WHOOP Podcast - Introducing the all-new WHOOP Journal.

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo are back to talk about the all-new WHOOP Journal, which allows members to log and track more than 40 different behaviors on a daily basis. Kristen and Emily go in-depth on how drinking can alter your sleep (5:28), how we metabolize caffeine and what we can learn from tracking when we consume it (8:58), how marijuana and CBD impact sleep (10:27), the effect of sex on performance (15:59), measuring anxiety and stress (20:15), preparing for travel (29:03), how people respond to sleeping in unfamiliar beds and sharing a bed with a partner (31:26), how women can track menstruation and pregnancy through the new Journal (33:13), what we can learn about different diets (38:26), and how to evaluate various medications with WHOOP (40:20).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. This is the WOOP podcast, and I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. For those of you unaware, we build technology across hardware and software and analytics to really help understand the human body. And this podcast is very close to our mission because it's all about a new feature, The WOOP Journal. And this is a customizable feature that's going to allow members to log specific behaviors that may impact your performance on a daily basis. There's going to be over 40 behaviors that you can track. This is across lifestyle, nutrition, supplements, medication, sleep, recovery, more. And it's now going to allow women to follow how pregnancy and menstruation are also affecting their bodies.

Another thing this feature will allow you to track is whether or not you are sick. This is an area that WOOP has been investigating deeply. Obviously, it's very topical right now with the coronavirus and everything else. And one thing that Woop focuses on is looking at different indicators that may be a sign your body has run down before you can feel run down. By logging whether or not you're sick, Woop will better be able to understand what signs in your data can predict that in the future. Your privacy is critical to us here at Woop, so it's important to note that this feature will be extremely private. Your answers are for your eyes only. I sit down with Kristen Holmes and Emily Capulupo to talk indebt.

about what we may be able to learn from all these different types of behaviors. Kristen and Emily talk about some of the ones they're going to be tracking. I talk about some of the ones I'll be tracking. And I think you'll enjoy this conversation because it'll help you better optimize the way you use this feature. Without further ado, here are Kristen and Emily. Okay, Kristen, Emily, welcome to the Woop Podcast. Thanks, Will. It's fun to be on with the two of you.

It's been a little while. I just, I learn all about how I can be a better whoop user by listening to the two of you. So this is going to be fun. And we are here the three of us because we are so excited to announce this new feature, the Whoop Journal. And really the inspiration for the Whoop Journal is you want to be able to understand how all these different things in your life, behaviors, nutrition, lifestyle decisions actually affect your whoop data. And to date, we've had this in the form of user input, where in the app, you'll get questions every day about your sleep and about your recovery. And that's been reasonably interesting.

We'll talk a little bit more about results that we've seen from that. But of course, they are the same questions every day, and they're the same questions for everyone. It doesn't matter if you're a 15-year-old boy or a 60-year-old woman. You're getting the same questions every day. And we wanted to create something that was customizable and personal to you. And so with this new feature, the Whoop Journal, members are going to be able to track against virtually anything they want. And today we're rolling out about 40 plus different behaviors spanning categories across nutrition, lifestyle, bedtime, routine, supplements, recovery protocols. And this list is going to grow. There'll be more things that get added to it as members

start using it. I think we're going to hear what sorts of things they want to be tracking that we're not including. And over time, I can imagine allowing individuals to even customize anything that they track against. So with that in mind, what I wanted to do is actually walk through a lot of the different options that we're going to have. So to give people a sense for, Okay, if I decide to track this on my Whoop journal, what are some things that I can expect or learn? Does that sound good? Sounds great.

And by the way, the two of you, in case people listening aren't completely aware, are two of the best sort of life hackers I know in thinking about your own behaviors and lifestyles and diets and you're two of the healthiest people at Whoop. So this is truly, you guys are truly, those listening are truly getting the best advice from the best people. Let's start here with the category of lifestyle. And we've got a bunch of fun ones. Alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, tobacco. These are going to be quite interesting. And another thing that's important to note is within these questions, not only you're going to be able to answer yes or no, did you consume alcohol yesterday. You're actually going to say how many

drinks you had and you're going to be able to say at what point did you have your last drink right when did you stop drinking now uh emily explain why that additional information may be interesting for specifically to alcohol sure so there's a big difference between sort of you consuming alcohol all by itself is going to do things like dehydrate you it's going to um because alcohol is essentially poison it's going to put your liver tell us how you really feel sorry hate to be the bear of bad news, but our bodies treat it like poison. We create this sort of massive response and actively try and clear the alcohol. And so we divert a lot of resources to getting the alcohol broken down and out of our bodies. So that's just the alcohol. But if you also are now

