WHOOP Podcast - Insights From a Year of WHOOP Data

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

WHOOP members were busy in 2021--not only trying new things and getting out there, but also prioritizing their recoveries and sleep. Emily Capodilupo, our VP of Data Science and Research, returns to the podcast for an in-depth discussion on what data from 2021 tells us about the WHOOP community and the world as a whole. We saw our members had a “summer of fun,” with a significant increase in their recoveries and the number of times they reported having sex, as well as noticeable decreases in sleep, stress, and working late.  Our community-wide data also showed us which behaviors most positively and negatively affected both recovery and sleep efficiency. In addition, we saw a direct correlation between mental well-being and sleep across the WHOOP population. Emily and Will Ahmed discuss the uptick in people trying new activities and why that's important for our health (2:27), the summer of fun (6:30), understanding optimal sleep/wake time (10:17), the lowest recovery days of 2021 (11:50), the boost menstruation gives to recovery (13:44), how diet plays a role in recovery (15:36), how alcohol affects the body (18:48), why eating close to bedtime is a bad idea (21:03), and the role mental health plays with good sleep (24:50). 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

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more. Learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Okay, we got a fun, data-oriented episode. We're taking a look at what happened in 2020. 2021 within the WOOP community. Despite COVID still being a factor, you all were busy. You WOOP members were busy, trying new things, getting out there, but also prioritizing recoveries

and sleep. I am joined by Emily Capital Lupo, our fearless VP of data science and research, to talk about 2021 in review. We took a look at the entire year across all of our members across the globe, and what we found might surprise you, as pandemic. restrictions lifted and days got longer. We saw our members had a summer of fun. We get into significant increases in recoveries, sex lives, noticeable decreases in sleep and stress, and working late. Our community-wide data also showed us which behaviors most positively and most negatively affected both recovery and sleep efficiency. So that's right. If you've ever looked at the Whoop Journal and said to yourself, which of these is good for me, which of these is bad for

me, well, we've got some data on that. Emily and I also talk about the direct correlation between mental well-being and sleep across the whole Wu population, proving that good sleep comes from so much more than hours in bed. Remind her, you get 15% off a W-W-Mership if you use the code Will. That's W-I-L-L. And without further ado, here is Emily Capital Loopo. Emily, welcome back to the WOOP podcast. Excited to dive in with you. you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So 2021, a unique year, you know, mostly driven by COVID-19, having its various rise and fall and rise again. What sorts of things, just from a pure activity standpoint, did we see from the WOOP community? Yeah, it was interesting. You know,

the patterns that we saw like make a lot of sense in the context of what was going on in the world. So there is definitely, you know, an increase in people trying new sports. So about a third of all the people who are on whoop in 2020 and also on whoop in 2021 tried a new sport in 2021. And what we saw like being popular were sports like hiking, you know, really rose in popularity. And I think that makes sense. You know, hiking is very social distance friendly. It's outdoors. You know, it's all the things that are recommended during the pandemic. We also saw more swimming than we saw the year before. You know, it's interesting to see those kinds of trends. But we're also just seeing, you know, a shift in the way that people are working out that felt independent of the pandemic.

So there's a big rise in like high intensity interval training and like sports like spinning. You know, I think maybe that was related to the pandemic. I know the sales of at home spin bikes went through the roof during the pandemic. So let's get this straight. So we got more hiking. We've got more swimming. We've got more hit and spin activities. In general, members logged about 260 activities per person per year. So in all of 2021, we saw an average of 260 activities per person. Has that compared to 2020? Is that up, I would imagine? Yeah. So people were more active than they had been in 2020. What we saw last year, we actually published a paper about this, which we can link in the show notes, Was that when the pandemic hit, you know, in gyms closed, it was like people didn't know what to do.

