WHOOP Podcast - Body Composition: Unlocking the Complete Look at Health

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes and WHOOP SVP, Research Algorithms and Data Emily Capodilupo are here to discuss all things body composition. We’re excited to announce we just launched a new feature in the WHOOP app in partnership with Withings. With the feature, WHOOP members can now calculate their body composition, lean body mass percentage, body fat percentage, and weight. Kristen and Emily discuss the foundation of losing weight (1:25), WHOOP as the home for your health (6:32), the feature integration process (8:54), key terms of body composition (10:06), skinny doesn’t mean healthy (17:41), metrics you will see in the feature (20:09), having a more complete look of your health (23:02), and tips for improving your body composition (30:09).Learn More:The New WHOOP Body Composition FeatureGet 20% off a WITHINGS ScaleFollow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen HolmesInstagramLinkedInSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. We've got a great podcast today. Before we get to that, if you're thinking about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial, and see how you like the product before subscribing. Pretty great deal.

This week's episode, Woop, Global, Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes and WOOP, senior vice president, research algorithms and data, Emily Capulupo, they're here to discuss all things body composition. We're excited to announce that we just launched a new feature in the Woop app in partnership with Withings. With the feature, Woop members can now calculate their body composition, lean, body mass percentage, body fat percentage, and weight. This feature is going to help Woop members have a more complete look at their health. To tell you more about how to understand it, Kristen and Emily discuss how weight is not a complete look at your health, the key terms and metrics around body

composition, the all-new integration and feature in partnership with withings, and three ways to improve your body composition. Reminder, if you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast, whoop.com, call us 508-443-4952. Without further delay, here are Kristen Holmes and Emily, Capitol Lupo. Emily, hello. Hey, Kristen. Emily, this is, this is, this is crazy, but a quarter of our members cite weight loss as the top motivator for joining whoop. And they're just constantly asking us for us to help them manage track and be coached to improve weight outcomes. So really excited about this feature because I think it will satisfy I think a lot of what our members have been asking for, which is a better way to track their

body composition. Yeah, and a better way to also think about body composition. You know, When you look at consumer data, 52% of global consumers say that they're constantly trying to lose weight. Right. But one of the reasons why we've been maybe slow to sort of focus on weight is because we don't like the focus on weight. Weight is the wrong metric. A great way to lose weight is to stop working out, right? You're going to lose a bunch of muscle mass. Right, right.

But you're not getting healthier. You're not getting healthier. You're certainly not going to look better, which I think what a lot of people are thinking about and meaning when they say they want to lose weight. And weight is tremendously popular in part because scales are so ubiquitous. And yes, it's correlated for many people with positive changes in body composition, especially if you go about, quote unquote, losing weight in a healthy way. But I think that a lot of times when you focus so much on weight, you're really losing, you know,

the forest or the trees and sort of what matters and what I think is so brilliant about the devices withings created that we've integrated with and why we chose them as a partner is because they're not just looking at weight in isolation. We're looking at body composition. We're looking at understanding, you know, are you losing weight by losing fat or are you losing weight by losing muscle? Very different coaching and, you know, response that we'd want to have to those different scenarios. Right. And I, you know, I'm super. excited to talk about this integration, this partnership, because I think it really does, you know, again, satisfy a big piece of what's missing in the experience is being able to

kind of track some of these metrics. But I think we'd be remiss not to just lead off the conversation that a lot of improving or the recomposition of your body mass is the path that actually, in terms of it from setting up a foundation, is through sleep and is through recovery, right? And I think that oftentimes we forget how foundational that is in enabling your body to work in a way that's sufficient enough to be able to train in a way that allows you to actually, you know, recomposition your body. Yeah, that's such an important point. I think we say a lot that, you know, you don't get stronger while you're working out. You get stronger while you sleep after working out. So the working out is definitely an important