trying to go to bed while drunk, alcohol is sort of a deep sleep agonist. So you're not going to get slowly sleep. You're not going to get REM sleep. Because when you're drunk, you're more like being sedated than actually actively sleeping. So sleep is a super active process. Lots of things. of sort of chemical reactions and biological reactions happen during sleep that don't happen when we're awake. And so none of those things happen when we're sort of passed out drunk. And so you get this double whammy when you go to bed drunk where not only are you sort of dealing with sort of this ingestion of poison that we now have to divert all these resources to getting out of our bodies, but now you also sleep poorly. So then when you wake up the next morning, you have this sort of

response to having been poisoned the day before, but also you're dealing with, even though you might have been asleep or passed out for like eight hours, 10 hours, you might only have gotten four or five hours of like high quality sleep. So you're basically functioning as if you got four hours of sleep. So that's this like double whammy. If you say day drink and go to bed totally sober because alcohol, we clear about one standard drink per hour. So if you have three drinks and you're done drinking at least three hours before bed, you're actually going to bed totally sober. So now your sleep is going to be totally normal sleep. And so the next morning, you're only dealing with the recovery hit from being poisoned the day before. So it's actually,

not that I'm advocating for everybody to go day drink. Day drink, sleep sober. Is that what you say, Emily? Not that I am advocating for that, but it is actually has like a very different impact on your recovery because you don't also diminish your quality of sleep. So by tracking that variable of when you stop drinking, we can now understand what was the effect of the short sleep or the sort of effectively shorter sleep versus what was the effect of alcohol and it's worth noting right like when you stop drinking will depend and and its effect on your body will depend on who you are too yeah your height your weight all those things factor in yeah so i think that's why you know we're not just doing this like one-off study and saying like well on average whoop users

who drink have a 13 millisecond hit for on their HRV which it happens to be true in our case but we're saying like hey will when you have two drinks and maybe when those two drinks are wine versus beer this is what happens to you um because you know you're a foot taller than me you know you probably way more than i do like all these different things um you know you're male versus female so we have different enzymes different concentrations of these things we're going to handle alcohol very differently so to look at that you know 13 millisecond hit to hrv stat it's interesting but it's not all that actionable in isolation so emily here is referring to the fact that today when people report drinking alcohol versus not, they wake up the next day with a 13 millisecond

worse HRV. They have a 17% worse recovery. And in general, they're getting about 20 minutes less sleep. They also have an elevated resting heart rate of 6 beats per minute. So that's just across the whole population. And what we're excited about again with this journal feature is we're going to be able to hone this in for you. Okay, if you're going to drink, what's the right alcohol alcohol for you. When should you stop drinking? What's the tipping point? Is it two drinks? Is it three drinks? Right? So those are some of the things that I think are quite fascinating. Okay, here's another one. So caffeine, you're going to be able to track how many servings of caffeine you had and when you stop drinking caffeine. Kristen, you've told me a lot about

this. What might be interesting here? Yeah, well, everyone metabolizes caffeine very differently. So I think that's one thing to pay attention to. Am I a fast caffeine metabolizer? Do I metabolize caffeine slowly. You know, we're all a little bit different. So, you know, when I need to stop drinking caffeine could be very different from you. So being able to track that and pay attention to it can give you a ton of insight into when you actually need to stop. So it doesn't influence your sleep onset. I can see, for example, and it, because it can creep into, you know, well into your sleep. You know, if you, you know, drink caffeine after 4 p.m., for example, and are trying to go to bed at 11, you're probably going to have issues. So being able to kind of track that and be mindful of it,

can definitely give, you know, our members a lot more insight into how they're handling caffeine and how it might be influencing their sleep. For me personally, this is one that I'm really excited about because I would say on 50% of days, I drink a cup of coffee in the afternoon. And I'm really interested to see how those specific days affect my sleep. And if it's a meaningful thing, like I'll actually try to cut the coffee out in the afternoon. But that's where you can really only manage what you measure. and if I see data in Whoop that's telling me, hey, this is messing up your sleep.

Okay, I'm probably going to make a change. Now, it's also worth noting all of these are optional. So you could answer, you know, you could look at tracking all these different things are none. I think our goal here today is just to talk about how they might be interesting for you and why you should potentially consider tracking them. Okay, here's another one. Marijuana. What do we know about marijuana?

