WHOOP Podcast - John John Florence, two-time world champion surfer, shares how mindset prepares him for elite performance

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

John John Florence, two-time world champion surfer, joins the WHOOP Podcast for a discussion on mindfulness, visualization, and the mental skills needed to be successful in sports and in life.  He explains how his mindset helped him recover from a torn ACL in 5 months in order to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics.  John John also discusses how the best surfers in the world inspired him (5:20), the mental side of surfing (7:57), controlling the controllables (10:09), mindfulness in sports and life (15:50), overcoming his ACL injury (22:31), qualifying for the Olympics (25:55), surfing strain on WHOOP (29:12), understanding HRV (32:15), managing red recoveries (44:25), sleep need (50:34), and where he finds inspiration (55:04).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. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We got a great guest this week, who I'm going to get to in half a second. First, I want to let you know you can get 15% off a W-W-M-M-Bership. If you use the code, Will Ombed, that's W-I-L-L-H-M-E-D. W-M-M-M-Rewp membership includes hardware, software, analytics, and it's designed.

to help you improve your health. I also want to give a big congratulations to Hadeki Matsuyama, who just won the Masters. I happen to be at Augusta on Saturday and Sunday. It looked amazing. It was pristine. It was beautiful. And Hadeki Matsuyama played with enormous courage with, I think, the weight of his country on his back. And I think is our first whoop member to win a master's. So all new meaning for In the Green. Thank you, Hideki, and we're here if you ever need us. Okay, this week's guest is world champion surfer, John John Florence. John John was a prodigy in the surfing world,

becoming the youngest person ever to win the World Cup of surfing at the age of 13. And 15 years later, he's a two-time world champion, and he's now preparing for the Olympics this summer. I think the road to getting there wasn't as easy as quite, it sounds. John John tore his ACL in the middle of the 2019 season that jeopardized his qualification for Tokyo. He came back five months after his surgery, which we talked a lot about, and he beat the legendary Kelly Slater in the Pipeline Masters tournament to clinch his trip to the Olympics. We talked about how to channel your nerves in a positive way. This was really,

I think, a big theme for the podcast. I took a lot away from just how John John approaches visualization and his overall mindset, why it's critical to accept variables in surfing and in life, what heart rate variability can tell you about stress and readiness, how John John uses Whoop to optimize his performance, and why red recoveries are also a sign that you might not be at your best when it comes to decision making. I think you're going to find this awesome. I certainly did. Without further ado, here is John John. John, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Thanks. Thank you for having me on. So you were on a surfboard at the age of six months. What is your first memory of surfing? My first memory of surfing is definitely

not at that age. I probably remember surfing when I was like six or seven, I think kind of around that age, you know, pretty young, just have my mom take me out. Well, reading your story is really It's similar to, you know, many of these other world-class athletes where it's just like they grew up in their sport. You know, you see images of Tiger Woods when he's one-year-old swinging a golf club. And here you are on a surfboard at the, you know, age of six months. And you were competing in events at like an incredibly young age. So was it just kind of always obvious to you that you were going to become this amazing world-class surfer? Like, did you have that vision for yourself? no it's kind of hard to explain really you know it's you grow up so so like involved in the sport it's kind of your life it's kind of like what you do before school it's what you do after school what i did with my family every day um and so then i mean actually it kind of evolved into being really young and going to the surf contest where i would serve with all my friends and we could go to all the islands in hawai and travel kind of every other weekend and do uh

like the junior serve contest and then um that just kind it just kind of like naturally evolved from one thing to the next and then from there went to go to the nationals in california um and then from there just yeah there was never this thought of like oh i i need to be here you know it was kind of just like this kind of evolving thing that kind of happened over time um obviously once i got a little older you know winning a world title and things like that start coming into your mind And they're like, oh, that would be a pretty awesome goal. But yeah, it just seemed like things just kind of like evolved over time. I watched the movie Momentum Generation about the group of, you know,

they were all about the same age, Kelly Slater and others. And they grew up surfing together. And then sure enough went on to become many of the best surfers in the world. For you, you know, it sounds like your family played a big role in becoming a surfer. Did you have a kind of a whole group around you that you would surf with all the time, similar to it sounds like other groups of great surfers? Yeah, I had my family that was always around me. But then also growing up where I grew up was, you know, it's like the mecca of surfing.

Everyone comes to the North Shore of Oahu for three months, every single winter. It has the biggest, the best, most powerful waves that has some of the biggest surf contests in the world. And so I grew up getting to spend my time in the water with, like, Kelly Slater and Andy Irons and Mick Fanning and all these guys that, you know, Kelly and Andy were, like, battling for world titles when I was really at a young age. And so surfing the water with them and then seeing them within the world titles the next day at Pipeline right in front of my house was just, it was a crazy thing to be growing up in, you know? And so that was kind of like the group, you know. It was just this big surfing as a whole. Yeah, it's amazing to sort of think about that, this idea that your backyard was the number one home for surfing.

And you're surfing with these legends in the same waves, and then you're seeing them win a world title the next day. I mean, in some ways, that must have made it feel very possible. It must have made you feel like, hey, I can do this. Yeah, it made it feel possible, but it also made it feel in a way. like such another just realm of surfing I guess you could say you know when I when I first qualified for the tour how old was I was 19 I think and so when I first got on the tour I remember

coming up in a heat against Kelly and I was just like I can't beat Kelly like this is the guy that I've grown up watching win world titles you know and he was in a world title race the first year I was on tour and he ended up winning a world title that year and so But it was like kind of a hard thing to wrap your head around, you know, being in a heat with this guy, trying to beat this guy, trying to wrap your head around. I'm like, I can beat kind of my hero. And it took a while. Yeah, that's a mental barrier to get over, I imagine. I mean, the best analogy I'm thinking of right now is we have a lot of professional golfers on Whoop.

