Barbell Shrugged - Avoid Overtraining by Measuring HRV, Sleep, and Recovery with WHOOP — Barbell Shrugged #385

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

WHOOP is the performance tool that is changing the way people track their fitness and optimize their training. WHOOP provides a wrist worn heart rate monitor that pairs to their app that provides analytics and insights on recovery, strain, and sleep. Know when your body is recovered or when it needs rest by getting to know your nervous system through heart rate variability and quality of sleep. Automatically track workouts and get strain scores that let you know how strenuous training was on your body and see even more data like average heart rate, max heart rate, and calories burned. Get optimal sleep times based on how strenuous your day was and track sleep performance with insight into your sleep cycles and stages of sleep, sleep quality, and sleep consistency. WHOOP monitors heart rate 100 per second 24/7 to give you full insight into your day so you can optimize the way you train. WHOOP has provided an offer for listeners to get 15% off their purchase with the code “shrugged.” Just go to WHOOP and use the code “shrugged” at checkout to save 15% and optimize the way you train.   In this episode of Barbell Shrugged we talk with Mike from WHOOP about the goal and vision of WHOOP, our experience with WHOOP, the impact of travel schedules with athletes, how to apply data into daily routines, how to interpret strain, future tracking goals with WHOOP, going through Ander’s data, how coaches can use WHOOP with their athletes, and much more.   Enjoy! - Anders and Doug   Episode Breakdown: 0:00 – 2:12 Intro                                                                                                     2:12 – 5:04  Mike’s Background                                                                      5:05 – 5:58 The goal and vision of WHOOP                                                5:59 – 7:41 Barbell Shrugged’s initial experience with WHOOP                                                                               8:07 – 10:49  Recovery                                                            10:50 – 14:18   Strain                                                                    14:19 – 14:48 Where WHOOP got its start in sports                                        14:49 – 16:07 impact of travel schedules with athletes                                  24:04 – 27:37 The sleep cycles WHOOP tracks                                               27:38 – 35:35 How to apply WHOOP data into daily routine       35:36 – 38:18 How to interpret strain                                                              38:19 – 42:23 Adjusting sleep to wake up optimally                                     42:23 - 45:32  Recovery across different types of training and sports              45:33 – 48:46 WHOOP calories                                                                     48:47 – 50:55  How nutrition helps with sleep and recovery                           55:56 – 51:52 Future tracking goals with WHOOP                                           51:53 – 54:32  How the WHOOP Strap tracks data                                           54:33 – 55:52 Wearing WHOOP                                                                       55:53 – 1:11:55  Going through Anders’ data                                                 1:11:56 – 1:15:08  Teams and groups WHOOP works with                    1:15:09 – 11:16:20 How coaches can use WHOOP                                                 1:16:21 – 1:19:20  How WHOOP calculates HRV                                                      1:19:21 – 1:27:30   Applying physiology to training plans                                   1:27:31 – 1:29:17    Training through injury with WHOOP                                       1:29:18 – 1:30:38  How athletes deal with their WHOOP data day of events            1:30:39 – 1:34:29     What WHOOP does with collected data         1:34:30 – 1:41:26   Finishing thoughts and outro   ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-whoop ----------------------------------------------------------------------- @bioptimizers: www.BiOptimizers.com/shrugged  “shrugged” to save 37% @sunlighten:www.sunlighten.com "ShruggedCollective" for $200 off + free shipping @perfectketo: https://perfectketo.com “shrugged” for 20% off @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20%   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrugged family, we are at Revival Strength. We just wrapped hanging out with Marcus Philly on the West Coast swing of the Shrugged World Tour. I just made that up right now. How much fun is that? Today's show is with Whoop. We met these guys down at Waterpalooza and as I say in the interview here, anytime these companies come over and try and hand us technology that's going to make you stronger, I'm always skeptical.

And this was one of those moments. I've been slowly backing away from the conversation. But they got me. I put the band on. And next thing you know, I was in Boston interviewing the owner and the performance director. And on top of that, I wear this thing every single day of my life. Now I love checking out how, how, what my sleep score was and how my recovery has been from the day, really allowing me to make a better decision when I get into the gym on the intensity and, uh,

the direction of where my training is going. It's been awesome to partner up with them. And if you get over to whoop.com, you will be able to use the coupon code shrugged. And you're going to save 15% on the whoop band. On top of that, you're going to be a part of the cool kids club because now when we walk in, I'm looking at Marcus Philly right now getting ready to do a bunch of filming. He's got one of these sweet whoop bands on. We interviewed Carrie Pierce. She had one of these Sweet Whoop bands on. It looks like all the cool kids are wearing them. So make sure you get over to whoop.com. Use the coupon code shrugged.

You're going to save 15% on your order. And, yeah, let us know. Get into the stories. Take a little picture of how well you're sleeping, how well you're recovering, what your HRV is. And I always like seeing these numbers from people. So whoop.com and use the coupon code shrugged. You're going to save 15%. Also want to thank our friends over at Organifi. Make sure you get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. The green, the red, the gold. They've got all kinds of crazy flavors out now.

The chocolate, they've still got the pumpkin spice. You should totally get in on that. But especially when we're on the road here and we don't always have the best access to delicious food, it's nice to have Organifi with us to get our micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals that we need in these delicious juices. So get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged and use the coupon code shrugged. You're going to save 20%. Also, Sunlighten Saunas. Also, Sunlighten Saunas. Yo, Sunlighten Saunas.

We all have these saunas in our garage. We all love sitting in the heat. And you're going to save $200 if you go to sunlighten.com. S-U-N-L-I-G-H-T-E-N.com. Sunlighten.com. You're going to schedule a consult. They're going to talk about the exact needs and requirements that you have for having a sauna in your house. But all the heart health, there's a reason that everybody is focusing on recovery these days.

And the ice and the heat, this fun combo seems to make a massive difference in recovery and health and longevity. So get over to sunlighton.com and schedule an appointment. $200 off your order. And let's get into the show. I actually wonder how people enjoy the pre-conversation that I put in there. Because we keep some of it. Some of it's not appropriate. I like having a rolling start. Yeah.

Where it's like, it's not like totally silent and it's just like, welcome to the show. Like this little bit of energy, like everyone's having fun. It's a good conversation and then you kind of just

casually roll into the show. It feels more natural. Unlike this one. Yeah. So wait, are you good to go on as far as video? You're good?

Dig it. So you want to be in right here if i move my having my phone out even though we need it to to go over the things is terrifying to me maybe be checking your text messages during the show i feel like the babysitters are like daycare's gonna call like problem uh what do i do welcome to barbell shrugged i'm andrew tarner doug larson mike lombardi elite performance manager sir we're at whoop i swear if you're just listening to this on the podcast fenway park is right in the background and if you were a fan of 90s juiced up baseball players mark mcguire probably put a baseball in the window where we are right now he was like uh what was it fair point what was the the home run derby of like 96

where him and sammy sosa were just like juiced to the gills and they were just cranking baseballs like over the mass pike out here this is a gorgeous office we were walking through here earlier getting a little tour and i was thinking i've never really been in one of these like cool tech offices before like usually i'm just hanging out in gyms this is the most tech office i've ever been in super cool i feel like there's like real things happening here like changing the world we'd like to think that too that's the goal is change the world, change how people think about what they're doing every single day. Yeah. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having us. How do you get this awesome title of elite performance manager? Sounds so good.

I think it comes from, you know, a lot of years of being in elite athletics and thinking about training and living in an empirical way. So my background is in elite rowing mostly, the Olympic. You look like a rower now that you say that. Now that I say it, it all makes sense. The running thing kind of clicked, but the rowing thing definitely clicked. Definitely clicked. If you listen to audio only, Mike towers over Anders and myself. he's the only one seated so we could keep it in a frame uh so my background is uh i went to princeton university to row sweet what year uh graduated 2010 oh my sister graduated in

oh six oh really yeah rower also or uhball. Oh, softball. Very nice. So, you know, it was a big part of my career was managing my own training within the team training as well, and then managing summer training outside of it. So I was always kind of doing self-experimentation on myself. Hey, everyone wants to do long and low. I think I'm going to do some high intensity and some strength training, and, you know, I'd come back pretty fit. So self-experimentation is where I started. And then after I graduated, I decided to stay and continue coaching. I started with the lightweight men and started playing around with kind of physiology of understanding how different people with, you know, different body mass are affected with different, you know, similar or different training loads.

So I started tinkering with that. And then that actually led me to uh working with Olympic level athletes so my wife was 2012 Olympian for rowing not nearly as tall as me about 5 10. but uh it was actually after her London journey that we really started diving into uh empirical data to improve training so she was hurt how do you fix somebody that's hurt? It's probably overtraining. So what we started to do, we created this system on our own prior to, I guess, WHOOP being available to the public.

It's probably early 2013 of every single morning creating our own recovery metrics. So using SPO2 monitors, urine color, sleep, perceived kind of mood that day, how you're feeling, are you ready to go take on a load or you're not. And we're using all this data to inform the training. And with that, we saw great results. And then when I moved here to go to business school, I actually got connected with Whoop

via CrossFit. At that time, I guess it would be just CrossFit Fenway, but now it's CrossFit Invictus. They were one of the first CrossFit gyms to kind of jump into this space. And I started looking at this. I was like, holy cow, this is unbelievable. How do I become a part of this? And it just so happened that I knew some people on the team. We ran in a similar circle at Princeton. And before long. Now I'm here helping everybody understand their data and action it. What was the original idea for the technology and for the app? Has it progressed

past the original ideas or kind of still the same mindset but with more features? With Whoop? Yeah, with Whoop. You're saying with just Whoop in general? Yeah, with Whoop. So the original ideas are, and we'll have spoken to this many times, is there's a lot of things that your body's trying to tell you, but you just can't really get a look at just by feel. So yeah, I feel certain something. So quantification of what's actually happening inside of your body.

And that's always kind of been the goal. How do we take a look at HRV? How do we look at daily readiness to inform training decisions? How do things out of here, you know, outside of the gym, how does your just life affect you? And people weren't quantifying that, right? It's very stressful. I heard you, Anders, talk about it recently on your own stories. You know, there's a quantification to when there's hard periods.

Yeah. And, you know, it suppresses your HRV. Yeah. Because of what's going on. When we met you guys down at Wadapalooza, anytime someone is coming to me with, like, a wearable device, I do this, like, get really quiet, like, take many small, tiny steps backwards so I can hopefully distance myself and leave the conversation.

And we took the whoop bands home, and I was like, no way is this thing, like, I don't want it counting my steps, which it doesn't do which i love um but i found myself so interested in the data and being able to like track individual pieces of my workout and where the intensity is at where your heart rate's at and the way in order to survive i guess like when we're 35 and to continue training and like finding that actual, uh, strain piece that you guys have in there is super interesting to me because so many things don't incorporate stress of life. And there was a day where, uh, we were just on the phone all day long having like super intense business conversations. It felt like it was just like 10 hours straight of just high level

trying to figure things out and i hadn't been to the gym i actually hadn't even like gotten off my chair at all and i looked down and was like your daily strain is it like 14 already i was like i've only been sitting here what happened but there's so many cool pieces to it that i've literally found myself now like going to the gym or leaving the house, turning around, coming back to get the band. Because I feel like this thing is really testing a lot of the pieces that most of these wearable bands aren't testing. Like recovery pieces, the individual ability to kind of see your workouts, see your heart rate throughout the entire day. What are some of the big pieces that you guys are looking at in kind of just the general layout of the app and from strain to recovery, HRV? Like if there was an overriding concept of how you guys have structured the app, what does that look like?

Absolutely. So you really kind of just touched on a couple of the main features. So if we're thinking about strain, recovery, and sleep, that's really what we're trying to show you. So we'll break down each one. So let's start with the recovery piece because I think that's what makes us the most unique. So when we're looking at your recovery, we're looking at your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, and your quality and quantity of sleep. So you can see that users that use the app, you can see those numbers every single morning you can see that, you know, users that use the app, you can see those numbers every single morning when you click that, you toggle your

recovery score. So heart rate variability, for those that don't know, you think a lot of people know? We're going to talk about heart rate variability. No, I definitely think you should go into the details there. Okay. All right. So heart rate variability on the simplest level is a pretty good indicator of your daily readiness. Where that comes from is autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic, and sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic is what speeds your body up. It's that fight or flight. It gets you going.

Then parasympathetic is what brings you back down, helps you go to sleep, digest food, things like that. When those two systems are both primed and ready to go, you're going to have a nice little high HRV. And the cool thing about WHOOP is all we're doing is comparing your HRV daily to your baseline. So we keep a rolling 30-day baseline of your HRV metric. So if you're above that, great. If you're below that, okay, what's happening in your life? Are you stressed? Are you just not sleeping enough? What can we do to improve that?'s that's the first part of the recovery metric then we're generally higher is better like as you age your hrv tends to decline correct so as you age hrv is going to come down and it's largely genetic so you know we were just you know talking about what's everyone's kind of baseline hrv so you

guys are in the mid 90s i'm like 60 um and i i don't i think i'm younger maybe i'm not um but it's it's largely genetic and you should just be looking at how you're comparing yourself to yourself not i feel bad that i don't have 150 hrv and you guys actually laid that out in kind of the the q a piece on there because i had no idea because i'd never tested my hrv ever um of like what an actual range is of healthy, unhealthy. And it's kind of just like, just test it, figure it out and see where you go. Find your baseline and then find how to improve it. That's what we're trying to do, behavior modification.

