The CAROL Bike is the world’s first-ever AI-powered exercise bike build around Reduced Exertion High Intensity Training or REHIT. Unlike other workout equipment out there, it allows users to enjoy cardio benefits of a 45-minute run in under five minutes. CAROL Bike’s CEO and co-founder Ulrich Dempfle is here to reveal the secrets of their invention and how it can vastly improve VO2max and metabolic health. He also explores the bike’s AI capabilities that automatically adjusts based on the user’s behavior and health to provide a highly personalized and efficient workout experience.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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The Magic Behind CAROL Bike With Ulrich Dempfle
This episode might just change the way you think about exercise and time. What if I told you that you could get the cardio benefits of a 45-minute run in under 5 minutes? What if just two twenty-second sprints of heart effort could significantly improve your heart health, insulin sensitivity, and even add healthy years to your life? It sounds like science fiction, but it’s very real.
In this episode, we’re talking to the man behind the tech that’s making it at all possible. I’m joined by Ulrich Dempfle, the CEO and Cofounder of CAROL Bike, the world’s first AI-powered re-REHIT-based exercise bike. CAROL stands for Cardiovascular Optimization Logic, and it’s built around cutting-edge research and Reduced Exertion High Intensity Training or REHIT for short. It’s a method that’s more efficient than HIIT and shockingly effective at improving VO2max and metabolic health.
In our conversation, Ulrich and I dive into the science behind REHIT and why it works in just two twenty-second sprints, how CAROL personalizes resistance and intensity to each individual in real time. Why this form of training is a game changer for longevity and cardiovascular health, and how biohackers, athletes and busy professionals alike are all using CAROL to get fit fast. If you’ve ever said, “I don’t have the time to exercise,” or you’re just looking for the most efficient way to support your health span, then this episode is for you. Let’s dive in.
It’s such a privilege and an honor to have you on our show. I’m really excited for our readers to learn from you. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Origins Of The CAROL Bike
I’d love to hear just about the origin story of the CAROL Bike. What inspired you to create the CAROL bike? How did it come about? Where did this idea come from?
It was a big coincidence, as many things in life. At the time, that’s back in 2012, my co-founders and I, we worked with hospitals with health services in the UK. Anything to do with making patient care better, more efficient and amongst other things we were running, designing, setting up management programs for people with chronic diseases like type two diabetes with heart disease and so on. We did fairly advanced stuff.
At that time, we were already using machine learning AI technologies to identify which patients would benefit most from which interventions. That’s great if you use modern technology in that way. When it comes to which interventions matter most, for most people, the answer is actually quite simple. It is exercise with nutrition and sleep, but exercise is really one, if not the most important intervention for better health, better life for most people.
The problem is so few actually do it or do enough of it. In the US, there’s solid statistics that some 95% of the population doesn’t do enough cardio exercise. We struggled with that, of course, too. It was really hard to get the patients in our programs to exercise. Literally just one evening, I’m watching television and saw a science program on the BBC that showcased the benefits and just how compelling REHIIT was. Reduced Exertion High Intensity Interval Training. I had never heard of it before, but I fell in love at first sight. REHIT is basically High Intensity Interval Training taken to the next level. It’s ultra short. It was portrayed as very easy.
You could do it in your suit. You don’t sweat. Only two twenty-second sprints. Wonderful. I was hooked. I was like I texted my co-founders like, “You need to switch on BBC. You need to watch this. It’s amazing.” I loved it so much that the very next day, I went into a fitness equipment store, and bought myself an exercise bike. I paid attention to how they explained the workout and what you needed to do. I bought a bike and I thought, ‘Yeah, that should work.”
I tried to do it at home and it just didn’t work at all. It was super hard. I sweated loads. I couldn’t get the resistance right. It was just nothing like what they had shown and what they had presented in the program. I was about to give up and say like, “That was slightly misleading.” My cofounders insisted, “No, let’s call up the researchers that were on that show.” That was Dr. Neil Vollard and Professor Jamie Timmons. We called and just asked like, “What are we doing wrong?” The very first thing they said was, “You need a special bike.” I was like, “Why didn’t you say that on the program?”