And they talk often about growing up idolizing Tiger Woods and how weird all of a sudden it was to be competing against him and then potentially beat. him and it's like they had to overcome that psychological gap almost before they could overcome the just the physical effort of beating him and it seems like you went through something similar yeah definitely i think it's so much in sports and i think with anything most things in life it's the it's the mental kind of battle of it you know it's how you think of the situation and how i think how you think of it really sets out like what you're going to do in that situation and so for me that's from the sorry from those moments like kind of set me off on a path of like really trying to make myself mentally strong in those situations,

really try to work through those situations, be comfortable competing. And for me, the mental battle is everything competing. When I feel mentally good, like that's when I surf my best. And when I'm able to kind of let things go and just move past things in my mind, I just allow myself to serve my best. What does mentally good mean to you or what does that mean to a professional surfer? I think everyone's probably a little bit different, but for me, mentally good is when I guess I can kind of accept everything, when I can accept that, yep, I'm tired today. That's fine. Some days I'll be tired. Yeah, I know I get nervous, like really accepting those kind of things and not fighting against them. I think, you know, when I'm not mentally good as well, when I catch myself really fighting against those things, like, I'm nervous. No, I don't want to. be nervous. I'm nervous. No, I don't want to be nervous. And you're kind of in this constant inner battle with yourself. And, you know, that just takes energy. It takes focus. It takes so much away from what you're doing in the moment, rather than just being looking at it. I'm like,

okay, that's how it is today. Like, I'm just, that's fine. Like, I'm going to continue on focusing what I'm doing here. Ever since I was able to really start, like, doing that and doing that in heats and stuff, that's I've had some of my best heats. You know, some of my heats where I was the most tired ended up being some of my most thought out clear kind of well put together heats I've ever had and it was interesting you know going to the heat being like shit I'm so so tired right now like I just want to take a nap like I've been surfing all day and then you get out then you're like okay like I'm tired I'm just going to try to be as efficient as I can and catching waves I'm going to be on the right waves and you change your mindset to that and

for me that was just a huge change it just opened a whole new world world up of, a whole new world up of where I could perform kind of no matter how I felt. I love that, that idea of an acceptance. And in a way, it's almost like being present too, right? You're not thinking about the thing that's about to happen or the thing that just happened. It's like you're in that moment. And I can only imagine how important that is for surfing, too, because so much of what you're doing, I imagine, is reacting to what the ocean's giving you.

Yeah, it's a hard thing to deal with. You know, you're dealing with a competitor that you don't know what he's going to do. and then you're also dealing with the ocean and you don't know what's going to happen there you know a wave could come a wave might not come that just goes back to the mental aspect of knowing what you can and can't control within those moments now what have you done to actually improve your your mental uh your mental game or your mental strength i read that you you also are into mindfulness like do you do visualizations how do you try to prepare yeah um i do a lot of visualization stuff a lot of meditation stuff and most of my visual visualization stuff though is you know i do a lot on like actual surfing and technique kind of stuff like that but for the most part it's on how i want to feel before it heat visualizing myself going down to the water putting my jersey on standing there at the water's edge and then they're like oh like i'm really nervous right now when i think about this you know and be like okay like yeah i'm nervous that's that's totally fine and kind of going into what we just talked about and practicing those

moments over and over again because I know for me like if I can practice those moments and I can get out into the heat and get to this mindset every time I'm going to do the best that I can do in that moment. And so that's like my visualization is like focusing on getting the mind right before heat. I love that so much. I mean the closest analogy I have in the business world is is pitching investors where you know you're convincing them to part with millions of dollars to help you build your business and you go in front of all these partners and you have to you have that moment. right where you're just like and i i i've done the same thing from a visualization standpoint it's it's it's unbelievable i don't think people realize whatever you do in life how much visualization

can improve your life and just feeling that nerves before you actually feel it and therefore becoming comfortable with it it's uh you described it beautifully i think yeah definitely and i actually wanted to ask you about that because you know starting a company and building a product and making something that people love is for me it just sounds like the craziest world ever. It sounds so nerve-wracking, you know, like, like you said, going up pitching in front of investors, like, yeah, what kind of techniques do you use? Is it similar? Is it like, you visualize that moment of going into it? And like, or does it do you visualize how the presentation goes? Well, I had a bit of a moment, I think, similar to what you described

with that moment of overcoming Kelly or overcoming the mindset that you can beat Kelly or someone of that talent, like where I was maybe 23, 24. I had already raised a few million dollars. Maybe the company was 15 or 20 people. But I personally realized that I was nervous. I was anxious. I wasn't present. I was over-caffeinated. I wasn't, you know, like I didn't feel like I was in control. And I also didn't see how I was going to get the company to the next stage. And mind you, what's scary about those early stages too is you're still in this existential phase of can you actually build the technology and that's when it's so important to be able to not just visualize yourself but to have a whole company that sees it it's going to happen because it's not happening it doesn't it's not real it doesn't exist you know you've got this vision that you really have to get a lot of people to believe and it was also a time where I was nervous with investors too and so I got into transidental meditation and that kind of led me down a rabbit hole of visualizing too.