Not too much. We know that people report sleeping much better. It reduces REM sleep, but it also reduces disturbances quite a bit. And we also know that people can become habituated to the fact that it helps you fall asleep. And so people who are sort of in the habit of consuming marijuana at night, when they stop consuming marijuana, actually, can have a lot of insomnia and trouble sleeping. I've read about that, actually. And they have like, what happens is the REM sleep that you don't get after smoking marijuana. marijuana will you'll get that rebound effect right when you stop when you stop that yeah it's

that next day you end up getting a lot more REM but it takes away from your slow wave sleep yeah I think this is going to be an interesting one for people because in my opinion there's a lot of anecdotal information out there about people saying they've smoked marijuana and and had a better sleep result but I have a feeling this could also be highly personal yeah I think one of the things that marijuana does really well is it helps with things like anxiety. So if the reason why you're having trouble falling asleep is because you're having trouble like turning off at night and like, you know, you're worried about your project that's slayed or whatever it is, like having something that's going to help you kind of turn off a little bit, you fall asleep. And then it does

seem like the CBD and marijuana also helps promote sleep. So you sleep more deeply and you wake up less throughout the night. But, you know, kind of depending on how you're using it and sort of what it is alleviating, you might notice different effects. Like somebody like you who has like very, very short sleep latency to begin with doesn't really have trouble falling asleep, might not notice that much of a benefit from it. Now, I'm glad you mentioned CBD because that's also an option here under the supplements umbrella. Kristen, tell us why CBD may be something that you want to track.

Well, I can tell you personally, I've been using CBD and magnesium as a combo. and I've noticed way more slow-based sleep, almost 3%. Wow. So, you know, maybe that's not a ton, but... For people who aren't familiar, marijuana has two active ingredients, THC and CBD. So THC is the one that gives you that feeling of being high. And then CBD, actually, it's fully legal in every state in the U.S., at least,

has no association with being high. And it's the one that sort of is the reason why medical marijuana exists. CBD is anti-inflammatory, and it helps a lot with sleep. It reduces stress and anxiety. Yeah, so it seems like when people are smoking marijuana for sleep benefits, what they're really doing is they're using the marijuana in order to get CBD, but you can also just buy like purified CBD as like an oil or you can get in like food and different things like that.

And then you get all of the anti-inflammatory benefits of the CBD without any of the getting high effect of the THC. Kristen, you mentioned magnesium. That's on the list. So is melatonin. Why might magnesium or melatonin be worth tracking? Well, magnesium, generally, I think for females in particular, we are usually deficient. Female athletes.

So if you're doing a relatively large amount of training, you'll probably be magnesium deficient. So I started supplementing magnesium, I guess, in the summer. So it's, you know, and I don't know necessarily, you know, how it's helped me. but I just figure something good. I know that I'm probably deficient, so I might as well incorporate that into my suites of things I do. Magnesium's an interesting one, too, just because there's no blood test.

You can't go to your doctor and get your magnesium levels tested. And so it's actually diagnosed by the symptoms, one of which is trouble sleeping. And then it's then retroactively the diagnosis is confirmed when if you supplement magnesium, your trouble sleeping goes away. They go, oh, it must have been a magnesium deficiency. And so it's sort of one of those things that you could very easily not know that you're deficient in. But we do know that athletes and in particular female athletes are sort of disproportionately likely to be magnesium deficient.

So it's sort of a good thing to, you know, start taking it. You know, it's pretty relatively inexpensive. You can get it in any drugstore or supermarket. And you can take it at any time because it's not soporific. Yeah. So it's not sleep inducing. It's not soporific. It's the technical term.

So you can take it in the morning. I take it after I exercise. exercise. And then if your sleep quality improves, then that's how you know that that was good for you. And if your sleep quality doesn't improve, then you can probably stop spending money on this product. Right. Like not the problem. Right. Yeah. And I had a good baseline of magnesium. So when I introduced CBD oil and saw some improvements over the last five weeks of my sleep, I kind of know that, all right, it could be due to the CB oil and not necessarily just the magnesium because I had a strong baseline with the CBDU. That's helpful. Now,

melatonin we know is something that helps you fall asleep i think what will be interesting in melatonin especially is also you can track again the dosage and i've found personally taking one milligram versus three milligrams versus six milligrams and also depending on whether i traveled or not it can have a very different effect on the sleep performance so i think that's something that people uh will also enjoy being able to look at. Okay. This is a fun one. Sex. So for a long time, there has been, I would say, you know, I'm trying to find the right word, but speculation, especially in the sports community, that sex can decrease your performance the next day. Having said that, and even on this podcast, I've heard the exact opposite. What sorts of things might people expect from being able to track