The next piece is resting heart rate, which is a good indicator of aerobic fitness. So heart health, aerobic fitness, obviously lowers better. So if you're looking at your numbers and you're kind of looking at how you're trending over time, we want to think about let's get that HRV up. Let's bring that resting heart rate down. Sleep, there's this very simple sleep score. So that's how much sleep we're telling you that you need. How much sleep do you get? It's a percentage. Then within that, we can look at the quality of sleep that you're getting. How much REM sleep are you getting? How much slow wave sleep are you getting, and there are optimal numbers for that. So like 22% REM, 23% slow wave. So that's kind of the recovery piece.

Within that, what's kind of factored in also is the strain which we talked about. So strain for us is calculated 0 to 21 based on the Borg scale. And it's right now... What is that scale? It's like perceived exertion. Okay, gotcha. So 0 to 21, that's kind of what it's right what is that scale uh it's like uh perceived exertion okay gotcha so zero to 21 that's kind of what it's mirrored that's where we got the zero to 21 and over the course of the day you're going to accumulate strain both training just life and it's based off of your resting heart rate and your max heart rate so the time that you spend in different percentage of your heart rate zone is going to accumulate strain.

So a longer cardiovascular effort, let's say like 70% of your heart rate, is going to accumulate a higher strain than, let's say, a heavy lifting session. Just because there's a consistently high heart rate versus, you know, you would do some work, then you take a break. So that's how strain is accumulated. And then if you're running around, or like you said, intense business calls where it's hard, you have a very hard day, that's going to accumulate that strain up to 14 pretty quickly. So that's a high level of strain. Once we start getting into 14, 15, above,

that's a high level of strain that day. It's nothing like talking on the phone with a heart rate of like 120 all day long but that's exactly it right humming like i don't even need to do anything i'll just keep talking to doug all day it's like it's like steady steady state business you're building capacity for making money exactly um you know i bet a lot of people watching the super bowl or any big you know where whoop you can see see how much stress you really are during the game. See what happens. We're working out. So how does that work for, say I compete in a weightlifting meet,

and I do my warm-ups, and then I do three heavy singles per lift. Maybe my heart rate wasn't jacked up the whole day, but I lifted really heavy. Maybe the next day I really feel like I did something because I was lifting at max or maybe I'm missing lifts because they're beyond my max whatever it is but my heart rate wasn't really jacked up but maybe i i need a couple days to recover after that that level of intensity correct so just because we'll use the lifting example because that's a very good one just because you don't accumulate a high strain for that particular activity doesn't

mean that we're not tracking how that affects your body so you let's say you really hit your cns and that you need those couple days to recover your recovery will be suppressed for the next couple of days so particularly with heavy lifting you're going to see that the next day with your recovery with a lower hrv probably a higher resting heart rate and it's going to take you a few days to get back into the green. And obviously there's things that can help you get there. You know, hydration, bedtime etiquette, all these things can aid you, but there still is a physiological response,

and you do need time to come back from that. How often are you guys testing? I want to say there was some crazy number that is significantly more tests throughout the day than most of the wearable products on your heart rate. So we're pulling data roughly 100 times a second. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot.

It's why we can be used, and you know it's going to be highly accurate. Yeah. So in the medical field or any sort of research study, you can rely on the fact that our sleep is very accurate. Our heart rate is very accurate. HRV. All of this is very, very accurate. And you're in the CrossFit space now coaching. A little bit.

I like to help out. I don't coach as much as I used to, but I definitely help out. Yeah. Well, where did WHOOP, wasn't it more in professional sports, baseball, football that you guys got your start in right we have a relationship with the nflpa we did one of the large i believe it's the largest study ever in professional sports with major league baseball uh we started with some and bigger nba players as well olympic sports that was that was the beginning was elite sports looking at how do the best athletes in the world sleep recover yeah you know if you start at the top how can we bring that down to everybody else

so that's really where it started when you are working with athletes like that are you able to see big differences in like travel schedules where they're sleeping are they yeah home on the road like that's something i'm super interested in because anytime we go on the road, like down in Miami, it's like, I know I'm sleeping, but it never feels like it. So part of it's obviously the travel. How can you kind of mitigate the effects of traveling, which is something we help people do. And it is, Will actually spoke to this recently about home field advantage.

It's really just the effects of travel. And it's not that you're necessarily sleeping less. It's a lesser quality of sleep that you could be getting. But there are things that you can do. Let's say you're going to Miami. You immediately just need to walk in and put that thermostat down, like immediately. You know, there's optimal temperatures.

We want that, you know, if you can take it 62 degrees, but 62, 68 degrees, that's going to help you get to sleep and stay asleep. So that's a lot of the teams we work with collegiately sleep better on the road after we've worked with them and practice. Let's look at your itinerary. Let's build in these tips. And they go out and they've got almost a better HRV and recovery score on the road because they're away from campus, whatever's going on, and business people as well. We've kind of seen this. I've actually noticed a massive difference in my sleep quality

when my wife is on the road and not. It's like my body does not recognize being in a bed by myself. And all last week, slept like crap. Well, I didn't really know until I looked at the thing and was like, something changed this week. It's like your HRV is trash. And I was like, I wonder why. I was thinking, well, solo dad. And then it recognized with the questionnaire that you guys have each night, like you're in a bed by yourself.

Something changed. Right. So that a bed by yourself, something changed. Right. So that's the really cool part about that. And that's being actioned now. So before that was something you could look at within the desktop version. You could see this night I said yes, I slept by myself and I had two drinks

or whatever the case. Yeah. Now the voice of Whoop on the app is actually giving you your stats. Have you guys noticed that? No, there's a voice? Oh, well, it doesn't really speak to you. Oh, I was like, dude. Do I get to change the person?

Is it Siri? Like, oh, you slept really well last night. Great job. So the voice of Whoop, it used to tell you things like if you're dehydrated or if you're thirsty, you've already been dehydrated, you've kind of missed that window. Now we're giving you actionable data as in when you read before you go to sleep, you get 22% more REM sleep than when you don't. Right. I saw that. Yeah.

Starting to give you real feedback as opposed to just suggestions yeah it's got to be the hardest part about giving someone a whole lot of data is they just go wow this is really interesting but what do i do like what changes do i actually make how is this actually going to improve me in the real world other than just being cool that i know this data right and a lot of things have just on people on their own uh there's behavior modification right people start getting more sleep they they start drinking less maybe um but that's the biggest one is people will see how much a couple beers before they go to sleep that's actually them for days not really one day yes um because i see that on there each time and two of the big ones that pop up to me are screen time and then two or more drinks yes

how does the alcohol like really affect kind of the recovery because you would think two drinks it's not a huge deal for somebody that weighs 200 pounds is relatively athletic it shouldn't seem like that much does it really affect their sleep and recovery that well it's all about the timing right so let's say the three of us went out and had some drinks right now, but if we did nothing else, we'd be all right. That's why it's within that two hours of going to bed. Um, just because your body's still processing that alcohol, the alcohol. So when you go out, let's St. Paddy's day, perfect example. Those people that really had a great time in South Boston, their recovery is going to be suppressed for probably five to seven days. And that's just the way it is.

Because the more excess you go, the longer it takes to come out. And it's like thinking about even eating late. So timing of food, it's not just alcohol. We're going to keep trying to add more inputs that you could put in there

like, hey, I ate cake at 10 p.m. or something like that. We shouldn't be eating heavy foods that require a lot of digesting late at night because that's diverting from our body being able to just go to sleep, which is the goal at night, right? Have you guys discovered any kind of counterintuitive findings there? Like if you're on your phone in your bed, you're probably not going to sleep as well. That's what mine told me. If you are drinking, as you just said, you know, a couple of drinks right before you fall asleep,

your sleep quality probably isn't as good. Those are semi-intuitive. You can probably figure that out without having data, but it's nice to have the data actually back it up. Were there any counterintuitive things that you guys discovered that you wouldn't have thought of at first? I don't know if they're necessarily counterintuitive, but it's deeper level stuff. It's something like, we do a lot of self-experimentation on ourself here. That's part of the deal. And, you know, let's say using like ROM water meditation. Let's say you do that for three weeks and then you pull that away. We've done that and our recovery levels were significantly worse off of it. So that's really it.

People think that I can just have the phone on and work until I go to bed. There needs to be a very clear separation between the bed and everything else. The bed is meant for sleeping. You shouldn't be taking your laptop and working in bed because your brain doesn't know what to do. It's going to think, I've got to keep working, and then you're stressed. So that's the biggest probably takeaway for everybody.

Is it kind of a combination of the light coming in and the dopamine just rush, or have you guys been able to parse some of that stuff out? Because reading, I think, brings you some of that dopamine hit just in general. So that is kind of a separator. So we suggest, and a lot of us wear blue light blocking glasses. Oh, that's so cool now on Instagram. God.

So cool on Instagram. Someone send me some of those just so I look like I know what I'm talking about. So we actually have a lot of them. You're a biohacker. For sure. Yeah. But that makes a big difference. Right.

Let's say you have dinner and then you're sitting down with your family. You can read on your phone, you know, all the options you have on your phone to, you know, put in night mode. Okay. But it's not really anything. Yeah. You actually need to block that light. And if you can start distancing yourself from your phone, like an hour out, that's outstanding. Creating more gadgets so you can play with your other gadgets that's what we need i'm gonna need something to protect the

blue blockers and then the phone we'll have three layers of this thing soon the the other part of that besides the blue light is people either just straight getting in bed trying to fall asleep or staying up beyond when their body's telling them to go to sleep so when you when your body's telling you to go to sleep and you fight that urge like oh i got my second wind yeah you did because your body thinks it needs to stay up because you need to survive so when you do that even if you do go to sleep it's not going to be very restful sleep so um when your body's telling you you kind of got to listen to your circadian rhythm and all of us are a little bit different. So some people need to go to bed early.

Some people like to stay up late and sleep a little bit later. If you can accommodate that with your schedule, you should do that and a little bit of experimentation. A big part that we're pushing out with Whoop now is sleep consistency or sleep regularity. And that's going to bed and waking up at the same time. So that's a new score you can see as well what we tell on people on the elite side is a score of 70 is pretty good um the higher we can get the the big added value there is deeper sleep that's slow wave sleep what was the context for the number seven you used throughout oh uh it's like a percentage we have that one on ours? You do now.

You do now have sleep consistency on there. So the context of that is how really, how regularly or how consistently are you going to bed and waking up at the same time? So even if it's a few minutes off, the closer we can get that to, let's say, 10 p.m., 6 a.m., even if it's a little wiggle room, 10, 15 minutes each way, that's huge versus 10 p.m. one night, 1 a You know, even if it's a little wiggle room, 10, 15 minutes each way, that's huge versus 10 p.m. one night,

1 a.m., 11, all over the place. Yeah. Because your body can start to predict when it needs to get to sleep, and we can get a big chunk of that slow-wave sleep right at the beginning of the night. Because as we go on, it's going to get less and less and less.

And, you know, I was looking at your date. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, we will in a little bit. Oh, but a lot of people... lot of people still mentally prepared let's the point is it's just say you have a newborn baby no it's it's not uncommon for people to get a good amount of REM sleep but struggle to get slow wave sleep that's the thing that people have to prime their body for and go ahead i was gonna say can you walk through each of the sleep cycles that are on there or each walk through each of the sleep cycles that

are on there or each of the pieces of the sleep cycle right there's like four of them on there there are four so it's light sleep rem sleep slow wave sleep or deep sleep and then awake all four part of a one sleep cycle uh so rem sleep uh is obviously is brain regeneration right particularly when people will use the student athlete. When they're studying for midterms, that REM sleep is jacked way up. They're in the 30% of their night's sleep spent right there. That's a good thing for most people.

You said reading before bed, a really good way to get REM sleep. Slow wave sleep is muscular regeneration. We're clearing the toxins from our body. So from an athletic perspective, we produce 95% of our growth hormone, daily growth hormone during that period of time. So if you look at just your sleep score and say, I'm getting 100% of my sleep score every night. I don't understand what's going on. Why am I so tired? I'm sore. My recovery's going down. Really, it's probably that slow-wave sleep and you're missing it. And there's lots of things to do to prime that.

And then awake is part of every sleep cycle. That doesn't mean, hey, I woke up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night awake. It's a lot of times imperceptible. So part of it, hopefully, we want to keep you asleep as much as possible. Again, new metric that everyone can see, sleep efficiency. so once we're actually asleep are we staying asleep or do we have these huge gaps in the middle of the night where we're just kind of up yeah what are some of those things that can increase that chunk of time uh for slow wave sleep yeah so you want to go simple and then more in depth definitely okay so so that's okay so so let's keep it simple

the simple one things you can do during the day you need to drink more water everybody needs to drink more water starting when you wake up yeah so if a good goal is if you can take your body weight cut that in half and drink that in ounces of water that's outstanding that's immediately going to help you stay asleep room Room temperature, we talked about. If we can keep it cooler, 62 to 68 degrees. Light, we have to eliminate all light. And looking at your phone, going to bed, we want to eliminate that as well. So think about using an eye shade.

