How To Get the Benefits Of A 45 Minute Run In Under 9 Minutes (& A 12% VO2 Max Increase & 62% Lower Risk Of Diabetes): The New AI Bike That Is Taking The Fitness World By Storm.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

So it's very noticeable. It's not subtle at all. If you do this for eight weeks, you will substantially improve your cardiorespiratory fitness. It's a very fast way of improving your fitness levels.

Yeah, I mean, like, I'm like, why can't I just go to the gym or go on a walk and run every other telephone pole and get the same thing?

But you have to find something that actually fits into your life. That's kind of how we see Carol and where we think a lot of people will actually benefit from it.

Help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Welcome to today's show. You know, I think it was probably in a podcast last year where I talked about some of the deleterious impact that high intensity interval training can have on the body. And of course, high intensity interval training is the bee's knees. It's the cat's meow. It's what everybody's doing for ultra efficient training. And it actually is a way, if you're someone who competes in a very glycolytically demanding event or something that produces a lot of lactic acid that you need to buffer. A very good way to train, if you are that type of athlete or someone who's prepping for the CrossFit games or a Spartan race or something like that. But it's interesting because when you actually look at the effects of those repeated bouts into bleeding lactic acid out your eyeballs, the evidence that that might have an impact on things like arterial stiffness and calcification of the arteries and things like that as one ages, dictates that with a lot of high intensity interval training, you may actually be trading a little bit of health for the performance or the fitness gains that you're getting from high intensity interval training. Now, when I talked about that and all these studies that have been done on this at some point last year, I forget which podcast it was, I brought up the idea of something different than high intensity interval training called Hirt H I R T and H I R T, as opposed to, you know, like a classic to Bataset, where you might be going 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy. Like eight times through is instead something that involves luxuriously comfortable rest periods interspersed between a very, very short number of extremely high intensity sprints. So an example would be, and this is something I've done before, I'll just go on a long walk, and every fourth telephone pole just sprint my ass off for 10 seconds. And so we're talking about a walk where I might do five 10 second sprin and be walking the rest of the 40 to 45 minutes. And it's interesting because there's another guy named Pavel Zatolin who wrote a book called the Quick and the Dead, and he's a Russian kettlebell instructor. And he also goes into this idea that modifying your rest intervals and your work durations when it comes to overall health recovery, performance and staving off some of the deleterious effects that excess lactic acid and the excess free radicals generated from that could produce might be a good idea, especially if you're in it for the long game from a fitness standpoint. So why am I telling you all this? Well, there's something very similar to that high intensity repeat training that I just described, and it's called rehit training. Reduced exertion, high intensity interval training. Okay. This is very similar to this concept of instead of beating yourself up with tons of lactic acid, you go just for a very, very short, hard effort and then you recover for a long period of time. Well, recently I got my hands on, it's out in my gym, this bicycle that kind of walks you through a rehit session. There's actually a few different options for rehit sessions, and the interval lengths vary from 10 to 20 seconds. But it's super interesting the way they've developed this. And it's almost like one of those things where you get a little bit guilty when you use it because you feel as though you maybe should have ridden for a longer period of time or gone harder. But the data doesn't lie in terms of what this rehit training can do for the body with a remarkably kind of short period of time exercising, or at least a short period of time, especially in the hard exercise phase. So I wanted to get somebody on who knows more about rehit training than I do and some of the science behind it, so I did. The problem is that my guest today, his name is very difficult to pronounce. It's Ulrich Demphley. Did I pronounce your last name right? Ulrich Demfli.

That is perfect, yes. Ulrich Denfley.

Well, it doesn't matter because I'm not going to say it again the whole show. I'm just going to call you Ulrich. But Ulrich is actually the guy who helps to develop this particular bicycle. It's called a carol. What's carrel stand for? Oreck.

Oh, it stands for cardiovascular Optimization logic. And that's kind of evidence about our geekiness to some extent. So it's the, the AI Persona, the AI character, if you want, that personalizes and optimizes the rehab exercise just for you.

And say that again.

It's, it's cardiovascular vascular optimization logic. We were inspired by HAL algorithm from Space Odyssey 2001. And so we needed to have one of those characters too.