sex? I think men and women respond to sex with a partner and an orgasm differently. Elaborate on that. I think men who have an orgasm, there is a decrease in testosterone post-sex, whereas women have increases in serotonin and all sorts of other chemicals and hormones. So for men, kind of has this, not negative effect, but definitely less energy, more lethargic, you know, ready to basically take a nap. Whereas women, for women, it seems to have the opposite effect. So let me play this out for a second. Do you think in the data we will see that men after reporting sex sleep better than women? Women are more sensitive to exactly what happened. I think like guys, it's like if they orgasm, they respond in a certain way. Women, when you have sex,

with a partner that you're intimate with have like you know they release all the snuggle hormones and the bonding hormones and then they sleep really well because they feel safe the oxytocin yeah all the oxytocin and versus if you just sort of did this physical act that doesn't because it's you know maybe with a stranger doesn't then induce all the oxytocin these bonding hormones then it's just you sort of have the effect of exercise really close to sleep so you increase your core body temperature with all the arousal, which is counterproductive for sleep. But I think it's interesting to sort of understand how you respond to it, especially if you're thinking about, you know, the night before a game,

you know, a period of time where you're really, really sensitive to getting all the maximal recovery benefits, because for some people, the arousal increases your core body temperature, which is counterproductive for sleep. So if tomorrow is a game day or an important performance or whatever, don't have sets. What if it's not a game day? What if it's like, I want to have a great day at work? Well, I think that's why quantifying so important,

because the idea isn't that whoop is going to tell you like have sex or don't have sex or like, you know, all these things. It's that if we can quantify for you what the effect of sex is, now you can go out and make an informed decision. So if I know that when I have sex, I get, you know, this hit or boost to my recovery score, then maybe it's a 1% recovery hit. So I'll say like, you know, and then it's worth it. And I'm willing to make that trade off because, you know, this sort of bonding moment with my. husband is more important than that one percent but you know you might make a different decision and our goal with all of these things with all the feedback that we provide is never to tell you do something or don't do something it's so that you can make this informed decision that like

okay this is my data this is what i can expect and i'm cool with that or i'm not cool with that instead of being like oh i wonder if this has an effect i have no idea and then maybe making a decision that because you misunderstood what's going to happen and so now you don't do something that would have been fine or you do something that's harmful so it's just about being informed Well, look, sex has been one of the most requested features that I've definitely received from members being like, but we want to be able to understand how sex affects us. So this is your opportunity, folks. I guess quickly while we're on the topic, how can sex potentially affect your body differently than masturbation? Because that will also be in this journal for you

to decide whether you want to... Yeah, I think it goes back to Emily's point. I think it's largely psychological, right? Like, it's a different moment masturbating versus like having sex with a partner you're intimate with you know so I think what's happening psychologically is going to is going to influence you on like a neurological level right the psychology piece is so important because if you're just doing it to kind of like stress relief like that's real right stress has been relieved so that's likely to offset the like small increase in core body temperature and you know it's going to increase the ferrying of hormones and you know like so there's like a lot of probably really good things happening you know that you're not aware of okay so you guys now mentioned

anxiety and stress, which is also something you're able to track against. Why might people want to measure every day how anxious they are, how stressed they are? Those are things that can affect the quality of your sleep that would be sort of not captured in training data. So you might be wondering why you slept so poorly after you worked out and, you know, having been anxious or stressed the day before can help explain that. So it gives color to something that we can't otherwise automatically track. I think that's right. And I also think you can use that response as an outcome in itself and that we can look at what are all the other things in your whoop data that may drive being less stress or being more anxious.

Yeah. Right. And I think you can also help, yeah, give better advice because if somebody is reporting being stressed and then also sleeping poorly, then the solution to their poor sleep is going to be stress management. So then you want to introduce something like meditation. Right. versus if they're reporting zero stress and then sleeping poorly, okay, so now maybe you need a different type of intervention.

