Today I chat with Eric Glader, The founder of the muscle stimulation technology which is taking cycling by storm - Power Dot
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Rowman today I want to talk to the founder of PowerDot, Eric Glatter. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our longevity? That is the question. This podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Rowman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman, Cycling Podcast. It's Wednesday, it's my favorite day of the week, it's Interview Day. Today I got a chance to sit down with Eric Glatter. Eric is the founder of a company called PowerDot. PowerDot is a company which I not affiliated with, but it's a product I love and it's a product I use almost every day. It's a neat little pack of muscle stimulators. I tried mine after trying in sessions. I tried mine when I'm traveling. I tried them on when I'm driving. I love them. It's one of those things I try my backpack and just habitually bring it with me because it's just very convenient. It gives me a big bang for the book and it's just something I really enjoy and we had Scott Morphy from Michelton Scott and he was on the roadman summit and that was before Christmas of anyone tuned in and one of the real takeaways I had from Scott was, we have all these recovery techniques, we have ice pools, we have massage, we have saunas, yada yada yada. The research and the evidence from a clinical perspective is very mixed on any of these. So what did I recommend for the Reuters that are, you know, finished a ground tour stage and looking to perform again tomorrow? Well, they move from an objective test to a subjective one. So they move away from the research and does the research say that ice bats are better than massage and they ask the Reuters what makes them feel better? Which one of these things makes you feel like you're more recovered, makes you feel more relaxed, makes you feel more ready to race tomorrow? Because when you put that lens onto it, the Reuters subjective feeling is really matter because if I feel more relaxed, my cortisol levels are lower, inflammation comes down and I'm ready to perform at a higher level. So maybe PowerDot is not the thing for you, but for me, PowerDot works super super well and that's why I wanted to bring you the interview today with the founder Eric Glatter and talked about his motivation behind building power dot. Guys before I jump into this interview with Eric I'd like to remind you about patreon.com. The link is in the bio down below as always it's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. Patreon's how I fund the podcast guys. Patreons how I'm able to reach out to guys like Eric it's how I'm able to devote time in the week to bring in you this podcast. So if you're getting value out of this, if you're learning stuff, if you're getting education, if you're getting entertainment, if you're cracking a smile, I encourage you please to head on over to patreon.com, make a small donation, price of a beer once a month. In return, I'm going to keep bringing you this podcast and I'm also going to give you access to the secret podcast once a month. Last month's secret podcast was pure fire. So please make that small donation over on Patreon. without further ado, I've pushed it off long enough. I'm going to welcome to the podcast, the founder of PowerDot, Mr. Eric Latter. Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Eric, so I suppose let's just dive in to start off for people that mightens know who you are or aren't familiar with PowerDot. Give us a sort of brief 60-second overview. Yeah, so PowerDot is a company where we focused on smart muscle stimulation. We were born out of a much larger non-invasive orthopedic company and we saw some opportunities to shrink down some therapy, make it smarter and really make it for people on the go. What we found was a lot of these therapies that currently exist out there, they're just really difficult. They require you to go in clinic, get some education. We saw with the rise of the smartphone and smart device that we could actually shorten that educational cycle by leveraging data from third-party apps to basically create a therapy that's very, very specific to the end user. In fact, we were just granted a patent around that specific piece of it. So we've just found out last night that we're really one of the first smart neuromuscular stimulation tens and electric stimulation companies out there. We've got IP around that now. Yeah. So we're going to dive into exactly what those in a second, but while you're touching on toward party integrations like who came up with the idea of the integration with Strava or I'd say they got a promotion.