That would’ve been helpful to know.
Yeah. They didn’t so I gave the bike away after a few weeks to some neighbors. I’m not sure what would they do with it, but so Dr. Vard, professor Timmons invited us to their lab and showed us how REHIT is done on their specialized equipment. Yeah, sure enough, when we did it under the instruction on their equipment, it was actually a very good experience. My initial enthusiasm was completely validated and justified. The problem was just in their lab, they had specialized exercise bikes. They were like $10,000, $15,000, and that were operated by a second person. That’s obviously not practical for a broad audience, for mass market.
We thought, “Can we not build something that basically takes that great science and that great workout and just replicates it as closely as possible in a format that’s actually usable for a normal consumer?” That was 2012. It took us a while. That’s the origin of the CAROL Bike. I think by now, we don’t only accurately replicate how they perform their research, but we’ve actually introduced so many new features, and we’ve got so much more data to work off that in many ways, we’ve improved on that and have actually a better solution. Our bikes are now used for such research in a number of the leading labs, academic research labs that do research on REHIT and other forms of interval training.
Features And Benefits Of The CAROL Bike
You’ve even taken it to another level. It sounds almost too good to be true. Can you explain and break it down for us a little bit? How does it work, the two 20-second sprints, 5 minutes and you’re done and you don’t even get sweaty and you get this amazing benefit? What’s the science behind that?
Let me clarify a few things first. Most people don’t sweat. I would say maybe 8 out of 10 or so, maybe even 9 out of 10 don’t sweat. There’s always the 1 that does sweat. We don’t give a heart from us that you won’t sweat. In terms of getting the most efficient shortest and very effective cardio training in a very short time and as little as five minutes, that we’re super confident about. REHIT works because you go for very brief moments all out, like sprint at maximum intensity. That’s not something that people usually do.
You log in on the bike, you can have several personalized or several user accounts on there. You log in, it loads your data, and you can start a REHIT ride, and then you have first two minutes really gentle warmup. The machine basically tells you to go to sprint. There’s some voice guided workouts. You should just go as fast as you can. The bike doesn’t have any buttons to press. It’s completely computer controlled. You’re being coached through the workouts, so all you have to do is go all out when the bike tells you to. Two-minute warmup, first sprint, then it’s up to 3-minute recovery, then a second sprint for 20 seconds, and then 3 minutes cool down. If the full length of that workout is 8 minutes, 40 seconds, the warmup and the recovery, if you’re in a rush, you can do it fast. You can cut that short so that it’s really five minutes.
That’s how the workout work. The bike is computer controlled and controls the resistance for you. Our AI algorithms optimize the workout for you the first time you use it, and then every following time. We find very quickly your optimal resistance. As you get fitter and stronger, we keep adjusting it so that you get a really effective, challenging and effective workout each time.
By having AI algorithms optimize the workout for you, finding optimal resistance is much easier. The equipment will adjust as you get fitter and stronger. Share on X
There’s a number of safety features in there to make the whole workout experience as simple and as safe as possible. In terms of what you gain from it. There’s a very long list of benefits, and that’s in part reflective of the fact that exercise has so many benefits. It helps with your sleep, it helps with your mental health, with brain health, with muscular strength, with a lot of things.
The headline benefits, the most important benefits is one, improving your cardiorespiratory fitness. Specifically, your VO2 max. What’s your ability to metabolize, to burn oxygen? The other main benefit is metabolic health. That’s your risk of developing metabolic diseases like type two diabetes. In both of those dimensions, you can get with very little time. You have to do this 2 to 3 times per week, so that literally, if you want it, you could do it in 10 to 15 minutes per week. You get a substantial improvement in VO2max. Scientific studies have shown on average, in the first eight weeks, an improvement of 12%. Longer studies suggest over the first 20 weeks an improvement of 20% and that’s both reflected in our user data.