So last spring we saw kind of, you know, activity levels dropped. And then as the weather warmed up, we saw them climb back a little bit. But they never quite got to like normal levels. And this year looked a lot more normal. So we're seeing more activity than last year. So 37% of members tried a new activity. Talk a little bit about why it's important to try new activities. You know, if I'm someone who's always playing squash and running and golfing,

Like, why should I start swimming, for example? Yeah, so cross-training or, you know, doing different sports than what you normally do is really important because it challenges your different systems differently. Also, a lot of sports, you know, if you kind of think about fitness, right, there's like cardiovascular endurance type fitness, there's, you know, muscle fitness. Then sports can also tax or, like, neurological system. So, and then also, like, you know, you can load up your bones in your skeletal system. And so different sports are going to tax those things differently.

And so when you add in a new sport, you kind of give some of these other systems a chance to be stressed out and to grow. And so you create like a more balanced fitness profile. It's also really important, you know, if you think about, you know, a sport like squash, right, like your racket hand might be getting a lot more of a workout than your other arm. And so in order to like stay balanced, you might want to do something that's going to challenge that at other. their side. And of course, acquiring new skills correlates with longevity and happiness. So those are a couple more benefits to trying new activities on Lou. Yeah, there's a great book that came out last January by Sanjay Gupta, who's the chief medical correspondent for CNN called Keep Sharp. And he talks about how like when we do things that are new, we create new neural pathways that actually do things

like fight off longevity and like correlate it to not only longer life, but also higher quality of life because less dimension, kind of age-related things like that. One thing that was fascinating to see is just how WOOP members' data evolved with the vaccine rolling out and then eventually restrictions lifting, especially in the U.S., and creating the backdrop for this summer of fun. A year ago, when we had Nicholas Christakis, the COVID-19 expert on the WOOP podcast, he actually predicted that we'd experience a new roaring. 20s, if you will. Let's play that clip and come back to what we've seen in the data.

Then there'll be, I think, the post-pandemic period, which will be a little like the roaring 20s, I think, after the 1918 pandemic. There's a lot to learn from previous pandemics in this regard, but it tends to be a period of excess and spending and, frankly, it sounded like quite a lot of fun. Describe that. Well, usually during times of epidemics for hundreds of years, people, get more religious, and we're seeing that now in the United States. Religion is rising. Religious church attendance is going up. People are finding God, which is very typical during times of plague. People save money. They don't spend money because they're uncertain, they're worried. Also, there are less places to spend money. It's the same thing is happening now.

It's happened for hundreds of years. There's a kind of abstemiousness that takes place, a kind of risk aversion. I think all of that will unravel very dramatically. I think, people are going to relentlessly seek out social opportunities at nightclubs and restaurants and sporting events and political rallies. I think spending will be liberalized. There'll be a lot of spending. It might be some sexual licentiousness, some joie de vivre, some risk-taking. You know, one reviewer looking at how I described this in the book says, you know, here's hoping, sort of like what you just said. So yes, I think that we're going to see a kind of, you know, people will have been caged in and closed in for quite a while. And, you know,

they will, you know, break out, I think, of that. That's such an amazing clip because that is exactly what we ended up seeing in the data. During the summer months from May to September, okay, U.S.-based WOOP members tracking these behaviors reported having more sex, working less late, experiencing the lowest sleep performance across the whole year, and the lowest reports of stress. So that sounds, you know, like people are having fun. It's exactly what Dr. Christakis was saying, right? Like, in the summer, people started averaging about two hours less sleep per week than they had in January.

And so that's, you know, well, we don't actually know exactly what they were doing is definitely consistent with them going out more. We should mention that we do typically see less sleep in the summer, you know, in previous years because when, you know, the weather is nice and it's lighter, later people do stay out. But this was much more extreme than what we saw in previous years. And then, you know, it was funny to see, just like he said, sex was much more commonly logged in July than any other month in the year. The lowest reported levels of stress in July, the least reports of working late in August. So, you know, we're seeing this like summer of fun effect pretty clearly in the data. What's interesting, though, is there was a noticeable uptick and recovery scores starting in June 2021 and carried through the end of the year. So in a way, this speaks more to the less stress side of things.

things that it does to the partying side of things. Yeah, for sure. And I think relieving stress is huge. And it's probably what makes us like open up to the partying and all that kind of stuff because you're not going to go out and have fun if you're all stressed out and think the world's ending. But it's cool to see that the dominating effect is the less stress, right? That that even though sleep was down a little bit, we're seeing recovery increase means like a net good was happening to people during that time. Another backdrop here, which may or may not be related, is around the same time the U.S. Labor Department revealed that 4.3 million Americans left their jobs in August of 2021. In the U.K., number of open jobs surpassed 1 million for the first time ever in August 2021.