Noise, think about earplugs. If it's really noisy, hopefully it's not. Keep your hands and feet warm. That's going to help you can take a quick little two three minute warm shower before right before you go to bed because what that does heats you up but then it starts to cool your body down which starts to put you to sleep which is a really important thing you could eat uh things uh like casein protein uh cottage cheese things like this that actually aid in sleep so So there, I know I talked

about don't eat too late. Think about what you eat too late. Let's say it's eight or nine o'clock. Just in moderation, you can have like some raspberries with some cottage cheese and, you know, maybe like a casein shake, whatever you want to do it. That will actually aid in your sleep. So there's foods you can eat, and meditation is another really big one. I would suggest that to everybody. You don't have to spend an hour doing it. You can spend five minutes doing it. Think about some mindfulness, journaling, getting your day in order.

Because how many times have you guys woken up in the middle of the night and you're like, oh, my God, I completely forgot, or did I not? So when you have structure, it eliminates that chaos that can wake you up in the middle of the night. So you can actually sleep more soundly and don't get in bed until you're tired. We talked about that a little bit. Don't stay up too late. Don't stay beyond that. But when your body is telling you to go to sleep, go to sleep.

And that will really kind of keep you asleep. The athlete that is just kind of going to crossfit classes three four days a week maybe five days a week how can they start to use some of this sleep cycle stuff and use their kind of workouts paired up with the the band and and the information that they're seeing um to kind of maximize their amount of time if they get three to five hours a week to actually be training say they're sleeping like crap on monday nights or whatever it is but how do we kind of start to take what's on the band and apply it to people's daily lives right so answering those prompts is a really important thing just for insight to yourself so let's start looking at how is it possible to get more sleep that's's the lowest hanging fruit. How do we just sleep from, can we get 30 more minutes?

That's a good start. Then what are the things that are affecting me? You said Monday's terrible or I always have a bad recovery on Monday. Why do I always have a bad recovery on Monday? Am I just burning it on the weekend and not allowing myself to recover? So it's starting to look in the mirror a little bit about what they can do. But if they're not changing anything, let's look at that perspective. That's probably more realistic first.

If they're looking at a red recovery, maybe they should go for a jog that day instead of going and doing Fran into something else. Yeah. Right? We need to think about managing load. So just because something is written and I think this applies to all athletes across the board, just because something's written doesn't mean still do it. If your body's not prepared, we've all been there before. Hey, I don't want to feel weak. My coach wrote this. They're counting on me. And then you go and you bomb. And then everyone's like, what the hell just happened? Why did I?

Yeah, exactly. So you're perpetuating potential overtraining. And how long does that take to come out of that? It's different for everybody. But if you're really deep in the hole, you might not come back for several months. So for the average CrossFitter, think about, let's say,'re looking at your recovery don't don't go crazy we just talked about 19.4 um if you're just going to kind of go to that class and you got a 32 recovery maybe don't go crazy at the very beginning you know i'm going to do this workout

but it's not going to be my 100 best and that's okay and on the days where it's green it's like let's go. I'm going to get nice and warmed up. Maybe I can even do some extra accessory work today. Make the most out of this. Because not only is your body more ready to perform at a high level, your body's working more efficiently when you're in the green. So we could do a five-mile run, and we're going to do seven-minute pace.

That same exact workout same exact stimulus same output green recovery versus red recovery that strain is going to be significantly different right so let's say that when i'm in the green it's like a nine strain when i'm in the red it's 14 and a half yeah that's something that needs to be taken into consideration the duration of time until failure is really what that kind of recovery score is indicating because it is, you know, cardiovascularly loaded. So CrossFit athletes need to just think about, yeah, how intense should I be? Right. Because intensity is part of the program. Yeah. And you have to be okay sometimes with,

hey, I got fitter by showing up, but I'm not hurt and I can come back tomorrow. Have you seen any benefits maybe on the performance side of hitting the red line and pushing through three, four days a week of like we're actually trying to build this capacity to stay in the red maybe once a month, something along those lines for three or four days where we're just really having our foot on the gas pedal and then testing how long it takes to get back to the green. So that's a dangerous game. Yeah.

I assume. Yeah. It's, it's, it's quick to the end, but I could see also just some general benefits of recovery. We call it functional overreaching yeah and you'll live in the great term yeah let's get it uh you're gonna live in the yellow so it's okay right you

don't have to be green every day if you're green every day one you could probably go harder or you're the greatest sleeper and least stressed person in the history of the world. So when you're in a heavy training block, it's fine to just kind of live in that yellow and just above the red. But if you're starting to see the red consistently, that's where it gets dangerous. So we, on the elite side, we look at that as two days in, we need to start seeing what's going on. Three, four days, that person's either already sick or really close to getting injured.

We've seen it enough times that that's really the trend. I wouldn't suggest anybody to just push that level. It's okay if you're just slightly out, right? You push yourself, but once we start living in the red, that's a dangerous game. So I have to live more live in the yellow. One thing that's also on the app that i've noticed where uh we talk about sleep we've always heard like you need at least eight hours of sleep every single night sometimes it'll tell me like six is cool is it all right to really be sleeping or does it put us in that much of a debt or is is eight like really a special number i think eight just is easy enough for people to say, and that was before people were really quantifying the number,

or quantifying the data. So if you look in your app, and you really dig into the sleep needed screen, if you click on that and it shows you, so it's going to show you what your baseline is, how much sleep you're kind of realistically getting, and how much more sleep do you need based off of the strain you've taken on,

sleep debt that's been rolling, things like that. So no, you don't necessarily. Eight's not the magic number. And it depends on what you want to do that day, right? Have you used a sleep coach? I guess not. Brand new? Oh, no.

I actually went to my app store the other day and saw that there was an update. So if there was an update in the last two weeks, I haven't. It's an older feature, but it's been slightly updated. It's okay. I'm just getting used to the HRV feedback. If I see a red, I'm like, I can't do it. So this is the actionable, right? I slept 29% last night recovery.

That's not good. Crying baby, travel, the works, you know? So it used to just be you could only set it for each day. And you had the options to, you know, get by, perform, or peak. And that's going to tell you how much sleep you needed. And what you do there is you set your wake-up time. So it's the perfect one for the CrossFitter or just anybody that's, let's say, is going to train in the morning. You set that time that you're definitely waking up and how you want that performance to be.

So then we start working back from that and we start sending you this. You get this push notification, right? Hey, you need this much time in bed to get this much sleep. Based on how you want to perform that day, we're going to give you a different feedback. So if you really want to peak, you're going to obviously need more sleep. I believe it's like 95% sleep performance. So use that as a guide. If you know that Wednesdays are a really tough day, you're not going to train.

When you say a tough day, how do I actually get to a 21? I literally yesterday was on my feet walking, doing – I must have walked seven, eight miles, just a couple hours, and then I ran 45 minutes on trails, and then just – I didn't sit down all day long. And I looked down, and I was like 16.5 or something. I was like, what do I have to do? What do I have to do to max out the score?

Maybe you're very fit. You've got to be a construction worker or something. Yeah. So something that will drive the strain up would be like a marathon. Ooh. So here's perspective. I strain up would be like a marathon. Ooh. I'm not going to do that one. I'll never max it out. It's just the way it is.

Here's perspective for you. So our head of military here, he, I don't know if you guys saw this, he did a Spectre series thing where they were wearing a 30-pound weight carrier, jumped out of a plane, landed in the middle of the ocean, swam two miles to shore, and then ran a hundred miles. And that,

and that they basically didn't sleep for, you know, a day and a half. And that was a 20.8. Didn't even get there. Okay. So it gets very, very hard to get there.

Maybe one day it'll be possible to get a 21, but right now, but oh yeah, no. Yeah. And, and you know, you're talking about this goal of accumulating strain if you really think about it you almost want to start seeing less strain potentially because that means you're getting fitter yeah you're getting your body is more efficient at doing what you want to be doing and then the other thing that i was really interested in is the kind of like the perceived level of exertion of how hard was that workout and how well do you think you did right what does passable mean like am i just kind of like half-assing my workout and you're like yeah you showed up i i tend to be always in like the the strong side of things because I just assume I'm doing okay. Like I feel good about working out.

It's relatively hard, but it's not like doing Fran the first time in my life where I was just like waxed and laying on the floor. And like where do each of those that's like passable, strong, and then peak?

How do we kind of perceive those from the band side of things? Well, that's really just for your feedback. Is it? Okay. I didn't know if it was like calculating. So it's completely for you. It does not factor into the strain score at all.

So if you're pretty hard on yourself, then you're probably going to be very favorable. You're going to be great today, Anders. You'll see a lot of passables. Give yourself a five. Yeah. So that's what it's for it's really uh subjective and then if you go back and look at your day and say man days when I have a 75 percent recovery I feel outstanding everything I do is outstanding some people feel kind of lethargic when they get like 95 percent recoveries they feel maybe a little bit of a loop so we've

kind of seen and and this is more anecdotal than hard hard evidence but there's starting to be more empirical evidence that pro athletes feel like they perform best somewhere between 65 and 75 percent they're just in the flow let's call talk about hockey or basketball guys that are playing consistently not like not something like a pitcher obviously we want to like a starting pitcher to have a very high recovery because of the effect on uh pitch velocity and control and all that um but from the that athlete that's kind of playing three four times a week staying in that flow state is really important yeah so you mentioned being lethargic a second ago i know if

you wake up in the middle of a deep sleep you kind of wake up you're just like real groggy and whatnot whereas if you would have completed a full sleep cycle and you wake up in a different phase and maybe more about this than i do like you will wake up and not be quite as tired even if you had roughly the same amount of sleep if you wake up at the right time you can wake up and feel a little bit better right when right when you wake up yeah is there any aspirations to build anything in the app to kind of set like a general time to wake up like i want to get roughly eight hours of sleep and then it will it will like set it will sound the alarm at the right time where you're going to wake up uh in the right phase so we're we're effectively waking you up softly right yeah or or ideally

right um this is so the combination of using the sleep coach and getting more on a regular sleep schedule your body will start to wake up in that right time on your own so maybe you have to kind of prime yourself of let's use the 10 to 6 you just are methodical i get in bed at 9 30 i'm asleep 10. I'm up at 6 a.m. That's pretty much my schedule. Okay, right. So do you still have to use an alarm? I don't set an alarm, but my wife always wakes me up. Every day. What is it with her?

She wakes me up every day. Yeah, my kids, I have three kids and they're four years older now, so they wake up at 5.30 or 6 every day. Once I hear noise, I just get up. It's very it's very very consistent okay so that's kind of part of it um you know if if you didn't have that waking you up hopefully you would just kind of like start drifting up towards that time i totally i totally would maybe in a couple years but it's like right now for me uh like i try and stay on the same schedule and even if i want to sleep it just my body just gets up and, hey, it's time to go.

So it's really kind of on the person. So we can aid with the sleep coach of, I want to do really well. Here's what time I'm probably going to get up. And you know, hey, I want to get eight hours of sleep. One, you should build in at least another half hour. Most people are going to be awake throughout the course of the night, even part of your sleep cycle, 20 or 30 minutes. Does it detect? The reason I ask this is because with my two-year-old, I got out.

I heard him crying the other day. I got out of bed. I went to his room. I held him for 10 or 15 minutes, and then I went back to bed. I didn't see anything that said that my sleep was broken up. I don't know all the different distinctions and how you guys track that, but it just said I got a full eight-hour block or whatever it was. Does it track if you're out of bed only 15 minutes?

Sleepwalking. Does it know that you did that? I've had the same thing happen. If your heart rate is still low enough that it's sensing, based off of your baseline numbers, that you're still in a state of sleep, that's where all that will come out. But there's other times where if you move enough during the night um you know let's say you do get up that for that 15 minutes uh it will uh process the recovery score have you guys seen that yeah it tells me that in the second half i took a nap okay it makes me feel like i didn't sleep at

all right so i'm like oh no i was up for like an hour in the middle of the night and didn't even know. Yeah, so when that happens, that's an editable field. So if it comes up as a nap, you actually just have to delete the nap and then change the time domain for the other one. That's what I end up doing. Yeah, and then it'll give you. I know that there's a block in there where I woke up in the middle of the night

of some decent amount of time. Right. Well, it's nice the way that you guys have the graph of your heart heart rate set up like you can you can easily go in there and just like see where it was low and then i woke up right at 620 and where the heart rate just spikes up and then it kind of levels off again so for the for the times that i have had something where it didn't quite track my sleep as well as i thought it should have like i could go in there hit the edit button and then it's very obvious where I woke up when I look at the graph. Exactly.

Which has only happened once. Yeah, it's rare. Sometimes it's just the way it's resting on your arm at night. So if there's any sort of space or there's any ambient light getting in, there's going to be an effect. So that's why it's really important that the band is threaded correctly, it's flush on the skin, and no light's getting in. For when you guys are working with the athletes, have you noticed anything kind of broad categories

of like, I know CrossFit specifically is a sport not just of like the elite performance, but these people have to recover for seven workouts in a day, it feels like, when they're at the games. Are you tracking stuff? Kind of like CrossFit's phenomenal at this. MLB, NFL, like are you able to see, I guess, the level of athlete

or the way that people are training and their recovery? Yeah, we can definitely see that. Are CrossFitters just freaks when it comes to recovery? I mean, the best are right yeah well they have i mean each day but are also is matt frazier waking up at like eight percent recovery and he's just i highly doubt it yeah well his life's a little different now but um yeah but when when the focus is so much on training and it's not just uh the sleep aspect right it's what are these recovery modalities that people are doing? High price is a big one, right?