We obviously see for longer-term users, and also like through anecdotal evidence, that over the first 6 to 12 months, even larger improvements in VO2max. Personally, I’ve improved my VO2max, but over 50% really in the first twelve months of using CAROL Bike. My VO2max was somewhere in the mid-30s. I’m now at 53, which for my age is an excellent value. That’s in the high category. I achieved that with really minimal time of cardio training.
That’s amazing, a 50% increase.
Yes. It probably also shows that we ran a business, we had clients, three small children that personally, I was also in a position that I found it really hard to find time for exercise, for workouts. I think part of the story, yes, it’s a great improvement. It’s probably also, but before I started with CAROL, to an extent, I neglected my cardio fitness. Obviously, it’s great that we’ve built a business around it, but it’s also personally very rewarding that I’ve found something to consistently do and keep my cardio fitness in top shape.
It’s literally life changing. I’ve heard you say before there’s really not much benefit to doing it more than 2 or 3 times a week. Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct. For cardiorespiratory fitness and VO2max, scientific data shows that two times a week is actually enough for metabolic health. Three times a week is better, and this is because the metabolic health benefits around insulin sensitivity, blood sugar control and so on, they’re slightly more acute. It’s good to do them ideally every other day. The cardiorespiratory fitness benefit is slightly more chronic or long-lived, so you don’t have to do it that often. Personally, I just do it every other day and then I don’t have to think about it terribly much. Adherence is, in any case, the most important matter of all. If you find a rhythm and schedule and a routine that works for you, then that’s wonderful.
When you get off after a 5-minute ride, you feel like you just went on a 45-minute run, or a 6 or 7-hour run.
It has the same benefits as a 45-minute run. This is what the academic trials have shown. This 5-minute workout delivers the same benefit as a benefits in terms of cardiorespiratory fitness, metabolic health as a 45 to 60-minute run. Do you feel exactly the same afterwards? No, it’s actually quite different. If you go for two twenty seconds all out, it sounds very little, is also very little, but it’s still a workout. Your heart rate will shoot up and you will breathe very heavily, and you will most definitely feel like you’ve done a really good workout. Once you’ve tried it, you will understand our claims, and they will not feel that outlandish anymore. On the other hand, you recover really quite quickly from this and then can go quite quickly back to work or back to whatever you’re doing that day.
Many people won’t need a shower afterwards. We have bikes that are offices where people do it in their lunch break or in their coffee break. That is possible. I usually do it first thing in the morning, and then I do have a shower afterwards because I like that. Other people do it differently. When I go for a longer run, I do that from time to time now, I feel more exhausted, more mentally drained, and certainly like ankles or sore muscles or so. It would be much more expected than normal because with those very short sprints on a bike, which is a really low impact form of exercise, you don’t put a lot of stress into your body, and so therefore, the recovery time is really fast.
No Age Requirement For The CAROL Bike
You’re getting all those benefits without the wear and tear to your joints as well. There’s an additional benefit there. That leads me to think about what about people who are older in age? I’ve heard you talk about your parents. I think they’re in their 80s, right? They are using this and hiking mountains and things like that. Tell us a little bit about people that are in the older demographic, how does it work for those folks?
Yeah, sure. CAROL is really for any age and fitness level because we have a computer-controlled bike with let’s call it 255 years AI algorithms that personalize it to each individual. We can create an optimal workout for anybody really. You have to be tall enough, so there’s no lower age restrictions. My kids do it as well, but they need to be tall enough. My youngest one is not quite there yet. Children should be doing this under adult supervision, that’s just to say that as well. There’s no lower age limit as long as you have proper supervision and you’re tall enough to use the bike.
At the other end of the scale. There’s also no upper age limit. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, it’s always recommended to talk with your physician first. Same as with taking up any other sport or joining a gym. We have many users who are older and one of our most avid users is, in fact, my mom. She’s 81 by now. She has some joint pain and can’t like walk or jog or run that well anymore, but she can use an exercise bike and she can do those REHIT sprints. She, very religiously, I would almost say, does this every other day and texts me her scores and uses this as something to keep her cardio fitness in as good as possible shape despite not being able to go walking, hiking that much.
