Supersapiens Dashboard for Desktop
The Supersapiens glucose sensor works nicely with the impressive app and offers lots of insights into your glucose levels in and around exercise. The scope of the platform also includes workout sync from Apple Health and Training Peaks, a proprietary workout band and CIQ features for select Garmin devices – these latter two both need some TLC.
However, the TLC has recently been directed elsewhere. Today, Supersapiens has made a big move onto your desktop with an impressive-looking interface. There’s lots of great information presented on the big screen but perhaps more importantly a coach is able to pull the glucose data from multiple athletes.
Note: This is not an in-depth look at the Supersapiens desktop platform, more of a news item to give you a heads-up as to some possibilities offered by Supersapiens.
Overviews/Trends – Glucose Heatmap
Let’s start with the glucose dashboard which unusually has the time of day on the x-axis and date on the Y-axis.
It looks a bit meh at first.
However, the slider in the bottom left-hand corner can be used to exclude progressively higher levels of glucose to enable you to better see the peak periods, like this…
Well, I thought it was cool !.
Next up, we have two charts with the first showing my daily time-in-zone. This uses Supersapiens definitions of glucose zones that essentially boil down to zones you don’t want to go into when at rest and zones you want to stay in when working out.
The second chart shows my Glucose Stability, ie how stable and controlled my glucose levels are through recovery and performance. The chart is zoomable for when you have built up many weeks’ worth of glucose data.
Daily View/Details – Glucose Trace
Here’s an interesting view of one particular February day. It’s the same sort of information you can get on the app. Nevertheless, you can see how well (or not) I was able to keep the glucose levels up during my morning ride and you can also see the effect of a post-meal spike on the glucose levels later in the day. You might want to target >140 mg/dL when exercising or target 70-90 mg/dL when at rest.
For that same day, my coach could perhaps zoom into the details of the cycling workout for a finer look at how I control the glucose and perhaps also review the impact of the dietary intakes I logged (I didn’t log any in its case)
Glucose Tips
Understanding your body and how it handles glucose is one thing. Changing all of it for the better is another matter entirely. You can use Supersapiens and lots of scientific research that exists to experiment with strategies to create a better, faster you. Like these…
Boost race day performance with these 4 glucose tips
- Increase your average glucose by around 10 mg/dL 24 hours prior to the event.
- Steadily increase your glucose levels and fuel to keep them in your optimal glucose range.
- Maintain higher glucose levels for 12 hours before the race.
- Optimize Glucose Stability leading into the event to have better Glucose Stability during the event.
Get better glucose stability for the rest of your life.
- Order Your Macronutrients – eat fibre, fat, and protein before carbohydrates
- Change Your Proportions – add fat, fibre, and protein to what is otherwise a high carbohydrate meal
- Post-Meal Walk – Perform any exercise within ten minutes of eating
- Add Vinegar – Mixed into a salad dressing
- Add Moringa
- Keep Stable Glucose Levels Early in the Day to positively impact full day stability
- Use Resistant Starch – bread, rice, pasta, potato change structure when they are cooked and then cooled. Eat them cold or reheat them
- Avoid the “Second Meal” Effect – restricted carbohydrates at breakfast can increase the rush at lunch. Include breakfast carbs like fruit or honey.
- Get Better Sleep – poor sleep negatively impacts insulin sensitivity, glucose control, appetite and cravings.
- Get more active, more frequently – movement maintains glucose stability.
Take Out
This seems pretty much like the same functionality and data as found on the app. Which is good.
Whilst the dashboard may be nice for people like me who prefer the big screen it will probably be of greater benefit to coaches who are spending more time looking at this data across a range of athletes.
Glucose data is one of those subjects that seems to divide those who use it for sports. I’ve heard from several people that they seemed to get more benefit from Supersapiens when not exercising, seeing how well they regulate their dietary intake during the day. Some of these people then might comment that it was pretty obvious that taking a gel boosted glucose and that’s true – however you also get to understand how dynamic your body is at adapting to the rigours of your workout/race.
My criticism is somewhat different. I do want the in-ride glucose data but I don’t want to have to carry a phone with me. To that end, I got the Supersapiens Band which helps show live Glucose but it needs to be made more reliable. Plus then I want to see the same colour-coded glucose metrics as absolute and as trends on my Wahoo Bolt as well as my Fenix 7/Epix…and I can’t do either of those yet.
More: wiki Blood Glucose
Is there any difference between the data provided by the Supersapiens band and the Garmin CIQ data field?
Very interesting but a bit expensive for me at the moment.
I can’t understand why so many apps aren’t still available for Epix2/Fenix 7 (And the Ciq system 5 not yet updated to the last and most expensive garmin devices ..or I’m wrong)
i think it’s essentially the same.
i don’t know why epix/f7 aren’t available.
i think it is probably a complicated issue to do with the controls required by the Abbot Libre sensor rather than what Supersapiens themselves are doing in ciq as, yes, you should just be able to copy a data fields from one garmin to another perhaps spending 5 seconds to tinker with the screen resolution. but i suspect there is some complicated pairing or authentication required somewhere.
as proof of my theory i don’t think you will even see any 3rd party developers being able to get access to the SS data directly. I’ve asked a few to give it a go but none got back to me with a solution!!