And so I think giving somebody melatonin, which helps reduce sleep latency and increases the quality of sleep early in the night, you know, isn't the right intervention for everybody who's having trouble falling asleep. But, you know, so it's, I think, like, helping people direct people towards the correct intervention because if stress is your issue, you need to address the stress. Like the poor sleep is just a symptom of stress. What's cool about this journal is that it takes into account the factors that actually are going to influence your performance, you know, and it allows you to, by tracking it and paying attention, you can then start to figure out how different behaviors throughout the day actually impact you. And that will show up in the metrics that we're tracking. So if you pay attention and, you know, you're relatively diligent about it, you'll be able to increase your awareness. And it could, you know, for some of these, it's been life changing for me, you know, just incorporating. seeing what happens when I take mindfulness practice out of my day, you know, what that actually does to me. Just seeing the impact of CBD oil at night has been interesting, you know, thinking about the feeding windows, you know, when to stop eating. You know, all these things have been really transformed for me, I think. So actually, all the things you just listed, you're going to be able

to track against. Let's start with meditation. I'm a huge believer in this, but tell our audience why that might be an interesting thing to A, B, test on yourself. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, Emily's point about just the, you know, when you start to, to toggle, oh, okay, I'm sleeping, I'm falling sleep, sleeping well, but I'm not reporting stress during the day, or I'm reporting stress and not sleeping well. Well, a lot of what influences sleep at night is the degree to which you manage stress during the day. And mindfulness can be just a very easy intervention to mitigate that negative stress accumulation. So you can start to look at, okay, when I incorporate, you know, a 20-minute bout of mindfulness during the day, is my sleep onset better?

Am I getting into these deeper stages of sleep? You know, am I sleeping more efficiently? You know, these are things that you're going to be able to track. And I think it's really exciting too because getting into meditation is hard, right? It's like a hard habit to start. And so by tracking what happens when you make this effort and do this thing that maybe doesn't feel natural at first and then to be able to see in your data like, wow, this actually is helping. you know, because it starts subtle because we all meditate poorly kind of the first time we do it.

It's like hard to kind of get good at it and make it effective. And so if you can start to see like, oh, wow, like this really is making an impact, all of a sudden it's that much more like motivating to kind of push through the like acclimation period. And one thing I found just by paying attention is that, you know, while I'm not as good, you know, sitting for 20 to 30 minutes, you know, meditating, I am quite good at doing, you know, these kind of mini bouts of meditation throughout the day. seconds to two minutes and i found that to be just as effective as actually more effective just because i'm not great at sitting still for 30 minutes um doing a meditation session so um yeah like these are things that you're going to be able to understand i think that's a great point christin too like the idea of the length of it and the number of times that you do it like for me i meditate pretty much religiously every day although some days i'll do it for 10 minutes and some days i may do it

for as long as 40 minutes. And so for me, that'll be what's interesting in tracking against it is just seeing how the duration of meditation potentially alters a few days or my sleep. Right, because if you find that you're getting all of the benefits after 10 minutes and then that extra half hour to get to 40 minutes isn't giving you any additional benefit, like, wow, you can just save a half hour, which is huge. And if you find that like you really are getting so many more benefits in that incremental half hour, well, now it's like, okay, that's kind of cool.

and I know that if I need those benefits, how to get them. Okay, we've got some great ones here related to sleep. We've touched on some stuff already. From a product standpoint, we've got blue light blocking glasses, we've got sleep mask, and we've got reading. How might any one of those affect you, Kristen? Well, definitely, I mean, the sleep mask, light in general, can be quite disruptive to your sleep.

So we definitely recommend blocking out all lights if you want to have the deepest sleep. So going from a situation where you're not blocking out light and then all of a sudden now you're blocking out light, you should see a pretty drastic increase in your sleep efficiency. Well, you're a big wear of blue light blocking glasses. You convinced me to start wearing them. I absolutely love them. Talk about those. Well, I think when you're exposing yourself to blue light, you're basically blocking the release of melatonin. So you're not going to feel like that natural pressure for sleep is not going to come at its natural time when you're exposing yourself to all this artificial light.