So it's possible that less work also is triggering higher recovery scores or less people in the labor market. Yeah, it could be. One of the interesting things that we saw, too, with the point you made regarding less work is that, you know, a lot of people are forced to sleep and wake on schedules that aren't really aligned with their bodies naturally in data that we looked at in 2020 when people were working from home and so had a little bit more freedom to like sleep late and go to bed later because they weren't commuting, for example, that their recovery scores went up then too. And that like probably, you know, you're going to see an even stronger effect if people are leaving their jobs all together. And I think, One of the trends that news has been commenting on for months is that people are switching industries and using this as an opportunity to get totally different jobs or, you know, move to somewhere random and work remotely and all those kinds of things. And so we're seeing people, I think, say no to jobs that made them unhappy and more willing to take a risk on something, which is, you know, an interesting global trend going on right now. Speaking of recoveries, so I always love this, the lowest average recovery score of the year, drum roll, please, 48%. I thought this actually would be worse, 48% took place on New Year's Day. Emily, what might be happening on New Year's Eve to cause such low recoveries? Well, we actually did look into this. It's one of the highest drinking nights and lowest sleeping nights of the year. So if you drink a lot of champagne. pain and don't sleep and don't love to sleep.

Yeah. And that is not a COVID-related statistic. If anything, that's what's making it, you know, less extreme. But we've definitely seen this pattern in other years as well. Here's an interesting one. The second lowest average recovery score, 53%, took place on Saturday, May 15th. Now, it's hard to know whether this is a direct causation. But it's worth noting that May 15th was the day after CDC guidance in the U.S.

change, saying that fully vaccinated people could forego masks and social distancing. So this may have been one of the first sort of get out and about moments at your local bar or fill in the blank. Yeah. And even if you didn't like go out that day, I think that even just in terms of what that represents, that's such a moment of hope that like we can relax some of these guidelines. All right. Let's look at some of the behaviors that drove positive impact on recovery.

Okay. interesting number one menstruating increased recovery on average by four percent i know this has been a big theme especially for our deep dive on women's health yeah so we introduced uh the journal in march of 2020 and pretty early on we looked at like who's doing what and what's the effect of these different things it's really interesting to see the menstrual cycle kind of pop up there as being significant and that you know really was what started all of the mental cycle coaching features that we recently released and that you know we're really excited about and you know as we started to dig into this and really understand what was going on it you know it's completely consistent

with what we understand about physiologically what's going on so throughout your menstrual cycle you're releasing different hormones and when you're menstruating you have sort of the mix of hormones you've higher testosterone lower levels of the female reproductive hormones and it just puts your body in a state where you can recover better. And so we see, you know, throughout your cycle, like just changes in sleep changes in recovery and they just happen to peak for most people who menstruate during the actual menstrual cycle. And so, you know, it's definitely powerful data. And we were excited that we were able to, like, capture this phenomenon in the menstrual cycle coaching feature where for people tracking their menstrual cycle, we're giving you different

recommendations in the strain coach based on different phases of your cycle in order to account for this. You can actually push harder when you're menstruating because your body's that much more able to recover. And where can women find this in the WUP app? So if you go into the journal feature, you can add menstruation to something that you're tracking. And if you're tracking it, then automatically your sleep coach and string coach will track your cycles and then modulate your recommendations accordingly. Okay, hydration plus three percent, taking turmeric plus three percent impact on recovery. What's going on with those two? Yeah. So, I mean, hydration is kind of a no-brainer, right? You know, you need to be hydrated, makes every system in your body work more