And I just found that the more I could control my breath and the more I could control my thoughts, and in turn it felt like I could control my world. And that's probably the best way I can describe it, is that feeling that you're almost seeing yourself in the third person before you're in that moment. Like when you visualize, are you seeing it through your own eyes or are you seeing yourself walking down to the beach like when you just described right before the event i i feel like it goes back and forth yeah i'm the same yeah i feel like i feel like i see myself standing there but then i feel like i see my like hands grabbing the jersey and pulling the jersey over my head

um and then before the water yeah i'm like seeing myself standing there but then when i'm actually thinking of how i'm feeling like i do little things to like get myself into like a focus mode too of like feeling like the water rushing over my feet and really focusing on that. So like I can see that like as if I'm looking down at my feet and feeling that. So I feel like it just kind of bounces kind of back and forth. Well, that's a really smart technique too because I've talked to some experts in this and the more you can tie it to something that you feel or a sense, something that you see, something that you taste, you know, like things like that actually make the visualization feel that much more real and it's totally yeah it's almost like you're remembering your future yeah that's

super interesting because yeah like even right now just thinking about like the water going over my feet like I do it so often that like I almost feel that you know that sensation of that totally it's crazy what the mind is capable of and it's no surprise to me that that this has been a big unlock for you because I think I've met a lot of professional athletes who have serious levels of talent but actually have not invested as much on this side of it. And I think this side of it is a bit of the unlock to that future potential. Totally. And it's not even just in sports. I think it's in life in general. I noticed it like I take so many things from trying to think about it explain it. But I use, so I like to use like competition as a platform essentially. And it's a platform that's this amazing

platform. You get to compete. You get to test different mindsets. You get to test different things. in a really compact format, and you go through the whole range of emotions and competition in a really short timeframe. So you learn things really quickly. And so I've found like taking things that I learned from competition and applying it to life just works. And it works so well, you know, whether it's business stuff or interviews or talking on a stage in front of people. Like I'm absolutely terrified of these things, you know. And so for me, taking the stuff from competition that I've learned there and applying to all different sorts of life. It's just, it's been amazing for me. Yeah, that's so interesting. So, for example, maybe you didn't love

public speaking, but obviously you're a famous professional athlete. So you might now apply that same visualization technique to write before the competition to write before a public speaking event. Definitely. Yeah. Apply the same kind of almost process that I go through in order to get ready for competition to a public speaking event and interview anything really like I'm a pretty introverted person so I don't love being in like parties or big gatherings but so sometimes you have to do these things and I'll do that process like up to any of these things I'll just keep using it wherever I go and for you is that something that you're doing the morning like right when you wake up in the morning is it something that you find your your

like stealing off to do throughout the day. Is it something that you're sort of subconsciously doing in all walks of life? How regimented do you find this practices? I think it depends on the task at hand. So for example, for, you know, we have some events. I'm in quarantine here in Australia and we have events coming up and I've been taking this time to really focus on getting that mindset really good for the first events. Sure. And so that's like something, and even before the last event in Hawaii, I worked on it every single day for weeks.

Every morning I'll wake up and I'll meditate and I'll visualize and I'll go through these emotions every time and kind of work it and mold it and work it until it starts to feel just kind of right and it starts to feel good. But then there's other things, you know, where it might just be a couple hours before a big dinner or something like that where I'll just need to take a moment and be like, okay like kind of process what's about to happen clear my mind and remind myself that like it's okay yeah my heart rates at like 160 and I'm like about to go to this dinner like oh my gosh I'm so nervous and but you know just taking a moment to breathe and slow down and be like I'm not going to

die I'm fine this is going to be this is going to be great well I love your honesty too because I think a lot of people listening to this would probably be surprised that you're someone who even feels nervous going to a dinner or speaking in front of people because they see what you're able to do in the arena of competition. And I think a lot of people underestimate just how people in all walks of life are constantly trying to get comfortable in other scenarios, right? You've spent in a lot of ways your whole life in the water. So maybe that's a very comfortable environment for you. But you're using the same techniques to become a world-class surfer that, you know, be comfortable in this other setting. I just think that's a very, it's a very inspiring and useful

message. Yeah, definitely. And surfing for me, though, it's like you said, when I'm in the water, I feel really comfortable. And so when I'm standing on the beach before heat, I can be really nervous. And then, but as soon as I get out in the water and you're kind of sitting on the side, watching the heat before finish, and you're sitting there, you have a couple minutes. I start to just, like, all that kind of peels away. And I feel really good. And I feel really comfortable. I feel like I am separated from everything that's on the beach. And I feel like I kind of get into my zone out there. But so I don't feel that way about dinners.

Like, I don't feel like I'd go into this really comfortable place. So I really have to set myself up for it. Do you ever find that you're not nervous? Like, for me, almost being nervous is a sign that it's something that matters or it's something that I want. Or it's like, to me, it's almost like a positive trigger now. Like, okay, let's take this moment on. Yeah. You know, that's an interesting way to think about.