So really controlling the artificial light and blocking the blue light can be a really easy hack to enable your body to produce the natural chemical to help you feel sleepy. And Emily, we've talked about reading a little bit. So one of the reasons why reading is an interesting thing to track is because it can have different effects on different people. So a lot of people have trouble falling asleep because they have trouble kind of turning off from the day and they're worrying about work and they're worrying about their family and all these other things. And so, you know, reading can be this release where you start thinking about some happy fantasy world, helps you turn off from your day and then kind of eases into sleep. If you're reading something really exciting though, you know, reading can be extremely. extremely stimulating and then you can get all nervous about, you know, what's going to happen to your favorite character in the next chapter. And so it can kind of backfire. And so I think like with reading, it's not only interesting to track reading versus not reading, but, you know, are you reading fiction? Are you reading, you know, something that is really exciting? Are you reading, you know, a math textbook or, you know, whatever it is and trying to understand to make this period, which I think a lot of people think about reading before bed is something that eases you into sleep. But, you know, we have seen definite cases where people respond really negative to reading before bed. But I also think that for people

who read habitually, it becomes part of your nighttime routine and having a really consistent nighttime routine. Like if reading in bed can start to sort of trigger for your brain that, you know, this is sleep time and can almost become this cue that helps and do sleep. So I think, you know, understanding how you personally respond to this because just looking at the average stat for whoop data is probably not going to apply that well to you. We have been recording data on reading for the past a number of years. And we've seen slight improvements. It's like in general, people who read versus don't before bed, getting 12 minutes more sleep, 6% higher recovery, 4 milliseconds higher, HRV. I have a feeling that those numbers could be quite dramatic by individual. I think

that could be quite dramatic. It kind of points to, I think, though, it's about the routine. You know, if the person's reading, then they're probably doing some other things that are relatively routine-based. So you're getting these environmental triggers, you know, that kind of cue you to, oh, it's time for bed. So now you have this response, you know, this powerful response that kind of there's this downshifting moment happening and now you're prepared for bed. Okay, here's a combination or a group of things I'm interested in looking at. We've got travel, we've got red-eye flight, we've got whether you shared your bed, And we've got whether you slept in your own bed.

I'll start for a second because I find that I'm thinking about these things all the time. Traveling in general, I think, is messing up your data. I mean, time zones, we know that's enormously problematic. And where I would encourage people to think about tracking this one, if you do travel a fair amount, is to figure out how effectively are you managing your body when you travel, right? That's something that I think at various points in time I've done better or worse. course. So I'm very excited to track travel. Yeah, me too. I think just exposure to the data over these last couple of years in terms of what travel actually does to me has totally changed how I think

about the lead up to the travel. You know, we call it like the prehab, you know, drinking way more water than you need, you know, really trying to stabilize, you know, your sleep wake time and just trying to check all the boxes and the lead up, even though you're not going to, it's not going to be ideal that red eye. You're positioned to basically be more resilient to handle that. And I think if you if you do that and you're you won't be as compromised the day after and the next day in terms of your recovery now the bed piece i'm really interested in too so did you share your bed right so uh with a partner and then also did you sleep in your own bed right and those at least for me will be not necessarily one in the same right where maybe i'll share my bed with my wife and be at

home, maybe I'll share my bed out with my wife and be traveling. Maybe I'll be alone. Maybe I'll be alone in both of those scenarios. And it will be interesting, I think, to see where the data comes out. My guess is for people listening to this, again, this is a highly, highly personal one. I know people who tell me that their data is so much worse when they share their bed, so much better. I know some people have built great routines when they stay at a hotel and they sleep better on the road. I know some people who say they can't sleep on the road. So this will be an interesting one, I think, for people to delve a little deeper in their overall bed lifestyle. Yeah. So we've seen a couple different things. We've seen with some professional athletes who have little kids at home that they sleep

so well on the road because they're not on daddy duty. And so it's like, you know, they're traveling usually for their sport. And then they're just really focused and they're sort of in the zone. And nobody's asking them to do bedtime stories or crawling into their bed and waking them up in the middle of the night or anything like that. So they sleep great. But what we actually see overall is that when we're in an unfamiliar environment, we get way less deep sleep. And it's because when we're in deep sleep, we're much less responsive to our environment. And so there's this evolutionarily protective thing that when we're in a foreign environment, we don't want to become completely unresponsive to our environment because that's dangerous. And so we sleep

more lightly so that we can wake up more easily if a threat presents itself. And so people sleep less well in new locations than they do when they're at home. There was also some really interesting research done about the effect of your partner on your sleep. And if you look at couples who have been married for a really long time, they actually go into slow wave sleep at different times than each other. Like their slow wave sleeps will not overlap. And it's almost like they're taking turns being vigilant.