It's a cool idea that we recover differently based on different stress in a session that day. Yeah and it's not and it wasn't a big stress for us right it's how do people use it and I think you and I have talked about this before look everybody is different everybody's activity is different everybody's life is different we all have different stresses and strains but it's not like we shouldn't have You know, that optimal recovery, because we're all, the way we like to see it is we're all professionals at one thing, our own lives. And we should treat it as such. You know, there's professional athletes out there that treat their muscles because it's a career for them. But I would say that, you know, my life, your life is just as important. So managing your body, which is the only vehicle you've got to get from point A to point B is hyper important. And so our whole focus was how do we get data about you specifically? And what we realized is there's a ton of that data out there on what we call the smartphone, right? You've got Strava, you've got Apple Health. We've got other collaborations that we're about to do with some other very large brands. But the idea is that data is only so relevant for so long. And what we wanted to do is put value behind it, which is hugely valuable. If we know that you wrote 100 miles yesterday at a certain clip, and the next day that you didn't perform as well, we can start now creating therapies that are specific that we can continue to watch and monitor that and make sure we fine tune that recovery to keep your optimal performance and optimal recovery. You know, it's the exact same rationale behind any good coaching plan. Like it's why template plans don't work because what happens if you fall off the wagon? What happens if you have a stressful day? What happens if you have a niggle? The training plan next week, it needs to reflect how you've responded to this week in much the same way that you're a recovery protocol. Up to now it's been a stagnant recovery protocol. I come home from a 60 minute recovery rise, a 60 minute sprint session or a six hour endurance ride. And I put on a 10 minutes cycle on my space boots. It's the same recovery for every session. that intuitively makes no sense. Right. And it's kind of constantly adjust because we're constantly adjust as we get older, things are changing as we change some of our training regimens, they're going to change. As we change something as small as, you know, I got two boys here. If all of a sudden I throw one of my boys in the air and I get a little kink in my back, that's going to change things, right? So there's not just this constant, you know, we're not on this constant curve, there's always kind of the ups and downs of that curve. And so the idea is how do you get a recovery mechanism or recovery methodology that kind of works within that lifecycle. So how do you see powered off fitting into the entire recovery landscape? So if you think about traditional recovery protocol for a world tour rider or even an amateur who's clued in, first thing to prioritize is glycogen replenishment. So they're getting their recovery drinks in straight away. Then they could be onto the bus into the space boots and its massage later on that evening and maybe ice baths. Where do you see powered off fitting into to that. So is it a replacement for someone? I don't think it's a replacement. And you and I've talked about this before, is like, we don't believe there's a silver bullet. You know, recovery is very, very specific to the end user. We're very good friends with Jim Luther and the guys from Hyper-Ice, their dear friends of ours. We don't believe that there's one therapy that's specific. What we do believe is that, you know, partnering up with various modalities kind of creates that Chinese menu. It's very specific to the end user because everybody is different. Everyone is going to react to different, to different plays. So where does power how about fit in. How about is tens neuromuscular stimulation. So we do as we focus on waveform to create a certain reaction within the muscle, whether or not that's a type one muscle contraction or a type two muscle contraction or transcutaneous nerve stimulation, which is effectively blocking or masking a pain symptom to provide some sort of relief. And so that's very different than percussion. That's very different than compression. That's very different than thermal and ice. And so what we actually believe is we fit into that quiver of a couple of different modalities.
You want to be the best in the neuromuscular stimulation in 10 space. And so we believe that that fits into certain areas. Now, where does it fit into the daily regimen? It depends on what you're using it for. If you're using it for recovery, you want to use it within about five or six hours of your workout. And so what we're going to do is we're going to pump those muscles. We're going to create that lymphatic pump. We're going to create the circulation and we're going to flush out the old blood, bring in the new blood, reoxiate those muscles and really keep those muscles moving because we're firing involuntary waveform into that muscle. So all the stuff that's not firing, it's going to fire because we're firing. and stim in there. And so the body's going to recognize that and it's going to keep those muscles activated. You know, one of the things that we say at our company is if you're not moving your diet and that's very true. And so what we're doing is we're making those muscles move. And so we're making sure they're not going to atrophy. We're going to make sure that they fire. And when the body is kind of a post workout, your body's also going into adaptation. So when we start firing those type 2 muscle fibers, all of a sudden the body says, hold on a second. I'm trying to recover from this workout. And what it does is it says, I want to make the next workout easier. So what it does is it starts recruiting those motor neural pathways. Charlie Francis coined this back in the day with all the Olympic sprinters. He would go out and have them sprint 400 meter runs. And then he'd go strap them to a neuromuscular stimulation machine. And what he was doing was he was teaching the body that it had access to more of these muscles. And so effectively what he was doing is he was taking that adaptation process and shortening it by forcing that recruitment faster over a period of time. So effectively what happens is the body says, holy cow, I have access to all of this. And it starts recruiting those motor neural pathways faster and more completely, which creates higher performance outputs. So I suppose one of the things that a lot of listeners, and I know it's something I've heard world tour guys talking about as the wider maybe a little bit hesitant to use that, and especially on a multi-day event toward a France-type event, is if we broadly break our recovery down into passive recovery or active recovery, if they've been racing for six hours today and if six hours racing to do tomorrow, do they want to come home and for a stimulus are they going to want to let you start muscles possibly heal for the evening? So when the muscles passively heal for the evening, you're going to get some inflammation in there. So it's actually better to have some sort of movement and keep those muscles moving so they actually don't get fired. So if you actually focus on some of the lower waveforms and the seven to 10 hertz range, you're not really going to get it. It's not going to create a stress on the muscle. It's actually going to keep it moving, keep it from getting stiff, keep it from getting inflamed. It's going to keep that blood flow going. So while I agree, you don't want to go out and start firing type 2 muscle fibers. You don't want to start firing type 1 muscle fibers very aggressively, but you do want to have that stimulation to create those little minor contractions to force that blood flow through so the muscles don't get stiff, keeps it nice and pliable so you're not all tight the next day. That's fascinating. Have you seen studies or have you guys conducted studies asked to athlete A who's not recovering using electric muscle stimulation versus athlete B who is? We have, we've seen it both and again, some people, again, we'll go back to everybody is different, right? So there are going to be guys, some guys that do react to stimulation and it will have a, you know, it could potentially have negative effect. With any recovery methodology, compression doesn't work for everybody, but it does work for some people. Percussion doesn't work for everybody, but it does work for some people. Again, back to the original piece of the conversation, which is you got to find out what's right for you. We look at ourselves as one arrow in the whole quiver, but that whole quiver has to be sampled to find out how you behave the best and what works for you as an athlete, a performer and a human to kind of achieve your optimal goals.