I've never really thought about it in that way, but I think it's really true because if I think back to times where I wasn't necessarily nervous, then I almost was like not taking it seriously in a way or not too relaxed. You know, like you get out there and you're just like, okay, like I'm so relaxed. And it just doesn't happen. Yeah. Just too relaxed. Like there's just that feeling of like I just don't care what happens. I think that. I think that. nervousness definitely shows that like yeah like I'm I'm kind of fired up for this this this means something like maybe that's it for me is like that it just means something you know yeah that's right definitely I think I never really thought about that that's really interesting yeah because I think that people sometimes think of meditation or mindfulness or visualization as a method to remove nervousness or stress altogether and at least the framework that I like to think of it as more is is not to remove those things to but to help you cope with them in a productive way and those are sort of two different those are sort of two different things

definitely because I think when you're trying to remove something you're essentially fighting with it in a way you're you're trying to grab grapple with it and mess with it and move it yeah rather than like just accepting like this is how I naturally am this is how I've been brought up this is how, what's been ingrained in me. And then you're able to move past things easier. I don't know, for whatever reason, like whenever you just accept the way that you are or accept the way something is,

you can just move through it a lot easier than trying to fight with it. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I'm not surprised you've been so enormously successful. Let's go back for a second to this injury you just overcame in a record time. You tear your ACL and you want to qualify,

for the Olympics. You were having this incredible season and you were able to recover from this injury in five months, which I think is pretty much unheard over, at least on a spectrum, would be on the crazy, fast end of the spectrum. How did you cope with that and maybe talk also a little about the mindset that you probably had to do it? I think, again, everything has to do with mindset on it because it's the way you look at the situation that really projects kind of your path. And so So when that ACL injury was kind of a two-year deal for me, like I had heard it in 2018, partially tore it, and then took six months of the competition off, came back to competition in 2019.

You know, feeling pretty good, it felt a little bit loose, but no more pain or anything. So I continued surfing through the 2019 season and did pretty well on two events right away. You were doing great. Yeah, it had a really big lead in the world title run. And then coming into event five, I think it was in Brazil, I re-tore the ACO, and I fully ruptured it this time around. And right away, I kind of just knew. I was just like, oh, okay, I'm pretty sure what happened here. And at first I was pretty like, just like, oh, I can't believe this.

Like, this is, you know, you're going after a dream of winning another world title, like this process that you're, you've started down this road. and you're like running full steam down one direction and then something just stops you in your path and you're just like no redirect go left and so I kind of felt like that's what happened and I just took that moment you know thought about it for a few days really focused on it and you know I think I could have gone back to competition braced up served without an ACL really tried to like fight through it and but overall like my goal is just to I wanted to be healthy and the long term. I wanted to be able to surf and do all the things that I'd love to do without thinking about it. And so that's when I decided to get the surgery. And knowing the surgery was

going to pull me out of the world title race. And most likely the Olympics was a really hard decision to make. But I just kind of thought like, you know what? In the long term, I want to be healthy. And another opportunity to will come. And I'll take this time and do things that I love to do that I don't get to normally do. And so I took like three months of that kind of when I was healing and went on this amazing sailing trip of something I've always wanted to do. And spent a lot of time on that, working on that, and that was a lot of fun for me. It came back, I really refreshed, just focused in on training and felt re-energized and kind of saw that Kelly was getting close to passing me in the ratings.

And then it just became a fun goal almost. I'm like, yeah, I want to see if I can heal this thing before the pipe masters and do the best I can, the Pipemasters, in order to qualify for the Olympics. And so it was just like, it was like turned into one goal and then it kind of pivoted to another goal and then pivoted to another goal. It felt really like free flowing through things that I wanted to do. Now, at that point, were you like, so let's say you're three or four months in on this and you have to come back really fast in order to get there in time to be able to qualify

for the Olympics and keep your rating above Kelly Slater? Were you visualizing that that was going to happen? Were you visualizing yourself at that event? Or were you just very focused on like I'm getting a little healthier today? It kind of became a day-to-day thing because when the first time I tried to surf was probably two weeks before the Pipe Masters. And I stood up on a wave and I just like went one-footed on my front foot because my back leg was the one that I got the surgery on. and so I went one foot in on my front foot and I was like there's no way I can do this like first wave and I was just like no way and then so I laid back down on my board and went in and walked up the beach and I was just like pipe is two weeks away it's one of the scariest waves in the world and I can't even stand on my board right now that's pretty fucking amazing two weeks before this thing and you couldn't you can't stand on your board yeah like how did you like that's a lot to overcome in a short period of time mentally so what happened the next day did you go back out? No. So what I did was I, I just broke it down into smaller pieces. And I just

kind of thought about it in the sense of like, okay, if I can't do it, I can't do it. If I'm not comfortable, I'm just not going to do it. But if I feel confident, then this will be an amazing opportunity. And so I just worked. So then I just went three days of really hard training, stretching everything I could possibly do, try to surf a little bit more, catch a couple of waves, stood up, it felt a little bit better, was able to ride a way of, like, not too much turning. Then, same thing, a few days, stretch, train, go back, and then go back, surf a little bit more. And it just kind of became this thing of just getting a few sessions in before the contest and each time upping a little bit into the positions that I knew I was going to need to be in, all these kind of

different movements I knew I was going to have to do. And so, yeah, working with my trainer and just every day working on it and when I got to like the day before the pipe masters I was just kind of amazed like wow like I cannot believe like because I hadn't been thinking about it the whole time until I got to the day before like I feel pretty good like I feel like I can do this now and I think I surprised myself more than anything on that one well it feels like you had a you had a good attitude about it you know you didn't put too much pressure on yourself like to have it be a success in the moment. But you said, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make it a success in the moment. Would that be a fair way to frame it? Totally. I like to look at it. I was like, I'm going to

do the best I can do. And I do that a lot in heats too. I just go, I'm going to do the best I can do with what I have right now. I'm tired. I don't have this energy. I'm just going to do the best I can do. And I think then you don't over expect anything, you know, so you don't have this huge, this huge pressure on you. You don't have the stress, the anxiety. everything kind of lets off and you just you do the best you can do and that's all you can do yeah no it's amazing now how long have you been on on whoop and how has that factored into some of your uh your lifestyle your training so whoop i've been using the loop since end of 2018 i want to say and then through all the injuries actually it got it started to get really interesting

