After a highly successful Kickstarter campaign ($121K for a $50K goal) and thousands of the finger pricks they hope to make obsolete, BSX Insight is preparing to ship their lactate-sensing calf sleeves to their early backers. Soon, these endurance athletes will be able to check their lactate threshold while running or cycling – without a trip to the lab, and without shedding a drop of blood. We talked with BSX Insight co-founder Dustin Freckleton to get the latest on what’s been happening in the lab, and what we can expect to see down the road.
Expanded Anaerobic Threshold Metrics
The final phase of product development has focused on ensuring the stability and accuracy of the product’s performance. “Athletes’ physiology, biochemistry and physical makeups are very different,” Freckleton says. “In addition to testing simply a large number of runners and cyclists, we needed an even sampling between elites and introductory athletes.”
Over 850 test subjects performed a standard finger-prick lactate threshold test while wearing BSX calf sleeves. BSX used the data collected during these tests to validate and refine the algorithms, making them robust enough to accurately report any athlete’s lactate threshold.
As the data started to pile up and BSX improved its testing methodology, the team detected new patterns in the data that allowed them to develop a previously unplanned feature. “Initially, our focus on the lactate threshold was limited to the anaerobic threshold,” Freckleton said. “We’ve now tuned the system to identify aerobic breakpoint threshold.”
The breakpoint threshold is commonly referred to as LT1. LT1 is the highest effort level an athlete performs while maintaining a minimal amount of anaerobic metabolism, as shown by blood lactate levels remaining at baseline. The standard anaerobic threshold, or LT2, is the effort where the athlete’s lactate production exceeds the ability to clear it, causing an exponential accumulation of lactate. This represents a reliance on anaerobic metabolism to maintain that effort level. Between these two points the athlete uses her aerobic and anaerobic energy systems in near-equal amounts, making it a key endurance training zone. By setting their training paces between LT1 and LT2, an endurance athlete can maximize the efficacy of that training session under conditions that are race-specific for many athletes. “This development doubles the value of the BSX product,” according to Freckleton.
Big Data Comes to Endurance Sports
Over the next few months, hundreds of athletes will perform thousands of lactate threshold tests using BSX, and BSX is standing by with data scientists to take full advantage of all that data. “We completely de-identify the data so we can continue to look for trends in much larger volume, offering an unprecedented amount of data as it relates to physiological systems. Our data will bring much greater resolution to how the body adapts to training and how to focus on individualized training methods that impact each athlete the greatest. Having such large data sets will allow BSX to find the nuances and the features that are very difficult to determine with individual tests.”
BSX sees its users not just as data providers but collaborators in their efforts to further understand endurance training, and optimize athlete performance at all levels of sport. “A lot of discovery is done by a community of passionate, committed individuals who come from a variety of backgrounds and techniques. We hope to open up the data so that people with a working knowledge of big data analytics and physiology can access it.”
Continued Innovation in Endurance Wearables
These collaborative research arrangements with data scientists and partners in the wearable space will enable BSX’s expansion into other aspects of physiology and training. Just as LT1 was a fortuitous discovery from the data they were collecting, BSX is already working on finding out what else they can capture and how they can improve the user experience. “Lactate is a lagging indicator,” Freckleton says. “The next goal is to break away from lactate levels to find variables that indicate more accurately and in real-time what is happening in the muscle.”
And just as BSX took lactate threshold tests from high-performance labs to household gyms and DIY tests, they have their eyes on making the experience even more seamless. “The future of BSX is always about going one step further. We want our users to be able to get full use of our products out on the road under any circumstances, where they are not limited by benchmarking moments during a LT test.”