part. It creates that, like, hormetic stimulus that says to your body, like, go get stronger. But that actual release of growth hormone that results in us putting on more muscle is happening during sleep and specifically during slow wave sleep. And so if you want that exercise to translate into that return on investment of greater fitness, greater muscle mass, you have to let yourself get into deep restorative slow wave sleep that night. And so, you know, the things that you can do to promote sleep and promote good quality sleep are going to be the difference between that exact same workout translating to like one amount of fitness gains or the exact same effort translating to something less than that. And when you kind of put it that way, it becomes

for me really motivating because like, hey, I did all the hard work. you know and so it's like do you want the reward from that or do you just want to throw that away and if your answers i just want to throw it away why did you do that right and it's and it's worse than just like not getting the benefit because you have broken down your body that's what creates the stimulus and so you're not only going to not get the benefit but you could end up worse off than you started and so then when you'd go to work out again you're not working out with the recovered system and so you know this is where we see people who they think that they're doing the right things because they do more than what their trainer said. And they keep doing more. And they're just

like, well, if I can lose this weight, you know, by following one plan in 10 weeks, well, I'll just double the plan. And it doesn't end up working that way. And they actually end up gaining weight because your body starts to go in this like, O'Drat state of like, you know, stress response. And that stress response makes it really hard to give up fat and can be really counterproductive. And so getting the stimulus to recovery ratio, right, is absolutely critical. And I think really powerful for our members that with this integration, they're going to be able to see that more directly. So talk a little bit about this vision we have,

a whoop as the home for your health. The idea broadly is that there's so much information we can get just from the wrist. And that's what we've really been. focused on for, you know, the 12 years to date. And everything we can get, everything we can help you understand. But more and more, we realize that there are external sources of information. I think, you know, the journal was a great first step in this direction, that external pieces of information give context to what we're seeing in this really powerful, you know, data collected by the device. And all of a sudden, when you layer that in, it starts to become more actionable and

make more sense. And so this is exciting because you don't have to go and manually journal it, although if you don't have a withing scan, you can manually enter those information. So it still becomes available to you. But we want to make it as easy as possible for people to give us this context rich information that we're not then looking at in isolation. Like, you just here's what you get, which is the experience you would have if you owned the scale and didn't have a loop membership. but really the magic comes in this like synergistic interaction when the body comp data starts to be overlaid with how you're training, how you're sleeping, and can start to help you understand why it's moving in a certain direction because it's really easy to be like,

oh, if I eat less, I'm going to lose fat. And it's like, it's not exactly how it works. Right. It's actually a lot more complicated than that to really help you understand, like, what's the right amount of, you know, training to recovery that like your body can handle given where your fitness is right now and how that change. as you become more or less fit. And so, you know, there's this really exciting opportunity to think about what are the data sources that we can start to layer in and start to get not just another dimension of coaching, but actually strengthen the coaching that we already have with all of the things that we've already does so well.

Right. And I think that's why we decided on this because it's the biggest missing piece right now that I think we'll provide context that our members really need to get to that next. level of performance that they're kind of striving towards. So before we talk about just some of the keywords around body compositions, I know there's a lot of confusion around that. Let's talk just briefly about just the technical aspects of integration. So how do members go about the process of integration? Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. So what you're basically going to have to do is through the WOOP app, you log into your Wittings account. If you're buying the Wynn's scale, specifically because of this announcement.

You're going to go as if you were just a Withing member and go create a Wittings account. If you already have the scale, you've already done this. Then you're going to go into your Woop app and in the integrations tab in the main menu, you're going to log in to that Wittings account. And then you're basically going to say on both sides, like I agree to share this information,

and you can read through exactly what information is being shared. And then you're off to the races and you'll see that that data as well as some historical data, if you've been using weddings for the past couple months, get pulled in, and then you can visualize those trends in your Woop app alongside other Woop terms. Amazing, amazing. Let's talk a little bit about just some of the terms

regarding body composition and weight. What do you think members need to understand about these terms that will help them make better decisions about or help them understand their data better. Sure. So I think a big thing is, you know, weight, if we're going to talk about it from a physics perspective, right? So like mass is how much matter is present.