Everyone's using high price now. All the different things, foam rolling, contrast therapy, cryo, all this stuff. You know, they're building it in. And we tell people to do that too. You know, you add in two recovery modalities when you're below 50% of recovery, we can bump your, it won't show in the app,

but we can build you up throughout the course of the day and then your next day recovery is going to be significantly better just by adding in these recovery you can actually track that going and taking asana cryo that stuff actually really helps with the absolutely you can and you can test it off of right next day yeah we've we've done that over time are there any that are better than the others? This is where it's very individualized. So you need to do a little self-experimentation on yourself. So if you've never even foam rolled, let's start there. Yeah. And see how that goes for two weeks. If you do that when you're sore, how much better is your recovery the next day? What kind of blood flow are you getting? How much better are you sleeping? So people that are in pain or, you know,

tight muscles, they're not going to sleep they're not going to get the deep sleep right because it's just uncomfortable so like soft tissue massage has been shown to help people get better sleep yeah uh each day you have the you know i wake up and then i have to do my input of you know did i did i drink alcohol did i smoke cigarettes so i um did i read on my device while i was in bed did i share my bed there's there's a there's a host of questions that you answer yes or no to is there is it possible in the future to have like a create your own entry i think that's where we're going yeah um because we did we did get a lot of feedback that people want more customizable options and that will help

people really understand because while we have this kind of like i guess it's you know general look at here the main things are going to affect you i think people do have uh particular circumstances that they would love to know like let's say a doctor's on call like i was on call and i haven't really slept in 36 hours so how does that affect me for three days out and that kind of thing? One thing that, and when we had our call, when we about a month after we had been wearing the band that came up to me was the calorie counter that's in there. Can you walk through just a little bit of the process of like,

how has that created? And then I felt like mine was really high when I first started wearing it. Does that come across with most people? Just kind of the process of where does it come from and then how should people interpret that data? Yeah. So just like anything that's, you know, kind of machine learning, it has to eliminate kind of outliers over time.

So if you only have four days of data and it's all over the place, that's going to be very variable. So that's why once we kind of get that month baseline, it's fairly accurate. Calories, it's based off of heart rate, height, weight. If we could put like BMI in there at a high level, that'd be great, but most people have no idea what their body mass is. Or that just says we're obese. So it's a guiding principle. Are you obese? Not right now. I have been in the past, though.

I'm overweight, though. I am definitely overweight. I'm probably like a 28 right now or something like that. It puts me overweight. It's a guiding principle, but I wouldn't live and die by it well i mine has significantly come down to a more um i would say to where i think expectations would be um it's still i feel like a tad bit high i actually started eating a ton more and put on like eight to ten pounds in the last three months because of i just looked at i was like oh maybe i'll just try and meet that number um whether

that's great or not i don't know i feel like mine was artificially low for a long time. I think part of it, too, is that I don't wear this during jiu-jitsu. It just won't stay on. I'll break it or whatever. So that's a hefty chunk of my activity. I know I can enter it in afterward, but actually that leads to a good question about when you enter in an activity, I say I did weightlifting for an hour, I did wrestling for an hour.

You could have a drilling session for an hour or you could roll live for an hour and those are radically different sessions their way to like rate the intensity of those activities is that part of it so you could right you could put that you did jujitsu and you could manually input uh hey the first 30 minutes were skill and you could put that perceived exertion low, and your strain score will be lower. And then when you're actually really intense with it, you could put that as a separate session. I think a lot of people probably, if it's an hour-long session,

they just kind of let it roll and kind of look at how it was over the hour. Not everyone's looking at it at a deeper level, but you absolutely could do that. Yeah, I think I could do that. Yeah. Yeah, I think I might do that. Just entering it as two separate sessions, I think, solves that problem. So, yeah, you might have to turn off auto-detect for that. When we first got the band after Waterpalooza,

I was moving across the country. So each day was like packing boxes, then moving, and then unpacking boxes. And the first couple days came back at like 4,500 calories. It's like, how am I going to eat all this food? How am I going to do this? But it's totally come back down to like where my expectations would be as it's kind of like learned what I'm up to.

Right. And what I tell people and what we tell people all the time is if you're really, really interested in calorie intake and that macros, you should really consult a nutritionist. And if you really want to dial it in, dial it in. We're a guide for that. Have you guys gotten into any of the nutrition stuff and how that helps with sleep and recovery? So, again, we know anecdotally what works. But I think everybody needs to figure out what works for them, too.

So some people are highly fat adaptive, and it works very well for them. Some people should avoid, you know, grains and, you know, they're better with lean protein. Figuring out what works for your body. I mean, even just recently, I've been saying this to other co-workers is nutrition i think is is borderline the most important thing and we need to kind of figure out how to how to talk about it more because let's i don't want to say eating clean but eating right for your body and for performance or whatever it is let's just say debut daily performance um that is a game changer yeah versus when you do just say i'm gonna have two slices of pizza and that's lunch um that that affects you yeah that's actually how i so when i started coming back at

like 4 500 calories in the first couple weeks when i was moving and up all night it just wasn't great like health wise um i started taking screenshots and sending them to a good buddy of mine that does nutrition coaching and i was just like what is going on like where where how am i going to eat all this and um it was just really funny because he was looking at it he was like dude you're lifting like 30 pound boxes for many hours a day like yeah you're just like total caloric burn is just so high it'd be very cool to be able to take people's nutrition if they could enter it into there and then see like

not only the sleep but the performance side of things. And I think that's a goal. We want this to be a full 360 view of everything and how do we integrate

with other things as well to make it a seamless experience for let's say someone that's already using like MyFitnessPal where people are already logging their macros. How do we make it more accessible for everybody?

And we already have API integrations with other training platforms because a lot of big programs, military, they all use different data aggregation platforms that we just push our whoop data into. Are there any metrics that you guys want to get on the platform that you haven't quite built into the system yet that are objective, like the way that heart rate is objective?

I think where a lot of feedback people ask for is more real-time feedback. Because the way Whoop works right now is it's collecting real-time data, but it does need to be processed and then pushed back to your phone so particularly with endurance athletes or even crossfit athletes what what's my actual heart rate at this moment in time um and that's something we want to work towards uh in the future of giving the biggest thing is what's my heart rate it seems like it's a little bit off it's just because of this slight delay of having to process and and we're working towards this real

time objective heart rate so you don't need to also have the polar strap you can you're good yeah you've got real feedback so how is that all being detected you know i flip it over i see there's two little green lights on the bottom of it. It's just shining a light into my body, and that's how it's giving me feedback. So these little green lights. How does that work? How does that work? Smart people, where are you? The green light.

I'm not the hardware guy. So, yeah, it's photo plasmography, right, like most wrist wearables. We've also, it's got an accelerometer. The temperature, and we talked about, you know, we're talking about our data sampling, data collections, right? Different skin tones are, you know, absorb light differently. So that's part of it. Body temp, all these things factor in to how we're reading this. What does body temp have to do with it?

What does body temp have to do with it? What does body temp have to do with anything? What's it reading? I guess I wasn't expecting that to be. Or even skin tone. What is that? Let's say we have different skin tones. The way that light reflects off of that is different.

That's why when we're testing, we've got all different types of skin tones, you know, how many different types of people. How well the light is getting through your skin. The green ones? Correct. Gotcha. Yeah.

Not hardware people. Sorry. Yeah. With this type of technology, is it at all possible to get any other metrics? Like, if I have a continuous glucose monitor, I'm measuring glucose. Or if you expand that to other metabolites or whatever, like testosterone and whatnot, is it possible for something like this to detect those types of molecules within your blood?

As it's created now, i'm not sure about that um just because of you know probably the blood testing required for that um but when we do uh research studies where we're using whoop as the monitor and we can do some sort of you know blood testing as well that's the goal right and maybe as we continue to work forward we get to those things um but part of it i'd say just from the business perspective is uh you don't always have to do everything right some people do things very very well in the space and how do you kind of work together to put everything and let's say you know like inside tracker does a great job with blood you know just because i'll give them the local shout out.

You know, they already do that. How can we work with them to put all these things into a place to create that full picture that we were talking about? Before we get in and break my whole life down, some of the design features, this thing's waterproof. It is. You can take it to the pool. Correct.

A lot of swim teams actually use it i saw this all the time do you really oh two three days a week easy wow what i don't know tell me about it do you notice anything i haven't taken in the pool yet i didn't even know until we had our call well it's really nice like the way this the way this strap is i barely recognize that i have this on my body like it's it's very comfortable to wear so like when i when i swim i don't even notice that i have it that's great that wasn't a question for you no no no but that's good no that and that's the point we we want those first thing i thought when i when i got one of these i was like i don't want to wear something on my wrist all the time like i'm not like a watch guy i'm not like an accessories guy like but i barely

i barely remember that i have this whether it's swimming or I'm sleeping. The only time I ever recognize that I have it on is during sex. It always gets caught on something. Yeah. My wife asked me to take it off the other day and I was like, don't you want to leave it on? Don't we want to get some data?

Do you want to see my heart rate? Don't we want to get some data? You're going to get an arousal metric with this thing moving forward. Starts vibrating. Prior to you guys being on there, it used to be an input. Really?

Yeah. Wait, why did you take it out? I think people probably will let it be more discreet. We'll let it be more discreet. All right, let's pull up the computer. Let's check this thing out. I think, how do we start this? So I have three months of data in here

that you have combined into what looks to be a beautiful Google Drive PowerPoint here. Yeah. So we're just going to look at month to month for you. So we're going to look at a period of time, January 19th to February 18th, and then February 19th to today. Okay. So the key metrics we're going to be looking at are the heart rate variability and resting heart rate. And then from the sleep metrics recovery, sleep performance, both quantity and quality,

your time in bed, and that percent of sleep in REM and slow-wave sleep. Are you ready? Let's do it. Okay. Can we get this and put this in the show notes once? Oh, yeah. I'll give it all to you. Very cool.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we're just going to you. Very cool. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we're just going to look at the trends first, right? So we have, you all can't see this right now, but as we're, you'll see it later. We're looking at the actual data points for the last, for the entire period. So January 19th to March 18th.

The top things we're looking at here, resting heart rate, heart rate variability. Do you remember what I said we wanted to see? You want my resting heart rate heart rate variability do you remember what i said we wanted to see you want my resting heart rate high you want my heart or resting heart rate low hrv high there you go correct got it backwards right so we're kind of trending the wrong way so right so that's that's the trend line that's fitted that doesn't mean necessarily you know the end of the world yeah you said you moved all these different things you travel that's part of it yeah so uh it's it's more or less flatline but it's a slight heart rate trend up slight hrv down yeah

i've actually noticed that i i mean i haven't really noticed anything like poor in the sleep but i've wondered why because it's usually under 50 and i think it's tracking like right at 50 right now a couple weeks yeah i like seeing the spread on these graphs again you can go to the show notes to see this uh this pdf but you know one day his hrv is 150 and the day before it's 50 right that's a huge swing but then on average it's what's that just below 100 somewhere 90 85 something like that so part of what we can take from this too is we look at the next one down it's time in bed and your hours of sleep has been trending down over the period as well so that's likely that's actually

100 of work thing in the last couple weeks it's yeah just more you just if you get less sleep that's what's going to start to tend to happen. So it's in the data right here. We're sleeping a little bit less. Heart rate's going up. HRV is coming down. Sleep performance trending down. And that sleep debt is starting to creep up, right? Have we been busy lately?

Things been going on? Dude, don't you keep just doing what you're doing. Keep working. More work. Just work until you crash i i actually have noticed um these these numbers just kind of slowly trending in the direction it's talking about and clearly work's been somewhat crazy lately um one day off from working out i tried to do something every single day like whether it's lifting whether it's, going to the gym and just

doing yoga, breath work type stuff. Um, an actual day of just full recovery switches the numbers completely. Like it's insane how much actually taking a day off. I just really like going to the gym and working out. So I play in that like 12 to 14 range all the time like that's kind of my sweet spot of my daily strain um but i i have really noticed these these numbers i don't like feel much worse like i feel like they're kind of i would like to think they're decent numbers but um i've definitely noticed uh just as as work's been crazy lately we slightly trending in the wrong way for all of them yeah but you kind of nailed it in terms of physiological adaptation of, yeah, it's possible to do something every day,

but eventually you kind of hit a plateau, right? So if you relax, let's say you take a rest week. Oh, my God. What would I do? Really light activity. What would I do? You do yoga. Where am I going to spend my time?