That’s my mom. My dad is a slightly different story. Similar age, 82. He uses it more on and off, but one summer, we did a big family trip to hike up Germany’s highest mountain, almost 3,000 meters. He had done his preparation also with walking, but also with CAROL Bike. I was very proud to see him get up to 2,967, like a 9,000-foot summit. My youngest son was maybe not quite the youngest on the mountain, but my dad was for sure the oldest on the mountain and it’s a very popular hike. We’ve met quite a few folks on the way up. It was wonderful to see.
To go back to that, so basically, anybody that has the ability to ride a an exercise bike at any fitness level can use the CAROL Bike and it’s because it’s adaptive, it’s going to adapt to where they are and the sprints are going to be aligned to their fitness level, and then it’ll show their improvements over time. A young kid, an 85-year-old person or someone in with significant other back issues or things like that, but as long as they can ride a stationary bike, they can get the benefits of the CAROL Bike.
Our insurance, I’m sure, wants us to point this out. If you have pre-existing health conditions, it’s good to talk with your physician about it, whether you can do high intensity exercise, an interval exercise, and they will advise with your specific risk factors in mind. Having said that, there’s are very short sprints and it’s for a reason called Reduced Exertion High Intensity Interval Training. The overall amount of stress you expose your body to, it’s very low.
As far as we know, it’s a self and well tolerated exercise, and we’ve been on the market since 2018. I’m very pleased that we’ve not had serious adverse incident on our bike. Yes, knock on wood. I think people have to appreciate the real killer is the couch. If you want to stay safe and stay on your sofa, that’s actually not how it works. Getting some exercise in and improving your cardio fitness, that’s definitely the way to go.
I’m sure there’s a lot of readers out there thinking right now, “This is a game changer.” As with you, I’m 45, I have three kids, I have a busy job that takes up a lot of my time but I’m running from place to place. I love to exercise, I love to get a nice, long run in or a good bike ride. I like to do triathlons and things like that.
Gaining Over A Decade Of VO2max
To have something that I could go on for five minutes and squeeze it in these different places, or even during my lunch break or coffee break, like you mentioned, it’s amazing to have those benefits. I’ve heard you say before too, so basically, from the time we’re 30 every decade, we lose about 10% of our VO2max. To do this a CAROL Bike workout five minutes, 2 or 3 times a week for 8 weeks, we gain more than a decade of our VO2max. That’s what we’re saying here, right?
That’s exactly what we’re saying. Sometimes, if I say, “You gain 12% of VO2max,” it’s a bit hard to imagine what this actually means, but it means exactly that. If you could go ten years back in terms of your cardio fitness with very little time in over a short period of time, that is actually very noticeable and you will undoubtedly feel it.
VO2max is not just any health metric. It is really one of the most important health markers, maybe the most important health marker. It’s a very fundamental indicator of your health. It’s the strongest correlate, the strongest predictor for life expectancy. If you compare it to things like smoking, there’s some really shocking scientific studies, very high powered with tens of thousands of participants where researchers found that low cardiorespiratory fitness leads to more avoidable deaths than smoking, diabetes, and obesity combined.
I find that’s a really shocking thing because if you think about obesity, diabetes, smoking, the main things, if you think about it, if you think about unhealthy lifestyles or big health issues but low cardiorespiratory fitness leads to more avoidable deaths than those three combined. If you address that, you have an awful lot to gain both in terms of greater life expectancy.
Also, in terms of capability, in terms of what you can do with that time, for most people, a 10% improvement in VO2max would equate to two years additional life expectancy, greater increased life expectancy, which is wonderful. It’s not just that you have more time, it’s also the more capable to make something and to be active and to do things with that time. VO2max and cardiorespiratory fitness really do matter.
The work that you’re doing and that you have done, it can change so many people’s lives throughout the world. This is amazing. You must be so excited that this is taking off.