And then weight is when you apply a gravitational force to that matter. This physics doesn't super matter here. But because assuming you're roughly at sea level, that gravitational force is equal everywhere on earth, so people tend to use those somewhat interchangeably that probably upsets physicists, but it generally works. The problem with weight, what we use weight to mean, is that it mushes everything together. And so we get told, especially in these like BMI tables that like, okay, like I'm, you know, five foot four. And so for my height, there is a correct weight or what the BMI tables are going to call, like, normal or healthy, and then anything below that,

you're underweight, anything above that, you know, you become overweight, and then you start to become, like, obese, and then, you know, morbidly obese. And then they do all kinds of, you know, health research, and they say that if you're in this obese category, you're at high risk for all these things, and you're shortening your life and, you know, shame on you, right? They're very judgmental. What they conflate in doing this. is that all weight is created equally. That's what they're saying, and that could not be more wrong. One thing that I see that's so unfortunate and, like, really, like, as a female athlete, like, is, I find painful because girls look at this number, female athletes, look at this number, and they go, oh, I'm heavy, it must be bad, I'm going to eat less.

And there's a huge, huge problem where female athletes underfueled because they're so afraid of weight. You know, as a gymnast growing up, and, you know, we perform basically nude. And so, like, body image stuff is such a problem. And when you add this, like, judgment around your weight, especially for people who are absolutely beautiful bodies, they're just strong, it's like, I think one of the worst things that we've done to female athletes and probably women and people in general is that we just sort of, like, lazily go, like, let's use weight because it's easy to collect, cheap to just, to just. put somebody on a scale and then say like, you know, you're this many pounds. And they're affected by this too. Definitely. You know, it's not just women.

Absolutely important point to make. But muscle weighs more for a given volume than fat. And so you can actually gain a lot of weight while fitting into smaller and smaller clothes and gain a lot of weight while losing a lot of fat. And so you actually could be moving meaningfully in a much healthier. direction while the scale is going to tell you like oh whatever you're doing like stop that right you're going in the bad direction and that can freak you out and I hear so many times like I'm not going to lift weights because I don't want to bulk up one of the best things we can do

for our longevity is add muscle mass yeah um in this fear of like bulking up and putting on weight is super harmful right I think like if you're going to take away like one thing it's that not all weight is equally. And I see this particularly create body image issues for beautifully strong people who get afraid of putting on muscle and then they get this weird message from their doctors, right, that they're overweight. I remember like during the pandemic, one of the high risk qualifiers for getting the vaccine early was if you were obese. And I like had all these friends who are getting vaccinated before me. And I was like, how are you qualified to, like, skip the line?

And they're like, technically, I'm obese. And it was like, like, it was so ridiculous when you think about, like, triaging access to care because they're so healthy. Yeah, yeah. They just have a lot of muscle mass and they're heavy. They're muscular. Yeah. And they, like, have really low body fat percentage.

And it's like where, like, who got access to the vaccine had, like, a tremendous impact on people's health outcomes. And, like, we were just so lazy about this. It's like, if your BMI is over 30, like, please cut the line. And it's like that it just misses who actually had these risk factors. Right. Which is just super unfortunate.

So to get back to the question, your body has like a couple of different types of tissues, right? Muscle is a big one. Bone is one that generally isn't going to move. Obviously, as you get older, like bone mineral density can decrease. You can avoid that by doing things like weight-paring exercise, but generally that's not moving, at least in the short term, you know, as you gain and lose weight or recomposition your body. The things that you tend to be able to move are fat mass, muscle mass, and then a little bit, you know, water mass.

So there's how much muscle your body has, it's your muscle mass, your fat mass, how much fat you have, and then water mass, just how much water you're carrying around. And so, you know, what we really want to help people achieve is for those who want to gain muscle, we want to make sure that when that number on the scale is creeping up, that they are in fact gaining muscle and doing what they think they're trying to do for people who want to reduce their body fat. We want to make sure that when they're exercising, they are in fact reducing fat. One thing that I think has been really unfortunate lately is some of these miracle drugs like the somaglitides and the GLP ones that show really exciting numbers on the scale. You can lose 20 pounds in your first month on some of these medications.

