WHOOP Podcast - Kristen Holmes, WHOOP VP of Performance and NCAA Champion Coach talks helping elite athletes sleep and recover, plus all the tips & tricks she uses to optimize her own performance.

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

Kristen Holmes, Vice President of Performance at WHOOP, former Team USA field hockey player and national champion coach at Princeton University discusses how her coaching philosophies evolved (9:09), the physiological and psychological factors of performance (15:10), advising the world's best athletes (31:05) and what they've learned from WHOOP data (39:20), Moneyball 2.0 (45:39), the vital importance of sleep (21:40), including blocking blue light (55:10), creating the right environment (56:35) and sleeping consistently (1:04:10), functional overreaching as a training method (1:11:30), mindful breathing (1:17:00), nutrition (1:23:15), recovery methods her athletes like and don't like (1:30:56), and the single most important thing we can all do to be healthier (1:43:39).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

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome 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. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for the best professional athletes in the world,

to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast to dig deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. When I founded Whoop, I didn't know exactly where it would take me, and hosting a podcast was certainly not one of the first things on my mind.

In the process, though, I've gotten to interact with amazing athletes, advisors, investors, and had some really fascinating conversations. And that was a lot of the inspiration for starting this podcast. podcast. I think there's something about this format, this type of conversation that really allows you to delve deeper. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop Podcast. As long as you're aware of what the optimal choice is, there's no reason why you can't be the best version of yourself pretty consistently.

My guest today is Kristen Holmes. Kristen is the vice president of performance here at Woop and works with thousands of the best professional and NCAA athletes in the world. If your favorite athletes having trouble sleeping, she's the one they call in to help understand and interpret the individual's whoop data. Along with that, Kristen's an amazing coach and athlete in her own right. She's a former member of the U.S. national field hockey team, as well as one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history, having won 12 league championships in 13 seasons and the first national championship ever for Princeton University and the Ivy League.

Today we talk about her career, her role at whoop and all the athletes that she works with, the advice she gives them in terms of performance and recovery. And I think for a lot of you listening who are who are whoop users or thinking about how to monitor your body, you'll find a lot of the insights that she gives really relevant for you. Without further ado, here's Kristen. Kristen, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me, well. So we are sitting here in the whoop headquarters, recording this in our office. There's so many things that I'm excited to talk to you about today.

You know, one being just your journey at whoop and all the phenomenal. nominal athletes that you work with on a daily basis, really some of the best athletes in the world. You personally have some of the best whoop data of anyone in the office or anyone I know, so it's going to be interesting to talk to you about your techniques for improving lifestyle and improving daily health. But I want to start by just talking about your career to date and how you got into sports in the first place. If we go back in time a little bit, you are a member of the national field hockey team in 2005, and you had been playing for quite some time. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, how you got into field hockey as an athlete and everything

that you've enjoyed about it. Yeah, so going way back, you know, I remember when I was like four years old, or my dad recounts this story. You know, for my birth, I asked to have, I asked for two things, I asked to have my ears pierced and I asked for professional basketball. So literally coming out of the womb, I was just really into sports and just loved everything about it, really gravitated to team sports, was playing basketball at an early age, and I was really into soccer, I was playing at the club level and doing really well. And then my best friend encouraged me to play field hockey. And, you know, seventh grade, and I just fell in love.

And I remember there was this U.S. field hockey publication called The Eagle. And it featured, you know, Olympians and, you know, some head coaches. I remember very clearly the Iowa coach, Beth Beglin, and the UNC coach, Karen Shelton, and they had these, like, storied careers, you know, in the national team and were so successful as coaches and as athletes. And so they really became, like, my idols and ended up being the two choices that I kind of gravitated to for college. But that really, you know, kind of having that visual of the possibilities, I think,

really inspired me to kind of train and practice. And that became just really my obsession was, you know, to make, you know, to go to college, play field hockey and play on the national team represent my country. Well, you did that very successfully. You graduated from the University of Iowa. You were an all-American athlete there. You then went on to play as a member of the national field hockey team. What was the moment for you when you said, okay, I've been this phenomenal athlete myself. I'm now interested in coaching.