because you can kind of see trends you can kind of see like okay oh wow like i had um my resting heart rate was high for like four days in a row waking up up to this injury, you know? Interesting. Yeah, and like I never realized how much we push ourselves surfing especially when we're free serving like fun. Like my brother, Nathan

and I have 20 strains like all the time. Amazing, right? Regularly having 20, 20.6, 20.7 strains like and so I didn't realize how much of a toll surfing takes. You're out there for so long, right? And you're you're like professional paddlers along with being professional surfers right you have to get out

yeah that was a big learning point for me though because you know i would go to an event and i would just surf all day and then show up the contest the next day and just surf my heat and then just kind of go with it but now realizing like whoa okay i know how much one session will take kind of energy wise and now how much two sessions will take you just started like regulating it way way better And so you have a lot more longevity and your energy, as well as the rest days, you know, thinking before like, oh, I need a rest day and just doing nothing all day. I would wake up worse recovered than if I do like a little something just to kind of move the body, like an active recovery type thing. Yeah. I wake up way better recovered the next day rather than just sitting around all day.

But more recently, though, like I've been really getting into just reading based on the, because sometimes it'll say, you know my HRV is really high and the heart rate is still pretty elevated too resting heart rate my recovery is still pretty far up but I've been balancing more just looking at the numbers and so if I have a really kind of high heart rate in the morning and a high HRV I'll kind of take that into account like okay like my body needs a little more rest today um my mind is good yeah but my body needs a little more rest and kind of vice versa you know playing with looking at the details of it more in that sense and applying it to the day. That's an interesting relationship when you have a high HRV but also a slightly higher resting heart rate.

Normally those trend in the same direction where you'd have a lower resting heart rate in a higher heart rate variability or a lower heart rate in a higher resting heart rate. But it's probably a sign that your body's getting a little fitter while also being a little run down. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, because your resting heart rate is reflecting that it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit sympathetic dominant. Although your heart rate variability is, you know, by it being elevated, it's a sign that your body's actually getting fitter and your heart is getting more balanced and taking it

on. So that's an interesting combination. The HRV has a lot to do with the mental aspect of it, right? Because, and I kind of understand it to a certain point, but from what I've seen, too, just in my experience with it, is like when I'm stressed, when I'm traveling, when I'm anxious, HRV just plummets. Like, it's much, much lower. Yeah, so we measure heart variability continuously, although a bit of the secret to whoop is that we're capturing the reading for recovery and the reading that we show you. we're capturing that during your slow wave sleep. And in particular, we're measuring it during the last five minutes of your slow wave sleep.

Slow wave sleep is when your body produces about 95% of its human growth hormone. So we're able to look at your heart rate variability during this period of time where your body's repairing itself. And that makes it a very good predictor of your next day readiness, your next day recovery. Because if your body is showing that it's more sympathetic, dominant, or less balanced. Your autonomic nervous system is less balanced, right, with sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. That's a sign that your body might be a little more run down. And the way that your stress levels can also affect that is your mind can also drive the sympathetic nervous system. And again, if it's more sympathetic dominant, that's almost the equivalent of exercise

where you're putting additional stress on your body without having that parasympathetic response, right? Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah, so parasypathetic is like what helps you fall asleep or when you inhale, that's sympathetic. When you exhale, that's parasympathetic and you effectively want the most to be in balance. Now, you probably have a high heart rate variability because, one, you're a professional athlete and two, you practice breathing. So each one of those independently would make you have a high heart rate variability. variability, but the combination of it is pretty nuclear. Man, my heart rate variability, this past like four months.

I just can't get it to where it was, though. And when you say where it was, where was it like that you're trying to? So when I was like, when I got hurt the last time for my last surgery, my like, and this was like my highest ever was like I was averaging at like 140. Yeah. And it showed like highs of like 220 or so. So that's very high. Yeah. And then, but now, you know, I'm just kind of ranging below that, like just below 100, just above 100, kind of back and forth around there. And I don't know if it's because like I'm not allowing like enough rest with it or if something's changed with it. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure of why I can't get it back to that. We'd have to spend a little bit of time talking about all the different behaviors and circumstances. It could be.

that you're getting cardiovascularly you're catching back up to your cardiovascular fitness of before you got injured right it could be that your body's still training itself back into that level of cardiovascular fitness it could also be that you're a little suppressed from doing things like travel right you're in australia yeah right yeah that's a big time zone jump your body's probably still trying to get used to this new time zone uh because that can have a big effect on your circadian rhythm and your ability to have yeah because we we actually went Hawaii to California for like four days and then California back to Australia for so it's like kind of been bouncing around time zones for a few days now yeah so I would expect actually your

HRV right now to be suppressed and you could even argue that if since it's not that suppressed maybe you're actually doing just fine like maybe you're in a very good place once that stabilizes I bet you will see it go back to some of those higher levels. And if you compare that to the moment in time before where you felt like you had high heart rate variabilities, were you generally in Hawaii and generally not traveling as much? Yeah. And I was, um, the highest heart rate variability I had was when I was kind of resting for a whole week. You know, like I allowed my body to kind of catch up with all when I, because when I'm at home, it's hard. I serve so much. Like every day I wake up and I look at the way as I'm like, I have to go serving. Boys are good. And so it's like,

Like, I'm never really allowing myself to catch up. And so the best it got was when I kind of had a week and I allowed myself to kind of catch up with it. Yeah. So that would be an example where you trained for a long time and then let your body rest. That's like how you actually peak, right? You think about an Olympian, well, you're now about to be an Olympian, but you think about what you want to peak on that specific day. That's the kind of behavior that you'd want to lead up to on the specific day that you want to win that medal, right? That's interesting.

