Humon Hex

While I don’t have any first and experience with the Humon Hex, it functions like the BSX and the Moxy oxygen sensors which have been around for a few years and have had many users. They all work by shining a small infrared laser through the skin and measuring the back scattered light’s wave length. The level of O2 saturation in the muscle being so illuminated is correlated with with the wave length of this reflected light. So, inferences can be made as to how oxygenated the muscle fibers are and hence more inferences made as to the metabolic state of the muscle fibers. The end goal of these devices is to provide a real time “intensity meter” for endurance athletes. Something more accurate than heart rate or power and less invasive than blood lactate testing.

All good so far. The trouble with the Moxy and BSX was that their correlation between O2 sat of the muscle and the normal intensity markers like anaerobic threshold was not clearly established despite promises from the manufactures that this would be the case. You got ton of data but it was not actionable because it was up to each use to correlate that data to some know metabolic marker.

Humon Hex seems to have made the data more user friendly. However the color scheme they use appears to be derived from an algorithm designed to identify the athlete’s ANAEROBIC threshold. That’s not a bad thing to know but it is not going to provide the information you need to be using for 90% of our base training, which is identifying your AEROBIC threshold.

I understand why they have created their algorithm to work this way but it completely over looks the importance of knowing where the aerobic threshold lies on any given day. I could be wrong about this and maybe the boundary between the Blue and Orange Zones is where one will find the aerobic threshold. Only testing this agains a known method of establishing the AeT will confirm this though.

Scott

Its not even a rookie mistake. Exercise science literature is so full of multiple and even conflicting terms for these two rather important metabolic markers that no one can be sure what people are referring to when they use these terms. For instance; There are some quite highly regarded exercise scientist who call the first (lower) metabolic point the Lactate Threshold even though the consensus in terms of usage is certainly given to calling the higher metabolic event the Lactate Threshold.

I have tried to use terms that seem to be accepted well in both popular and scientific literature but that does not help when nomenclature confusion is the only real norm here. The lower point is most commonly referred to as Aerobic Threshold (AeT) or First Ventilatory Threshold (VT1), but occasionally as the Lactate Threshold (LT).

The second point was for decades called the Anaerobic Threshold (AnT). That term seems to have fallen out of favor and been replaced by Lactate Threshold (LT) or Second Ventilatory Threshold (VT2) but will sometimes show up as Maximum Lactate Steady State (MLSS) or Lactate Balance Point (LBP) or Functional Threshold Power or Pace (FTP).

There is no convention but I’m trying to remain consistent in my usage to avoid adding to the confusion. What’s the dang deal here anyway. Why the heck can’t exercise science agree on a convention? Physics does not have this problem. I mean when you use the word ‘momentum’ or ‘entropy’ everyone knows what those terms mean.

Scott.

I’ve done a couple ramp tests on the treadmill to test out the human hex threshold data and I’ve found potentially really interesting data. In two pictures attached, the solid green graphs are my hemoglobin % in two different tests. At the point where the % begins to decrease after the slow rise, my heart rate at that point correlates very very close to my heart rate at my PA:HR < 5% tests I did recently to estimate my aerobic threshold. Also a study displayed two graphs from two different athletes taking a similar test. The hex data for the Athlete on the left captured his aerobic threshold in orange at 2mmol/L and anaerobic threshold at 4mmol/L in red almost perfectly. Not for the other athletic however. I wonder if that is because the other athletes aerobic threshold was so low, shown in the graph as being well over 2mmol/L during the ramping. I’d love to see more tests with this.

Link to study mentioned above:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5880957/#!po=0.476190

Keep us posted. Mine too is in the cupboard gathering dust. I bought it on the promise they wouldnt end up like bsx.

My percentage differs depending on location so that could be a possibility. What kind of AeT test did you do?