WHOOP Podcast - Elite CrossFitter Sam Dancer shares the profound impact of WHOOP on his professional and personal life

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Sam Dancer, one of the top CrossFitters in the world, joins the WHOOP Podcast to discuss the keys to recovery and healing. Sam was one of the first athletes on WHOOP and describes the profound impact it has had on his life, helping him cut out prescription drugs, coffee, and tobacco. He also explains how WHOOP has improved his relationships with others and his relationship with himself. Sam discusses how he found CrossFit during a self-described identity crisis (2:58), competing with a broken leg at the CrossFit games (7:20), discovering WHOOP (8:09), how he stopping taking prescription drugs (10:36), the impact stress has on recovery (15:57), why WHOOP has improved his spiritual life (18:08), love's affect on recovery (21:05), listening, observing, and reacting (21:57), staying present (25:01), the keys to success (27:24), and finding peace and happiness with WHOOP (36:38).Support 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

Hello, folks. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We build wearable technology to help you measure everything about your body. That includes strain and recovery and sleep. It's lightweight wearable technology and the most accurate product on the market. And if you're interested in a WOOP membership, you can use the code Will Amid, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D for 15% off your W-W-P membership. This week's guest is the amazing and thoughtful Sam Dancer, one of the best crossfitters in the world. Sam has been a long-time Woop member. He was one of the first athletes to ever wear whoop. So he's actually been on WOOP for years. And he was wearing WOOP before we even had a consumer

product. Now, I want to be very clear, Sam is not on the payroll. In fact, we actually met for the first time when we recorded this, and he really loves Whoop. I mean, it's been awesome to hear him talk about his experience. We recorded this episode in February at Wadapalooza. The world has certainly changed since then, and we are so excited for the CrossFit games next month. Sam and I discussed the evolution of CrossFit over the last decade, how it's changed. Why a self-described identity crisis led him to the sport. His thoughts on how stress, emotions, love, and spirituality can accelerate or slow down, recovery and healing, and how he's used whoop to cut out prescription drugs, coffee, and tobacco. He's really used whoop, I think,

to profoundly improve his lifestyle. It's been amazing to hear about that. So without further ado, here is Sam Dancer. All right, boom, we are live from Miami, Waterpalooza. I'm here with Sam Dancer. What's up, man? Pleasure, such a pleasure. This is going to be fun. We're looking out right now on an unbelievable event.

I mean, you probably appreciate this even more than I do because you've seen the evolution of CrossFit for the last, I don't know, decade. Yeah, I haven't missed one of these yet. And this is your first one, I think, right? First one here. A little overwhelming? Well, you know, it's exciting, too, because I'm walking around and I'm seeing. a whoop strap on every other person.

That's got to be... Which feels great. A good feel, man. And look, this is such a powerful community, right? It's a group of people that seems to really care about their lifestyle, about their performance, obviously about their fitness. I mean, you're hard pressed to find a fitter group of people. So for you, what brought you into this community originally?

Man, there was a little... There was a gap where I was, you know, kind of like in this identity crisis. I'd been a football player my whole life, and I just finished up collegiate football and knew I wasn't going to go play professional and just trying to figure out, you know, who I am not as a football player, you know, full on. Like if you would ask me, hey, who are you? I would have, like, identified myself as I'm Sam Dancer. I play football for Western Illinois University.

and like next to my name that was the the biggest part of my identity so once that ceased to exist there was a little gap in time where I was like wow man okay I should have thought about this a little earlier like who am I without football and and it didn't take long to find CrossFit my my cousin had been doing it for a while and she was a stud and I but I always kind of year is this? This is 2012, 2011. Okay. So about eight, nine years ago. Yep. And she had always been kind of like plugging it a little bit, but I was like, I'm a football player. Like, I don't do crossfit. Yeah, right. I'm as fit as you can get because I play football. Right. And, yeah, I would see it on TV and I'd be like, damn, man, like, I can do that. I couldn't move

like they moved. And I was a big guy at the time. I was 275 pounds. And I, yeah. What do you? away right now about 220 oh wow so you've lost a lot of weight but maybe you're stronger even i feel way better than i ever have yeah i always say the further away i get from football the better i feel um so yeah my cousin taylor dresser introduced me to it and uh it didn't take long for me to start like they say drinking the kool-lade and um yeah i opened a gym i've been a gym owner for the past eight years and uh i've been competing in crossfit and and you've had had Some heroic results in CrossFit as well. Don't be too humble.