What's super fascinating is Scott Morphe from Mitchell from Scott spoke at Lent about this. It's the mind-body connection where if you're using a device like PowerDot and for anyone that hasn't seen it, just google a picture of it, you're worried up and it's pretty cool looking. It looks like a cyborg. So you're pretty unlikely to wobble out to the fridge and sink, you know, a court of ice cream and six beers when you're wearing power though because it just creates this conflict like I'm trying to get a marginal gain here And now I'm sabotaging that marginal gain. So that's like an almost an external Soyte effect that's very helpful for an athlete. Yeah, there's another piece of it too Which is you know, we made this very portable, you know The last company I worked out we had devices that were fully wired and had to be with a tower and all of these things And what we found is that actually kept people not compliant with their recovery. It made it very difficult. And so our whole focus was how do we make this fit into kind of a working man's life? Let's face it, all cyclists are pros and that's not the only thing you're doing. Most of them are type A personalities. They've got a job. They've got to go to. They've got kids. They've got a wife. And we've got this thing called life that's also part of this journey that we have to work in. And sometimes time becomes the only asset that we have. And so our focus was how do we make this simple, elegant, easy to use but small so it doesn't distract you from your life so you can get that recovery and we can kind of fit in with with with these people that have more than just sport on their mind. Well like I tried my backpack almost wherever I'm going because if I'm in a long car ride and your legs are getting blocked up from the car ride it's just so easy to show it on and that's being my default recovery from travel and it's working brilliant for me but I want to touch on another aspect of it because I've mainly used it and I hold my hand up and say I probably haven't and explore its full potential, because I've mainly used it as a recovery tool. But I know it's possible to use this more in a recovery tool for building strength, injury prevention, maybe even some mild injury treatments. Do you want to take us through? So, Marach? Sure. So we actually have a whole medical division that we're building out, so we have a healthcare platform. And look, where STEM initially came from, it's the idea of firing waveform into a muscle to create a contraction in a non-weight load bearing environment, right? So if you think about that, you think about ACL, MCL, anytime where you've had an issue where you're going to be stagnant and again we go back to the statement if you're not moving you're dying it's called sarcopenia it's muscle atrophy so that's really where stem came from it was how do we maintain that muscle strength how do we take maintain that muscle density when we can't actually put the muscle under load and so the whole focus is is when you're injured but you need to maintain that muscle we can do that without putting stress on the body and we use that for all of our medical stuff so there's absolutely a play for that but But the other piece is, back to the muscle recruitment, we've actually done tests with a product where we've looked at vertical jump, and we've tested people with no stem, then we put them through a workout where they're doing concentric and eccentric contractions. So they're effectively squatting into a contraction with stem, they're doing other movements into stem, and what we've actually found is we can increase for school jump by almost 30%. Why are they so insane? Yeah, so we've seen huge gains with people, these are non-professional people, But we see huge gains by implementing STEM again. It's because we're getting more of that muscle to fire and we can get those users to recruit more of that muscle fiber the next time they do that action. And so really when people talk about biohacks and all this stuff, I mean, this isn't really a biohack, all you're doing is doing what your brain can't do. Why do you lift heavy weights? Why do you cycle? You do it because you want to put your body under stress because when your body's under stress, it goes to recruit more muscle to make your body perform better next time it's under that situation. So now think about that.