To me, it sounds like a lot of like, hyped up marketing. Like, that was my initial reaction. I'm like, oh, they're calling this some artificial intelligence bike and cardiovascular optimization logic. Aren't I just getting on a bike and like riding kind of easy and then throwing in a couple of sprints along the way. And so that was my initial thought about your bike, honestly, because, yeah, I mean, like, I'm like, why can't I just go to the gym or go on a walk and run every other telephone pole and get the same thing? So, you know, when I use the bike now though, it seems like there's something kind of different going on as far as, like, and we have time to dive into this, like the breath pacing and the way that it adjusts the intensity and everything else. So I want to get into that because, like, that, like, that was my initial thought. You get that sometimes from people who are just like, can I just get on a bike and do this myself without like buying one of your bikes?

Yeah, of course, of course. And I wouldn't expect anything different. So we basically get two things very frequently. One is people are skeptical about the science so that they question whether it is really possible to get these superior health and fitness benefits in such short amount of time. And so that's, that's kind of questioning the science behind it and skepticism towards that. And I mean, there's very robust evidence and it's actually very well understood why and how it works. And then the other question is, why do I need a special bike? And I mean, I tell you, when we first came across the science of rehit, and this is like 2012, this is quite a while ago, we basically fell in love overnight and thought, this is amazing science. I want to do it. And the very next day after I heard about it, I went to, you know, an equipment shop and bought myself a bike that I thought was most suitable for that type of exercise. And I was.

I mean, you bought, you bought like a stationary bike from the store?

Exactly, exactly. Just, you know, I went to my local fitness store and bought spinning bike.

You mean like a spinning bike? The kind that has the flywheel on it.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I'm very familiar with those because I used to be a spin instructor. I spend a long, long period of time on those bikes.

Yeah. And I tried to get re hit right as I had heard about it on a, on a BBC documentary. It was just nothing like what they had shown it to be. It was very hard to actually execute and to get right. I mean, one quite amazing fact is that if you do it right, you hardly sweat. But I sweated buckets and it was instead of a relatively easy to do exercise, it was very hard.

What did you do exactly? Like what was the protocol that you did?

So I did three 20 second sprints or tried to do that. And a few things that people do get wrong is to get the sprints right, you would need to find the right resistance that's just in your sweet spot, reasonably high, higher than people think. You need to apply it at exactly the right time. And that is after you've built up speed quite some pace and start pedaling really fast. And then the resistance has to kick in like in a fraction of a second and go very fast from low to high.

Okay, I'm going to keep interrupting you much of the chagrin of my audience because I don't want to forget stuff as you're going through your story. So hopefully I don't derail you as you go because I want to get back to the whole story if I got this stationary bike and then what you did from there. But so far, a couple of quick questions. When you said you got to be at a kind of like have attained a certain speed and RPM before you get to your first sprint. Basically in very simplistic terms is what you're saying that a warm up is key before you do. Like you shouldn't just drop everything, you know, like if you're at the office and just like drop down and do a 20 second sprint. If you want to get the most out of something like this, you want to warm up first and then go into your sprint.

No, actually not. The warm up doesn't do terribly much. Obviously you want to get ready and be a little bit. It's really just the few seconds before the sprint. Think about it like cycling up a steep hill. You wouldn't want to start in the middle of the steep hill and then build up pace. You would want to pick a little bit of speed up on the flat stretch and then go with high speed into the steep part. So it's just about two, three seconds before you apply the really high resistance, you want to rev up because you're just more efficient at a higher RPM level and rev up and then apply the resistance. And that's where you get your absolute maximum power. And then throughout the sprint, the power will drop off. And that's completely normal. You can only keep your maximum power for a fraction of a second. But this kind of basically getting to, you know, sprint pace at low resistance and then applying the correct sprint resistance in a fraction of a second. In the lab before those researchers had Carol, in fact, because now they're working with Carol, basically there was a lab technician next to the bike, operating the bike and coaching the research subject. So it was just a two man operation. Whereas what Carol is, it's, it's fully automated and you don't have to do anything, you don't have to turn any buttons or so any knobs to adjust the results.

