's quite easy to get all riled up and negative and pessimistic and how everything gets worse because it's so in your face. And I spend a lot of, like, if I need to decompress, I find X a very nice app, spend fully too much time on it, but obviously it serves you all the negative stuff. If it bleeds, it leads is what they say in the media. Yeah, exactly that. And kind of anything that that kind of increases engagement, like shock value. Exactly. That's a book that puts that into perspective and shows actually, you know, in what a good world we're living right now. I thought I've read that 2 or 3 times myself, gave it to friends because I think it's such a great book.

Brilliant.

And if you could wave a magic wand and solve one aging-related challenge instantly, what would it be? Yeah, I think I would say that overcoming the inactivity prices. And that's what we're working on.

It's not a magic wand. You have to be consistent, but you've reduced the time dramatically to a few minutes a week, which everybody has. I'm sorry, but even if you've got 10 kids, you've got 10 minutes a week. So yeah, really exciting. Where can people find you and find out more about Carrel? Where would you like to send them to?

And we'll link everything in the show notes. Yeah, sure. So we sell our bikes online, carrelbike.com. Um, or The Carol Bike on all the socials. Um, our website is very comprehensive. There's a lot of information. If you have further questions, you can drill into all the papers and the research. So that's where to learn more about us. You can also schedule a call with our, with our team, with our fitness advisors. They're qualified. They have MSCs in exercise physiology and can have a meaningful conversation and discussion whether it's right for you. We try to make it as easy as possible for people to actually purchase a Caro bike. So we do offer— and I think that's an industry-leading returns policy, if you want to call it that. We call it risk-free trial. So if you purchase a Caro bike, you have 100 days to see whether it is right for you. So whether you like it, whether you can stick to it, whether you can actually see and feel the benefits, whether it's working for you. So it's more than enough. It's longer than all the scientific trials. Sales that have been done with it. And if it's not, then you can also just return it. Like we have a, a no questions asked return policy. And so if it's not for you, it's not for you. That's okay.

To most people, it is for them. And can you just indicate for people the price point so they have an idea and if financing is available?

So we sell our bikes globally and there are different prices in different countries, but our main market is the US and it's 2,795, free delivery with that. We offer 0% financing if you want that to make it a little bit easier. And that's, that's how you can see it and try it. You will find us also in some of the leading biohacking studios, coaching facilities, and so on. But generally, it's a bike that's designed for commercial use. Many people have it in their own home just to lower the barrier and make it as easy as possible to, to to do it.

I'm very, very excited about this. Before we wrap up, could you leave listeners and people watching with a parting message or piece of advice, or maybe you have an ask for them?

Stay active. Something like prioritize activity. VO2 max is super important. It'll, it'll have profound benefits and impact on, on all aspects of life.

So yeah, that's one message. Perfect. For sure. So, Ulrik, thank you so much again for coming on today. Thank you to your audience for listening, for tuning in, and please share it with friends, family. So many people need to know about this. It's hit on so many different important areas of healthspan, longevity, metabolic disease, etc. So yeah, just let's all keep living a longer, vibrant, and more active life.

So thank you. Such a pleasure.

Thank you so much. That was really great. Thank you. Hi everyone. It's Claudia again. Before you take off, would you like to get a short email from me to you several times a with top tips, insights, and strategies to help optimize your life, health, and business. This could be interesting posts or articles I've read on life and longevity optimization, cool biohacking or lifestyle products that I've discovered, and other fun things to help you be at your best. It's a very short piece of inspiration for you, so if you want to receive it, check it out by going to llinsider.com.

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