I agree with you that this is a really transformational opportunity. On the other hand, we obviously have formidable competitors with the like of Peloton and others, so we have our work cut out. There’s a lot of skepticism like, “Can that really work? Why would two twenty seconds give me that much benefit, and why would I need a special bike?” Those are the questions we get confronted with in very many first conversations. We have a lot to do in terms of communicating that well, and educating people about what different approaches there are to improving their cardiorespiratory fitness, and then for whom this might be actually a really good solution.
Responding To Doubts And Naysayers
I’m curious, what’s your response to a skeptic who says, “Forty seconds of sprinting and five minutes, that can’t possibly work?” What’s your go-to response for that?
It depends whether I have a bike next to me or whether I have to do it verbally. Once people try it, it’s actually quite easy to win them over because just the sensation of doing those sprints, I think it’s quite clear then, yes, actually, this is effective and people understand why and how. If I have to just explain it in conversation, it’s slightly more challenging but I can try.
What we do with those two twenty-second sprints is simulate an emergency situation. For a very brief moment, pretend that you have to fight for your life or run for your life. The bike, through the computer control break and so on, the guidance through the workout, helps you to basically go from level 1 to level 100 in a fraction of a second. The energy demand in your legs, in your thighs, where your biggest muscle groups are, goes basically through the roof. Your muscles need so much energy that and need it so quickly that they can only access or have to access the fastest energy systems your body has.
For less than ten seconds, the energy system is called phosphocreatine system, is immediately there. It lasts only for up to ten seconds. Once that is exhausted, you have to tap into the second fastest energy system, which is your glycogen system. Glycogen is a storage form of sugar and you’ve got lots of it in your liver, but you also have lots of it directly in your muscles. That is your body’s emergency energy reserve. That’s only used when you’re in an emergency. It’s because we simulate with this rapid increase in energy demand, we simulate an emergency and your body responds to that and mobilizes lots of muscular glycogen. It mobilizes about 25% to 30% of the glycogen stored in your legs.
You use only a fraction of that. In energy terms, that’s a lot of energy that could fuel you for a long time. In the sprints, you only use very little of it. What the clever thing is, and the hack if you want, is it doesn’t actually matter how much of that glycogen you burn. The important thing is how much do you mobilize, how much do you take out of storage and get ready, because bound to the glycogen are other molecules.
It does not matter how much glycogen you burn. What matters is how much you mobilize because other molecules are bound to it. Share on X
The important one is called AMPK. That gets released with the glycogen, mobilized with the glycogen and activated. In turn, that then activates another molecule, a signaling molecule called PGC-1alpha, which is your body’s master regulator for what’s called mitochondrial biogenesis. The process of developing more or larger mitochondria and mitochondria are the powerhouses in your cells that basically determine your capability to burn oxygen and create energy. These are really fundamental things and affect so many different health-related and biological processes. That means that with these two very short sprints, we can activate that pathway.
It seems to be that’s what the research seems to indicate, that it’s really flipping a switch that two twenty seconds are enough to activate and to saturate this signaling pathway. What’s really astonishing is that if you did more or longer sprints, so not two twenty-second sprints, but let’s say you did like 3, 4 , 5 or 6 and you don’t do twenty-second sprints, but 30, 40, 50-second sprints, you don’t actually get more benefit. You seem to get less benefit.
This is hard to understand. The scientists we work with also are not entirely clear why that is, but the presumption is that psyche kicks in and once you have to do 5 sprints and they’re like 40 seconds each, and it’s going to be terribly long, you pace yourself. You don’t go to a 100% effort, but you stay at 80% because you hope to finish it somehow.
You’re holding back.
That’s just not what activates the pathway. It’s very brief to go to max. With two twenty-second sprints, they’re shorter. If you do all out sprints, they still feel quite long, but it’s short enough to actually go all out, to push to your personalized maximum intensity and therefore trigger this very powerful adaptation pathway and create a really powerful training stimulus. That is how it works. If somebody reads that long, then a good number of people believe me. If they’re still not convinced, then they have to try it and they have to get a bike.
