The FITNDEX Founder/Creator was curious as to how much total work he had done on a squat/legs day in comparison to his bench/chest day. So as a starting point, he decided to see if he could accurately compare an air squat vs. a pushup using the standard work equation. He found that an air squat was about 5x the amount of work than a pushup for himself. Further trials with friends revealed that the ratio of work is highly variable from person to person. He then challenged himself to develop a model which predicted the work and thus the ratio of work between the two exercises...this was the birth of the user synchronization process.
This process forced FITNDEX to develop a biomechanics model to accurately estimate energy demand. When dealing with biological systems, it made the most sense to convert the energy demand to oxygen demand as oxygen is typically the limiting factor as whether an athlete can continue performing an exercise or not... this conversion from energy to oxygen openned the door to the development of the muscle 'heat' map.
We have only scratched the surface of what muscular oxygen demand patterns can teach us. We can already decipher categories of oxygen patterns such as endurance training, strength training, or hypertrophy training.
Hypertrophy training is considered muscle building and is an area we are currently studying with highest priority. They say 'No Pain, No Gain' where gain means muscle growth. The pain experienced is the muscle attempting to do work without enough oxygen available. If the muscle is maintained in this state of stress or low oxygen long enough, the body provides a hypertrophy response. More intense exercise requires a higher rate of oxygen demand, therefore, less time under load is required. However too much load makes it so that the user is unable to perform enough reps to achieve a hypertrophy response.
Due to the variable design and firing nodes of muscles, we find the patterns required to reach hypertrphy are variable from muscle to muscle but are consistent between users for a given muscle. We plan to tie these relationships to anatomical variables as well over time.