They actually have now been shown that they reduce muscle mass a ton. So while the scale moves in a really exciting way, and that makes you fork over like $1,200 a month to get these drugs, you're actually losing a lot of muscle mass. And that's a huge contributor to why when people stop taking these drugs, they tend to gain the weight back really quickly. Right. Because muscle is actually protective against fat gain. And they didn't actually really lose a lot of fat. They lost muscle. And so, and they also typically didn't make positive behavior changes that result in sustaining that. But, you know, I think, like, it's really easy to get confused about what's happening in your body and misled by what you're seeing on the scale.

And I think one thing that a lot of people who lose weight really quickly, whether it's medication-assisted or just really intense training, is that if you over-train, you're going to lose a lot of muscle along with the fat because your body starts to break it down for fuel. Right. And so when you're training really intensely, you want to make sure, as we were talking about earlier, that you're recovering in a way that allows that to be fat loss to maintain. the muscle that you're fueling appropriately so that your body can put on that muscle and that you're not essentially like going at a pace that you're not adapted to such that

you're breaking down and consuming the wrong tissues to fuel it. Great. That's such a good overview of why weight alone is not necessarily a good measure of health. Maybe talk about the other side. Like you can be really skinny and also not be healthy. So maybe talk a little bit about that paradigm. Yeah. I mean, I think that's just everybody knows at the extreme you can be super skinny and not be healthy.

But even people who, you know, to your eye appear to be like a healthy shape, they call it, I think, being skinny fat sometimes when it's like you have quite a lot of, you know, abdominal fat and stuff like that. But you still might look fit, but you're just not very strong. And those body types, actually, there's some really interesting research. They actually tend to be less healthy than people who are larger, but then have, like, more muscle mass also. So it's – I think that we reward that body shape because they look like what society and fashion magazines have told us, you know, is the ideal body type. But at a given size, you know, let's even. say those like really nice low numbers that people kind of create these like I you know I really want to be a size two or I really want to this type of goals like at those sizes um you can have wildly

different body fat to muscle mass ratios and body composition and so when we're saying like put on muscle but we you know you don't have to change sizes if you don't want to but like so you might already be a shape that you're kind of happy with, but it doesn't mean that you have the right body composition. And so we want to make sure, and one of the things I'm excited about, you know, this integration enabling us to do is that we can monitor that you're recompositioning in the desired direction. Right. And that might be adding more weight to the scale. It might be less weight to the scale. And it might be not moving it at all. And it might not be moving at all. But you could not move at all and wildly change what your body looks like.

What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. you get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. So given all that, Emily, let's talk about what people should be paying attention to on the scale. So what are the numbers they're going to see? What are the

most important numbers? How are we going to visualize this on our app? So you are going to get your weight. It is a scale after all. And as much as we're hating on that metric, the science that has connected it to all cause mortality and longevity and all those different things is not bad science like these things are correlated and so you know what I don't want you to take away from this the like weight is a completely meaningless number it's just an incomplete part of the picture so we are pulling in weight weight is important and you're going to see that you know presented in pounds or in kilograms whatever unit you've chosen in your app and that'll just be a trend with the frequency depending on how often you're stepping on the scale.

You're also going to see numbers that you might not be familiar with unless you've been a long-time withings user or a similar product, but you're going to see your body fat and your muscle mass and it breaks it down by part of your body. And so you'll be able to track how those things are changing over time as well. Amazing. When I first got the whithing scale, that feature was actually really fun for me. me because I actually, so I'm left-handed and my left arm was a little bit stronger than my right. So it wasn't an equal number. And so that's also really interesting information that I guess I

kind of knew because, you know, your dominant hand, you use it for more things. But that's really valuable training information that maybe I should be more intentional about even them out. And it's not, it wasn't so, so much. But it's the kind of thing that if I'm intentional about for six months or out, can probably even those out. And then I might find that, you know, I look and feel more even. Yeah. I mean, there's a thing when you have, you have discrepancy, you know, in terms of strength, you end up compensating, right, in weird ways that could lead to injury or, yeah, I think something real there, you know, and you could then maybe incorporate more unilateral training. That's really cool. It was cool. So that was a fun, personalized learning

