Biohacking Your Workout: How to optimise your gym routine with science

Drishti Chhabria

Biohacking is no longer a trendy word in the start-up world, but a reality in today’s world of technology. We are experiencing a time where we tend to track everything that we do with the use of wearable technology and wearable devices, in ways we never thought about. Biohacking your workout means leveraging technology and science to optimise your workout to achieve your fitness goals more efficiently.

Often, we don’t realise what we do in the gym or how effective our workout is. A great way to ensure that you were productive and achieved the right number of calories burned or how much blood oxygen you consumed, it is important to track your workout with technology and science. By integrating a strategic approach, you can enhance your strength, endurance and power level overall. The best way you can start diving into your workout is to account for unique aspects of your body that influence your performance and efficiency. This includes age, fitness level, heart rate levels, metabolic rate and a lot more factors that determine the effectiveness of your workout. An easy way to do this is by wearing a device that calculates your metabolism based on age, gender, weight and activity levels as well as tracks your heart rate trends to see your overall performance. During your workouts, a great metric to track is your heart rate and what percentage of your max heart rate you are at. This allows you to effectively perform heart rate-based interval training to ensure you achieve the right amount of time in the correct heart rate zones as per your fitness goals. Most often, people tend to optimize their workout by introducing zone training into their routine to achieve higher calorie burn, improve cardiovascular health and enhance endurance overall.

Effective recovery is equally important as an effective workout. By tracking your recovery levels, you can ensure you are preventing an injury and giving your body the adequate rest you need. A good way to track your recovery is to track sleep metrics, hydration levels and stress levels. You can also look at the effect of additional recovery activities such as foam rolling, stretching, massages to see its effect on your recovery post workout.

Biohacking especially involves tracking your body’s metrics and performance to optimise your workout more effectively. The most common and most effective metric to track would be your heart rate! It shows not only your heart rate levels and effectiveness during the workout but also post workout recovery and stress levels. A great way to start biohacking your workout is to optimize your workout by tracking your heart rate. A heart rate monitor is a must to track your workout along with your step count, calorie count, time spent in each heart rate zone as well as your avg heart rate and avg percentage of max heart rate and more. All these important metrics help unlock your potential to motivate you to either push more or scale back depending on your body’s individual needs. These biohacking strategies can be utilised easily to achieve your goals and be able to sustain them in the long run without any burnout.

Drishti Chhabria is Founder & Chief Experience
Officer at Orangetheory Fitness India