Tell us about those results. Yeah, so back when there was regionals and whatnot in the open, I almost qualified my first year doing CrossFit. Literally, like, found out about the Open maybe two weeks before it and had no CrossFit experience at all. Like, double unders were a real chore for me. But still, I came so close to qualifying. The next year was able to qualify, do pretty well.

regional and ended up punching my ticket individually in 2016 did team in 2014 team in 2000 in I think 17 and 18 and then doing individually again this year so I'm known as like the strong guy but I I have to work really hard to almost not be defined as that guy and what does it mean to be the strong guy what are some of your your strongest lives? Well, in college, I was able to back squat 700 pounds for a triple. Wow. I benched cress 500 pounds when I was 16 years old. When you're 16. Yeah. Now, is some of that just the rate at which you developed? I mean, that seems unbelievable. You must have been the strongest 16 year old in the country. Yeah, I definitely had some genetic potential that, you know,

it was very much gifted to me. But I, uh, I was bullied really hard when I was like a young teenager. younger than 16. Yeah, so about when I was like 13. And I just, in my mind, I thought, like, if I just got big and strong, then nobody would be able to pick on me anymore. So it got you in the wait room. Yeah, so it got me in there real early, and I had some awesome leadership in the gym. I was very fortunate at a young age to have people who had been on the scene for a while guiding me. I was big into this guy, Louis Simmons, at West Side.

I actually ended up going to one of his affiliate gyms in Ohio after college. And my college coach was a big Westside conjugate Louis Simmons fan. So he's kind of like the father of getting strong and powerlifting and all this stuff. So, yeah, I was just really fortunate to find myself on a good path with good people to help direct me in the right direction. And, yeah, it's been a fun journey. and, but yeah, I think I'm kind of known for this deadlift out at the ranch in 2016. I had a broken leg, and we just had to run a 7K, and then after the 7K was a max deadlift ladder.

You did all this on a broken leg. Yeah. Oh, yours. And then you're sick. I wanted to, I've worked so hard to make it to the games, man. And I wanted to do well at the games, but then as soon as that injury happened, like the goals had changed and shifted. to rather than, you know, maybe placing top 10 to just finishing the weekend. So I was able to finish the weekend and it wasn't very enjoyable,

but I'm glad I was able to kind of persevere and make it through and be able to, yeah, make it to cross-bill games. Good for you, man. Now, along this journey, you discovered whoop. Yeah, I was a whooper before you guys were even selling it. And it radically has changed my life. So when did you get on WOOP? Gosh, it would have been maybe, gosh, it probably would have been,

when did you guys start your pre, like the pre-orders? Do you know? So my guess is you got on Woop in like early 2016. Yeah, I was thinking 15. It could have been late 15. So we didn't have a consumer product in 2015 or even early 2016. I think we first launched to the consumers very end of 2016, but really early 2017. It was a pain in the ass trying to get one.

Yeah. It was a bit of a drug deal back then. I had to dig deep to find someone that was willing to take the chance on sending me one. And it did not take long for me to just start eating it up, man, and making some serious life changes, man. Um, like I, I used to drink coffee all day. I don't, I don't drink coffee anymore. I used to chew tobacco. Wow.

I don't, don't consume any tobacco products anymore. I used to stay up past 10.30 watching TV. I go to bed now at like 9 o'clock. I don't watch TV at all. Wow. Um, I used to fiddle on my cell phone before I go to bed. I won't expose myself to any light anymore. And this is all stuff that I learn by reverse engineering my recovery scores.

