Research Guinea Pig

I went to the Endocrine and Metabolism (i.e., exercise) lab in Montefiore Hospital today to be a research guinea pig! As some of you already know, I decided to make my bike ride a little more interesting by tracking my body changes as I bike throughout the summer. There's not too much data on how really long term bike rides change body composition, so I decided to use myself as an experiment. (And well, besides that, it'll just be fun to get up close and personal with how my body works, after being in the dark for 24 years!)

Today I did my pre-bike testing--it was a lot of fun!! I underwent a DEXA Body Composition test AND a V-O2 max stress test. The DEXA test tells you about your fat vs. lean mass and bone density. You like down and this 'arm' hangs over you and moves down your body, scanning kind of like an x-ray as it goes. The whole thing only takes 6 minutes! Everything was relatively as expected (not too fat, not too skinny), BUT I found out that I have super-strong bones! Woohoo! I can't wait to tell my mom, so she will stop making me drink so much milk... ;o)

Next I had a V-O2 max test on a bike. I've heard of stress tests before, but I've never seen one done. Basically, I got on a bike, they hooked up this awkward ventilator. There was a huge mouthpiece which prevented me from drinking and made me drool all over, then the mouthpiece was stabilized via headgear, and my nose was pinched so I could only breathe out of my mouth. How ridiculous people must look when they do this! Then I had to bike for 2 minutes at progressively harder resistance levels, until I was biking so hard my muscles gave out or I couldn't move. Fun... =)

AND after all that I got a cool toy to take with me on my trip!! It's this monitor that sits on my arm 24/7 and records all this data about my activity levels, like energy output (in kcals), moderate vs. vigorous activity, # of steps I take, when I'm lying down, and when I'm sleeping. When I come back, we'll upload the data and we can see if things change as I progress (through the Rockies!) or which days were really hard. It has only 2 little lights on it, a mysterious button, and a place for a battery, so it's really curious how it actually works.

I'll be tracking other things too, like my calf, thigh, waist, bicep circumferences, H2O intake, average speed, weight, etc. I haven't decided if I'll post measurements on my blog yet, but please let me know if you'd like to see the results!

Thank you to George Grove (for his time today), Dr. Goodpaster (for funding the tests), and Dr. Studenski (for referring me to them)!