Our customers tend to be a little bit older. Our main bracket of customers is 45 to 65 with tails on either side, but that’s the bulk. Some of them are very skeptical. When we do customer insight or meet our customers at shows or so, then they tell me like, “Yeah, I heard you talk about that workout, but I didn’t believe it. I went to your website and I read all like the science pages and yeah, there’s a lot of material there, but I was still skeptical.”
“I read all the original research papers but I was still skeptical. I had to get a bike to see for myself because I was still skeptical, but it really works.” Yeah, we have to overcome that quite a lot because it challenges long held beliefs, no pain, no gain or that you have to work be long hours in the gym. We try our best to make that clear and make it as easy as possible to try our bike.
To simplify and boil it down, essentially, this all out sprint for 20 seconds, you know you can do it for 20 seconds, so you’re going to max out, and then you’re really just tricking the brain to think it’s in an emergency. That kicks in, and then that stimulates the mitochondrial biogenesis, which creates this boost of fitness. Your brain is thinking, “I might have to do that again at some point in the future, so I better grow more healthy mitochondria and maximize my ability to metabolize oxygen.
We force the body to tap into its emergency reserve. That’s something the body doesn’t like because it’s like, “I’m under threat. I really have to get fitter and stronger.” It adapts. It’s a very powerful stimulus that you give your body to momentarily put him into that, or pretend, to simulate that it’s in that position.
When we force the body to tap into its emergency reserve and make it think it is under threat, it unlocks a powerful stimulus that elevates your workout. Share on X
I’m just doing a little math here, too. The 10% VO2max is equivalent to 2 years of life expectancy. Is that what you said?
For most people, yes. It depends a little bit where your starting position is. If you’re already a at the very top end and one of the fittest people, then that relationship would break down. For the majority of people who are not there, that relationship is true.
If you’re an average person, one of those 95% people that’s not getting enough cardiovascular exercise, using the CAROL Bike, you can increase your VO2max by up to 50% in 12 months. That would be equivalent of ten years of life expectancy added onto your life.
I’m not sure the that you can extrapolate that far because the logic is basically if you go from poor cardiorespiratory fitness to good cardiorespiratory fitness, which for most people is the 10%, then that’s the additional life expectancy, if you go from average to excellent or so. First, I suppose not everybody will gain 50% in 12 months. We very clearly see that. I think 20%, 30% is entirely achievable for many people. I think we see 50% across multiple users, but it’s you couldn’t expect that.
If you went from, let’s say, average to excellent and even further, I don’t think there’s a clear relationship that just basically it doesn’t stop. In German, we say the trees don’t grow in the sky. It’s a very substantial improvement for most people. On the other hand, not all our users are suddenly Olympic marathon champions and so on. There’s a little sense of realism that needs to be maintained.
Introducing The New Zone 2 Threshold
If the average person starts doing three 45-minute to 60-minute runs a week, they’re going to have some significant health benefits. Speaking of Olympic marathoners, so I’m curious too then, what about someone who’s training for an Iron Man or something like that? My daughter is an endurance runner. She races in cross country and 2-mile and 1-mile events in track and things like that. How could a CAROL Bike fit into those types of workout routines? How does it fit together and correlate?
We have a very diverse user base. We people who busy executives or busy moms who just need to get a cardio workout in with very little time. That’s one. We also have really fitness enthusiasts and athletes amongst our users. One is it’s just a different and new stimulus. If you don’t have really maximum intensity sprints as part of your training program, then that would create another stimulus. I think it’s quite plausible that you see additional gains.
On the other hand, if and some pro and elite athletes, they will have already types of high intensity interval training. They will have already some sprint interval training, and they might, in some ways, have already reached the level of cardio training and training stimulus that they can expose themselves to. At some point, over training becomes even a problem.
For those athletes, it’s not so much getting a whole lot more additional benefit, but is more can I get the same benefit with less stress on my body? Can I get like really effective HIIT session in that is less strenuous as other forms that I can recover from more quickly that it doesn’t affect my game performance or my race performance and so on. That is one consideration.