Yeah. The way that I, my, my meal frequency, my, my, my, the quantities, the, the amount that I was working out. I used to, you know, I used to take some prescription medications to, and stopped all those. What kind of prescription? I took, I was, and a lot of this kind of came from the, the football culture, too. Totally. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

It's, it's, I mean, whoops, the official. recovery wearable to the NFL PA. Yeah. So we're distributed to every player in the NFL now. Dude. And so I've gotten exposed a little bit to that. Yeah. It's, it's a, and when you're that age, too, you just don't, you say you know better and

you say you know what you're doing, but you don't. Like, I didn't know what I was doing in my body, even though, like, I would say that. Yeah. So, like, I would take Vicodin all the time just so I could get out of bed, and I would take Adderall just so I could get up. And then I would take Ambien, just so I could get down. And that's the vicious. cycle of those two drugs.

Adderall up, ambient down. I've seen this with a lot of a lot of high-performing people, ironically, because it helps someone who's driven feel like they're in control and feels like that you can do more. But the reality is you're actually just running your body into the ground. It's not sustainable by any means.

And I was just seeing, when you see it just right in front of your face like that, it hits home. So what were some of the things that you were seeing in your whoop data. I can imagine that you had really high heart rate throughout the day, very high strain, even probably when you weren't exercising. Yeah. I would see that just verbal altercations with my wife would affect. Because I would just look at the data. Yeah. And be like, why did I wake up in the red today? And how did I wake up in the green yesterday? And literally go back and you'd have it all on a timeline. You'd be like, what happened at 1.30 that caused me to go, go up?

through the roof and be all stressed out. And you'd be like, oh man, I was arguing with my wife for 30 minutes with something about our business. And so it's being able to see that has changed the way that we even communicate with each other because we know that we're not going to heal as fast if we're not being communicating with each other harmoniously. So it's things that you would never even,

I would have never even thought would have affected my, the rate at which I was able to heal. Yeah. Right? So just things that you can't really even weigh in, well, I thought you couldn't weigh in measure, but apparently you can. And so, yeah, like I said, stimulants gone, prescription's gone, drinking a lot more water, eating a lot more food, but smaller meal size.

Now, for people listening to this who maybe have some of their own demons or whatnot that they're trying to unlock or trying to get rid of. What's your recommendation for how to, I don't know, for example, quit prescription drugs? Gosh, I mean, it sounds like for you a huge motivator. For me, seeing it in the data. To a degree, I thought, like when I thought of medication, I thought I was taking care of the problem. And you're not. You're just covering up symptoms.

So once I kind of had that realization, it was really quick for me. It was like, oh, I need to stop. It wasn't, I wish I had like this story of how difficult it was for me to stop and all the things that I did to stop. But as soon as I saw the results on the screen, I was bought in. I was like, this has to stop today. And I made those changes immediately. So you immediately kind of overnight quit some of these prescription drugs and stimulants. Like all, like, did you do it all at once?

No, because a lot of the things I didn't even, it was like one thing at a time. I would literally just reverse engineer. Which is great advice, by the way. Yeah, so that would be my advice. Whenever you're trying to A, B, test things on your body, try to change one thing at a time and see what the result is. Now, for you, you got on whoop, it sounds like, let's call it end of 2015. in the early 16. How quickly from seeing the data

were you making changes? Days, weeks, months, because one phenomenon that we have amongst our root population is people are always asking, how quickly do I know that the data is showing me my baseline? How quickly should I react to this data?

Obviously, I have points of you on it, but I'm curious what yours are. Yeah, not long. There was an initial, like, kind of infatuation and fascination with just the range and the abilities of what information it was collecting and so it was just kind of cool and playful at first. Yeah. But the actual like notable changes probably started to happen maybe two weeks in. Okay. So pretty quickly. Yeah. Very, very quickly. You're starting to think about things.