So one's in light sleep while the others in slow wave sleep. And so people tend to sleep much better, people who are used to sleeping with a partner that they love and trust. They did this study in like 80-year-old couples who had been married for decades that they don't go into slow-wave sleep at the same time. It was kind of an adorable result. And then they also followed up with the women after their husbands died. And they got like very, very little slow-wave sleep because they're sort of like trusted

bed partner wasn't there. And so they didn't feel safe. It was kind of tragic. The reason why we sort of wanted to separate out those two behaviors of, you know, sharing a bed from sleeping in your own bed is that there's a separate effect of like I'm with this person who I trust kind of like be my backup if a tiger arrives so I can go into deeper sleep knowing that he's in lighter sleep and will wake me up and a tiger arrives versus like we're both in this foreign environment and so we both don't trust the environment as

much and you know I think like what you said like you know sometimes my husband's the one who's traveling and so I'm alone in my own bed sometimes I'm the one who's traveling so I'm alone in a foreign bed and those effects do compound now two enormously important elements here for tracking are related specifically to women's health. One is menstruation and the other is pregnancy. Let's start with menstruation. What might people expect and now being able to track against that? So during different phases of your menstrual cycle, the way that we respond to a training stimulus is actually really different. And so the long-term goal is that we can help create better strain coach recommendations based on the phase of your menstrual cycle that you're currently in.

So for about the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, which you can think of as the low hormone phase, day one of your menstrual cycle starts the first day of bleeding. And then it goes about 14, day 14 is roughly when you ovulate. So that's like your low hormone phase. And during that time, women actually respond very similarly to men. And so probably our current to training. And so our current training recommendations for strain are probably quite appropriate during that window. But then the second half of your menstrual cycle, that's the high hormone phase, women actually respond to training very differently than men and should probably do different types of training. And so by tracking your response to training and your recovery from different workouts during that two-week part of the cycle,

we'll be able to create more tailored training recommendations that are appropriate given the levels of hormones in your body. And so what's really exciting about this is sort of understanding when you're ready for different types of training stimuli should help reduce injuries and it should reduce, you know, fatiguing and overtraining and help women train more intelligently. It's probably worth mentioning that this only applies to women who are not on hormonal birth control. Women on certain types of hormonal birth control might still get a period, but it's what they call a false period. And so they don't have that same cycle of hormones. And so they're going to respond more like men. So we do want to separate out the use of hormonal birth control when we're looking at the cycle data. I think it's going to be very important to now have this functionality in the app.

And actually for a couple of these, we've designed it a little differently. So it's not like every day you're going to have to say yes or no. Were you menstruating? You'll be able to effectively say on or off and sort of toggle in and out of these different periods, which is most relevant as well for pregnancy because you don't have to say you're pregnant for nine months straight. Kristen, what might people, you know, learn about their bodies as they're pregnant? Well, definitely your, you know, your sleep behavior is going to change. Your core body temperature changes. You know, there's all sorts of things happening in your body to make this

little human. So, as you can imagine, there's there's lots of things happening. So, you know, I think understanding, I think sleep number one is is going to be super helpful because there's probably things that you can adjust in your environment and your habits during the day to kind of help mitigate to a degree, some of the impact the pregnancy is actually having on your sleep behavior. Yeah. And I think, you know, over time, there's going to be this opportunity to learn from the data that, you know, it's not going to be available the day that we release the journal feature. But our training recommendations currently in strain coach are probably way too aggressive for a pregnant woman. And so over time, we'll start to understand.

understand by tracking this data, how do pregnant women, you know, in their various trimesters of pregnancy, how do they respond to training? What is a normal response given that you're also growing a human, which is an incredibly high strain event all by itself? And so how to kind of adjust those recommendations so that they stay appropriate. There's also potentially the option to start to create features around what's normal. So I know that when you're pregnant, your resting heart rate goes up a lot, especially, you know, towards the end. And it's because you're beating for two. It's normal, but it could be like, you know, so who probably shouldn't be showing you that you're getting way, way, way, way less fit, you know, and kind of freaking you out for no

reason. So if we know that you're pregnant, there's this opportunity to sort of change the language and the feedback and the insights that we're providing to sort of tailor around the fact that, like, hey, your resting heart rate's going up, but like maybe that's totally normal or maybe that's just something we don't want to comment on during this period. And you'll leave that to your doctor, but not, not like sound all these alarm bells that like, oh, wow, your resting heart rate went up 10 beats per minute, you're probably unfit. I think that's a great point. And also just the way you're describing our use of information back to the end user,

the member, is really important, right? We want to make sure that the feedback we're providing to an individual is based on their status in life. And so obviously we're going to give feedback to a woman who's pregnant differently from one who isn't. And by the way, we have two other states that are similar. in that through that lens in that you can now report whether you're injured or whether you're sick and that again will over time change the way whoop is communicating with you now for the men

listening you'll also be able to now say that you're parenting an infant so that that now applies to all members on who let's transition for a second here to nutrition which i'm particularly excited to see what we learn from given the number of people that have told me with a 100% certainty that their diet is the answer. And of course, that diet violates what the next person said. So we've got ketogenic diet. We've got meat-based diet. We've got a paleo diet.