Which makes sense because if you are riding a bike and you want to get into your sprint phase and you have to increase resistance and you're reaching down to fumble to increase resistance, these are like the subtle nuances. It takes you away from being able to do your spin up, like your high RPM spin up prior to the effort. So to have some kind of way that the bicycle will automatically, at the right time, switch into that high resistance mode actually does make sense. And what you said about spinning up if you were outdoors riding on a bike makes sense to me because I've done a lot of competitive cycling. And yeah, before you get to the hill, you typically will increase RPM and kind of get ready to, to tackle it. And there's something that goes on there too, from a sympathetic nervous system standpoint. For those three to five seconds as you're spinning up, getting ready for the effort, your brain is clicking on and getting ready. And you've sent the message to your brain that's about time to go hard. You get that slight norepinephrine and epinephrine response, that little bit of a cortisol release, and your body's like, okay, it's kind of like you see the lion coming and there's like those few seconds between the time you see the lion coming and the time you start running, and that kind of seems to like quickly prime the pump. The other quick question that I had for you as you were explaining about this stationary bike you got and how you started and you did these three 20 second efforts, you mentioned that it's important that you choose the correct resistance. And that's something that I wanted to ask you what is better for these very, very hard 10 to 20 second efforts? A very high RPM at a low resistance or a very high resistance at a low rpm or is it something in between?

So it's basically something in between. There's an optimum resistance. And that's part of what our algorithms, what the AI does. And this is basically based on now tens, like a rider community of more than 10,000 riders and hundreds of thousands of rides. It's learned basically based on how you exercise who you are in the context of everybody else. What is the optimum resistance and the optimum RPM for you to perform at your peak intensity. And it will keep adjusting that. So we, through, you know, our collaboration with academics and through our own data, we know fairly well what the right resistance for a person, for you would be. But then you keep titrating and adjusting it as you get fitter, because it's obviously, it's not stationary. You evolve, but you get just fitter and stronger, or if you take breaks or so then also kind of reduce it. And that's a key thing that even, like the researchers in the university labs couldn't do because their equipment just didn't have the capability. Whereas our algorithms do dynamically adjust from ride to ride.

Okay, that's where the AI piece comes in. The bike is learning about you each time that you ride it and then making the adjustments to your sprints and your effort. And then I have to admit, I run into this with fitness equipment sometimes, and this is going to sound like me tooting my own horn, but sometimes I find that the preset values seem to be too easy for me. I had to do this with my, with my Vasper too. I talked to the engineers with that, because with that one, it's not so easy as it was with the Carol, but I had to go in and adjust what the base level is that you start with because for me it was like, I'll be honest, it was too easy. Like the periods of time in between the sprints, it was almost like it was so easy that there was so little resistance for me that I almost felt like my knees were hurting because I, like, I, they, they didn't have any muscular engagement whatsoever. So I went into my settings on the carrel and there's like a setting on there that's like your base setting. And I kind of like manually adjusted that up a little bit because that, that, and I know I have a lot of fit listeners listening in who, if they get a bike, they'll be like, oh, this is too easy. But I just manually adjusted the base level. And what I like about that is not only does it, does it feel like I can, I can get a better warmup and lead up to the sprint, but then also I have the bike out in my G and sometimes I just use it in free mode. I'll just get on and use it in manual mode just like I would a stationary bike. So it helps for me to set the base setting like that. But that makes sense what you're saying as far as the actual intensity goes. All right, so I derailed your story when you were talking about how you bought this stationary bike and you're messing around with it and you did your three 20 minute sprints and then what happened from there?

Well, so we called up the scientists who were on that BBC program and basically asked them, what's up? Why is this not working? What are we, what are we doing wrong? And they were kind enough to meet up with us and the first thing they said, well, you need a special bike. So that was one thing that, that the BBC had conveniently not mentioned. And in the lab they had these, you know, special pieces of equipment. They were like 15, 20,000 pounds and they're like a two man operation. And we still liked it so much and were disappointed enough that there was no consumer friendly, you know, like a mass market solution that we decided, well, if there's a gap in the market, let's close it, let's develop something. And maybe kind of just to put a little bit more context around it, at the time, my co founders and I, we were working in healthcare, so we worked on setting up chronic disease management programs for people with diabetes with heart conditions. And it is just the fact that exercise is like the most important intervention that people with such conditions should use and benefit from. But at the same time, people just don't do it. And if you surveyed them and if you ask them, the number one response is, oh, they don't have enough time. And this is exactly what rehit kind of answers. And then we set out to build a bike that would make rehit very, very easy. And that's basically the background. And then Carol was just a name to, you know, it's just the brand, isn't it?

Yeah, well, plus it's kind of like CrossFit. You know, CrossFit has all the names of its workouts, right? Like Fran and Murph. And so Carol works for that too. So you kill two birds with one stone. And so you developed this bike based on the re Hit training. And I want to get into some more of the bells and whistles that we briefly dove into regarding RE hit and how you've woven it into this bike. But I'd be remiss not to kind of ask you a little bit more about what you found out regarding chronic disease, because in your guys, in your marketing materials for the bike, for example, you say that regarding diabetes, that it can lower your risk of type 2 diabetes by up to 62%. Was this based on a REHIT study or how did you actually find this out regarding the blood sugar management?