I'm interested in helping other athletes. You know, even as an athlete, you know, I would be the geeky ones sitting in the stands, you know, scouting Korea and, you know, watching extra film. And so I always kind of had this interest in, you know, really digging into the opposition and understanding their strength and weaknesses. And so it was very end of the tactical piece. And I love the innovation of, you know, thinking about pressing and outletting and all the kind of tactical components of the game.

And I played basketball too. So I was, you know, really interested in. the out of balance plays and a lot of the set pieces. And so I was always kind of at a young age had a very kind of, I guess, tactical interest in sports. So I think I always kind of had that coaching mind. So even while I was playing, I was an assistant coach at the University of Iowa. I was coaching the U19 national team. I was coaching the U17 team. So even as an athlete, I was actually actively coaching. So I kind of always knew that I loved that piece of it. I loved interact with that. I love teaching. So I think I, you know, I kind of, it was always kind of in my soul to kind of work with

athletes, you know, even while as an athlete myself. Well, that's an amazing calling. And to be fair, I think it's a little unusual to be, you know, the best member of a team from a, from a talent standpoint, and also someone who gets excited about coaching. Normally you find it's like the role players who are looking at the game a little more cerebrally. And then you've got, you know, the high talent people who are a little bit more difficult to deal with than just competitive. Well, that's interesting. I mean, definitely on the national team, it, you know, took me while to kind of, you know, work my way up. So I really did, you know, I was more of a role player. I made the team when I was young, you know, I was in, I was still in college where I made the national team. So I really had to work my way up. So I think that that probably was a little bit of a forcing function that I was a role player. I was trying to establish myself. And I knew that I had to really really really really to really solidify myself. Okay, so in 2003, you start coaching at Princeton. Yes.

And just to hammer the point home, over the course of 13 seasons, you won 12 Ivy League championships and a national championship, making you one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history. So this is an incredible run. Take me back to 2003. It's your first year as a coach. You know, what are you thinking? I was so young and dumb. I just made stony mistakes. Fortunately, you know, I had a lot of really great mentors. You know, the gentleman who hired me, Gary Walters, he's the athletic director at the time. He really gave me a long leash, but was, you know, very, you know, subtly kind of guided me. And I had a Emily Goodfellow was, you know, one of most important people to me while I was at Princeton. She was always there to kind of encourage me. She was a three-sport athlete played field hockey squash, lacrosse, arguably. the best female ever to go through Princeton. And she was really present and available and amazing.

And Martin Franks, who is, his son actually was our, Athena Franks was our team manager. He and his wife, Mary, were just really helped me through the fundraising. And a lot of the administrative stuff that's required to be a coach, because it's not just the tactical pieces of, but it's also kind of this really, you know, kind of a robust, like administrative piece in terms of the fundraising, especially in Ivy School. So, yeah, so the early career was a little bumpy and then realized really quickly that, you know, I think I was one of the better technical and tactical coaches in the country and, you know, always kind of pushing the limits there. But I realized that, you know, the physiology and the psychology were equally, if not more important. So I really started, even, you know, kind of as I was leaving University of Iowa, I really got into kind of performance science and just the research and, you know, how to think about performance on a more holistic level.

started building out models so I could help my athletes think about their performance, apart from what was actually going to influence their ability to be effective on the field. And that involved kind of habits, the behaviors, the strategies, the routines, you know, everything underneath that's happening before they get to the practice field, kind of what did that actually look like and what was important about that. So I started kind of adding that, I guess, to cut up my thoughts and, you know, really intellectually how I spent my time so I could be a more effective coach and really help these young women. optimize their potential in on the field but obviously off the field as well okay so let's break down