We've got a plant-based diet. We've got intermittent fasting on here. I'm sure over time we're going to add more diets. Kristen, what do you expect we'll see in this? I mean, this is going to be like battle royale of dieting. But I think the big takeaway is that every. Everyone is different. Totally.

How you respond to a keto diet is going to be very different than me for a whole host of reasons. A lot of reasons. Yeah. And same with meat base versus plant base. There's so many things that go into it from genetics to just how you process food. Nutrition science is so complicated. And I think to have a blanket approach just isn't the answer, right?

You know, there are probably some principles that would apply to the general population. But I think it's going to have, it has to involve a large degree of experimentation. to really figure out how you are adapting and responding to different types of food. Content, quality, timing, you know, all of these things are are massive influencers, right? And they're all going to influence us differently. So it's exciting because I think we're going to have data that no one on the planet has around this. And I think we're going to uncover a lot of really cool stuff. And our goal for that, again, is to be able to tell you.

you what's right for you right i mean it's it to me it's crazy that people are saying this one diet is the diet you should be on without even knowing anything about you right um so anyway that's why i'm excited about about that whole section now another section is related to medication and i think this is going to be particularly interesting for people and highly personal so we have a section on anti-anxiety medication anti-inflammatory medication prescription pain medication, prescription sleep medication. Kristen, what should people make of this section? I mean, I think at a high level, I think we don't, you know, we think about just treating the symptoms, but not necessarily how that medication might be impacting kind of our overall wellness. And I think

when you can look at it in the context of sleep behavior, recovery behavior, how that might be influencing my, how I build strain, you know, now all of a sudden you start to see, wow, okay, maybe this isn't helping me as much. The trade-off isn't as good. You know, maybe I need to find different, an alternative way of dealing with some of these symptoms as opposed to the medication, just one way of maybe thinking about it. And by the way, another way to think about it is how it evolves over time in the way it affects you. Yeah. You know, for someone who recently got surgery you may require pain medication to be able to sleep but if if you know months later you know i just said a podcast with with a green beret who was talking about how months later he was completely

addicted to his pain medication if you're still taking it and now you're seeing maybe decreases in some of your physiology just from taking this thing habitually i don't know those that's hopefully where as a feedback loop this can be helpful yeah and again monitor the tradeoffs yeah that's where this hopefully can be a tool. I'm also very interested to see how certain sleep medications help people. And that's where people are going to need to pay close attention to. You know, Emily, we may find that Ambien helps you fall asleep, but doesn't give you REM and slow wave sleep, right?

And again, Woop is going to give you that feedback back to you. So let's not forget that either. Yeah, and I think it's also just a really valuable explanation about what's going on. Like we've seen for years that when allergy season hits, everybody starts taking antihistamines and their HRV plummets and then they freak out and then allergy season ends they come off of the antihistamines and their HRV just bops right back up and you know that might that definitely doesn't mean like don't take antihistamines for your allergies you have to treat the problem but as we start to gather this data you can kind of have this moment of like

okay that's normal that's caused by my allergy meds it's going to like fix itself in the you know summer or fall whenever you stop taking those and so you can kind of just start to learn like oh, that's attributed to this other thing, and it's not something that I necessarily have to worry about. Like, you know, I'm just going to take this prescription and then, you know, after whatever the course of medication runs off, it'll fix itself as opposed to just seeing like all of a sudden your data fell off and like whoop has no idea what happened or how to kind of explain that to you. We're clearly all excited about this feature. I think what's going to be more exciting even is seeing how WOOP members use it and what new behaviors and lifestyles and

and sorts of things that they want to track that maybe we didn't anticipate, and then getting to learn from the community. And I think the three of us will come back in some time to talk about, okay, on a population level, what are some of the different things we've learned? We'll report that back to our members, and who knows, maybe you'll discover something in the process that you didn't think of tracking that now you should track. Well, as always, I leave my conversations with both of you feeling wiser and more informed. Thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you, Emily.

Thanks for having us. If you're not already a Woop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free Woopstrap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's WI-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you 15% off a membership just for listening to this podcast.

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