Uh-huh. Just like, and just being, it was all out of curiosity. Like, what did I do? I don't feel like I did anything different than what I did the day before. So I started standardizing a lot of my operating procedures and really getting them down on paper so that there wasn't as many variables for me to have to identify. So I tried to just get a little bit more consistent with maybe, yeah, so maybe it started with just right there. Just, okay, I need to get consistent with my standard operating procedures so that I can better identify what it is that is causing me to wake up in the green and what's causing me to wake up in the red and would literally just like full on after I would wake up see my score I would I would just backtrack and just like

and I would pick what I thought would be the most obvious thing and then and later on it would get to be like some less obvious things. Like I said, just like a simple argument with my wife could completely change the way that my body heals. Yeah, yeah, sleeps. No, I mean, that's a very important phenomenon is the way psychological stress can affect your heart rate variability and affect really your ability to sleep properly as well.

You know, for you and for almost everyone here who looks super intense, the importance of getting slow wave sleep, it's so hard to understate it, right? Because slow-wave sleep is when your body's producing 95% of its human growth hormone. If you're working out in the gym all day, you're actually not building muscle, you're breaking muscle down to later be repaired stronger. And a lot of that happens during slow-wave sleep. Yeah.

So if you're someone who's getting 30 minutes of slow-sleep a night versus two and a half hours, that makes the world of difference on how your body's recovering and how much stronger you can get. Yeah. And to piggyback off of that, When you're producing stress hormone, you're not producing the hormones that are helping you recover. The sex hormone, the reproductive hormones. Yeah. And so I just started to be able to better identify all these different types of stress.

And I would only typically think of stress as physical stress, what I'm putting my body through. But there's emotional stress and there's psychological stress and there's chemical stress. And that was another big one for me. Like maybe something as simple as like filtering the water. in my shower may very well improve my you know recovery scores and in choosing foods with that didn't have like toxic additives to them non-food additives and and dies and whatnot so gosh like again I could go on and on and on about all the things that I've I've been able to notice and make changes that now from the who ultimately what this what the strap did for me

it just brought awareness to everything and like you can't make any changes if you're not aware of what it is that you're doing that is keeping you from your goals or keeping you from healing better and faster and and that's all of this has been it's the whoop has even like it is improved like my spiritual life too like because I like an all in the sake and pursuit of performance I've just started trying to find out how to heal because it's that's what it's come down to Everybody, for the most part, can do thrusters. There's only, like, a certain, like, speed that you can do thrusters at.

And, like, everyone's clean and jerk is pretty much the same. Everyone's, like, everyone's times on everything is pretty much the same stuff. And it's coming down to who can heal the fastest and who can get into the green the quickest. And maybe it's in between events and in between days. And so it's ultimately become just a healing journey for me. And that has transpired into this kind of a spiritual awakening as well. And realizing that, like, that too. Again, I talked about these things that you can't really weigh and measure.

And just maybe as simply as like how, what is your core language maybe? What's the internal dialogue that is going on in your head? And how is that affecting your recovery score? And you're seeing it, bro. It's like, it's so in your feelings. face, like, it tickles me, man. Well, I'm grateful for how much the product has inspired you. It's obvious in talking to you about it.

It's powerful. Now, you talked about spiritual. What does spiritual mean to you? Again, going, you've been able to, like, you guys have been able to weigh and measure the things that we typically can't weigh and measure. Yeah. Again, like, I talk about that core language. uh like that you know what how are you kind of talking to yourself and what are the what is your

thought life like and and you would think that you know just the way that you think in your head is like it's your own personal stuff and that doesn't like affect maybe anyone around you or anything internally but from what i've gathered from my whoop like the the way that i speak to myself and on a vibrational level, the words that I'm using when I'm communicating with someone else and communicating to myself have a direct correlation to the rate at which I'm able to heal. That's amazing. And again, it's all, I love that it's all been in the pursuit of performance because