efficiently. And so if you're well hydrated on average, what well means by plus 3% is on average, you're going to be 3% more recovered than if you weren't well hydrated. Turmeric is a well-known anti-inflammatory. It's actually used in like Ayurvedic medicine to treat a lot of diseases and stuff like that. So if you're taking it, you know, it's going to make you more recovered the next day. Now, it's also worth noting like, okay, 4%, 3%, these sounds like smaller percentages, but these are being averaged across the whole population. So for any individual listening to this who's looking for benefits, like just being hydrated may actually for you have a 10, 20, 30% benefit to your recovery. So just think of these as sort of a hit list on

things that you might be able to use to positively impact your recovery. I see caffeine actually gives you a boost or on average is giving you a boost? What do we attribute to that? Yeah. I mean, it's well known that like caffeine is good for you, assuming you're not pregnant or anything like that. It keeps things moving. It keeps, you know, your energy up so that you can do more things. I love this one. Dairy-free diet. I'm lactose intolerant. I'm a huge preacher of all the bad that is dairy. What do you think is driving that? Yeah. So one of the things that is interesting, just jumping on that is following a paleo diet was also associated with a 2% increase in recovery as well as following a vegan diet. And so what I make of this little trio that like dairy-free paleo

or vegan are all associated with recovery boost is that having an intentional diet is probably really good for you and just being mindful of what you're eating more than anything else. I'd say like, you know, I'm kind of personally of the opinion. I think research supports this that like cutting out most food, if you're not like lactose intolerant, it's unclear how much you're going to benefit from cutting out dairy, you know, and stuff like that. You know, certainly like if you're not, you know, have celiac disease or some kind of gluten intolerance, you're not going to benefit too much from cutting out gluten, which is, you know, a big thing eliminated in the paleo diet. But if you're following an intentional diet and reading labels, you're just much less likely

to like make a bag of Cheetos your lunch. And so, you know, I think you're going to benefit from that. But I think that the biggest thing with all of these diets, it's about trying them and seeing what happens to you. Because if you are dairy sensitive and you cut it out, you're not going to get a plus 2% benefit. You're going to get like a plus 30% benefit, right? But if you're not very sensitive, you're going to see no difference in your data. And so, like, those people might be bringing this down. And so, like, what Will was saying a couple of minutes ago, on average is a 2% benefit. I think the actual experience benefits are going to vary widely.

And so it's important to pay attention to what's happening in your body and see in the journal feature analysis automatically does this for you. But see, like, when you cut these things out or add something new, like, are you seeing a meaningful benefit or not? and then to make behavior change decisions in the long run based on your own personal data. Let's hear what Rich Roll said about his vegan diet. The first thing I would say is, you know, it's not for me to tell people how they should live their life or how they should eat. Like one of the things that I've learned in sobriety is to refrain from giving advice and only share my experience. So all I have to go on is my experience. And my experience is that a plant-based diet works for me.

me. I've been doing it now for 15 years, and I turn 55 this week. I feel great. I'm still able to go out and kill it and build lean muscle mass and recover more quickly between workouts. Even without getting into the details of it, it's going to be a predominantly anti-inflammatory diet. And as you know, as an athlete, it's all about mitigating that inflammation. Yeah, worth mentioning Rich Roll, great guests we had on the podcast not that long ago. guy who really changed his life with diet. So, you know, Emily and I are not saying that you need to go on a diet to boost recovery, but we are saying that applying some level of a restrictive diet or at least a very intentional diet, you may see meaningful recovery benefits.

All right, let's go to the sadder list, Emily, which is the negative impact on recovery. You know, it's interesting if we polled the community, what do you think has a more negative impact on your recovery? Do you think it's alcohol or do you think it's sickness? You probably wouldn't guess that alcohol has close to 9% and sickness is at 5%. I think the only thing to make of that is that sickness is whatever you want to define it. So it could just be waking up feeling a little bit weird and you're like, oh, I feel sick and then maybe you feel fine later. But keep in mind, we live in a world right now, which is terrified of being sick. Right.