Then you can build back up. But, hey, you've let your body recover, and now it's time for another training phase. So it's something for everyone to kind of think about there. So with your sleep debt going up, the way that you get rid of sleep debt, everyone that is listening, is you need to get 100% of that sleep need. So when your sleep performance is 100 or you're actually getting more than what you need, that's going to start to go down. And if you take naps, you probably need to enter them in yeah how does a nap work in

this is a nap actually equivalent to like sure is 20 minutes okay it's two hours needed do we full full cycles uh we want to probably get between 30 and 90 two hours it starts to get to be a lot and when you do nap you don't want to nap after 3 30 p.m because it messes sleep start you're good and while it's great to get that nap to to chip away that sleep debt realistically you're probably not going to get the same level of quality of that sleep and we like you already hit it we don't want to mess up that natural sleep cycle at night where that's where we're really going to replenish the body and that's something you always have to manually input it's never going to just detect that you took a nap sometimes it will if it was long enough and and you did get some of that deeper sleep

but you should be inputting uh that nap time even if you're not 100 sure what it is whoop will detect your actual nap time so you'd be like i think it was some time in this hour and then it shows it was like 34 minutes great but you were close enough i wonder also a couple things there was i think probably in the last three weeks three or four nights that i didn't have the band on or it ran out of batteries in the middle of the night how is the how does the band pick that up and run that into the averages in term and does calculate it as like a zero for the night? Or does it throw that out? It'll skew it a little bit. Let's say you get like two hours of sleep.

I just know there's been at least three nights in the past couple of weeks where I've just like ran out of batteries or fell asleep with it on, or with it off. So that will skew the data a little bit. But that's why it's important to wear it as much as you can, because let's say you do have one or two bit. But that's why it's important to wear it as much as you can because let's say you do have one or two outliers, that's okay.

It's not really going to skew the data all that much. Now we're looking at hard numbers. We don't have to talk about your actual. No, we should. Tell the people. They want to know. No one's looking for a rough estimate here.

This would be good firepower for them on the comments. Anders' resting heart rate went from 49.5 up to 51. HRV went from 92. Hold on. What are you looking for? What's your ideal?

You're the elite performance person. What are you trying to do? Lift home 120. Okay. Is that good? Am I going to do it? Again, part of it's genetic, but it's also how much endurance work do you do?

Daily. Daily, right. So that's pretty good. Cool. Older, I mean, right around 50, under 50, that's a good spot to be. Sweet. And you're just kind of living there. HRV is 92 down to 87. Still a very good place to be sweet um and you're just kind of living there hrv is 92 down to 87

still a very good place to be most people are 60 or below um so come at come at me so recovery 66 down to 54 so that's a pretty big uh slide and part of that's coming from the sleep score difference here so it's 85 down to just under 74 do you want to know lifestyle factors going into the last month please do um well doug and i've been very busy at work uh we've had a lot of a lot of big changes and then uh last week it would be interesting to also pull up like a week by week on it because i could tell you like oh my wife was out of town last week and work plus daddy daycare is not the simplest form of life um it would be i mean i'm you could so you know that you can actually look at week by week on whoop yeah and i do that's why i when i go back and look at it on my own but um to see like that just on your graph here right why

why all of a sudden it's a little bit red. Yeah. I mean, it's aggregation. But that's cool, right? It's very cool. You can explain it away that, hey, there's been a lot of work. It's been tough. And I'm doing what I can.

You got a full hour less time in bed as the next metric we're looking at. It's got to contribute heavy to it. As a monthly average, you had a full hour less? Yeah. That was when some of them, them when ashen was out of town like man we're getting into some like really boring life things here but we don't need all the details yeah when you're up like just when your night doesn't start until like 10 o'clock at night and all of a sudden like an hour of tv or whatever just trying to wind down and it's like all of a sudden it's 11 11 30 at night right trying to wind down and it's like all of a sudden it's 11, 11.30 at night. Right.

Now you're totally, totally out. And you got to get up. Yeah. So the big one, we'll skip a couple of things here. Your disturbances are about the same. Cycles are about the same. Your REM sleep actually went up. That's a percentage of your night's sleep.

But that's not so that you're getting more, right? You're still getting 1.1 hours. Yeah. But as a percentage of your night, that's good. So you're just dipping right in. The more and more sleep that you get, the more likely you are to enter into that phase faster. Correct, because you're exhausted.

So your body's doing everything it can to kind of like pack a punch with that six hours of sleep, six and a half hours of sleep. The dangerous thing, right, is this eight, eight and a half percent slow-wave sleep. And that comes from, how you said, I watch TV. of sleep the dangerous thing right is this eight eight and a half percent slow wave sleep and that comes from how you said walk i watch tv um you know i work late your body's not necessarily primed yeah to just fall into a deep stage of sleep i stay there notice that too it was it was literally the combination of like just purely lifestyle of like instead of me being able to work till five now it was like you stop work at three you go do baby things and then work picks back up

at eight right and that was i could literally like feel those things happening and see the scores the next day but it's totally like what you're talking about like if you weigh yourself every single day you probably don't like fully understand what's going on with your weight correct when you see it on the graph or when it's set up like this becomes very obvious what your actual scores are right and some things i know we talked about how do you get uh digress or how do you get in deeper stages of sleep, I take melatonin. Melatonin works really well. I love that stuff. If you're going to take any sort of sleep aid, you need to make sure you get in at least

seven hours of sleep or you're going to feel pretty groggy. We've played around with... Have you guys ever tried SOM sleep? S-O-M sleep. It's a proprietary thing. It's NSF certified, so it's very clean. You don't have to really worry about it. I know it's being used by a lot of pro teams.

And it's kind of like in a little Red Bull can. And if you take that like 30 minutes out, recovery like jumps off the charts. Really? It's pretty interesting. Does it make you sleepy? It does make you a little bit sleepy. Or does it make you just sleep deeper?

It's both. So it's kind of like sleep inducing a little bit. So if you know hey i want to start winding it down you do what you can on your piece uh you drink it it's going to push you a little bit deeper and then you're going to be out you know i've heard with some things like that like if you take a benadryl or or you drink alcohol it's like you sleep but you're not really getting the same quality of sleep like you're on like if you pass out drunk you're unconscious you're not really getting the same quality of sleep like you're on like if you pass out drunk you're unconscious you're not sleeping like that type of comparison so in this example

with som sleep yes something like yeah it's actually helping you sleep with a higher degree of recovery and higher quality sleep it's not just making you more unconscious no correct yeah it's helping you get that deeper sleep more REM sleep like that so uh i mean it's it's not like there's like uh snake oil in there or anything it's you know it's things that people are already using for sleep magnesium uh some zinc the melatonin and they just have a proprietary blend that just kind of kicks it all together so um again this is one of those things where you should just play around with what works for you and and go from there the next thing we're going to talk about is strain here so on any given day based on your recovery there's an optimal strain for that and and when we talk about optimal strain that means where you can train or how much

strain you can accumulate in a day without overtraining so uh you know, 66 recovery, you're looking at about 12.6 optimal strain, and you've got 13. So, 100-ish percent, right? And then for the second period, 54% recovery, 11.3 optimal strain, and 12.1 actual strain, so 102%. It's really not that bad. But like you said, when you take a day off, your numbers are completely different. So, you can get a couple days where even if even if you're in the green yeah let you it's okay to relax well i i just i shouldn't say i just started it's probably been six months now like i really just like going to the gym it's

kind of like my time to be alone and do all that so i've been trying to this has been a super helpful tool for me of like how can i stay in this range and play with the numbers and like actually track what i'm doing because that's my happy place it's my dojo it's where i want to go and do things and how do i take the information that's in this and then turn that into a training program so that i get to be there six or seven days a week not because i want to go pr my deadlift and my two-mile run, but how do I make the gym work for what I have here? Exactly.

Only being off by a percent and a half kind of makes me feel good about that. That's very good. Yeah. Listening to your body. Check that out. There you go. Bam! Nailed it.

Get in the show notes. Check me out. I'm killing it on this page. Yeah, and then people can just kind of read these, going through the data, things we've talked about with the slow-wave sleep, and it's just kind of a write-up of actual actionable steps that Anders could be taking to improve his sleep. What do you see as like a,

what does like the normal person's sleep life look like? The normal person? Yeah, I mean, if Joe Schmo from the CrossFit gym shows up and they're three to five days a week, their normal desk job and they're relatively high stress, probably sitting in a car, sitting at a desk. Are they getting six hours? Do you guys have an average of a population versus...

I'm sure we could do that, but it's not always where we're looking i think different like you just created the three to five a week crossfitter that's that's gonna look something different depending one what their job is yeah it'd be more like hey what does people that what do people that work on wall street look like right that's the kind of thing where you're like terrifying whoa um if they knew they probably wouldn't know or they wouldn't want to know. And that's part of it too. Some people hate seeing that they need to make a change to their life. So they push back.

But it's like, hey, this is actually what your body is telling you. It's important for you to listen. Is this type of analysis or reporting available for the average person or do you just put it together just for the show? This is what I do for the elite teams as well. Maybe one day. But that's why we're trying to build these things into the app more. So when you answer those prompts when you wake up,

it's important to answer those prompts because the more feedback you you put into whoop the more actionable data you can get out um and we're going to keep building that out too so and if you're the coach of a team and you want to see the data for your entire team is there a separate app or or desktop version that where you can see the whole the whole group right so we're uh we're on the the desktop version now And if you ever logged in with what you signed up for Whoop with, your email address on thewhoop.com, you can actually look at this.

You guys. I'll get there eventually. That's a lot of teams. What teams are you coaching? Are you allowed to talk about them? So I'll make it more general we have uh just over 65 i think we have like 65 or 70 college teams college college uh university or colleges and then within that we have multiple teams at universities um we work with high-performing military groups

like the SEALs, Green Berets, things like that. And then we also have a corporate wellness side as well. So everyone's looking for something a little bit different. It's not like I'm going to tell a SEAL, hey, you know what, you should really think about trying to get some sleep. I'd like to see some more meditating out of you. So how do we help them, right?

So yeah, so this is what the coach page looks like you can click on the individual athletes and we can set it out so it's six months three months one month two weeks one week we can go through the strain and uh recovery daily and then we can actually click on the strain see what the period looked like. Look at a breakdown of each day. We could hypothetically go into that and look at the actual activity. That was yesterday. Yeah. That was a big run yesterday, 45 minutes on the trail.

Got after it, right? 150-ish heartbeat. Right. And then you see all of your, right? So that's pretty good. And then if we look at recovery, we can see where you are versus your baseline on any given day. And then hours of sleep, let's pull this out to two weeks.

We're going to see time in bed, slow wave sleep, REM, all of these kind of running averages, how many nights you got, eight to nine hours, seven to eight. So it's really all laid out for you pretty nice yeah I really have taken the data that it gives me and really paid attention to man I hate when the sleeve stuff

is all jacked up because I know like I know it's coming but to be able to go into the gym and have a decent plan of maybe you don't need to kill yourself today today's the day to push it i really enjoy having that that functionality for just understanding intensity and just duration of how like what you're going to be doing each day yeah so you're using it really well yeah and

that's people should be thinking that again how can i use this information to not put myself in a bad spot where I'm susceptible to get the flu or tweak my back just because class is doing five rep max back squat. Have coaches been pretty open to the idea of getting their athletes on this or are they still? Oh, yeah. Coaches love it. We work with them in kind of like a consultative way. We're their sleep expert and we set sleep goals. And the more that teams work with us, the changes are unbelievable. People start at, as a team average, 75% sleep performance before long.

The entire team's at 95%, and they're winning national championships, and their sleep debt's under 20 minutes and things like this. So the more feedback you get or the more you like actually looking at the data, the more it can help you. So, yeah, go ahead. For coaches that, you know, say you're coaching one-on-one athletes, like is there a way to get notifications to the coach?

Like your athlete wakes up and their sleep quality is really poor and it just pops up on the coach's phone saying, hey, you know, Andrew didn't sleep very well last night. you go okay cool like you just got it right away so that's in development in terms of like a dashboard for that to happen um but right now we do have excel reporting that will do exactly that athletes wake up we push the reports let's say at 9 10 a.m whatever you want the reports we have them set up for you and what that will do is it's going to bring those athletes to the top of the list and highlight them in red and it's going to have all of their metrics hrv resting heart rate recovery sleep um like six weeks out two weeks out one week three days two days one day

so they can see the trend it's like is this recent or has this kind of been happening so they're seeing like you said the trend analysis of this person's been low for a little bit and it's because we're looking at the deviation off of all those baselines hrv resting heart rate recovery sleep so right now it's in excel but soon it will be uh an actual dashboard for coaches to kind of see. Is the HRV calculating throughout the day, just giving you one reading in the morning? So we calculate HRV and resting heart rate

in your last five minutes of your last slow-wave sleep cycle. Why is that? So part of it is so that people can't hold their breath and try and be still. So we're taking the human element out of it. Cheaters. Right? And we need a long enough duration for it to happen. So if we can get that duration, it makes it a very accurate reading as opposed to someone waking up.

The second you wake up, heart rate's already a little bit elevated. You start stressing. People try and manipulate the numbers to see something they want to see. So we take that away from them. Yeah, exactly. We take that away from them by, you know, cherry-picking that data. Yeah. So is this desktop version that you're showing us right now

your internal thing that you guys can look at within the company or is that something we have access to as well as consumers? You can look at it if you signed into Whoop with your email address. You can look at your data. Okay, cool your email address you could look at your data okay cool because i'd only seen the the mobile version i think you know most looks more comprehensive is it is it the same it's so we have a couple more things on here so we have respiratory rate which is new what is that oh dope uh so it's you know breathing per minute oh cool of course tonight. What is respiration? Oh, I was expecting.