So you want to train really hard and then you rest and then you have that and probably a little bit more of an active rest as you were describing before. That's some of the work that we've done with other Olympians because it's a little bit of a different thing than, you know, I don't know, take a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player or whatever, even a golfer. You know, they're competing every other day or something like that, right? And so them it's more about consistency. sort of this daily notion of optimal for for an Olympian a lot of it's about peaking and it's like

it doesn't matter for a month ago it matters where you are today because today you need to win the right that's a that's a cool way to look at it what got you into all this like what got you into creating this thing yeah I was a college athlete and um I played squash while I was at Harvard which is like a pretty cardiovascular sport in itself and I was someone who used to overtrain where I kind of just felt like every time I worked out, it should be the hardest it could be. That was kind of my mindset of training. And, you know, it gets you very fit, but then all of a sudden you fall off a cliff, or at least I did.

And I was really young and naive, and I was in college. And it didn't even really occur to me that if I did a great practice or a great workout, that all the stuff I did afterwards would then limit the benefits of that. And this is like 2010. 2011 time frame. I think the pendulum at that point within sports, it really swung pretty far in the direction of more is more. Can you do two workouts today? Can you do three workouts today? And at the same time, I was, you know, I was a college kid and like I would stay up late. I'd go out. I'd, you know, you have to study at some point at Harvard. So like, there was just a lot in my life. And I wasn't

focused at all on rest and recovery. And so I started just doing physiology research while I was a student. that let me down a rabbit hole really of okay there's this metric heart rate variability okay there's resting heart rate okay there's sleep like wow if you could measure these things think how much you'd be able to tell an individual about their bodies and so i i just like my personally wanted to be able to measure those things about my own body and i got very interested in that and very excited about that and you know by the time i was done doing research i had read like 500 medical papers and written a paper myself around how to measure the body. And so that, you know, that really became the business plan for Woop. And by my senior year, I committed to starting the

company, which was in hindsight a pretty crazy thing to do, but super grateful I did. Yeah, me too. Well, you did that. Well, no, it's a moment of gratitude for me just to get to meet you and talk about all this and to know that you're getting value out of the process. product. I mean, it's really what I was dreaming of when the company was first founded is that it could have this kind of an impact authentically for everyone from the world's best athletes to your everyday consumers. And it just, it makes it fun, you know? It makes it fun to think about it, I guess. Things that normally aren't that fun to think about it. It makes it like, I talk to talk to my brother about it all the time. We wake up every day and we talk about

because we're I feel like fit wise we're pretty even like cardio wise and things like that and he'll come up with these scores and I'll come up with these scores I'll like why is that happening and so we'll think about it and we'll like talk about it and it just opens up the conversation um and so I just think that's why it's so cool you know to people who like you know before that I never thought about heart rate or anything like that and now that's like all we can talk about after we surf for six hours no I love it I mean there I think just as a general rule, it's very hard to manage things that you don't measure. And as you've learned, like, so much of your success comes from being in that right mindset,

having your body be recovered and ready. And so to me it seems like the ultimate waste to not be able to figure out what are those ingredients that make you peak or make you optimal in a given day. Just down to the little things of like I recently was. using a hyperbaric chamber a bunch and um i thought it was really interesting you know if i used the hyperbaric you know two days in a row the third day my recovery would actually go down um and then you know a day after that it would shoot back up really high and so whatever it was the hyperbaric did to my body just it took a day for my body to like kind of like accepted i felt

like whatever you know having all that oxygen and so i used that to my advantage i I looked at, if I had the contest, I used it, made sure I didn't use it the day before I surfed in the heat, you know? And so all the little things like that, like you can really start like lining them up. I love it. I remember we worked with the Olympic, the U.S. Olympic swim team and this is years ago. But their default was to travel to time to their time trials. They would travel three days before the event. But what they saw is that actually, actually, their recoveries the day after they got there were high, and then they slowly declined to the day of the event, which is obviously the worst possible thing. So they were doing the time

trials when they had, like, relatively speaking, their lowest recoveries, which is like such, it's completely undermining all the work that they've put into being these physical specimens. And what they saw is then two days later, their recoveries came back up. And so they were able to change their behavior for the next time trial to travel five days before the event versus three and sure enough they saw the same thing where it was high then it dipped and then it came back right when they needed it too that's so crazy that's really crazy yeah i just i can't imagine like you train for two years or three years and then it's like the day that you fly to the event that ends up being the reason whether or not you're successful right doesn't that seem like

to undermine everything about what it means to be a peak performer. Yeah. So, and I think what, you know, what's also exciting about this moment in time is I think the professional athletes yourself, of course, included, like you play such a big role in helping society at large understand what's right for them. I think the next story or the story that's actively being told is how you all, you top peak performers, treat your bodies to be able to do this type of competition, to be able to do this type of strain day and day out. What are you doing for rest and recovery? Because guess what?

All the rest of us who are entrepreneurs or executives or lawyers or cops or firemen, you name it, need to be able to do our lives, do our jobs, do our lives, and be productive ourselves. And so whatever learnings we can take into rest and recovery and diet and lifestyle, I think are incredibly valuable. Yeah, and I think it kind of goes to what we were talking about earlier, how it's like transferable from sport to any way of living, any way of life. Like you can take the mental aspects of it, the physical aspects of it, the, you know, taking the whoop of it.