And so it's just interesting that alcohol really is such a negative driver on recovery. and an alcohol relative to everything else we're going to say on this list is a complete outlier in terms of how negative it tends to be on recovery. Okay, here's an interesting one. Sleeping at altitude, this crushed me. I went to Aspen at one point this year, and the altitude just crushed my recovery, totally crushed it. Yeah, so the air is thinner at altitude, and so your body has to work a lot harder to sort of do all the baseline level stuff. that's why athletes tend to train at altitude once you habituate to it and you come down to sea level

you get the opposite effect right so if you're used to altitude you come to sea level you can basically think about like that's a huge recovery booster and so you want to compete you know at sea level and train at altitude but if you're used to sea level like you and i are and then you go to altitude you know your body really isn't expecting that thinner air and typically people are really going to get hit with this like the first day or two So if you had stayed in Aspen long enough, your recovery scores would have totally... That's true. By the end of the week, I was there for about a week, it had come back and stabilized. The other interesting data point to look at for altitude is blood oxymetry, your pulse ox.

Which you can track in our new health monitor feature. And that's one of the... It's an important, I guess, thing for people to be aware of because you will potentially get the low pulse ox notification in the health monitor if you go to altitude, but it's not a sign that anything's wrong. it's just your body adjusting to it and within a couple of days you'll see that level coming up. Yeah, I think normally I'm at 98, 99% pulse ox reading and when I was at altitude, I was at like 94% 93% I was out of that 95 to 100% range that we say is comfortable. Food close to bedtime, that's when we see a decrease on. That's something I've learned a lot about in my own data. Why is that, Emily? When you're trying to go to sleep, you're trying to like turn

your body off and focus on a lot of repair things. And if you just ate a lot of food, basically giving your body this big task, and having to do those two things are a little bit incompatible with each other. And so your body diverse resources to processing this meal, which means it's like taking them away from the productive things that should be happening during sleep. A lot of people also can have issues like with acid reflux and stuff like that, just being horizontal, you know, that things don't flow the way they're supposed to flow. And so it can make it harder to fall asleep and to get comfortable and stuff like that if your stomach's full and you're lying flat. So we generally see that it's best to finish eating a couple

hours before bed, like three or four, it doesn't need to be crazy and kind of have as little going on going into sleep so that your body can be focused on the things that it needs to do. What's the digestion hack again? Which side of your body should you be sleeping on to optimize for digestion? So you want to sleep on your left side. Another hack that works pretty well is to use like a wedge pillow or somehow prop yourself up so you're not all the way flat. Okay, let's jump into sleep, a subject, which I know you care a lot about. As the year went along, people got less sleep. So we're going to forgive everyone for that because 2021 was the awakening, as Christakis would probably say. Sleep performance, it peaked in January at 84% average. And then it got to a low of

78% in June. Australia showed the inverse. Proving sleep can also be affected by the seasons. So unpack this for us, Emily. Yeah. So if you just look at the data from the U.S., you might think it's that, you know, summer of fun effect where, you know, we're getting less sleep because we're doing more because the pandemic is getting better.

But if you look at the Australia data, you're seeing the opposite. So, you know, Australia, they're in the southern hemisphere. And so during our summer, it's their winter and vice versa. And so what we're actually seeing here is that maybe. maybe one of the larger effects is that just in the winter, you know, when it's cold out, they're less inclined to go out and do things. You know, there's less daylight. We go to bed earlier and in the summer when there's more fun things to do, we take advantage and we stay up later and we sleep less. So the fact that, you know, Australia had the same COVID trends that we

had, but had this opposite trend in sleep, suggests that the seasonal effect explains a lot more of it than the COVID effect. We're also seeing as the week goes along, people are getting generally less sleep. Average sleep performance lowest on Fridays, but highest on Sundays. And what's interesting here is also you start to feel the disconnect between sleep and recovery, too. You know, I remember when we were first starting to the company, people said, oh, well, wouldn't your recovery just be how much sleep you got?