You're thinking heart stuff still? The big thing, if you think about it as. How much blood pumping? Just as another tool in your toolbox, right? Your resting heart rate can change day to day. You know, two, three beats, okay. But if your respiratory rate starts to also climb, that's when there's, you know, maybe something happening.

Maybe you're getting sick. Maybe your body's just worn down. Because it's 13 versus 50, 1 to 2 is a big variation versus on that 50. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So that's something I imagine as far as being recovered, you want your respiration rate to be lower rather than higher? Yeah. You want it lower, but you also don't want to see a whole lot of change.

That means business as usual. When we see spikes, that's... So there's HRV, and then is there respiration variability? Is that a real metric? Is that a thing? Maybe you just made it, but we're looking at variation in... You can look at your own variation in respiratory rate so for most people it's just going to be i'll click on here it should be fairly

flat straight across right um now let's say anders got up to 16 he's probably sick already that's right now he's roughly 14 or less he's 13 he's got one day at 14 the other days are pretty much all 13 so um like that's kind of business as usual for you that's good your resting heart rate's about the same um but yeah it's just we're trying to continue to make it a more robust profile so it's not just resting heart rate and hV, which are both very valuable. HRV is the most valuable. But this is just another tool. I dig it. You're working with CrossFit athletes specific at the gym you're coaching at,

right? Yeah. And they all use Woo. Are you? Well, James Hobart's over there, right? Are we allowed to talk about him? We can talk about James. James doesn't use Woo.

He's pretty open. He doesn't use it? I think he used to use it uh when he was training with rich and uh for the games but all other coaches do i well i can see because i see a lot of times especially um probably in the last two years people training with heart rate monitors on and i feel like this is a significantly more comprehensive way to go about really actually including the recovery but not people started to bring the heart rate monitors in to see kind of where they were at like how long can i maintain 70 75 80 percent um do you notice

any of those numbers when you're working with crossFit athletes of how well they're able to stay aerobic, anaerobic? Is there a recovery piece to that? So that's actually a really good point. So, you know, since we're talking about the gym, I actually have a page for it. We can talk about it. So one of the younger coaches, very good at CrossFit, you know, high skill. I said to him the other day when the open's over we need to start working on your aerobic capacity because his heart rate is a bit higher than everyone else's so these are the elite people uh these guys are pretty elite yeah

they're they they train five six times a day and seminar staff. Is that you with a 67? Where? Oh, HRV? Yeah, HRV. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my average is 60. Yeah, that's fine for me. But you can look at things where, hey, he's got a good HRV

or someone has a good HRV, they're sleeping well, they're training well, but you see a high resting heart rate. That's where we can see, hey, we just need to work some base level physiology of you need to spend some time doing lower intensity cardio. And I still think that's where a lot of people are missing out in CrossFit. I think Chris Henshaw has done a good job

teaching people about pacing and thinking about that piece, filling that piece. But it's like, it's not sexy, right? It's to sit on the bike for 30 45 minutes i mean that's not instagram worthy so i think most people are not doing it especially since not everybody has time so you know filling out your whole physiological profile by not just lifting heavy not not only doing skill work you know actually just kind of doing some stuff that

work a consistent heart rate even if it's a little bit boring make it not boring like yeah that's that's where we see the improvement and then we're just increasing work capacity that's all we want to do well you said you were helping them with kind of the endurance side of things um how do you incorporate a lot of the data that you're getting from here just into their training is are you varying it by workout by night uh yeah so depending on what i know they're going to do throughout the course of the week um and what days they might have to wake up early um you know we have different like a different stimulus we want to hit so throughout the course of the week obviously we want to hit probably some sort of like longer base work and then we want some middle distance it's kind of an uncomfortable

burn right probably something similar to like a 10k if you if you did 35 40 minutes of i could definitely do this but i would rather not uh and then it touched that high intensity as well so making sure they're staying in touch with all different intensities but also cycling off it so you know like during the open it's like okay they're gonna do the open and that's like a focus i could see my like 27 year old self just seeing how long we could stay red let's just see how many friends we can hit in a row to get to 21 and just hang out there for like three days just to see like what it looks like. And that's a mentality though, right? People definitely are like, whatever.

Like, it's funny. I've got 8% or 8 HRV right now. It's hilarious. And it's like, kind of, but also you're like dying a little bit. How long have you guys had the data to be able to see maybe longer term health effects of hanging out at 40% recovery or the lower levels of the yellow and the higher levels of red

where people still feel like they may be able to get after it because they're mentally just pushing through things and not paying attention. I think we have that data. We would just need to have somebody's performance data too, right? So you need another objective measure of, you know, you clean and jerked 325 today,

and it was at 40% recovery, and let's measure when you're at 40% recovery in three months, can you clean and jerk more than that? So it kind of has to be apples to apples. If people wanted to share that data, I bet a lot of people are doing, hopefully, keeping a training log and kind of looking at, here's where I did well, and comparing those pieces.

So 5K, run it when you're 90% recovered, and 90% recovered again. That's a good measure. Earlier we mentioned if you're under-recovered, it might be a good idea to back off and kind of downgrade your training for the day. Do you ever do the opposite, where you're like, now you're 100% recovered, let's let's add 50 training volume do an

extra session it's yeah absolutely and i think that's where you need to look at uh kind of the real-time feedback so let's say you already knew you were going to do a few things it goes really well see what that strain is and you're like okay this is very high uh but i feel good i can keep going um definitely do it but what we also see is when people feel really good they do that they increase volume by 50 and then all of a sudden they're in the red the next day so they went from feeling great to i think i overdid it a little bit um that's okay it's fine for training adaptation we just don't want to live in the red right so what do we the next day maybe a little bit lighter get back to the yellow and then eventually get back to the green but absolutely if you're feeling good is there a

like a health unleash it a health and longevity 12 13 14 just hanging out in that well we would say i believe by our definition uh 13 starts to be definition, 13 or 14 starts to be a high strain day. Gotcha. So you definitely don't want to be living up at 18. Yeah. So 21 is actually incredibly high. Very, very high. Yeah.

So 14 is a very solid number for exertion. That's where I hang out a lot. 12 to 14. I thought that 14 was was a pretty medium number, but now I know. But again, you're a pretty fit guy, right? You've got a good resting heart rate, a nice HRP, low respiratory rate.

It's getting worse by the day. Trending down. I think it'll stabilize. How does it learn you so well? Is that the right way to say same. How does it learn you so well? Is that the right way to say that? How does it learn you? That was a really intelligent way to say that. How does it learn your in-shapeness?

Like, is my body, I don't know. Yeah. What's the 24-7? Is my body really taught? This thing's learning me. How do you do this in the technology space? The band is learning my HRV better. Mic takeover. Yeah. i'm just so it's it's just pulling your data 100 times a second right so think about that 24 24 hours a day seven days a week

every day of the year you're there's a hundred times per second and those numbers recalibrate the better correct yeah so it's the more because of the continuous data pool, it's just creating this profile for you. So it's not like it's necessarily learning you. It's telling you what's happening. So if I put Doug's on, the whole thing would be super screwed and have no clue what happened overnight if we just switched bands tonight. I mean, it would keep reading, but it would – Yeah, the feedback would be weird.

The feedback would be – yeah, you guys have kind of similar metrics. But, yeah, it would still be like, what the hell. Yeah, it would definitely recognize. Absolutely. So what about if you – say you tear your hamstring really bad. So now your lower body training is kind of temporarily off the charts. So you go and your upper body is totally recovered. You can do a lot of upper body training is kind of, you know, temporarily off the charts. So you go and your upper body is totally recovered. You can do a lot of upper body training, but, like, your upper body feels good.

So let's say you're doing bench press and pull-ups and whatever else, but you still have, like, this massive hamstring tear. You've got lots of swelling, et cetera, et cetera. Like, does it still mark you down as unrecovered, even though your upper body is more or less fine, but your lower half is recovering recovering from an action like real trauma so we actually had a situation like that where we had a football player who broke their leg and immediately went into the red and then just kind of stayed there but that's part of it right your body is diverting energy to fix that

broken leg so in your example of is it going to accurately show it might be skewed depending on the severity of the injury so it's it's looking at your entire body's health so if something is suppressed that doesn't mean that you still can't do bench press and that's an important thing to think about is just because you're in the red doesn't mean that you cannot go still do something right like my wife ran the new york marathon in the red and it was fine and did well so uh it it's a guideline it's a guideline for you to think about your behavior if you know that man i'm itching to just throw some plates on and do some bench press and some pull-ups like you're probably right so mood mood is a really good subjective uh thing to think about because it's it's easy to look at the data and people can get crippled by it

yeah um you do have to still understand yourself if you know that you're capable and that's part of just being filling out your mindset as an athlete do you guys have any instances where the athlete just just wears the band and then the coach looks at all the data and you just kind of like don't tell the athlete? You can't wake up and look at your own data because it just messes with their head. They're like, I'm in the red. Today's going to be a horrible session. Oh my god.

No, no, no. We actually have that. Just let the coach make all the decisions. You just lift weights. A lot of people ask us to do that on game days so we will hide or if it's match let's let's use tennis or something like that where it's going to be several days or swim meet hide all the recoveries so we're still pulling the data but the the coaches will see it and the kids will not so yes that's that's it's a very

real thing and it depends on different cultures. So we've seen that the gamification of sleep and recovery is a good thing when there's education with it. Now, if you just give people the tools and they don't really understand, then usually the compliance goes down and it's not as helpful. And eventually people stop wearing it. But as long as people understand what their metrics are telling them and the coach manages it a lot of times it's a strength coach as well or it's it's a performance director that's relaying the information to the coach so a lot of times the coach just it's like just tell me what i need to know so there's even another layer to that of you

know down the totem pole. Yeah. Interesting question. What do you guys do with all the data? It just lives there safely for you. Yeah. Yeah. Just in a big server of trying to calculate, like, the population's health? It's not there.

You know, we've been very adamant about keeping our users' data secure because it is always monitoring. Yeah. You know, we want people to feel safe, and it is a very secure product, and that's a really important thing. And I think it's a key differentiator that we don't want to sell people's data and let it just get out there because that's just kind of a breach of trust and this is telling you a lot of things right yeah so if you look at let's use professional sports you know nfl pa loves it does the nfl want it because what's it going to show about

concussions right okay that that you know that's hypothetical but you can think about even within any league players and the league might not always think about it the same way are those players just so jacked up for those 18 weeks i'd imagine you'd have to be right well you guys have seen like a large aggregate of what the NFL looks like I mean what do you mean by jacked up well the recovery seven days isn't enough to get through having 12 car wrecks on a Sunday it's a very very hard thing and there's a lot of uh studies that we're working on with concussions so teams at the collegiate level let's use because they are a little more forthcoming with the data um we've seen like a 60% drop in injuries

and like an 80% drop in concussions. For these football teams that are actually actioning the data to kind of change training protocol and keeping their athletes healthy and ready. So it absolutely works. It's just, you know, do people really want to listen? If I was to potentially just go on some testosterone and have better recovery, is there going to be like a massive jump in my numbers if I start taking some extra supplements?

There certainly could be. Everybody's body responds differently, right? Yeah. Maybe we'll get on the juice. We'll test it. I's body responds differently, right? Yeah. Maybe we'll get on the juice. We'll test it. I'm going to go on the gear, see what happens. You could do beta alanine. I bet beta alanine would bump everyone's recovery.

That's a really good one. And you don't have to be super concerned about the steroids or anything like that. Well, I mean, that's what it's there for, to help recovery. But I wonder if steroids really helps your HRV. Like daily readiness? Yeah. Potentially. I'd imagine it does, but I have no idea.

Yeah. You don't really hear much about steroids and HRV. That's not like a hot topic. I'm on the juice right now. Watch me snatch 500 pounds and it's like, and my HRV is at 100. It's really good well those would be great things to add into the uh the thing i brought up earlier about being able to enter in your own yes no little checkbox during your daily input i took beta alanine i took creatine i took

fish oil or whatever it is like you put all your supplements in there if you were if you were on the juice you could you could put that in there as well you put can put whatever you want. I think it'd be awesome. I would love to know what your number is. Now I might have to try. But it's just self-experimentation, right? There's probably some guy down on the street that's got some stuff we could buy. We could buy at lunchtime. Yeah, I didn't mean to derail the conversation. It's just interesting.

The whole thing tracks recovery. I think you're going to have better luck when you guys go to New York to find that guy. I don't think he's in Boston. I don't know. Big Papi was here. I don't know. I was going to say, yeah. Wasn't go to New York to find that guy. I don't think he's in Boston. I don't know. Big Papi was here. I don't know. I was going to say, yeah. Was that how we started the show? Call McGuire's guy.

McGuire and Sosa were here lighting it up. This is phenomenal. I'm really excited that we get to try this out. Where does this product go as far as just take the CrossFit athlete and from the highest level to your average Joe,

are you doing any specific tests on the CrossFit athlete, that population of things that they're interested in? So we work with a couple teams a little more closely, a couple athletes more closely, and that's something where we could look at kind of end-of-the-year post-games analysis of how are you doing, you know, with regionals not existing anymore.