within spirituality, the body oftentimes gets kind of a bad rap. like it's this like broken sinful thing um that we're is like what is like constantly against us and me me pursuing performance and just trying to find out ways for me to outperform another another athlete has has yeah it's affected my my spiritual life too so again the things that I would say like you can't typically weigh and make like love for instance like yeah you know it's a very real thing. But you can't, you can't measure, you know, what love is really, but you guys kind of are. Yeah. I mean, 100%. We've heard from, I mean, all kinds of different group members who have talked about how breakups have put them in the red for weeks, you know. And on the

flip side, you know, that feeling of when you've met someone who's important or who's going to be in your life in a meaningful way, you know, seeing yourself in the green. And boy, is that cool, right? to measure the impact of a relationship or to measure the impact of people in your life. Yeah, that was one of the biggest ones for me was just, again, my language and how me and my wife would speak to each other. And it definitely, this, the strap in general just, it turned me into being a better observer and less of a reactor. Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it. And the way that you react to things again changes the way your body recovers and heals so I'm able to better now be able to observe something happening feel what I'm feeling and then because because of that

I'm able to creatively choose how I want to emot it and and that has been healing very very healing. So because I'm not now, now I'm not just reacting in a way that is, again, like whether this is woohoo stuff to you or not, the way that you react changes the rate at which you heal. So now because I'm able to observe how I feel and then use that, that energy, that those feelings in a more creative manner, it's, it's resulting in a more like more harmony in our household. again, more harmony just within my physical body, and that's allowing me to perform better and be more competitive. It's amazing.

It is. Now, for you, are you doing anything around meditation or mindfulness? I mean, a lot of the phenomenon you were describing of observing and being sort of proactive about your behavior versus sort of reacting in the moment, that was a phenomenon I got to through meditation personally because I felt like I was at a stage. my life with creating whoop where I wasn't up to the challenge of managing a team and managing investors and managing a product. And I felt like things were kind of folding around me and I needed to up my game. This was in 2014. So quite a long time ago, but at the same time, you know, I had

been building whoop for like two and a half years already at that point. So I was well into it. And what I found from meditation is it actually helped me slow everything down in my real life so that there were moments in time where I would actually be looking at myself in the third person. Rather than being in this moment, oh, I don't like what Sam's saying, and I'm saying something now that I regret already after it's come out of my mouth. Oh, I see myself and I think to myself, oh, Will's about to get angry. Will's going to say something stupid. And you know what it does?

It pulls you into this place of observance that makes you almost feel like you're a step ahead. Absolutely. And it's so powerful. I can't understate it. It's a superpower. And you've come to it in your own way. But we're describing the same phenomenon. Yeah.

To kind of touch on some of those things, like you mentioned just being in the present moment. And a lot of times we find ourselves. If you're constantly judging and worrying, that is like a simple diagnostic tool to let you know that you are not being in the present moment. Because if you're worrying, you're either thinking of something in the past or something in the future. And granted, there are times that we need to, we need to plan, we need to organize, we need to get organized so that we can execute. but again tying tying this all back into the rate at which you're able to heal and recover and by being in the present moment you're able to in my opinion kind of signal to the body like things are good and when things are good like the body naturally just starts dishing out

good stuff that helps you feel good that helps you heal faster and so I again can't recommend enough to people to just start becoming a little bit more observant of your of your language and also use use your worry your anxiety your your your stress as a diagnostic tool to know that you are not living in the present moment right now and by simply doing that you may be able to put yourself in a a certain physical state that's going to allow you to whether we're talking about just a mom or a CrossFit athlete to be your optimal highest version of self. So this tool is not just for elite athletes. This could make someone be like a super mom, a super dad.

