What is GRASPOR?

GRASPOR is your new training partner. This tool can help you improve your training through new insights and data from your body. But what exactly is GRASPOR, and how does it help? We’ll try to explain here.

How does it work?
GRASPOR works by measuring two metrics, muscle activation via EMG technology and muscle oxygen level with NIRS technology. Both technologies are well established for many applications, but GRASPOR is the first product to incorporate them together in a wearable sleeve.

Muscle Activation
The EMG data enables you to track your quadriceps and hamstrings’ activation in real-time and compare these muscle groups’ use to each other. This data can help track differences in activation during your training.
Differences in activation over time can indicate a developing overuse injury, commonly seen around the knee area. The activation data can also help you improve pedalling efficiency and identify bottlenecks in your muscular capability.

Muscle Oxygen
Muscle Oxygen has similar applicability to the blood lactate level. You can use Muscle Oxygen to measure the intensity of the work the body is performing. The difference between Muscle Oxygen and lactate is data availability. Muscle Oxygen is displayed live via our app. You can continuously evaluate your performance based on accurate data from your body rather than an arbitrary power number.

Muscle Oxygen is an expression of the oxygenated blood available in the muscle. The number you will see in the live feed is the percentage of oxygenated red blood cells in your muscle.

Threshold test
With GRASPOR, you can also complete a non-invasive anaerobic threshold test, even in a non-lab setting. As the data is similar to blood lactate data, you can get the same results from a lactate threshold test. However, with GRASPOR, you can see exactly where your body responds to the intensity change during a particular step.

If you were to get a 4.3 mmol/ml lactate measure after 4 minutes of 300 watts, you would have to estimate where your 4.0 mmol/ml threshold is. With GRASPOR, you would be able to find the exact moment where your Muscle Oxygen drops, e.g., after 3 minutes and 5 seconds.
We have another article about threshold testing with GRASPOR right here.

Warm-up
Muscle oxygen can also be used as a marker for blood flow, to guide your warm-up and follow your muscle recovery.
Warming up before an event or training session is essential to make sure you perform your best.

You can finally quantify your warm-up with GRASPOR. When using GRASPOR live during your warm-up, your goal should be to increase the Muscle Oxygen level as much as possible. Increasing Muscle Oxygen gives you the best grounds for a successful event or training session. You can even further analyse your warm-up protocol in the apps full-screen graph. You can do this by looking at the total haemoglobin measure.
We have another article about warming up with GRASPOR right here.