Well, not necessarily, as we know, because your physiology might be telling a different story. It looks like people are starting to get a lot of sleep. on weekends, but as we talked about before, their recoveries are also lowest on Saturdays. Is the missing variable here going out and drinking? Partially. So some of it is that the reason why we get so much sleep on weekends is often because we're doing this thing called rebound sleeping, right? We're like sleep deprived all week because we're getting up early for work or whatever. And then we make up it on the weekend. And so that sleep tends to be lower quality. And, you know, we tend to sleep really late and like spent a lot of time in bed, but there's a lot of inefficient rolling around because

we're not actually sleeping sort of with our circadian rhythm. That's why we push sleep consistency so hard because what you're basically seeing in this data when you look at the recovery trend and the sleep trend is that like you're almost getting a lot of junk sleep because it's not aligned with your circadian rhythm. One real key theme that emerged was the importance of mental health and comfort really as it plays a role in getting good. sleep. So we look to the top 10 behaviors that most positively impact sleep and sleep efficiency. And look at this. We've got number one is sleeping in your own bed. So if you want to get good sleep efficiency, sleeping in your own bed, number one. Number two is feeling control. Number three

is feeling efficacy. And then, you know, we go down the list here, hydration, blue light blocking glasses, fasting. So those tend to be more behavior-oriented. At least the first three feel very comfort, mental health-oriented. Speak to that a little bit. Yeah. So it was really interesting to see in the top 10, you know, your core physiological need showing up. So we see that it's important to feel like you're in control in order to sleep well. It's important to feel efficacy. It's important to feel a sense of purpose. And, you know, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, right? It's actually understood that insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, is most often a mental health disorder and not actually a primary sleep disorder. And it's just because, like,

if we're unhappy or, you know, stressed out or all these things, we stress ourselves out, so we release cortisol, which totally counterproductive to sleeping. We, like, think about all the things that are going wrong and we, like, roll around with our thoughts and we can't turn our brains off and so we can't fall asleep and when you feel a sense of control efficacy and purpose you're at peace quite literally right and then you can just sleep like a baby fall asleep and like you're less worried about these things so you don't roll around at night stressing over them and the reason by the way folks that we're we're talking about sleep efficiency versus say hours of sleep is we're trying to understand what makes you get the highest quality sleep for the amount of time that you're

putting in. Yeah. So sleep efficiency is just simply the percentage of the time that you're in bed trying to be asleep, that you're actually asleep. And so being sick is actually associated with getting a lot of sleep, right? Like think about the last time you had, you know, cold and you just spent like 16 hours in bed. But that's not really like what we're going for here. We want to know it's going to make you sleep well. And so for the most part, it's like we want you to be in bed and asleep and like getting benefits out of that. Okay. Negative impact on sleep efficiency. Top two. sickness and alcohol we've already picked on both of those so i think we have to talk more about that sharing your bed interestingly has a negative impact on sleep efficiency mostly what i think that that comes down to

is um what you're doing when you're sharing your bed right if you're not in a committed relationship and consistently sharing your bed then maybe having somebody else in there's causing you to chat or roll around or do any of the other activities that you do with somebody in your bed and so it's not so much that having somebody else in your bed is a problem unless, you know, potentially they snore or something and so are actively keeping you up. But it could also just be that like that's going to be associated with other behaviors that aren't pro-sleep. Well, this is where an interesting follow-up in the whoop journal would be like consistent partner, new partner, because I have a feeling that may skew the data pretty dramatically. I would think so, yeah, because for the most part,

what we're looking at in this journal analysis is people who do things intermittently. So if you do something 100% of the time you're excluded from this analysis and so these are people who whether or not they're in a committed relationship i don't know but um they're at least not consistently sharing their bed so that does signal either that they're traveling a lot or that this is you know someone who's single and and may or may not you know have have the same person in their bed yeah and one of the most important things for sleeping well is like feeling really safe and secure um and so if you have an unfamiliar partner in bed. You're probably not going to sleep very deeply. Okay. Well, it's in store for 2022, Emily. What are some things that we may see in 2022 that vary from this data? I think it'll be