The other thing is, we’ve talked a lot about REHIT and that, by and large, is why people buy a CAROL Bike. CAROL Bikes is actually a very versatile bike. At the moment, we have 24 workouts in our CAROL Bike app. The bike has a screen comes with our app preloaded and there’s a range of different workouts. If somebody is already a highly trained athlete, an elite athlete, they might want to do something called Norwegian 4 by 4.
That’s a longer, it’s half an hour workout. I find it quite strenuous, but it has a lot of research behind it. It is one of the HIIT workouts that has also a lot of research conducted with elite athletes. Most exercise science is done with the 95%, because that’s more important from a public health perspective. That’s a workout that has a lot of research that has shown its effectiveness also in high level elite athletes. That would be another thing to mix in.
Something that has gained more and more traction in recent years, Zone 2 training. I don’t know whether you’ve heard that. That is a lower intensity cardio workout that you do for longer periods of times, even up 60, 90 minutes at a pace where you’re meant to be able to still speak in whole sentences and there’s a little bit of a guessing game of at what intensity should I work out?
There’s guidance around this much of a percentage of your maximum heart rate or should be able to speak, and it’s all rather inaccurate. There’s some really exciting new research. We’ll launch that on our bike to use heart rate variability to dial in as precisely as possible to the point where you are operating in that at that Zone 2 threshold. You get a chest belt with your bike so it tracks your heart rate, but it doesn’t only track your heart rate, it also tracks your heart rate variability.
There’s a higher order, like the complexity of your heart rate variability. By analyzing the complexity of your heart rate variability. We can dial in fairly precisely where that Zone 2 threshold really is. Where that the threshold is between fat oxidization and carb and sugar oxidization. Therefore, for somebody who’s really a fitness enthusiast who wants to do both the short sprint interval trainings and the longer Zone 2 trainings to cover all bases, I think we’re probably the most advanced product on the market. At least, I don’t know anything more advanced to really help you get the optimal cardio workout.
Yeah, this is brand new research. What I’m familiar with to get your zones is you ride a bike, prick your finger, take your blood, they test the lactic acid, and then you go your threshold based on your heart rate and how much lactic acid is in your blood at that level. You keep going. Now you’re saying, instead of having to do that and go to a lab and get that done, you can just wear the heart rate monitor, and this is tracking your HRV, and so it’s going to tell you exactly where your thresholds are.
That’s exactly what we’re saying. With the lactate testing, you get every minute or so, you get they take a little bit of blood, but in that minute, your body moves further, so there’s some fuzziness there. Another way of doing it is with a breath analyzer where you look at how much carbon dioxide, how much oxygen you breathe in and out to determine what’s called your respiratory exchange rate. With that, there’s also a lot of fuzziness. It depends what you’ve eaten before when you had your last meal and on quite a lot of factors like how you’ve slept. Another way would be some people say 65% of your maximum heart rate, others say no, it should be 75% of your maximum heart rate.
In all of the approaches, there is a fair amount of fuzziness and the lactate and breath analysis. Anyway, that would be a one-off test. You’d hope that next time you ride and you want to do that training, that you’re same time of the day, same fasting state, same recovery state and so on, which may or may not be the case. With the heart rate variability, of course there’s also a level of fuzziness in there, but it’s something that’s very easily done every single time you’re on the bike. That can give you good guidance as to where that optimal training zone is also for the lower intensity exercise.
It’s like having a full exercise lab in your living room or your office or wherever. That’s amazing.
We’re trying to, yeah. That’s the beauty of having a product that’s cloud connected where we can update the software. As the science evolves and as our understanding of what works, we can bring that and make it available to all our customers.
A cloud-connected product allows a software to update automatically and make its scientific findings available to everyone. Share on X
It’s in that sense, like a Tesla. It is just going to update automatically, overnight, or as long as it’s connected to Wi-Fi. Soon, every CAROL Bike owner will just automatically get this update for the HRV and they’ll be able to dial in their zones better than they’ve ever been able to do before.
