The Dutch pro cycling team Jumbo Visma and the Serpentine portfolio company Supersapiens partnered up in 2020 – in the meantime the cooperation has been extended. Supersapiens offers a real-time glucose monitoring and consequently tailor-made advice to nutrition. We talk to the VP of Science at Supersapiens, Federico Fontana, to find out more about the benefits of the partnership with Jumbo Visma which was the most successful team at this year’s Tour de France.
Could you describe in which state the partnership of Supersapiens and Jumbo Visma currently is?
We are currently focusing on the relationship between training load accumulation and overnight glucose control. The aim is to better understand Continous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) dynamics overnight in a group of high level athletes under extreme training conditions to see which role it plays when adjusting and prescribing training load progression. Over the past years we’ve been focusing on different working directions.
At the beginning of our partnership we spent time observing and understanding CGM dynamics for each athlete to characterize their individual response to food during different exercises.
We have been exploring the impact of different breakfasts on glucose control and how this affects athletes CGM dynamics and feeling during training. The aim was to establish the best breakfasts for each athlete, aiming for a stable glucose control while ensuring a proper macronutrients intake. The objective for our trial with Jumbo-Visma was to aim to avoid reactive low glucose levels and achieve stable glucose control.
What do you still want to find out together with the team?
Our main target for this year is to better understand the role of monitoring glucose overnight to better inform training prescription and training monitoring. We also plan to investigate how different athletes respond to different feeding schedules during training and how individualized nutrition ensures a correct glucose response in different individuals under different conditions.
A member of the Jumbo Visma team testing the Supersapiens setup during a training session. Photo: Federico FontanaWhy is this partnership important for Supersapiens?
Jumbo Visma is one of the best sports settings to work with. Their scientific driven mentality and attitude toward excellence make it a perfect match for investigating the role of a novel technology within the sport science context.
Their capacity to plan, monitor and carefully actuate plans is paramount to ensure the best possible way to isolate and control certain effects in a real and filed-base setting.
For the everyday athlete to adopt Supersapiens, they need to see that it has been tested by the best in the toughest conditions. We know Supersapiens is a luxury item and by having a team of the caliber of Jumbo-Visma rely on Supersapiens helps build confidence. The learnings we gain from our partnership with the team are then implemented into our ecosystem so that the every day athlete can help validate their fueling and nutrition strategies without needing a team of nutritionist and sports scientists.
How can you translate insights you gain from your work with top athletes into improvements of the technology of everyday users?
Jumbo Visma athletes are power users for us. Their capacity to understand applied data and put CGM in relation with their feeling and performance is instrumental to understand which role our technology can play in optimizing the training environment.
Also, we have a unique opportunity to work with leading experts in the world of sport nutrition and human performance and this gives us an opportunity to better understand and translate results into practice.
Our approach is also always looking at a very specific hypothesis. This allows us to isolate the effect and the association between variables and then to clarify what is the meaning when referring to our everyday practice.