Again, you're just, you're becoming aware of everything and able to note it. And when that happens, you can change the course a little. You know, we're talking a lot right now about, you know, how you talk to yourself, how you recover, how you think about sleep. And to some people listening who are maybe skeptical, it's going to sound a little woo-woo. But I think I also want to remind people, you and I are high-intensity people. I mean, you're competing in an extremely high level in CrossFit. I'm running 100 miles an hour trying to build a business, right?

and obviously we're talking about different levels of optimal performance but I truly believe that success is overcoming a level of stress that would break most people and if you look at success through that lens it tells you a couple things one the obstacle is the way

right you have to take it on in order to get to the next challenge in order to get to the next level and two you have to be capable of taking on an enormous level of stress so a lot of the things that we're described are not in themselves to dial it down, but to allow us to be prepared to take on these enormous levels of responsibility or intensity or performance, whatever it might be.

Resiliency. And you mentioned something about sleep just a moment ago, too, and I just want anyone who's listening to this to know that with practice, you can change your behavior. like I had to work on my sleep like I again you see the data you're like shit and by the way you went from taking Ambien to fall asleep to now you know probably having all kinds of of lovely practices before bed oh bro I mean it was no no doubt man it was work but it's it's worth it's worth it and you know you just see like wow it's taking me 45 minutes to fall asleep and and a lot of people think just because they're laying in bed for eight hours they're getting eight hours of

sleep. I was one of those guys. I was getting four hours of sleep and tossing and turn in. And, like, I had to, I had to have a sleep practice and I had to work on it. And, you know, now I can, I used to, like, your language, your language, I would speak to myself in a way. Like, I can't. I can't fall asleep that fast. Like, I, you know, it, again, I had to change, I had to change my language Yeah, a more positive language, it sounds like. And basically start almost speaking to myself in a way as if it was already happening. And by the way, even just the fact that you became aware of what you were saying to yourself is a breakthrough in itself.

I think a lot of people don't even recognize that they talk to themselves more than anyone else in their life. We all do, right? We all have an inner voice. And you want to dial that inner voice in because it's a shame for that voice to be critical or negative all the time. Yeah. And I still, I don't want to make it seem or sound like I got it all figured out, man. No, not at all. I'm still to this day, like, oh, again, I love saying this. Noted. Like, I got you.

Like, I saw that. And it's all a practice. It takes, it takes some work. It takes some time. But it's, it's so, it's so worth it. The byproduct of all that work ends up being, being able to just create conditions for yourself. where you're able to thrive and just and be your optimal self. So I, again, just so stoked on all this, man. Like, I've literally, I've taught myself to be able to dream. Like, I used to never dream. That's one thing people don't realize about hard prescription drugs for sleep, especially, is that they actually don't ever get you into the right levels of deep sleep. Yeah.

You know, REM is when your mind is repairing itself. It's when you're dreaming. and it's actually very hard to get into REM from taking a product like Ambien. Yeah. And again, just learning all these data points or I consider them like diagnostic tools like to help figure out what it is that I need to do or or why something isn't working. So like if I'm tossing and turning at nighttime, that's a tool for me to use to figure out that something, something didn't go right in my day to set up myself to be able to sleep rest.

So sleep's been one of the greatest, greatest ways for me to know that I need to make some sort of change. So like maybe if I'm tossing and turn it, for me that's been like I'm eating food too late or maybe eating food that isn't very well digested or getting assimilated. So maybe eating a little earlier and then maybe doing some stretching or going for a walk to help get that stuff to move around. So I'm not tossing and turning at night to be able to help and aid in that digestive process. Or if, like, I'm not dreaming. And again, just like, why did I not dream? Like, what went differently yesterday that I wasn't able to get into a state where I could have a dream? And the whoop was the catalyst and all that.

No, thank you, man. I mean, you are in a great place in life. You should be appreciative of that. And it's always so gratifying for me to get to meet people who have used this thing that we've put into the world in their own way. And so listening to the way you've described, you know, behavior change, relationship improvement, dieting, all these things that you've potentially unlocked in some ways through understanding your loop data. Yeah. It's inspiring for me, man, and it's inspiring for the rest of the team. And it keeps us doing what we're doing every day, which is charging hard to get this thing on everyone in the world.