So that's based on a study that was conducted independently at Western University Colorado, commissioned by the American Council of Exercise. So they saw our product, they liked it, but they said before we can make any recommendations or so we actually want to try it. So they commissioned independently, they bought two of our bikes and commissioned Western University Colorado to do a randomized controlled trial. So with two cohorts, one did two and a half hours per week, five times 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, and the other cohort did three times a week. Carol. So that's 26 minutes in total, three times the reheat routine. And they measured VO2 max over the whole study lasted eight weeks. They measured VO2 max. And then they measured something called the Mets Z score, which is a common score to measure the risk to develop metabolic diseases. And it takes your blood glucose levels, triglycerides, kind of a basket of 6, 7 clinical measurements, and basically then expresses your risk of developing metabolic diseases.

What's that score called?

It's called METS Z score, Metz score.

Okay.

And it's a common measurement to basically take a basket of these clinical markers and combine it into a risk score. And in only eight weeks, the subjects, so 16 in each group reduced their Med Z score by 62%. And also kind of just to provide the context, like, I mean, exercise is always, you know, the group that did the two and a half hours moderate intensity exercise, they also improved their score, but they improved it by 26%. So we had more than double the improvement in the risk score in 20% of the time. And I mean, that's very significant. It's like it's the level of change you'd expect to see when you take metformin or something like that.

Yeah, I was going to say that's pretty significant. That's like also what you see. That's actually more than what you see. I think the Men's Finnish sauna study found, I think it was like a 40%, I could be wrong there on the exact percentage, but we know that 98% of statistics are made up on the spot anyways. But I know it's more than what they found in the sauna study. It's similar to what you'd see from something like metformin or any of these blood glucose disposal agents, which is significant considering. And we'll get into this, like, how long the actual workout lasts because it's pretty short. Did you guys see anything on. On like triglycerides or blood pressure or any of these other metabolic effects that you'd want to pay close attention to from a chronic disease standpoint?

So they're all basically bundled into the medset score, and I'd have to dig them out now briefly if you want, but yes. So it's insulin, the triglycerides and blood pressure all form part and go into the MEDZ score. Yes.

Okay, so painting with a broad brush, we know it's very favorable from a metabolic standpoint. From a fitness standpoint, I think that's the other eyebrow people raise. It's like, how could I actually get fit with like a couple of 20 second sprints a day? And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, There's even some 10 second sprints on there, even though I've just been doing the 22nd workout. But regarding the actual cardiorespiratory fitness, did you guys measure any changes in either? I wouldn't imagine that you'd see much with lactic acid buffering just because you're not really producing much lactic acid. And that's kind of the point of it. But did you see anything with VO2 max or muscle strength or anything like that?

So VO2 max. Absolutely. And so same study, I'm citing the same study, the rehit group saw an improvement of 12.3% in VO2 max in eight weeks. And that's. Yeah, and that's really. That's very significant. It's not subtle at all. So kind of the. To illustrate it, on average, you lose about 10% in VO2 max per decade of aging. So in only eight weeks, you can basically feel like more than 10 years younger in terms of fitness levels. So it's very noticeable. It's not subtle at all. If you do this for eight weeks, you will substantially improve your cardiorespiratory fitness. So it's a very fast way of improving your fitness levels.

Obviously, from an aerobic training standpoint, which is kind of the bucket this would fall into, you typically don't see that being something you would do for say, muscle strength or power. Although when I was in exercise physiology in college, we would use the Wingate cycling protocol, the very fast short sprint, just an ungodly hard test to test for power output. And so I'm curious if you guys were able to test at all for any effects on leg strength or power output in somebody who uses this type of approach.

I mean, we have at the moment with this is again, Western University Colorado, we have another study running measure the impact on peak power. And that would be kind of just one rep max for a squat after doing eight weeks of carrel. I don't have the results yet because the study is ongoing. However, we see from our own data that peak power in our users. So the real world data absolutely does go up and does go up by something like 15% on average. This is kind of the academic study. This is happening as we speak and we should have results in the new year. And we're very curious what it does to kind of like strength.

What's the science behind what's going on in terms of the actual metabolic effects and some of the training effects that we're alluding to with such a short surge in energy demands? It's a very sudden spike in energy demands, but also very short. So can you go into what's happening on a physiological level when we're engaged in these sprints? Like the kind of the science behind.

