Are you or your clients trying to get rid of that extra 20 from 2020, or is your six-pack looking more like a keg these days? Biohacking offers you new ways to meet those New Year’s resolutions. Here are some basics of physical fitness biohacking to help build your bottom line while you firm up your own bottom.
Biohacking Basics: It All Begins With You
Current best practices in healthcare are based on large population studies, and the gold standard for research is a double-blind placebo study that enrolls as many subjects as one can afford to blindly test out in either a real intervention or a fake one (aka a placebo) to see if the real intervention works better than the fake one.
The results for an intervention deemed “significant” generally fall along a bell curve, with some people having little to no response, a larger segment having a moderate response, and a few people who have a strong response. This is likely due to genetic and epigenetic factors. This is great, albeit very expensive and time consuming, for the task of creating public health standards. But, since a particular individual may not be in the group that responds to the intervention, this big-picture view isn’t nuanced enough for personalized programming.
As personalized precision medicine advances, we begin to move from general recommendations that should work for you because they work for most people, to making sure that something does work because we are studying just your response to the intervention. In research, we refer to this as N=1, with N referring to the number of subjects in the study; so, in other words, this is a study with one test subject—namely you (or your client).
In reality, this type of self-study should be key to any wellness practice you’re putting into place to make sure that whatever you’re doing has a positive impact, but we often don’t think in these terms or don’t take the time to follow an intervention’s progress to evaluate the success. The good news is that the model is easy to put in place and a successful biohacker knows that this is at the core of what they need to do.
There are three phases to setting up your N=1 system for yourself or your clients. First, determine what you are trying to hack, and then measure it before you begin an intervention. Because in this case we’re focusing on building a better body, you need to decide what you’re targeting. Is it weight loss? Body fat? Greater strength? Agility? More energy? All of the above? As I am working with my clients in designing fitness programming and other wellness systems, I have them focus on providing evaluations to get measures in two categories—physical status and lifestyle preferences. Tests should be administered at the beginning of a program and then quarterly to track progress.
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Biohacking for Better Business
In our typical wellness businesses, we often gather data before a treatment to see what the client is hoping to get from the treatment, but we often miss the critical final step by tangibly evaluating the results of our treatment. You’ll find that if you do this, it will reinforce the value of the service to your client because you helped them achieve their desired result—and your measurements help prove this. The next time they are trying to justify investing in more of what you offer, you’ve won half the battle because they know that it works.
Deciding to adopt advanced technology to assist with evaluations depends upon your brand philosophy, your desire to scale your practice, and your intention/ability for using the information as an element of your ongoing connection and relationship with your clients. And of course, it is crucial to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for adopting these tools, which will require you to estimate financial opportunities that create additional revenue (i.e. charging more for the initial service or ensure on-going service utilization) and/or provide a more cost-effective method for capturing the data (using tech instead of in-person sessions) against the investment for getting set up with the technology.
Better Body Evaluation Tools
Along with standard muscle-strength tests that your fitness team is trained to use when developing a workout program, measuring physical status (i.e., weight, body composition, metabolism, agility, etc.) can be easily performed and data can be gathered using observation, hand tools, and standard mathematical estimates, or advanced technology. Tests should be administered at the beginning of a program and then quarterly to track progress. Below, we’ll explore some of these advanced tools that you may want to incorporate into your program.
Body Composition
There are several ways to measure body comp, or the ratio of fat to other body tissue, which is a more accurate measure of physical fitness than just taking a standard weight to height ratio. Here are a few options:
| Device | Level of Accuracy | Cost | Method | Comments |
| DEXA Scanner | Best in class | $$$$$ | Uses Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry to scan tissue density throughout the entire body – also can determine bone mass | Practically speaking, this is only really viable if you have a medical practice in your setting as you’d get highest ROI if you’re primarily doing bone density scans and offering Body Fat Analysis as an add-on |
| Bod Pod® | Highly accurate, when used properly | $$$$ | Uses air displacement to evaluate body mass and volume. Individual sits in an egg-shaped pod in a tight bathing suit and the air is sucked out of the unit. | Used frequently in research at universities, this unit is highly reliable as long as the tech operates it properly. Some people don’t like the fact that they need to wear a tight bathing suit and swim cap. |
| 3-D Body Scanner | Advanced units within 2-5% of DEXA | $ to $$$ | Takes a 3-D image of the body and uses the data with the individual’s weight to estimate body fat. | The image can be distressing for clients. Note that for facilities that also sell retail clothing, it may have use there as well. |
| Bioeletrical Impedance | Somewhat variable as hydration and the timing of meals can impact readings. | $ to $$ | Foot-pads and hand-holds send tiny electrical current through the body and analyze how quickly the pulses move through the body. Note that there is no sensation. | This is the easiest system to operate and has a high throughput. For best accuracy, readings should be taken at the same time of day and ideally at the same time in a woman’s hormonal cycle |
| Skin-Fold Testing | Variable based on the tech’s skill and only measures specific body parts and subcutaneous fat. | $ | Uses a caliper to measure the thickness of the skin and underlying fat | For best accuracy, the same technician should perform the follow-up measurements |
Metabolism
Once you know the body composition, you can set targets for improvement, but another critical piece of information that will help guide the prescription has to do with metabolism. Many people believe that they have a low metabolism. Getting an actual measurement of both resting and active metabolism can either prove or disprove this belief. As with body composition, there are different tools available, and depending upon your needs, you could go with a simple system that does breath analysis to predict caloric burn rates or a full-blown medical unit that does analysis, lung function testing (spirometry) and cardiac-stress testing (EKG read-outs).
Motion Capture
One of the newer technologies provides real-time motion capture data on movement patterns and analyzes the movements to identify postural imbalances and dysfunctional patterns that can help prevent musculoskeletal injuries. It can also do stroke analysis and gait analysis for performance athletes. Currently, this technology is being used primarily with sports teams, but more recently I’ve been seeing this successfully integrated into employee wellness programs that are provided by self-insured corporations, because it is saving them money in healthcare claims from over-use injuries, back pain, etc. I’ve been encouraging our senior living community clients to include this to help with fall prevention, and I’m sure you can see the many ways that fitness facilities can benefit from this type of technology.
Lifestyle Evaluations
Using data gathered with lifestyle evaluation tools will help you design a program that connects to core personality traits and behavioral preferences, ensuring the best chance of for success. Understanding what people like to do, who they hang out with, what they’ve successfully achieved in the past, what they hope to achieve, and why they are doing this now helps you build a program from a client’s position of strength—what they can do versus what they have not yet been able to do. As with the physical measures, we can choose to use simple pen-and-paper questionnaires, structured interviews, or adopt technology-based assessment apps that have built-in questionnaires to gather behavioral traits and generate suggested programming, such as what is done with Technogym’s Mywellness or Wellsource.
Putting it All Together
Using physical markers, lifestyle habits, and behavioral preference data as a base for creating objective measures and personalized programs will help develop accountability systems that are tailored to behavioral preferences for you or your clients. For wellness business operators, this will also help you cement ongoing relationships with your clients. Accountability has been shown to be the most important success factor in permanent lifestyle change, so it is a win-win for the wellness business and client.
