Mobile Metabolic LaboratoryComing soon

Built into a sixteen-foot Hino 155 box truck.

What’s in the mobile metabolic laboratory

VO2 max — the VO2 Master. Built in Vernon, forty minutes from where these sessions happen. A wireless mask that reads oxygen uptake and breathing live through a test, with no cart or tubing. That portability is what makes a mobile metabolic laboratory possible.

Body composition — an InBody 270. About fifteen seconds on the scale gives skeletal muscle mass, body fat, total body water, and lean mass arm by arm and leg by leg. There is no radiation, unlike an X-ray scan, so it can be repeated every week and compared with itself over time.

Read more: why impedance, and why always the same device

No ionizing radiation, and that is not a small thing in practice. An X-ray method needs a licensed facility and a qualified operator, and each scan is supposed to be medically justified — the IAEA notes that scans done for athletic performance or a sports contract are not always. Impedance has no dose to justify. It can be run every week, every month of a season, on a whole roster, without anyone counting.

What decides a training question is not one reading but whether the same reading can be trusted six weeks later. An impedance scale’s absolute numbers sit on their own scale, so they are compared with themselves — this device, this person, over time — and not mixed with a reading taken on different equipment somewhere else.

Body composition, the free version. Before any of that, there is the tape test — the body-fat estimate the US Navy has used since 1984, which needs a tape measure and nothing else. It is rougher than the scale in the truck and it is honest about that, but it costs nothing, you can do it at home tonight, and measured the same way each time it will show you which direction you are going. Take the test — the directions, the arithmetic and where it came from are all on that page, and RizunResilience BF% puts it beside a second method so you can see how far apart two answers about the same body can be. That gap is the reason everything here is compared with itself rather than with somebody else’s equipment.

Lactate threshold. A finger prick at each stage of a graded treadmill test, read on a handheld analyzer in about ten seconds. It shows where your aerobic and anaerobic thresholds actually sit, which is what training zones should be built from, instead of a percentage of a guessed maximum heart rate.

Blood pressure. Taken on an Omron HEM-907XL, the monitor clinics and research studies use: three readings averaged, seated and rested, with the cuff sized to your arm. The number goes to you and into your record. Trevor is not a physician and does not diagnose; a reading outside the normal range is a reason to see your doctor.

Grip strength — handgrip dynamometry on a Takei Smedley III. You squeeze the dynamometer as hard as you can. Twice on each hand, alternating, standing, with the arm hanging at your side. It takes under two minutes and it is the cheapest, fastest and best-evidenced single number in the whole vehicle.

Read more: why one squeeze tells you so much

It is not really a test of your hands. Grip is a usable proxy for whole-body strength, and whole-body strength turns out to track a great deal else.

It predicts death better than blood pressure does. The PURE study followed 139,691 people across 17 countries. Every 5 kg of missing grip strength came with a 16% higher risk of dying of any cause and a 17% higher risk of cardiovascular death — and grip was a better predictor of all-cause death than systolic blood pressure. One squeeze, no electricity, no consumables.

It tracks mood, which is why it is on this page and not just in a gym. In 162,167 UK Biobank participants aged 38 to 70, each 5 kg of lower grip strength came with a 7% higher risk of depression and an 8% higher risk of anxiety. That is exactly the relationship Resilience Therapy is built on, measured in a cohort large enough to be taken seriously — physical capacity and mental health are not separate ledgers.

Which direction the arrow points is genuinely unsettled, and nobody here will pretend otherwise. Strength may protect mood; low mood may cost you strength; both may be downstream of inflammation or sleep. What is not in doubt is that they move together, and that this is a two-minute way of watching one of them.

There are Canadian numbers to sit beside. Statistics Canada measured grip in 11,108 people aged 6 to 79 for the Canadian Health Measures Survey and published percentiles by age and sex. So unlike most gym tests, your result can be placed against the country you live in rather than against nothing.

The device was chosen to match the table. Those Canadian percentiles were collected on a Smedley III, standing, with the dynamometer held in line with the forearm at thigh level. That is the same instrument and the same protocol used here, deliberately. The other common standard has you seated with the elbow bent at ninety degrees on a different make of dynamometer, and it produces a different number from the same hand — reading a percentile off the wrong table is the same mistake as weighing yourself on different scales each month.

The digital version is used rather than the analog one for a dull but real reason: a dial has to be read and typed in, and over a few hundred tests that is a transcription error waiting to happen.

Teams

The same testing works for a squad. Because the mobile metabolic laboratory comes to the team, a whole roster can be tested where it already trains, rather than each athlete booking a clinic in a city on their own time.

Three points in a season:

• Pre-season — a baseline for every athlete before the work starts.
• Mid-season — what has changed since that baseline.
• Post-season — where the season left them.

Tested the same way each time, on the same equipment, the three sit next to each other and the season reads as a line rather than three unrelated appointments.

Teams in the area get a discounted rate.

What this costs everywhere else

Priced one at a time, at clinics in BC, as of September 2026:

• VO2 max test — $235. Scienced Athletics, Vancouver. A sixty-minute appointment around a fifteen-to-twenty-minute treadmill test.
• Lactate threshold test — $250. Same clinic. About an hour, with seven to ten finger-prick samples through the stages.
• InBody scan — usually $25 to $60. A Toronto clinic charges $60 plus tax.
• Private blood work — from about $89, depending on the panel. Private blood testing in BC runs from there upward; haemoglobin and ferritin are not covered by MSP when there is no medical reason to order them.

Add it up and the physiology alone is about six hundred dollars, before the drive. The clinic above is in Vancouver, which from Salmon Arm is an overnight.

Starting out free

To start with, the testing is free. The mobile metabolic laboratory will be travelling around the Interior doing two things at once: collecting data, and letting people see for themselves what it can do. Most people have never had a VO2 max test or a body composition scan and have no particular reason to pay six hundred dollars for something they cannot picture. Free testing solves both problems — the dataset grows, and the testing stops being abstract.

The data is worth more than the fee right now. That is not generosity, it is the trade: the more people tested, the better the picture of what these numbers do across real training, and the better the programming gets for everyone after.

For rates, please email.