By Elena Hight, Professional Snowboarder

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As a professional athlete, I tend to think a lot about my body. During training and competition I need to excel, and even when I’m at rest, I need to be mindful of activities that could set back my training or put me at a competitive disadvantage. Like many of you reading this though, I’ve found that there aren’t really great options out there to give me true insight into my health – and even the numbers that I can get are only compared against population metrics.

That’s not really a very “personal” approach to understanding my body.

Q Bio’s approach is different, and that’s why I’m excited to be among the very first to use their technology to get real, reproducible data about my health so that I can monitor and measure it over time to understand what’s getting stronger, what might need work – and what I should know that my body isn’t otherwise telling me.

I recently had my first exam – a quick and easy full body scan that produced more than 3,000 data points about my body that we will use as a baseline for future appointments. I’m getting a better understanding of my cardiometabolic profile, seeing my heart and how it works – as well as better understanding of my body composition and muscle fat fraction. These initial measurements weren’t surprising – but as an athlete, it was good to see confirmation that my cardiometabolic functions are performing at the higher end of the population health range. 

I’m back on the slopes now though and keeping busy wherever it’s cold enough to keep having fun, so I won’t be back for my follow-up until sometime this summer – and I’m excited to see just how much my body has changed in that time! 

More than that, I’m excited to see how *I* change because of the information I’m given. I’m thinking about potential diet changes in response to any trends I see. I’ll also be thinking about monitoring my workout both during this active season and during the summer. The kind of data Q Bio is able to provide is giving me more inputs into being more proactive about my health even as an athlete – and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me.

Note: Elena is an IRB consented research participant.