that now I'm working on correcting. I'm very conscious, so I have a toddler and You know, when I carry her, it's like one side or the other. So I've been very conscious about, like, carrying her on the hip of the weaker side, trying to even things out. So that's been my daily rebalancing strength training exercise. So let's kind of highlight, like, this feature in the context of maybe three different types of buckets. So if we think about it from a holistic perspective, someone who's maybe more, has more health-oriented goals, you know, how we can personalize it. Like, let's think about it from a holistic standpoint. So when we zoom out and kind of think about long-term health, like more broadly, where is this insight really valuable?

Honestly, I think it's so important for people who are maybe. We're biased, of course, because we believe in data as a really important source of truth and using those data to adjust behaviors so we can optimize our ability to kind of show up as the best version of ourselves. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is so important for everybody. But I think that one thing that people nearing or in middle age don't realize is that, you know, putting on muscle mass gets harder as you get older. And if you don't do anything intentionally, you will lose muscle mass sort of year over year as you age. And that accelerates for women postmenopause in particular. the biggest thing if you talk to people who work in nursing homes that like puts people and particularly

women in nursing homes is that they can't do the tasks of daily life and you know this is things like you know that two gallon jug of tide that you store above your washer dryer you have to be able to like pick that up and take it down and like control that as you pull that off of the washer dryer right So that thing weighs what, like, six, seven pounds? I don't know. It's not crazy. But, like, that's an overhead press. Which ones from Costco are pretty big.

Some of them are really big, and they're kind of heavy. And, like, or you can't carry your groceries in from the car comfortably. You can't walk upstairs. Carry a load of laundry up the stairs. And, you know, a big one is if you can't do a bodyweight squat, one rep of that, you can't get on and off a toilet. So, like, you know, we think of these things, you know, when we're 40, like, yeah, like, you can definitely.

probably do even fairly untrained, 20 body weight squats, and it's no big deal. But, like, if you're not actively maintaining your muscle mass, it's declining and you're on a trajectory, like, before you would otherwise die of not having the strength to do one rep of a body weight squat, which, hello, is, like, getting on and off the toilet independently, right? Yeah. So, like, you want to make sure that you're not losing your muscle mass because once it falls below a certain level, you're going to find that you can't take care of yourself.

Right. And so, you know, when my mom, mother-in-law, like, ask me about, like, what are the things that I should be doing now? It's like, you need to be focusing on strength training because if you're not, you're losing it and you're going to get away with it for decades. Right. But then all of a sudden, you're going to be, like, still with a good amount of, you know, cognitively, like life ahead of you and you're not going to have the strength to go do

those things. And so, you know, I think like even if you're like don't care about physical appearance, you don't care about, you know, performance goals in that sense, if you're thinking about what can I do now so that when I'm 80, I can still live alone comfortably and like the fact that I live in a house with stairs like isn't going to be a problem or, you know, whatever those things are, it's strength training now. And so paying attention to this number and making sure it's not falling over a longer. period of time and ideally making sure that your muscle mass is growing. I think it's really helpful. And I think we're at a point with the science that, you know, children, you know, adolescents, you know, young adults, adults, elderly, literally everyone should be strength training and improving the quality of their muscle tissue. Because there is a relationship between quality of muscle tissue and reducing illness and injury burden to all the points that you're just making.

So, you know, I think this is an opportunity. This integration is really an opportunity to understand what your kind of lean mass looks like, you know, and whether or not you're, you know, putting enough of your time and effort toward building muscle mass. Yeah. There's also a lot of research. Like muscle mass is protective cushioning. So like if you fall and you have higher muscle mass versus, you know, let's say like a sort of similar waist circumference or something, but it's fat. you're less likely to break the bone if that's muscle versus fat. So for two people of an equal weight, so they're sort of falling with equal force because weight determines how hard that forces, the muscle, because it like tenses up in a protective way, it makes you like less likely to break those bones than fat. So it's protective in so many different ways, both in this sort of long term, what your health and independence trajectory look like, but also short term in terms of like, you know,