The physiology, the thing that makes you fitter, the point is rapid depletion of muscular glycogen stores. That is what you know, that's the scientific consensus as to what triggers the adaptation and what makes you fitter and stronger. And so what really happens is the sprints create a really sudden surge, a sudden spike in energy demand. It's about 100 fold greater energy demand compared to rest. When you start those sprints, usually in many types of exercises, the muscles would burn kind of fat or sugar from the bloodstream. But if you have this sudden surge in energy demand, that's no longer possible. And you force the muscle basically to burn muscular glycogen, which is a form of sugar, it's stored in the muscle. And that muscular glycogen is in some ways it's your body's emergency energy reserve. So if you need to access very rapidly large amounts of energy, that's where you'd go to. So what's really clever about the exercise and kind of what makes it a bit of a hack is that the muscles mobilize. They mobilize a lot more glycogen than is actually needed for those short sprints. So because the rapid increase in energy demand, the body and the muscle anticipates a huge energy demand over a sustained period and prepares for a fight or flight situation. And it mobilizes lots and lots of glycogen. But you don't actually use all of that in those two sprints and you don't have to.

So if you did more, I was going to say, it'd be impossible to deplete your glycogen in your liver and your muscle with something like a 10 to 20 second sprint because you got 2,000 calories of available glycogen on board.

Yeah. And here's the thing, you don't have to burn it, but what does happen is that the glycogen gets mobilized. So glycogen is a quite large molecule of polysaccharides with all these branches of, of essentially sugar. And you mobilize these large molecules, but then only use the very outer branches during the exercise. And if you did a lot longer and a lot more sprints, then you would burn through more of it. But that is not like the burning of the glycogen is not what triggers the adaptation. Our understanding of it is that what triggers the adaptation is just the, basically that this energy store gets depleted and that the glycogen gets mobilized. And that can be measured quite kind of. You can, with ultrasound, for example, measure the level of glycogen depletion. And we know that on average we achieve 25 to 30% glycogen depletion in your quads and your glutes. And that triggers the release of certain signaling molecules, and that's specifically AMPK and then PGC1 Alpha, which then trigger mitochondrial biogenesis. It triggers a response that your body develops more also bigger mitochondria so that you're basically able to utilize oxygen or burn more oxygen in your muscles. And that's the adaptation chain.

It's actually very similar to. In a book I wrote some time ago called Beyond Training, I outlined how there are two different ways to train for optimized cardiovascular fitness. The short and efficient route that for most people, aside from the very high level pro athletes, works very well, which releases and activates these same signaling molecules. You were alluding to amp K and PGC1alpha, which triggers mitochondrial biogenesis. And then there's the polarized training approach where you spend very, very long periods of time at a low aerobic intensity with a few brief forays during your training. About 80% aerobic, 20% high intensity. But that requires lots and lots of extra time spent training and is something that typically only a pro athlete has time for. So this kind of shortcuts that and instead goes via route that just rapidly depletes glycogen, which you just referred to. And that type of quick, high intensity sprint basically results in very similar, it's kind of surprising, very similar levels of mitochondrial proliferation and also vascularization. And from what I understand, and this is probably, I would imagine, how it's affecting the VO2 max, increased blood reserves and more blood pump through the vascular system. Because when you look at VO2 max, traditionally the classic way to train for it is hard maximum sustainable efforts for four to six minutes in duration, not 10 to 20 seconds. But VO2 max is dependent on cardiac output. It's dependent on the ability of your muscle tissue to be able to harness oxygen as it rushes past in the bloodstream, and it's dependent on stroke volume. So it sounds to me like probably the main element of VO2 max that these short high intensity sprints are creating. It's probably due to the increase in blood volume or cardiovascular delivery. I wouldn't imagine that, like the overall volume of air you're breathing into your lungs is being triggered down, because I don't breathe that hard when I'm doing it. But I just get that. I like that very, very brief surge and your heart rate goes up, but you're not breathing hard and you don't get that lactic acid burn. So I'd imagine that's what's going on. But it's like, it just surprises me sometimes. I don't know if you're the same, but in the exercise world that we operate in, people really do think that you got to put yourself through a lot of pain, right? The no pain, no gain type of thing. And it is true, that's partly accurate. Right. But it constantly surprises me how little you actually need if you truly go as hard as you can when you're supposed to go hard and then give yourself these luxurious rest periods.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I do think that there's truth in the no pain, no gain. But you can actually, with quite little pain, achieve really quite remarkable gains. Obviously, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so you do have to push hard and you go to max intensity. But because it's so short, it actually makes it quite easy and makes it quite easy to adhere to. I find sometimes you almost get through the sprint so fast that kind of, by the Time. It hurts. It's basically almost over.

