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