But there's some, like, heartbreaking stat that's something like 50% of people who break a hip never go home. Not because they're dying, like, like, it causes other complications. They end up in a nursing room or something like that, right? So it's like you want to avoid those breaks. Right. And, you know, the muscle mass is protective. You know, we've been talking about sort of why the everybody and especially those people in middle age when it's like, now is the time to, like, get on the right trajectory. But, of course, I think hopefully it goes without saying that if you have performance goals,

you very much want to be putting on muscles. And I think that there's a lot of sports, especially like endurance sports where being lighter is considered a competitive advantage. And so there's pressure to take weight off and you want to be really thoughtful that you're not losing strength while you lose weight because obviously losing strength is a competitive disadvantage.

And so when you look at, you know, runners, elite cyclist who want to be very lean, you know, in the high-end performance world, getting that right balance between, you know, lean enough that you're not carrying extra weight with you, but also not, like, leaning out so far that you end up losing muscle along with them. Amazing. So what data can Woop integrate for body comp and weight? Anywhere you're logging body comp and weight that's connected to Apple Health Kit or Google Health Connect will automatically pull in. Obviously also. Through Withings directly.

Sorry. We would pull that in from Apple Health Kit or Google Health Connect if it's not Withings. Got it. If it's Withings, we pull it in from Winnings directly and therefore we're getting richer data, more data there. And if you don't have a smart scale, you can go into Apple. Health Kit and like manually transcribe from your dumb scale, whatever the reading for weight was there. If you already have connected whatever your smart scale is to Apple Health Kit or Google Health

Connect and you've already connected or enabled Whoop to read from those platforms, we'll just pull that stuff and populate these new trend views automatically with that data. Great. The trend views are cool. They're really fun. Yeah. And I think it's extra fun that we are pulling in the first. historical data too. So it's not like you have to start from zero. Big shout out to our product

folks. They're just so damn talented. All right. So if we're thinking about, you know, kind of at a high level, if we're looking to improve our body comp, an overall health, let's just maybe go, we'll talk about just the top three things that people should be thinking about. Now, I know we're obviously not nutrition scientists. So, and that's a very barbed wire topic. So maybe we leave out, But we know MacR's important. Well, we can talk about that broadly. Let's talk about it broadly, right? Like from the perspective of like what are the top three things you can do to positively impact your body composition, you can't make a top three list and not put nutrition on there.

So you have to be fueling correctly because one of the things that people, I think, get wrong sometimes is they say like, oh, I'm going to train and I'm going to like turn fat into muscle. Or like if you stop working out, your muscle turns into fat. And, like, that's actually not how it works at all. Like, the fat gets burnt and, like, it's spent. It gets broken down into, like, base components and cellular respiration happens. And then those building blocks can, but don't have to be recycled to build muscle. But, like, one does not merely, like, turn into the other because they're not, it's not like the same Legos, like, put together in a different harder. It's like, yeah, like fat has things that muscle doesn't have.

Muscle has things that fat doesn't have. So this isn't just like, yeah, break down your Legos and rebuild them in a different order. It's like separate processes. Sometimes they're happening at the same time, which is why we have this like funny narrative around like, if you don't work out, your muscle turns to fat. Like it's not, you lose the muscle and you also like build new fat. Why that matters is muscle is mostly made out of protein. You will not add muscle to your body if there isn't protein available to build the muscle. And so you have to be eating properly.

That's huge. Eating properly also is going to enable you to fuel the exercises and the whatnot that is going to create the stimulus that tells you to build muscle. So hydrating and eating properly has to be. on my top three list. Yeah. And definitely refer to our podcast with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who talked extensively about the role of protein and, you know, muscle protein synthesis and all the components they're in. And it was really a brilliant podcast on exactly what you, how you should be thinking about protein. So to Emily's point, protein obviously is really, really important. If we're going to be building muscle, we need to get adequate amount of protein. It's probably way more than you

think you should have. So, you know, we'll maybe put some recommendations in the show notes. And quality of protein matters, too. Quality of protein matters. Yes, absolutely. So now nutrition is we kind of started here, but sleep is extremely important. Sleep is when your body turns the stimulus of the exercise into gained muscle. you do lose fat while you're working out as well as the phenomenon of afterburn in the time that follows as you're recovering. But you only build muscle, 95% of muscle building is happening at night while you sleep. And that stimulus will dissipate if it's not actioned on.