Talk to me about the breath pacer that's on it. Why did you guys put in this? Because it's kind of interesting, especially during my recovery periods, to have that little slider that shows me when to breathe in, when to breathe out. It's kind of a cool feature that I haven't really seen in cardio equipment before. Shocking that when you go to the gym, these fancy computers built into every elliptical trainer and bike and rowing machine and everything don't actually have some type of breath indicator or breath pacer or breath cue. Talk to me about what you guys did with the breath pacer on the.

Carol, the thing that gets you fit are the two 20 second sprints. That's really what creates the response. But you can't just do two 20 second sprints and then straightaway jump off the bike. You can actually or could shorten the warm up. And the first recovery, the cooldown is definitely necessary for your body to, you know, normalize again after the sprints. So you, you have to. It's not 40 seconds, it's 8 minutes 40 seconds. So you have spare time, basically. I think most of your listeners would appreciate, you know, the benefits and the importance of breathwork and having basically, you know, like a nervous system balancer that, that brings you into, into a parasympathetic state and therefore kind of just helps you. It's a bit of mindfulness that you can use while you're doing it. We want Carol to be very time efficient. That's the key thing. And so it's layering different hacks on top of each other.

Well, speaking of hacks, are people actually combining this with anything? Because I haven't done it yet, but I was thinking about maybe using blood flow restriction training and putting blood flow restriction bands on while I do it. And then some people I know will use a training mask to restrict oxygen flow or even I have a live O2 that will allow me to wear a mask that flips between hypoxia and hyperoxia. Have you gotten reports back or have you yourself combined this with any, I guess what you would call biohacking tools that you've found to upgrade the experience a little bit?

It's quite a broad range. So we definitely have biohackers and it's clever. But we also have everyday normal users who just want an improvement of their fitness levels and want something that fits into their life. But yeah, no, we do in fact, blood flow restriction bans. We've got users who Use it with that and see good results. The live O2, surprisingly many actually have reported back that they use it with that fasting or using it I think more correctly with time restricted eating. That's I think quite a common combination. Cold exposure.

Well, particularly with fasting by the way because it's. Because you really aren't burning through a lot of calories while you're on the bike. Right. It's the post exercise metabolic rate that you see the increase in. This thing's a no brainer in a fasted state. It's not one of those things where again coming back to glycogen depletion, unlike a crossfit workout where you're burning through so many carbs at such a high rate for such a long time, you actually sometimes can perform better when you've had a pre workout meal. This thing, I feel like I could do it after a 24, 48 hour fast. I mean because it's all super duper duper simple aerobic warmup, aerobic exercise with just these brief sprints in between. So I mean really you're just, I mean you're burning creatine and these slight amounts of glucose. So it seems to work out really well for fasting. Have you guys done any studies at all or any studies done on the combination of this rehit form of training in a fasted state versus a fast state?

Not yet. I can only talk about myself. I. So I do it usually first thing in the morning. I do it almost every day first thing in the morning and then would not have breakfast and basically you know my eating window wouldn't start until like 2, 3 o' clock in the afternoon. And I find it works very nicely and in fact I find it suppresses my appetite and helps me to extend my kind of fasting window. And then the other thing. So I have to. I rarely do kind of like all out fasting, like just water fast or so for several days. But what I do like to do are these Valter Lungo fasts, the fasting mimicking and there where you just have reduced calorie intake like a.

Right. It's like 40 to 60% of your normal calorie intake. You'd do that for what like four to five days?

Yeah, correct, correct. And there I find it very easy to still adhere to care and use Carol and find it actually quite nice.

Okay. And oh by the way, have you tried blood flow restriction bands with the. Because I've done blood flow restriction bands with the Airdyne. Right. I call it The Hell bike. That's the one out in my garage. It's incredible. I have also done that one wearing the electrical muscle stimulation suit, the Catalyst electrical muscle stimulation suit. Both of those. Oh my gosh. Like for a super duper, well, difficult workout. The BFR bands with the bicycle or the electro stem with the bicycle? Those both just amp it up through the roof in terms of how you feel and they kind of allow you to kill a few birds with one stone. I know some people will be chuckling at the idea of me out in my gym wearing an electrical muscle stimulation suit and maybe a training mask with some red light therapy on while I'm riding a bike, but some of this stuff's just kind of fun to mess around with. And honestly, I love to. To stack modalities like that that give you more bang for your buck if you're going to be sitting on the bike anyways.

