Self-Quantification Device Testing with Ray Maker - The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast

Foreign.

Terms of athlete quantification. You probably get this question all the time. I'm going to ask it anyways. But what do you think is the next biggest trend in athlete quantification? Because we see heart rate variability, we see sleep cycle tracking, we see like, I actually just recently got this power meter device for running called a stride that I've been testing on my treadmill. There's all sorts of new stuff all the time. What do you think is. Is the most exciting or the coolest trend that's coming down the pipeline?

I think it's some of those that you named. I think in terms of running, I think running power is definitely something that's coming down that pipeline. I've been trying the stride out as well, and it's a technology that's still emerging. There's still some open questions there, but to dismiss it would be silly. I think if you fast forward five or ten years from now, running power will be just as popular as cycling power.

Now, by the way, why would people want to go with power for running?

It allows you to basically kind of normalize, I guess you could say variables like wind and terrain in your running paces. So that's just like in cycling. So in cycling, people use power to go ahead and figure out if you're going up a hill or down a hill or into the wind or with the wind, that you can normalize all those variables and keep a very consistent effort across all those. And so cycle and running does the same here. So. So instead of having pace, because if you run up a hill, your pace is going to decrease for the same amount of effort or your effort increases for the same pace. So the idea with power is that it's more instantaneous than heart rate. Heart rate is a very lagging indicator, meaning it takes a bit more time for heart rate to catch up. And heart rate also can be variable depending on your health that day, whether you got enough sleep or if you're fatigued or if you're sick, heart rate can vary, be quite dramatic in terms of difference. There.