And just so you're not performing in a sport, but performing in life in general better. Yeah, I mean, I now know when I've got a red recovery and my body's run down, I know that I shouldn't be, like, still making a bunch of decisions for the company at, like, 6 p.m., 7 p.m. Like, it's better to just kind of shut it down and push those decisions to the next day. Even that little thought right there is something that I haven't even thought about. Like, it's when I see a red, I just think, okay, don't do anything physical. But then I'll go ahead and do, like, all these, like, phone calls and kind of other decisions that I haven't been able to make the days before because I was being physical.

And I'll be making all these decisions when I'm just super unrecovered, like that, super tired, not thinking clearly. Yeah, be careful with that. I mean, I've certainly done that, my fair share over the years. But I have come to realize that it's just not, it's not as optimal as it can be. And you just want to, you know, you want to make sure that for the really important decisions, you're giving them the, you're kind of putting forth your best mindset in making them, right? Yeah, totally. That's really interesting. I like that.

I mean, the thing you have to balance with all of it, and I certainly do, is still this sort of attitude of acceptance, right? Yeah. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation. I feel like it's this feeling that even if I'm red, I can figure it out, you know? Yeah, you can definitely figure it out. But if I wake up, I like to think about this way, if I wake up on a day that the contest is running, they're running regardless if I'm red or not. So you kind of have to have that acceptance of like, I'm red today. I'm terribly recovered, but I'm going to do the best I can do.

But then there are those days where it's like you talked about having a business meeting, a business decision, a phone call, where you wake up and you're in the red and you're like, this can actually probably wait until tomorrow to be a little more of a clear decision, clear thought process through it. So I think it's cool to be able to balance those things, you know, having the accepting part if it has to happen, but then also, having the balance part if it doesn't have to happen. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's a great attitude. What are a couple other things maybe you've tweaked about your lifestyle over the years

that you have maybe made you a better athlete or a better person? Alcohol is a really big one. You know, like I see that I'm not a big drinker by any means or party or anything like that. But if I have one beer or one glass of wine, I'm fine. It doesn't really affect my recovery. But if I go to the second glass of wine or the second beer or second drink of alcohol, it just terribly affects my recovery. Like, my recovery plummets down. And so little things like that, you know, just seeing like where your limit kind of lies within it. That's been a huge one for me.

The type of food I eat, if it's really clean, kind of light, good, you know, maybe some fish, salad, good rice or something. I'll wake up really well if it's a little bit of a heavier like a burger cooked like thicker kind of meal I feel like I definitely see it in my recovery

it's interesting hydration same thing yeah my if you look at my desk I mean I'm just like I've got water bottles all around my desk I'm just constantly drinking out and I'm certainly not doing to my body what you are which I imagine that could be something that sneaked up on you

because it's not like you've got a water cooler out in the middle of the ocean. No, and it's crazy because, like, Nathan and I, my brother, we had, in the beginning, when the winter started in Hawaii, we had a week where we surfed, like, I think we served three days in a row, seven-hour sessions without coming in. And so you're just seven hours straight in the water and the sun and the elements. And when, yeah, when you think about it, it just like, you're saying, sitting out there in the sun, you know, sweating. You can't feel it because you're in the water, so that you are sweating.

It's just a long time without water. Hydration. Yeah, that's a lot. The other one related to diet, which is sort of a sneaky one, is eating close to bedtime. You know, the more space between when you eat dinner and when you actually go to bed, I think, the better. I've seen that in my data. We've seen it across the whoop population.

So it's interesting because every year I do, I'll do like a blood test and then get like a full panel then. And one of the tests I got back, the doctor asked or the nutritionist asked me, hey, are you having a really big break between meals? So like you're eating dinner and then you're eating breakfast, but like there's like a certain amount of time where your body starts to create a certain type of chemical. I'm not exactly sure of the exact of what your body's creating. But he was just saying that it's not necessarily the best thing to go like a huge amount of time. Obviously there's fasts and things like that that you can do.

But he said for what I was doing, what I wanted to accomplish. And so I thought that was interesting because, you know, like you said, eating earlier and it does feel better. You sleep better. Like there's so many things that add into it that I can feel. But I wonder, is there a limit to that? like how early? Like if you're eating at dinner at 4.30 in the afternoon or five or seven and going to bed at 9.30 now. Like where is where does that number? I think the magic number is around three hours before bed. But all of this also is relative to when you wake up and like if you're

spending someone who's spending nine or 10 hours in bed, then maybe you actually do need to eat closer to bedtime. Yeah, that's like me. I spend like nine or like nine or 10 hours in bed. Do you really? Yeah. I mean, that doesn't surprise me because you're spending so much time exercising, competing. Your body's probably so tired.

That's actually another thing that I learned with the whip was if I don't get over nine hours, it's really hard for me to get in the green recoveries. Wow. So your body really needs that much sleep. Yeah. So nine hours for me is like that, like just that line of like where I'll get consistently good recoveries if I consistently sleep nine hours or more. See, on the spectrum, you're probably like a real outlier in the amount of strain you put

on your body and the amount of sleep you get. Like you're talking about getting like 20 day strain and then sleeping for nine hours. It's very similar to, you know, people who are training for Iron Man's or these hardcore triathletes, like they literally need nine hours of sleep to be able to recover to do the whole thing again the next day. A lot of people can put a 20 strain on their body, but they can't recover green the next day or even a couple of days later. Yeah, that's super interesting. That's what that's the one thing I love.