So I've ordered my blood flow restriction bands. I'm still to experience it properly. I think I ordered the wrong brand first, but didn't find them that appealing. But yeah, no, it's definitely. I'd like to try that. I know a few of our riders who swear by it.

Yeah, I think you'll find it to be difficult, but also it'll amp up the experience for sure. Now, one question I always get from people, and this is something that I also look at when I'm getting a device, is whether it produces an appreciable amount of emf. Now what I did with my Carol is I connected it to my phone because I don't have WI fi at my house. I just tethered it to WI Fi and then I set up my account and everything, but I write it with, with any WI fi or anything off. And I actually, I probably should have asked about this, but when I reconnect it to WI Fi, it will still like, will it still upload my data? And you guys can still get access to that if you, if you need it. And then when it's off WI fi, it'll still operate as it normally should, right?

Yeah. We have something called offline mode and it's for two cases like either for people who don't have stable WI fi or for people who are concerned about EMF exposure. And in which case you can set the bike just to airplane mode and this offline mode will just activate automatically and you can use the bike pretty much as normal. However, it was designed as a piece of connected fitness equipment and so for the initial setup you need WI fi To basically set up a new user, you'll need WI fi and we do recommend, at least periodically to hook it up to a mobile hotspot or so. The data gets uploaded, the personalized resistance gets downloaded again, and also you get our latest app updates with new features and any bug fixes and so on. So that the software is all up to date. So it can be operated without permanent WI fi, but every now and then it should connect.

Right. Okay, that makes sense. Another question that I have for you is, and this was just something that I kind of chuckled at when I was first riding the bike, but it has these. You can choose from a bunch of different music. You can put like techno music on or something that's kind of motivating from a music standpoint. But then there's also this voice that kind of will walk you through a scenario where it's quiet on the savannah and you're relaxing in the sun and oh, here comes a lion. Then the lion comes and you sprint. Whose idea was it to work in that story element, almost like an ancestral story element to the bike? Because I'd to like, it seemed cheesy at first and then it's actually kind of motivating.

Yeah, that's kind of. My co founder came up with that and I think it's much loved. And I mean, at some point people might maybe also not listen to it anymore, but it is to set you at ease and relax and help you relax during the warm up and recovery and cool down periods and then kind of help you kick into action with, hey, there's a tiger behind you and kind of getting that extra bit of motivation to help you push for that very brief moment to your max intensity.

Yeah. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you just because we really didn't cover this, but it's important. It's not just the workout itself takes I think what is like 8 minutes and 40 seconds, something like that. There's more than one workout option on there, Right. Because I've just been doing the 22nd. But aren't there a few different workout options?

Yeah, sure. So you have different lengths of the sprint. So at the moment you have like 10, 15, 20 second sprints. You know, the most important thing is adherence, really. So if it's easier for you to do, you know, if 20 seconds are still too hard or too long, then by all means do the 10 second version. The most important thing is adherence. Then we have what we call fat burn protocol. So that's a protocol that has shorter sprints at a lower resistance, but they're all kind of linked to your rehit resistance where you do like 30 or 60 sprints. And that burns a phenomenal amount of calories and creates a phenomenal amount of afterburn. Various fitness tests, kind of to test your FTP or if you have a breath analyzer or access to one, to test your VO2 max or your maximum aerobic power FTP.

For people who aren't familiar, that's your functional threshold power. So you could actually test your power very similar to what you do in an exercise physiology lab. And then if, say, you're a competitive triathlete or cyclist or something like that, you can actually take percentages of that functional threshold power to develop certain training zones. Like if you find that your functional threshold power is, I don't know, like 400 watts, you could actually develop, let's say, well, let's say you're an ironman athlete and you want to do your race at 60% of your functional threshold power. That'll allow you to easily test it. So there's a lot of little bells and whistles that you guys have woven in. But I mean, the amazing thing is how freaking short it is. I mean, you mentioned that you broke a sweat. I think that was with the stationary bike that you were originally developing. But I don't sweat at all in this thing. That's what I like too, is I don't have to change clothes or anything. And I think I even saw some marketing materials that you guys have some guy riding on it in his office suit or whatever. And it seems kind of dumb, but you actually can, you actually can just get on it and ride, get off, have your workout done. And unless I suppose you're a very perspirative person, you don't actually really sweat on the thing.