It could allow, I mean, the training's going to be different, right, because you've got to do sanctionals or whatever the case, so it's not necessarily going to be the same sort of, like, fluid flow up to the games. And it'd just be interesting to see where we have the ability to look back at an

entire year of training and say, man, this was a really bad period. Or you guys got super fit here and this is why you performed well at the games or this is why you qualified. We can quantify all that and give them to the team. Has there been anything that's come

out of the open for you guys of just recognizing general stress is way higher, recovery is down? I don't know. I think what I would speculate just from looking at my own gym is the data here. Everyone's recovery on Friday in the Open is incredibly high because they know they want to perform. They want to go to Friday Night Lights and they want to tear the roof off. The rest of the week is not necessarily that case.

But people are putting the time in to sleep more because there are scores out there. This is, for real, this isn't just a class. And for some people, this is how they measure themselves, right? It's an easy way to cross the community to just kind of see where you are year over year. Even though the workouts are different, it still shows you what you can do and it's it's an easy way for to cross the community to just kind of see where you are year over year even though the workouts are different you know it still shows you what you can do and it's it's out there so i think people are putting the time in to to change their sleep habits have

you guys run numbers on on your internal staff you got a couple dozen employees here that guy over there looks super stressed out 40 or 50 people you know doing doing the uh you know the normal work week thing have you looked at at the data for just the company? So we do have team page. We have different team pages for even different departments. And yeah, it looks very different depending on who's working with software. Are we traveling?

Our team travels a good bit. The Elite team travels a good bit. And it really just is dependent on how much the stress is. Well, you guys are also the test dummies in here for the product. Oh, we are. A little bit, yeah. There's a gym right behind you that's got some treadmills and erg in there, bikes.

Those look painful. But how do you guys – I guess what was going on earlier when your test dummy one was on there for on the treadmill for 40 minutes. So anytime, uh, we just want to make sure all the calibrations, right. We compare with, uh, polar straps as well. So we're measuring our heart rate versus what the polars are capturing since that's, you know, like the gold standard. Um, and we wanted to just keep refining it. So it's, you know, a hundred it's as close to 100% accurate as possible. So always trying to make our product better

so that all the users are getting something they don't have to think about whether or not it's accurate. And we talked about how easy it is to just leave it on. It's way easier than putting on a chest strap. So not that we're going to replace the chest strap, but if we can get it really, really close, that would be outstanding. Because the chance of me actually wearing a chest strap 24 hours a day is basically zero.

I'm not doing it. That's why I've never tested HRV, because it always comes on a chest thing. There's no way I'm walking around with that thing. If you've got that V torso too, it just slides down. I don't know. Because whoop, I put on nine pounds.

The V might not be there anymore. Pure muscle. Pure muscle. Definitely pure muscle. Right on, man. This has been fantastic. It has been. Thank you.

I love that this thing stayed in my life. I've never actually had a wearable that made sense to me. That you want to keep wearing and that you just do it automatically? Yeah. Well, when I learned how to get to 10,000 steps, I was like, okay, I get what 10,000 steps is.

This is pretty pointless at this point. Right. But now this thing is like a daily check-in to me that I can base my training off of. Understanding sleep is massive. Like, you know how you feel throughout the day but you have no idea what's happening in the middle of the night right the ability to figure out the intensity that you should be training at is really really important and i think that especially in the crossfit space where the the idea is that the gas pedal just needs to

be down all the time it just gives you some sort of metric to know why you feel the way you feel and it's okay to back it down a little bit if needed right and go harder if you want correct throw some extra bodybuilding in at the end and get after it i love being able to see my numbers every day yeah if anytime i wake up and like it died in the middle of night or something like that i can't see like what my sleep quality was like right then i'm like oh god damn i gotta charge this thing every day yeah like so this doesn't happen again like it like frustrates me that i can't see my data because i just love looking at it i made a conscious decision the other night to not have it on because i needed to charge it and there was like the weird thought maybe i'll just have it over the bed close to the

plug and i'll just do it while i'm sleeping but that would have been a disaster but i was like i remember going to bed and i was like man i'm I'm not even going to know how well I slept. That sucks. So right on. Well, where can people find you? All this information? Whoop.com. It's pretty comprehensive. All new things Whoop are coming via either Instagram or the newsletter.

So we're updating literally daily here. Always trying to make it better for everyone. So if you're really interested in this, I would highly suggest staying informed on the newsletter. Shrug family, this is about to get really embarrassing because in the second half of the show, we go into how poorly I sleep. Look, if you're looking for the best sleep in the world, having a child might not be the best idea. Just saying. Just saying. Depends upon how much you want to recover, how much sleep you're going to get at night. I want to thank our sponsors, Perfect Keto.

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Anytime I get the sweet package from Perfect Keto, my mom shows up to the house and all the Keto is gone. All the Keto Coffee is just eliminated instantly. She steals it because she loves it so much. They have starter kits over at their website. So get over to PerfectKeto.com. Use the coupon because she loves it so much. They have starter kits over at their website. So get over to perfect keto.com. Use the coupon code shrugged. You're going to save 20% and our good friends over at bio optimizers, B I O P T I M I Z E R S.com forward slash shrugged. You're going to save 20%. The mass zymes, the HCL, the gluten guardian, they've got an awesome stack over there for anybody focused on digestion, heart health. What's really cool about the mass zymes is, uh, we eat

all the protein to be nice and strong, but we never really think about how much we're actually digesting in this process. Digestion is a massive piece of breaking down all the protein into amino acids, which is a way that your body's actually going to be able to use that protein and grow muscle. So biooptimizers.com forward slash shrugged, you're going to save 20%. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com forward slash shrugged biooptimizers.com forward slash shrugged save 20%. Back to the show. We are at Whoop headquarters with Will Ahmed. Man.

Got it that time. That was the second time there, folks. CEO, founder of Whoop. This is super exciting. We just got done talking for two hours about my general health, longevity, all the things. This little band's super cool. I don't even know if they told you when we were down in Miami

and we were positioned right next to you guys, I was trying really hard not to get sold on the Whoop band and was slowly walking away from the conversation. And now three months later, I'm here. I'm hooked. How did you start this thing? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, guys. It's great to meet you guys in person.

You know, our mission at Whoop's really around unlocking human performance. I got into this space because I was interested generally in human performance, but more so as just an athlete myself. So I was someone who used to play a lot of different sports growing up. I ended up playing squash in college. I was captain of the Harvard squash team, so I was around a bunch of different athletes. I was training as one myself. And I was someone who used to overtrain. So you go through this period where, you know, you feel like you're getting fitter, fitter,

fitter. And then all of a sudden you fall off a cliff, right? Your body's run down and you don't really know why. And so for me, I really wanted to better understand like why I was overtraining. And it seemed obvious to me that you should be able to prevent something like that. And then more broadly, I was thinking about other things. Okay, athletes get injured, athletes misinterpret fitness peaks, athletes undertrain, how does sleep and recovery fit into this whole equation. And I guess ultimately, I wanted to take a more scientific or, you know, almost educational approach to understanding my body. Here I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard, of all places, training. And I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing with my body.

And so I got very interested in physiology. I ended up reading something like 500 medical papers while I was in school. Dang. Which was, by the way, a departure. Like I was studying government and economics. And the next thing I know I found myself in the science department. So if you get passionate about something, folks, watch out what you get passionate about. And yeah, and so I did a ton of physiology research and ultimately wrote this paper around how to continuously understand the body.

And in the process, I was ultimately writing the business plan for Whoop. I don't know if I knew it at the time. I didn't know necessarily, hey, I'm about to found a business. But, you know, I had this passion around understanding the body, and it just kept pulling at me, kept pulling at me. And I was fortunate to meet my two co-founders over the course of my senior year. So John Capilupo, our chief technology officer, was studying some of the hardest math classes in the country, like real math prodigy. And as it turns out, his father

is a professor of exercise physiology. So I start telling John about the idea and how to continuously understand the body. And he really got a lot of things from a physiology standpoint already. And I had a vision for how to build a product for coaches and athletes and he had a sense for maybe how we could be innovative on the data side on the algorithm side so we started working together we started working together that summer so this is summer of 2012 I just graduated from Harvard John had just finished his sophomore year and about two or three weeks into the summer i say to him hey do we have anyone who can help us prototype you know some of the hardware ideas that we're coming up with

around monitoring the body he's like you know it's funny i've actually got this romanian guy living on my couch right now i think something fell apart for him like in his job and uh apparently he's a mechanical engineer. I was like, yeah, let's get him involved. Like, bring him down. So I meet Aurelian Nicolai the next day. And by the way, if you meet anyone from Romania who went to Harvard, they're, like, savant-level smart.

Because every year there's, like, one or two Romanians that get sent to Harvard. And they have to be the best at everything academically in order to get in. And so I meet Aurelian and, you know, we start, we just hit it off and he starts prototyping all sorts of different ideas we had. And that's how I met John and Aurelian. And, you know, over the course of what's been a little over six years now, we've, you know, we've built technology that i think is quite innovative we've uh hired we've got a team of 60 people here uh we've raised about 60 million in venture

capital to date uh and we're we're fortunate to be partners with really brilliant people and you know cutting edge innovators and some of the best athletes or performers in the world yeah what was the original idea when you came up with the idea for the hardware and the software, what were the key things you were looking to do? Well, a lot of it for me goes back to solving problems, right? The first problem I really wanted to address was how do you prevent overtraining? And what that ties closely to is also how do you train optimally, right? And when I just zoomed out from

30 000 feet it was like you really need to understand recovery and you need to understand strain ultimately over training or under training is just an imbalance between strain and recovery if my body's run down and i take on a lot of strain i I'm overtraining. And if I do the opposite, my body's peaking, but I don't do anything, I'm undertraining. So I say to myself, how can we measure strain and recovery? And so that was the lens through which I was looking at physiology, was I want to really understand stress, I want to really understand strain, and then I also really want to understand recovery. And in the process of obviously focusing on recovery, I got fascinated by sleep and I knew that was going to be an

important metric. And what's interesting to me is that that earliest, earliest vision, like if I go back in time, even read the paper I wrote in 2011, 2012, it's virtually identical to what we've built today. And, you know, I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are sort of saying to themselves, I just want to start a company, I'll figure it out along the way. And I actually reject that as a point of view. Like, I think you want to have a really, really strong point of view and try not to like have all these zigs and zags and pivots and everything. Like you want to have a point of view that's differentiated that you can then ride out. And so that initial idea is very similar to what you see today in the Woo product. Did you always know that you were going to be going down kind of the entrepreneurial path?

Because jumping right out of college and going into taking on venture capital and building a pretty technical product, that's a big leap. I think from a young age I was always entrepreneurial. I didn't necessarily know what it meant to be an entrepreneur. I had worked a few summers in finance. I had other family members who worked in finance. My dad worked in finance. So part of me thought I would go down a traditional finance path. But in being an intern, at least, I realized that I didn't love it. Like a good test for any young person listening to this

is if you're within a job or profession, like, do you want to be your boss's boss's boss, right? That's what I kept asking myself in all these jobs. And the answer was no, I was working at great places, I respected the hell out of the people that I was working for. And I didn't want to be the guy who ran those firms. Even though they made a ton of money, and they were looked up to, and they were smart and powerful, these things like that, I just found that that wasn't what I wanted to do. And at the same time, I was finding something else that I couldn't stop thinking about. Right. And a good test, if you want, if you're ready to be an entrepreneur for something is like, can you just not stop thinking about it? Is it what you think about in the showers or what you

think about when your minds wander? Excuse me. wander. So that was how I came at it. We're in, I guess, what could be the Whoop Museum behind you as well. Can you, I guess, not walk through every single generation of this, but Generation 1, which looks to be called the Bobo, that doesn't look nearly as compact and beautiful as the band I'm wearing today. Yeah, it's funny. So we're looking here at the product evolution, some of the early prototypes of Woob. And, you know, some of those initial prototypes were like an enormous box filled with processing power. And off of it came a long cord, and then off of that was a somewhat wearable wristband.

And even in order to wear the wristband, you had to attach that enormous box into a computer. So it really wasn't functional. However, these initial prototypes were some of the first prototypes in the world to be able to monitor heart rate variability from the wrist. And that was one of the most important things that we were bringing to market. I'm sure Mike talked about heart rate variability and why it's so important. So if you think about the evolutions of building a business, you want to de-risk things at every stage. The first thing that we needed to de-risk was that we could actually monitor some of this stuff accurately from the wrist.

And that's what these early prototypes, I'm pointing here to the left side of the museum for everyone listening, that's what these early prototypes were able to do. They were able to measure heart rate and heart rate variability accurately from the wrist. And then, you know, we had to raise a lot of capital to figure out how to put this enormous processing power into what's a pretty small wearable form factor today.

When you start to present this to investors or in growing a business, do you have a vision or kind of a difficult time going out and saying like here's the problem with training today and how we can solve x i know you guys are working with a ton of pro teams college teams um was the the vision of where you were going pretty simple to explain to how this can really increase performance you know i think that investors are ultimately focused on how to make a return, right? So you want to be able to explain how it's also going to be a big business. The mission side of the business is very easy to get behind. Human performance, it's a sexy company, it's a cool product, we work with really intriguing people or leagues, right? It's very easy to get attached work with really intriguing people or leagues.