So it's not like if I don't sleep tonight, I can like nap tomorrow and like still get the ROI from today's workouts. You want to make sure that if you worked out today, you sleep well tonight. And if you can't, a great hack is, well, I worked out today, can I take a nap and get ahead of that? A really well-studied strategy, especially for like collegiate athletes who might have two workouts in a day, like one early and then one like after classes, is if you nap in between them, you actually perform way better in that second workout and you'll see greater fitness gains. Obviously, there's scheduling constraints that can make napping difficult, but do not let yourself wake up to the next morning sleep deprived. or if you do, just know that you're not going to get the same gains. And so in terms of how ready you are to work out again, how much you got out of that workout

are both very diminished. Yeah, and I think for a lot of folks who maybe are struggling to sleep or not sure where to start with their sleep, understanding that, wow, okay, I want to take this next step. I want to really build my lean body mass. I know sleep is important. I'm not sleeping. Think about many of the behaviors during the day that you're in. engaging in or not engaging in are going to impact your quality of sleep at night.

So you want to try to engage in behaviors that protect your nighttime sleep experience. And a lot of those behaviors are the circadian behaviors that we talk a lot about, right? Viewing morning sunlight, trying to kind of consolidate your calories within the daylight hours, you know, stopping eating a couple hours before you intend to sleep. If you feel hungry, you know, having, you know, something high in casein protein is a good you know, alternative, you know, just a bit of, you know, a shake way protein can be good, something that's not going to disrupt your sleep, but will kind of help maybe with a protein if you're struggling getting enough protein or feel a bit hungry because you have been

working out more. So those are two things that I think are really important. And if, and I think one of the, I think, important notes to falling asleep at the same time is making sure that you're waking up at the same time every day. That's kind of the place to start. Wake up at the same time, set your alarm, do that as consistently as possible, not really focusing too much on the duration of your sleep, although that matters, but your duration will kind of come into focus when you are waking up at the same time each day. View the morning sunlight and then kind of repeat that and you'll get into a really nice cycle and have more consolidated sleep, more restorative sleep as well. All right. So your number three is consistent wait time.

Definitely. Emily, thank you so much for the overview. I think I speak for the entire company. I say they were so pumped to partner with Withings. What are you most excited about with this partnership? I just, I really respect them as a company. They share our ethos around a strong commitment to data accuracy. So I think the product that they've built is great. It's really easy to use. And so it's not just that theoretically this is valuable data to us, but they've really nailed the great user experience, high quality data that felt worthy of pulling into

our system. And that felt like, you know, it was of the quality that we need in order to feel good about the way that we coach on it. And so just really excited for people to understand this new dimension. I've gotten a lot out of, you know, exploring my own things scam and everything I've learned from it. So I'm just excited for everybody to have a similar experience. Amazing.

I think I'll finish with a great quote from our CTO, Jamie Waito. She said, this is the beginning of 360 data where whoop wins in the end is that we are an ecosystem where members can see all of their data. And this is really helping to fulfill, I think. one of our core missions, which is whoop is the home for your health. Thank you to the fearless Kristen and Emily for that amazing interview on body composition. Go check out the new feature in the latest Woop app. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating or review.

Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed at Kristen underscore Homes 2126. If you have a question, you want to answer it on the podcast. Email us, podcast at Woop.com. call us 508, 443-49-5-2. If you're thinking about joining WOOP, visit WOOP.com. Try W-W-W-P for free for 30 days. That's a great deal.

New members can also use the code will. W-I-L get a $60 credit on W-W-E Accessories. All right, folks, that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. We'll get you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.