So yeah, that is the case. I mean, there's a little bit, I guess, genetics or like every person is a little bit different, but most people, if they just do those two 20 second sprints, don't actually sweat. Now we've dialed that a little bit back in terms of how much we talk about it, because people are already skeptical enough when they hear 2 times 20 seconds, if you tell them then, oh, you also don't sweat, then no, that can't be true at all. But it is for many people. It is true that you barely sweat. And we have quite a few of our bikes in offices where, I don't know, like a marketing agency or law firm or like some other, like even the local council where they have bikes in their offices and where people use it in their lunch break and in their coffee break because it's A, so short and B, you know, most people, a few unfortunate ones maybe do, but most people don't sweat.

Wow. Well, it's kind of one of those two good to be true things, but I mean, it works. So I'm sticking with it. The data doesn't lie. When I'm in exercise science, there's sometimes that sensation that if you don't feel it, it's not doing anything. But this one is remarkably simple. Yet if you actually go as hard as you're supposed to go on these efforts, you definitely, definitely experience some pretty good benefits. I certainly have my stamp of approval on it and I appreciate you guys just basically connecting me with what you guys are doing. And I think it's going to help a lot of people out, especially people who are time hacked and just need some way to train for cardio and even power and leg strength without actually spending a lot of time at the gym. And you can of course do your carrel workout nine minutes and then go on and do your strength training workout or vice versa. There was a recent research and meta analysis showing that there's actually no loss in your chance of hypertrophy or muscle strength when you combine aerobic strength training or aerobic with strength training, so called concurrent training. And so you could technically just use the bike as a warm up or use the bike as a finisher for a strength training workout, for example, which is also something that I'll do sometimes just to basically get in there, get the cardio over with with my couple of 20 second sprints, then go straight into the strength training. So a lot of versatility with this thing. Anything else about the Carol bike that you want to share with us while I have you on Oreck?

Well, I mean, one thing, maybe just to highlight because we hear the, you know, people are skeptical about the science, people are skeptical. Why do you need a special bike? We do offer to overcome that and to make it easier, I guess an industry leading kind of trial period. So we offer 100 day risk free home trial. When you purchase the bike, you could try it. That's easily a long enough time to see the benefit. And if it's not for you or if you're, yeah, you know, you're not convinced by it, you'll give it back to us at no cost and you'll get a full refund. So because we recognize that some of our claims are Quite out there, two 20 second sprints, fantastic fitness and health benefits. We offer that trial. So that's one thing I just, there's not much to lose in that sense. And the other thing which, which I find really, really important is because it is so short and this is my experience with it and feedback we get from our users, it is actually really easy to make it part of your daily or kind of like your usual routine and fit it into your life. Because while it is fantastic to see how fast you can gain fitness if you stop exercising, you also lose it again, of course. So fitness is something you need to stick to and you need to find something that fits into your life and that you can commit to and do basically every week kind of come sunshine or rain. And we believe that if you just don't have two hours or three hours per week for cardio, yeah, it's no good to have great music and other external motivator. But you have to find something that actually fits into your life and that you can stick to. That's kind of how we see Carol and where we think a lot of people will actually benefit from it.

I'm happy to have exposed my audience to this. You guys have, I think it was a discount code. You get a hundred day trial to be able to experience it risk free, which is enough time because most of your guys studies have shown you get all this stuff going on for you within eight weeks, which is less than 100 days last time I checked. So you'll be able to actually try this thing out for yourself and see if it resonates with you. Normally the bike I think is around 2,400 bucks. $250 off with the code. Ben. If you go to the Carroll bike website it's carolbike.com Ben. I'll also put all the studies and everything that Ulrich and I talked about in the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com CarolPodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com CarollPodcast and you can also go over there and jump in with the comments and the questions if you have questions for Ulrich or myself or if you have your own anecdotes to add about what you've found from using this bike or anything that you've successfully combined with it and found to be a real game changer as far as stacking different modalities with it. So that's all going to be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com CarolBike. You can get a bike for yourself@CarolBike.com Ben and use code BEN for a $250 discount and 100 day money back guarantee. Ulrich, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us man.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

Awesome. All right folks, well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ulrich Demflave from Carol Bike, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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