Yeah, I'm glad you said unlock. I always say unzip. And, like, just everything's just zipped up. And all you, like, you just got a, like, I'm just unzipping potentials, man. and that's unlocking these potentials and, gosh, did you know? Like, did you really know what you were going to, like, what you were doing? Like, yeah, I mean, fundamentally I felt it was quite obvious that there would be a better way to understand the human body than what existed. Yeah.

And in 2011, I wrote a paper called The Feedback Tool, How to Measure intensity, Recovery, and Sleep. Diagnostic tools. and you know today we measure strain recovery and sleep so it it did seem fairly obvious to me that this was the direction i think what's getting me more and more excited is now seeing how if you take that layer of data which is you know your physiology and then you add in a lot of the things that we've talked about on this podcast behaviors dieting lifestyle choices relationships you name it right If you just think about anything that's affecting your life, how does that then affect your data?

And what are the positive things in your life that you want to amplify? What are the negative things in your life that you want to decrease or remove? And that to me is how you unlock potential. Yeah. And I think that it's inevitable that we're going to be able to change a lot of lives through that. And like, I never would have really, I would have, like, believed it, but never understood it to the degree. agree that like how my psychology could affect my physiology that it could affect my body it's mind-blowing

that you've been able to capture these things that are on we can't see them and look man you know it's exciting i've been building this thing for for eight years with an amazing team and in some ways it feels like we're just getting started you know think how many people don't wear it think how many people have never even heard of us yeah so that's that's what's inspiring us now is how do we get whoop on everyone yeah and and like it a lot of it started around performance uh uh based stuff but as this starts to that's that's they're going to be the exciting part when when it's not just athletes wearing this thing and to be fair i mean we're at a crossfit event so it feels like only athletes wear because everyone here's an athlete but it's been amazing for us to see i mean we now have

surgeons doctors cops firemen executives who travel all the time what a better is to understand sleep, new mothers, new fathers who want to figure out what they can do to be better parents. It's amazing the stories that we're hearing from other areas of the population. I think what holds our population together is that it's just a motivated group of people. And you may be motivated because you want to win the CrossFit games, or you may be motivated because you want to be the best version of yourself at work, or you may be motivated because you want to be the best version of yourself, period.

right and i think that's what's been so exciting for us to see over really like the last 12 to 18 months is just grossly broadening into a lot of these different populations of people who again it's it's sharing a common mission that you have which is how do i improve performance how do i improve my body how to improve my mindset and if you in any way feel stuck or you just you're clueless you have you feel like you keep striking out and you can just cannot figure out what it is that you're you're doing wrong or that you're not doing right like this is such a great tool for you to start coming out of that and and figuring it all out this is going to give so many people hope gosh and I'm not like I'm not on the payroll or anything

like I'm not I'm not like some endorse like I'm just a homie of you guys like yeah just a friend and just a believer, dude, and, and, and, and just because I, I know what it's done for me. And, and it's, it's, it's, it's brought so much love and peace and happiness and, and don't get it wrong too, or twisted. Like, I'm, I love, I love competing. And, like, that was originally why I got it was to be, so I could, so I could be more competitive, but it's bigger than that, dude. It's so much bigger than, like, performing on a competitive stage. It's, like, the most fascinating parts of it are just, again, how I relate to myself, how I speak to myself, how, like, the way that it's changed my relationships. And, gosh, damn it, man, it's so beautiful.

I mean, look, every entrepreneur's dream is to meet. someone using their technology or using their product, using their service, who it's had an impact on. And so for me to get to have this conversation with you and see the impact that's out on your life, I'm super grateful for that. And I know the rest of the team is as well. Man, thank you again for trusting yourself. Yeah, this has been amazing. Yeah, thank you. And creating this product, my friend. Thank you to Sam for coming on the WOOP podcast. We're wishing him the best of luck this upcoming season. A reminder that you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code

Will Ahmed. That's WI-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. Follow us at W-W-P at Will Ahmed on social. Stay healthy and stay in the green, folks. We'll talk to you next week.