The other thing that puts us in a very privileged position is just the amount of data about cardio workouts that we’re collecting, and that enables us to do certain things that would be really hard for academic partners. If you think about a typical academic trial, you’d have 50, 60, 100 participants, and they do 2, 3 work workouts over 6 weeks, 8 weeks, the longer trials maybe 10, 12 weeks. You get data from hundreds of workouts. We have now millions of workouts from tens of thousands of users. The technology with which you can analyze those evolves also really fast. We just can draw more insight out of that and create just more optimized and continuously optimized workouts for our users.
Get A Trial Of The CAROL Bike
That’s amazing. I’m sold. I hope that many of our readers are going to get a CAROL Bike and try it out. You mentioned to me before that you can actually do a trial. Tell us how can people find a CAROL Bike? Tell us maybe a little bit about the trial so that they can take the worry out of it.
You can find us on all the socials with, @TheCAROLBike. We have a really comprehensive website where you have a lot about the science behind the bike, the different workouts, that’s CAROLBike.com. If you want to have a chat and a discussion with a competent person, you can schedule an appointment with one of our fitness advisors who have like Master’s degrees in Exercise Physiology and who can give good advice as to whether it might be the right thing for you and answer your questions. We don’t have showrooms. We recognize we have to give people an opportunity to try the bike without too much risk. We have an industry leading risk-free trial.
That means when you purchase a bike, you have 100 days to see whether you like it, whether you benefit from it, whether you can stick to it. A hundred days is enough time to answer all three of those questions. If it’s not for you, for whatever reason, you just call us and we pick the bike up and you get a full refund. Thankfully, for most people, it works. We obviously couldn’t do that if it didn’t work for the vast majority of people. That’s one thing we offer. That makes it easier for people to take that leap of faith and try this amazing new science and technology.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
It sounds like a very generous offer. I hope that many people reading will take advantage. I know I’m sold and I’m excited to implement and bring some of these into our community here. For myself personally, I’m hoping that I’ll have one in my office and in my home here soon. Thank you, Ulrich, so much for this groundbreaking life changing work. Really, the work that you’re doing is a game changer for, like you said, 95% of the population. I hope that it continues to make a huge difference for many people’s lives in the future here. Thank you so much for joining us and for the amazing work that you’re doing.
Thank you so much.
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What an amazing conversation with Ulrich. Thank you so much for joining us. I’ve been really excited to have Ulrich on as a guest because I’ve heard about the CAROL Bike for years, and I’ve heard him talk and share some of these statistics before, and I’m just so excited. I think it’s a game changer. I wish that everyone could have access to a CAROL Bike. I know I’m personally super excited to have those here in our community.
Personally, for me, at my home with my own family and myself, there’s so many days where I think to myself, “If I had a CAROL Bike right now, I could easily get a workout in. I have a limited period of time and so I’m not going to be able to go for a 45-minute run right now and be all sweaty and have to take a shower. I could have a five-minute bike ride and not get sweaty and then go on to my next thing.”
I really think that this could be a life changing technology for many people. As he said, 95% of the people in the US aren’t getting enough cardiovascular health exercise. That’s something that increases morbidity and causes a morbidity more than obesity and diabetes and all of these other things. I hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did. The amazing things, if we just recap a little bit here, just eight weeks’ time of using this CAROL Bike, 2 to 3 times a week for 5 minutes can increase your VO2max by 12% on average is what they’re finding.
Twenty percent over a 20-week time span, 20% increase in VO2max. That’s equivalent to two decades of increase in your VO2max, which he said was the leading indicator or predictor for life expectancy. It’s one of the most important things we can be doing. I hope that you’ll take advantage of this. Maybe try out the free trial like I’m going to, and go try it out. I’ll be curious to hear what some of you think about the CAROL Bike. Thanks so much for joining us, Ulrich Dempfle and CAROLBike.com. We’ll see you next time.