I love that, you know, the Iron Man, the marathons, like all that stuff where you're pushing your body to just like such a limit of fatigue and then trying to recover good for the next day, you know, whether we're surfing for seven hours or this summer we got into cycling and doing like a hundred mile rides nonstop. And so you do a hundred mile ride. And if you're not cycling all the time, that feels like a lot. It's far. It's a long time on the bike. And so you come back from it. And you're just a, your body is just obliterated. You're just like sitting there just like, oh my gosh, how am I going to even like almost so tired

to the point where it becomes hard to sleep in a way. It's hard to get your body to go to sleep. But that's the coolest part about it is like figuring out how you can recover not and just total 10% the next day. Well, that's the right mindset, too. I mean, I'll meet entrepreneurs or even professional athletes and they'll say, so you're going to tell me I should do less. And I'm like, no, not necessarily.

Like, I think actually the goal is to take a ton on your body, but then be able to recover from it. There's this conventional wisdom in the worlds of overtraining, which is sports, and the worlds of like burnout, which would be, say, your entrepreneur or your executive who like is just go go go the conventional wisdom that's offered to those folks who are overtraining or who are who are burning out is like you need to do less and that may be right but I think a better framework is like well what could you do to take on the same level of strain but recover from it and once you adopt that as a mindset I think it can

make you a real animal like you can you can really be a consistent hardcore you know all out person but you have to embrace the other half of it which is how do you recover from what you're putting on your body yeah and i think those um i think that it's a mixture of like you know you can have like we did these 100 mile rides and for us that was a really big kind of like a lot but we didn't do it three times a week you know we're doing it maybe like once a week and so then doing everything you can to recover eating as much food the different types of food sleeping hydration all this stuff and seeing how we recover the next day kind of resetting for a week and then trying again it wasn't this i've noticed the bad thing it for it is is when you go non-stop

and like i said this we served for seven hours in a row like three days in a row just going going and going going and then getting to like the fourth day and i'm pretty tired but i'm like oh i just want to serve and having fun and then tearing my mcel right you know yeah so like it's that it's that you can balance of like learning how to push in in certain moments and doing certain things i think and then learning how to recover from that and then you can apply that to when you do need to go like for a couple days in a row i don't know that's that's how i've been kind of taking it. I love that as an attitude. What are some sources of inspiration for you? You know, whether it's related to performance, whether it's related to health and well-being or just your

overall mindset. I get a lot of inspiration for kind of well-being, mindfulness from a lot of just different books. Right now I'm reading a book called The Obstacles the Way, the pretty cool book. Yeah, Ryan. He actually came on the Wood Podcast. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. That's an awesome book. I like it a lot. It kind of feels like it's just really drilling in like a great idea. Yeah, it's just throughout the book. Also, you know, these people who do these long-distance sports of like whether it's cycling or running or Iron Man's, things like that's where you're pushing yourself to the absolute limit of what your body. can physically do yeah um to me that's just so it's so interesting because you can do so much more than you think and i love to try to push to that you push to a limit you get to the limit and then

you're like i can't do it anymore and then you go a little further and you're like okay now i can't do it anymore and you go a little further and you're like now i can't do anymore you can kind of like you can go so far past what you think your limit is and so i i love that part about that inspires me in time. And then the other side of it, like the performance side of it, I think, just goes back to that mental side and being able to put yourself in the best mindset in the most uncomfortable situation. Yeah, I like that.

Are there any athletes specifically that you look up to in their ability to do that or you've kind of learned something from over the years? Yeah, you know, within our sport, I think Kelly Slater, obviously, he's just an amazing athlete he's done it for so long and he just has so much knowledge about doing that, you know, showing up to an event the day before and just being able to wrap his mind around, like, yeah, I haven't been here to practice, but I'm going to show up and I'm going to win.

Like, that's a hard mindset to have, you know. And then someone like McFanning, who is, you know, he seemed to me when he was on the tour, much more regimented and, but just so consistent. And seeing that consistency is, is inspiring as well. But then looking outside of our sport to people like, you know, Kobe Bryant and the things that he did and the things that he talked about, I also thought it was really inspiring and really interesting.

Is surfing a sport where you find yourself interacting with athletes of all different backgrounds, or do you find that you spend most of your time within the world of surfing? You spend a lot of time in the world surfing, but world of surfing, but I feel like I have a lot of different interests. You know, whether it's sailing or cycling or surfing or all these different ones that I kind of get into throughout the years. And so I like to look into these different sports. And sailing is actually a really interesting one. They just finished this race called the Bondi Globe, where you sail solo nonstop around the world. Isn't that amazing? It's crazy, right?

And so it's like it's 70 days at sea you're racing. and to me that is the ultimate like mental challenge of being by yourself everything's on you and you're trying to balance like getting 20 minutes of sleep at a time like for for me someone who I feel like I need nine hours a night these guys are getting 20 20 minutes and then waking up something's breaking fixing it you know and it it's really physical they're moving these big sales around by themselves I love looking into the other sports and getting inspired from that. Well, I love it, man. I think you're a real inspiration. It's been a pleasure getting to talk to you about your career and your mindsets and how you've used WOOP. And yeah, this is just a pleasure.

I hope we get to meet in person soon. Yeah, thanks so much. Well, it's a super good meeting you too. Wishing you all the best of luck and I'm sure you're going to win the next one. All right. Thank you. Thank you to John John for coming on the Woop podcast. We are wishing him luck. at the Olympics. A reminder, you can use the code Will Ahmed to get 15% off of W-A-H-M-E-D. W-I-L-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. Check us out on social at W-W-P at Will-A-M-A-M-A-M-E, and stay healthy, folks.