really interesting to see what happens to all of the activities that people picked up as a result of like gym's closing and sort of being forced to try things new for the pandemic. So your new outdoor runners and cyclists are they going to stay the course? Yeah. And I think even more than that, Right. Like one trend that was really interesting was that ski mountains like all closed at the beginning of the pandemic. And so one of the big winners of the pandemic was people who produced back country skiing equipment. These were sold out all over the country. And people started doing like back country skiing or things like that, right? Because you don't need the lifts to be operating. But now you have people who bought $500 worth of equipment and learned this new thing. So, you know, are the ski lifts going to make its full comeback? Or are these people now that they have the equipment and tried it out for a year going to keep doing that. I think probably a little bit more close to home. Like we bought a Peloton bike. I was never really a biker, but now I have this thing. It's in my house. Probably going to keep using it. It's probably going to be a deterrent to going back to like, you know, your typical spin studio, just because we have the thing, right? So I think

it'll be interesting to see, do people stick with these things, do these trends persist? Did people really discover a new hobby? Or did they figure out a stop gap and they're going to rush back to the old stuff as soon as they can. In terms of new features and research that we're developing, Emily, what might we tease for the audience for things to be excited about next year? Yeah. So I think, you know, we've been playing with this data all year, especially the data coming out of the journal, because we want to make our coaching features more personalized and more actionable and more engaging. And, you know, the way to do that is to understand things. Like when we see, you know, these different effects, like, oh, when you're menstruating,

right, you're recovering more. And then we can build menstrual cycle coaching and these other features around that. We want to now, like, continue to break these things down and better understand why are some people getting a small effect, some people getting a large effect, and so we can, like, further personalize these things. You know, I think there's also an opportunity to do things like that around things like nutrition, right? We were looking at all the data where meal timing and intentional diets are all associated with recovery in different ways. And so, like, how can we build that into our coaches? And so I think a lot of exciting things to come out of the journal. And, you know, that's why we're so appreciative of all

of our members who continue to log these behaviors in the journal. The data is not only really interesting, you know, for you to engage with your personal data, but also for us to look at, you know, in these larger scales and uncover exciting new trends. And it's worth emphasizing an individual's personal data is not accessible when you look at this stuff. Yeah. It's really all de-identified aggregate data that we're speaking to right now. Yeah, we don't pull anything personal or identifiable, you know, comes in these big anonymous polls where it's just like the frequencies of these different activities. If you were to predict next year's strain habits, do you think people are going to be logging more strain or less strain than we saw in 2021?

I think more. It'll be interesting to see. You know, I think like what Nicholas Christakis was saying and there's been this shift, I think, towards being less okay with burning out at work. I think there's to shift towards like a healthier work-life balance and just like self-care and all these things. And I think that a lot of that is going to manifest in more exercise. It's like the number one thing you can be doing for longevity. And I think that, you know, it's free. It's health promoting people who are fit did better during the COVID pandemic than people that weren't. And, you know, I think that a lot of people saw that big scary wake-up call pretty firsthand, right?

We were talking about like obesity as being like a really scary risk factor for COVID, you know, for last years. And so I think that hopefully for a lot of people that was an eye-opener and resulting behavior change. So I would expect to see more activity, not less. Well, that is good news and we'll keep an eye on it. In terms of all the research that we spoke to today and additional data, where can people learn more? So they'll all be available in the show notes, which you can find at whoop.com slash the locker, where we're also going to have, you know, all the different studies that we've talked about all the research on menstrual cycles that we keep referencing and other analysis of the journal.

Thanks to Emily for coming on the WOOP podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please give us a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe. You can check us out on social at W-W-O-W-A-Mad. And you get 15% off a W-E-W-Mbership if you use the code, Will W-I-L-M. That's all for now. Stay healthy, folks. Stay in the green.

Thank you.