If all of a sudden we start firing involuntary muscle contractions and we light up more of that muscle fiber when the body is trying to figure out how to make itself more efficient, what does it do? It remembers the body is the most efficient machine possible. When it sees muscle, and I'll give you this example. I tell people this because it's an easy way to look at it. If I walked you into a room and had a blindfold on you and walked you into a corner, room is pitch black. Had you in the corner and I said, okay, I'm going to ask you to tell me where the door is. I lifted the blindfold up, room is completely black and I put the blindfold back on. You wouldn't be able to tell me where the room is. You wouldn't be able to tell me where the room is or the door is. Now all of a sudden, if I all of a sudden have you in that same situation in the corner and I take the blindfold off, but all of a sudden, I introduce a quick flick of the light switch. You now have a reference point on where that door is. You can see where it is. The body reacts the exact same way. If we turn on that light switch on the body and make those muscle fibers fire, when your body's an adaptation, the body goes, hold on. I have access to all of this and we'll start recruiting that. So it now is a reference point on where to recruit from in those specific areas. That's really interesting. And I wonder, have you looked at the crossover because I know box jump in is highly correlated to top end sprinting for cyclists. Have you seen any studies as the how top end sprinting power has improved? We haven't looked at that quite yet, but we've also, we've got a couple of guys at some of the big golf facilities down here and we see box jumps and deadlifts. So we can increase the type two muscle fibers there. we can actually increase the amount that they drive off the tee. So very, very similar when we can get the hips firing and we can get those type two muscle fibers firing as we create that explosive strength. It will create benefit in those areas. I know for athletes we work with a lot of our athletes are job-laying work, family and then they're trying to come home and squeeze a session in. Common complaint I always get from athletes. Look, I'm stuck in the car for 60, 90 minutes. And then I'm coming home and I'm trying to jump on the walk boy, our jump-ons with and do two 20-minute threshold efforts. I feel completely blocked. Blocked is the cyclenter and we always hear. Is there any way or if you looked into PowerDOT, alleviate and that inverted commas blocked, failing from long travel? We do. We actually have got part of our new IP that we just got is we can actually see what you're doing. One of the things is if we can see that you're flying from San Francisco to Tokyo. 10 hour flight you're sitting down, your posterior chain is shut down. You know, we can now start making recommendations of, hey, you've been sitting down, your body's type, apply pads here, go through a quick session where we can start firing those type two type one muscle fibers. Get those in a quick warm up in about five minutes and get those muscles firing. But also when people just don't have time, again, we built this platform to be very simple to fit into people's lives. So when people are in the car, they can actually be using the device or when they're at works in at their desk or when they're on a podcast sitting at a microphone, they can actually be using this device and no one would know. It's very, very simple, very elegant and we made it to fit into everyone's busy schedule. I feel like the next iteration of it has to be some sort of smart aspect to it. I know for me a lot of times I'll pull it out after a session and I've mental fatigue from the session and I've a little bit of overwhelm because I'm like my car's are sore on my hamstring. I'm sore everywhere. Where do I start? Because I don't have time to put it in 20 different places here. Right, so that's the piece of it. So that's more of the things that we've built, that's some of the IP that we've got. We've now aligned with Strava, we've aligned with Apple Health, we have a couple other big partnerships that are coming out. So as we start doing this, and you actually log in, we can actually start taking that data from some of the other third party data inputs that you get, and we can start aggregating that into actionable therapy that's very specific to you.