It's very easy to get attached to that side of the business. The fundamental question is, can you build a really compelling business? For us, I think that's where having a very loyal customer base, making sure that our users see true value in the product and continue to wear it day in and day out, that's where we're most differentiated as a company from an investor point of view. We've really built technology that people love, and I'm proud to say that. Every day people reach out to us saying how the products change their lives. So that for us is super humbling and super stimulating.

We want to keep doing everything we can to engage those people. I'm actually one of those people. I never want to wear the things. Well, I always want to know what's going on in my sleep, but there's no... We talked about it. I hate the idea that I have to wear a chest strap

for anything. It's ridiculous. I'm never going to do it. This thing's super light super comfortable it tells me everything that i want to know all the things when i'm sleeping that i wish i knew um and it's kind of i shouldn't say kind of it like hrv really is one of the big pieces that's really challenging without great technology to understand like you can't just take your pulse and know what your hrv is so um i find myself like driving to the gym forgetting it driving back home before i work out um like if i go to sleep without it because like the battery dies or it needs to charge or whatever

i'm like man that sucks like i'm not gonna know not that i'm like over attached to it but it's really good information to be able to plan workouts and understand like the intensity level to bring with it. So, yeah, it's a super cool product. I've really enjoyed having it on. I appreciate that, man. Yeah, thank you. Where's kind of the future of this mission going for you? You know, if you think about Whoop having core IP, like intellectual property around understanding recovery, understanding readiness. And if you think about readiness as something

that's going to ultimately predict performance, our mission at Whoop is to figure out everything about individuals that help them be ready and be ready when they need to be ready right so for us it's incorporating more data more information to ultimately find that perfect recipe for you maybe you're a paleo diet guy maybe you're a keto guy maybe i'm a eat a lot of carbs guy i don't know right but it's like i think you know but you need to have an understanding of how different diets different lifestyle decisions different drugs different supplements fill in the blank how does that affect my body and then how does that lead to performance yeah and for whoop we're finding all these fascinating ways in which our technology is affecting performance so sure we started with professional athletes and a lot of the best athletes in the world.

There's an obvious tie there from a performance standpoint. Wins, losses, preventing injuries, you name it. We're now monitoring thousands of executives. Fortune 500 CEOs making really important decisions that are affecting thousands and thousands of people's jobs. We're now monitoring trauma surgeons, you know, who need to go into surgery on a 24-hour shift and make sure they save some dude's life. Yeah.

Like, wow, that person needs to know what they're doing to their body, right? Yeah. And how can they keep improving? We're doing this with the military. I mean, can you think of a more important population to understand performance? Navy SEALs, Explosive Ordnance Division. I mean, these are like total badass risking their life for this country. They need to understand their bodies. We're even now on construction sites helping workers and manual labor markets understand how their body is being affected in a daily workforce.

For the military, have you guys gotten any resistance from the people that are in charge? As far as like, military has a very kind of aggressive culture. You just grind and get shit done. Even if you're tired, you just fucking do it anyway. Has implementing technology like this actually had the higher-ups change training in any particular way? Well, what I like to say is you can only manage what you measure, right? Now, you can choose whether or not you change things drastically.

But if you're not measuring this information, it's very hard to know how it affects the day-to-day. And yes, I get the whole grind attitude. Like, yes, a trauma surgeon or a Navy SEAL maybe has to stay up for 36, 48 hours at a time because that's what it takes. What you need to understand, though, is how that affects your body and how you can bounce back from it right like we've had examples of folks in the military just staying up late because they want to play video games right and you know for them because they have this mindset that they can overcome anything which by the way is a really powerful mindset problem is it can also be dangerous for yourself, right? Where you're pushing yourself to do things that ultimately are going to set you back later.

And staying up an extra three hours when you could be sleeping, just seeing, hey, that takes me from a 45% recovery to an 85% recovery. And by the way, I can do 10 more pull-ups and I can run my mile time much faster. And, you know, I'm even less tired at the end of the day. There's a psychological shift that happens there. And you made a good point. You asked about the manager, right? The person oversees us. Sometimes the first step is just having the individuals understand this information. Like we like to say that the individual owns the data. It could be the athlete owns the data. It could be the individual owns the data. Whoever's wearing

WHOOP, we want them to be able to look at that data and understand it. And that's where you see behavior change. You see people starting to tweak things and they start to feel empowered. I worry that, you know, if you look back in time, maybe 10 years ago, team management software was very clunky. You know, you wear a chest strap at practice. It gets sent to a laptop. The trainer's kind of hovering over the laptop. It feels secretive. You don't even know what's happening.

We've really flipped that where, if anything, it's the opposite. The individual knows what's happening. And maybe the manager's going to have access to that data depending on the environment. And that, for the manager, is actually surprisingly empowering because now you've got someone else telling your troops or telling your athletes or telling anyone, hey, get more sleep. This is how it affects your body. Whoop becomes just a – the numbers don't lie.

It's not an emotional thing. It's not your mom telling you to get more sleep. It's just like, hey, this is your body saying you're run down. So that's where it's very easy to cut through in a lot of these conversations and just say, hey, you're better with this information. So as any business goes along and you have any level of success, people are inevitably going to come in and give you suggestions and try to have you add a million different features. And if you're not careful and you're not focused, then it can kind of scale out of control where now it's just a big mess and it doesn't focus on key things. How have you guys maintained that focus over time and not try to do everything for everyone? Well, you have to stay true to your mission, right?

So our mission at Whoop is own human performance. And then you also have to, I think, be pretty intellectually honest with yourself. Hey, what's core to our business? And what are things that are less core to our business? And that's where a lot of the lens through product decisions is made. And then it's also not trying to be everything to everyone. We have a strong performance point of view. We're not necessarily the, maybe the right product if you're trying to get motivated to get off the couch, right? Like right now we

work with high performing individuals, people who are trying to go from 95% to a hundred percent, right? They want to, they want to take things to another level. And that's what connects a Navy SEAL to a fortune 500 CEO, to you guys, to all these people who are trying to optimize their bodies. So we've stayed true to that market. As a result, we're not doing weight loss competitions in the app, right? Because that's not our core group today. Now, long-term it could be, but you got to stay true to that core group. And that's why we build things like a sleep coach that allows an individual to say, hey, I want to peak tomorrow or I want to get by tomorrow. And by changing what your goals are,

Whoop will actually change its coaching. Because we know that even high-performing individuals who always want to win sometimes just don't have time, right? So that to us feels very on brand, feels very core to our market and quite you know, quite different than maybe a different feature that someone out of the blue is asking for. One thing I've been pleasantly surprised is just to see how team management as a concept applies to a professional sports team the same way it applies to a construction site or thousands of executives. Right. It's it's a similar concept where you've got individuals who put stress on their body, who need to recover from it, who need to rest, and you're managing all those people. For you specifically, where is kind of your strongest spot inside the business? Is it the vision? Is it the technology?

I think the two things that I'm always most excited about are the product and the people. The product being, you know, how do we unlock human performance? What do we have to measure? How does a user interact with that data? From the earliest days, I've just always been super involved in that process. I've gotten to work with great designers. We've tried to make design very forefront, whether it's the app experience or the hardware. You know, I think our customers really appreciate that. So that's something I spend a lot of time on personally. And then the people, you know, making sure that I'm able to continue to recruit people who are much smarter than me at what they do. And, you know, you try to recruit people and learn from them and have them tell you what to do right you know you ultimately hire people to have them tell you what to do and so that's uh that's where i've spent a

lot of my time and and i think uh at least having gotten this far that's where where i've been successful one thing i'm always interested about when companies like this grow and it seems like you guys are growing very quickly is the number of pieces that need a ton of detail like just the design of the watch the bands how are you going out and finding the people that are actually really drawn to this kind of mission that you've put together it tends to be pretty easy to sell people on the mission i mean it's uh you're monitoring the body 24 7 it's a really cool technology. It's working with the best athletes in the world, the most high-powering execs.

It's a bunch of really aspirational mission statements and really aspirational users. So convincing people to join Whoop tends to be easier than finding people qualified to work here. I mean, we have a very high bar on an engineering standpoint. I feel like it's very competitive. Yeah, I mean, we get hundreds of applicants, thousands of applicants for every role. So it's about as competitive as I think you can find. So as a result, we've gotten to be very choosy

about who we bring into this club. And I think as a result, we have a higher retention as a team because once you're in here, you realize, okay, this is is a pretty special place there's a lot of smart people around me and one thing that I always believe in is you want to empower everyone you hire so we don't like to stack people on top of each other we don't like to have you know overburden some job descriptions we like to really make it an opportunity for people to grow their careers and take on actually more responsibility than they've had elsewhere. I love that. So there's

the key pieces of tracking performance and staying true to your mission, but then there's also the, just like the visual look and how it feels on your wrist and whatnot. You talked about design a second ago, like how did you guys get to the look and feel that it currently it currently is at yeah i think in a lot of ways good design is like the removal of features and function in some ways so for us what you see is looks very simple at the end of the day i mean for those of you listening who don't know what a whoop strap looks like it's it's a small sensor that's mostly covered by material and that material are various bands that can be customized that can be all sorts of different colors there isn't a screen on the product which was a very intentional decision

and even in first glance you might not necessarily know it's a piece of technology and my point of view on wearable technology is that you either want it to be cool or you want it to disappear and today we're we're primarily focused on on trying to make it cool you can dress it up in a lot of different ways and over time there's just going to be more and more customization on that side of things in terms of making it invisible that's where the idea of having whoop be able to live throughout your body comes in. So we have a lot of different things coming down the roadmap that are going to enable that. And even today, you know, you can see it can be on your wrist, it can actually be on your forearm, it can be on your upper arm. So it's starting to move around your body. And I personally think there's a lot of screens in the world. I didn't want to

have to compete with watches. We didn't want whoop to be a watch. And that's been a really important call that we made was actually removing the idea of a screen because now you can wear a watch and you can wear a WHOOP strap and we're not competing with your watch. So a lot of different decisions went into it. I think the last thing that we also own a lot of intellectual property around is we invented a modular charger. So you can charge Whoop without ever taking it off your body. So for folks listening, there's a modular charger. You just slide it onto the sensor, and literally you never take Whoop off.

And as a result, we get a lot of great 24-7 data from that. He showed me how to do that. I was plugging it in. No. I was plugging it in. No. Well, I was plugging it in on here. I never took it off, but I plugged it in the wrong way. He was like, what are you doing? It's so simple.

Just slide it on. I was like, oh, who ever thought of that? That's a genius. I had it messed up right off the bat, but he got me right. Well, so the strap without the battery pack or the charger is waterproof. The charger is not waterproof. Is that correct? Yeah, we're working on that, but yes.

Well, I put my charger in the washing machine, and it still works just fine for the record. Wow. So we don't recommend that for whoop users listening. You figured it out on accident. But yes, that's great. I'm glad it's still working out. Right on.

Well, we don't want to take too much of your time. I know you weren't on the schedule, so this is – I appreciate you coming in. No, happy to chat with you guys. I mean, if there's anything else you want to talk about. Give us kind of the big overview of everything. Actually, before we wrap up, just a few minutes on, you know, what does the next year or two look like? Well, it's a very exciting time for us.

We're growing in the consumer market in a big way. We're doing a lot of initiatives there. Again, working with more aspirational people. We're now working with fitness enthusiasts, endurance competitors, runners, cyclists, swimmers, triathletes, marathoners. I mentioned executives. You know, we see people who have stressful jobs drawn to whoop, right. Or even somewhat active jobs too, firemen cops um you know we talked about surgeons like these are all people that need to perform so our understanding of human performance is broadening uh as a result our sales are growing meaningfully so we're hiring more people and i think mostly we're we're fulfilling that vision of unlocking human performance.

I love it. Right on. Whoop.com. Is that the best place to find you? Yeah, check us out at Whoop.com. Definitely the best place to check out the product. If people have questions about the product, I'm at Will Ahmed. You can find me online.

Right on. Doug Larson. Find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. Yeah, make sure you go to whoop.com. Use the coupon code shrugged. There's a sweet deal over there for the listeners. Doug and I have been loving the bands. I'm pretty much stuck.

It's stuck to me now forever. But, yeah, the feedback, the data, I love checking out my sleep scores and the HRV stuff is really important. So get over there. Use the coupon code shrugged. You're saving 15%. Make sure you get into iTunes, YouTube, like,

subscribe, leave a comment. I'm at Anders Varner because I'm at Anders Varner and we will see you guys next Wednesday. Thanks guys. Shrug family. That's a wrap. Doug and I are on the road here.

Living the dream. We're in NorCal. Just wrapped with Marcus Philly. We're headed over to Jason Kalipas. Make sure you take a screenshot of the show. Tag me at Anders Varner. Hit up Douglas E. Larson, too. He likes to see your screenshots.

He likes to know that you're listening to him on the New Age radio called Podcasts. Make sure you follow us at Chart Collective. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Thanks for being a part of this fun journey, talking about weightlifting for the rest of my life to you guys. Couldn't be more excited about it. We will see you guys next Wednesday.