And as you start engaging in that engagement, we start seeing how these therapies affect your outcomes on Zwift, Strava, or other. But it'll then start gauging what therapy is going to be right for the next thing. And so the whole idea with this, and this was one of the things we had a problem with the other company, is people don't understand STEM. They don't get it. And so the objective in putting it into a mobile ecosystem and drawing on data that you're already creating is to demystify it and make it very specific to you as the user allows it. So if you opt into our Strava piece, if you opt into our Apple Health piece, if you opt into some of the other collaborations that will be launching in Q1 of next year, some very, very big names that you guys will know, It's going to start learning more about you and really start creating a therapy that's very specific to you. And then more importantly, we'll start recommending other partners that we've got, such as our friends over at Hyper-Ise to start implementing some other modalities that you may not be thinking about, but that could serve to help in your recovery along the way. Look, our goal is, of course, to sell units, but our goal is one thing, quality of life of each of our consumers. And we recognize that we're one tool in that, but we also recognize some of the partners we work with can also be beneficial in doing that. And so we partner with companies that are like-minded, such as the folks at Hyper-I, is to really start pushing out some of these ideas, I'll get you what you need, because STEM is going to be good for some people, but STEM with percussion, compression is also going to be good for other folks as well. Yeah, like we used today's plan. I'm not sure if familiar with today's plan, they're a platform very similar to the training peaks. So it's probably more advanced analytics still than Strava and stuff like that. I know a lot more the elite cyclists tend to show away from Strava because there's a reluctance to show what they're doing But I almost love to log into something like this and we spoke to the nutritionists for at the moment everything's piecemeal There's sports psychologists and saying okay, you need to do this daily. The nutritionist is working on a different platform It's nearly like we need a central hub to log in and we're pulling from it and saying okay Well, here's today's training Here's also my recovery protocol based on that training and that recovery protocol is is dynamic. So it's changing. If I didn't quite, if I exceed my expected session by 10%, my recovery protocol changes, but so does my nutrition protocol and my mental health protocol. It all needs to be linked at the moment. It just feels two piecemeal. So I love what you guys are doing with the integrations. Yeah, we feel like that's so we're in conversations with all the guys that are working in this space. And we feel like that's all coming together. And it's moving a little slower than we like, but we do believe that all the guys that are out there understanding that, yeah, We've got this data, yeah, we've got this data. It seems like we're now starting to come together, and there's an understanding that those pieces will come together here in the very new future. But I do see in the next probably 12 to 24 months that you're gonna see a lot of consolidation in that space where we're really gonna start optimizing all of the collective data to really come out with a solid performance outcome. That's awesome. And I know a lot of people listening to this are probably taking all of our 15 kilograms overweight, a bigger fish to Freud. We really need to worry about this. But like I found this is really a tool for, I would say more so amateurs than professionals because professionals have access to massage, they have access to advanced recovery protocols. When I was an amateur, we typically don't and that's why I found it quite useful on why I reached out and wanted to go and spread the good word by having you on the summit. Yeah, listen, I think one of the things that we don't talk about quite a bit is just because we're amateurs doesn't mean our body is important to us. I mean, this is the only body I've got. So to me, this is the body that needs to be professional. going to take me from point A to point B, point B, be an end of life, right? So I need to treat it as good as possible.
And what I would say to you is, you know, the guys that are 15 kilograms overweight, right? You can wake up in the morning if you have a pain. That pain is going to affect the way that you perceive the rest of the day. It's going to affect the way you interact with your children. It's going to affect the way you look at yourself. It's going to affect your work output. But more importantly, it's going to affect how much work do you put into your actual performance. And so the idea of, I'm just 50, I've got to be focusing on this. Now we take a more holistic approach. It's how does your body feel? Because if your body doesn't feel good, guess what? You're not going to get rid of those 15 kilograms. It's not going to happen. So it really has to be a 360 degree view. It's not one of these things where it's just, oh, I've got to do this first, this first, this first. No, it's really got to look at the whole view of your body and making sure that you're taking care of it. Because if one thing falls off, then you could fall off that performance therapeutic track and it becomes real problem. And is power dot designed to be used every day or come and use too much? It depends on how you use it. So some of the type 2 muscle fiber firing you don't want to use you only want to use those once a day but the recovery aspects the 10 aspects can be used as much as needed. So they're not going to create anything. The only reason we wouldn't use the type 2 muscle fibers is because you're firing type 2 muscle fibers and you're bought those are your short you know your fast switch. Those are the ones that aren't used to be fired I I mean, they're only supposed to be fired for that explosive strength, which is in theory, very short periods of time, very short periods of output. So if you're firing those all the time, you know, you don't have cases of those, but you know, if someone was to put this thing on and cover their body with call it six units and kept firing in type two muscle fibers, I mean, you could get RABDO, you could create that type of damage and you don't want to do that. So, you know, the type two muscle fiber firing can be used periodically on the muscle once a day. The other piece would be is the other parts of the recovery and the tans can be used as much as needed. Awesome. And finally, when can we expect some of these deeper integrations where Apple Health and the other companies you mentioned, or is this a tight-duty question? Yeah. So Apple Health is out now, Strava is out now. You'll see two more releases in Q1 that are fairly big within the space. They're going to be integrations that you guys are fully aware of, units that you're working with. We can't disclose them now and we're working with a couple of the big sports companies to do some integrations there as well. Awesome. think up, down below where people can go and buy their power dots and it was great chat with you. Thanks very much for joining us. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days, days, training plans regardless of what your level is. There's Masters Beginner Advanced, there's Mail Plans Shopping List and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio. That's roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.
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