the few different functions of just being a college coach and i think that today you know being a coach at the collegiate level is to some degree romanticized because you you know you the fan will see these college coaches in basketball or football especially on the men's side like making so much money and they've got like such an edge and they you know they seem like these sort of ridiculous figures, to be frank. And yet there's so much going on behind the scenes. And I, you know, it wasn't that longer that I was a college athlete. I just remember witnessing this, you know, from the point of view of an athlete or as a captain. For you, like, let's break these different functions down. So recruiting as one, right? What was your mindset on recruiting? How did you get

the best people? Obviously, there's like a rich get richer component because you win 13, you know, championships. And so people are like, okay, this is the best school or the best coach. But, in those early years especially, talk to me about recruiting. Yeah, I mean, I just tried to kind of establish Princeton as a high performing environment. You know, if I wanted to attract high performing athletes, I needed to, you know, think about physiology a little different, you know, think about psychology a little bit different, you know, making sure that the athletes felt like they had the resources to, you know, if they had the goal of making the national team, they weren't really going to Princeton, right?

They were going to these other schools. They were going to UNC. They're going to Maryland. They're going to Iowa. you know, how did I make Princeton attractive to those type of athletes? So really, I think what we had to do is make them feel comfortable that if they came to Princeton, they would be able to develop the skills and expertise to eventually achieve their goal of making an Olympic team because we had never had an Olympian on, you know,

from Princeton, I feel like a player. So it was really kind of making sure technically, tactically, athletes and their families felt comfortable that they would get the knowledge that they needed in that area. And then I think where we had an advantage is, you know, I really kind of developed this pretty robust, like, performance education platform that I think also, I think attracted athletes said, wow, okay, in addition to kind of the field hockey, I'm also going to be building some really cool knowledge around the physiological and psychological factors that are actually going to influence my ability to leverage my, you know, genetics and my skills and expertise in the sport. So you just touched upon a really interesting concept, which is the psychology of, managing college athletes and also how to manage their psychology. And, you know, one thing that we talked about a lot when we first got to know each other, we'll talk about how we met in a little bit, but the high performance initiative is something that you created while you were at Princeton.

And it touches on all these different elements. So explain that to our audience that might not be familiar with it. Yeah. So when I was at Princeton, and, you know, it's funny because now that I'm inside literally every high performance environment across Division I sports, as well. well as professional sports, I can see that there really is this gap in terms of providing student athletes with the resources, the education that they need to really understand what it is that's going to influence their performance on a day-to-day basis. You kind of get it in these, you know, little pieces across your four years, but there's nothing really structured that creates a very specific mental model around, you know, what to, you know, what

I need to focus on on a daily basis. And that's really what, why I developed this high performance initiative for Princeton was I wanted the administration, you know, to have a very clear picture of what it is that they needed to focus on to really help student athletes understand how to perform consistently day in and day out, you know, and that's where, you know, you win 12, Ivy League championships in 13 years. It's, there's a consistent message that's happening. There's a consistent education that allows you to replicate performance, it allows you to replicate performance, allows you to replicate high-level performance. And so I kind of felt like I had this formula in a sense that I wanted to share.

I kind of developed this platform, this educational platform that I, you know, for Princeton, to kind of give them really the blueprint of, from a physiological perspective and psychological perspective, that could really, you know, position performance more as a choice as opposed to something that you're kind of hoping you, you know, get to once every four years. Like a random walk. Exactly, you know, totally. Like, it really isn't rock and science, you know. I really believe in my, in my soul that performance is a choice.

And, you know, and that's really the message that I sent to my athletes. Like, if you're willing to develop the habits, if you're willing to focus on the variables that we know are going to influence your mindset and your perception, your appraisal. And, you know, you can then effectively choose your level of mental, physical, emotional response. You know, so it's really about kind of controlling for that energy production movement. motivation on a consistent basis. And that's all very possible. You just have to understand those factors that influence performance and have the right information on daily basis on how to develop the right behaviors. So if you think about the factors specifically that influence performance, and let's keep this still to the lens while you were at Princeton, what were the things that

you were focused on? Yeah. So on the, on the physiological side, you know, we're very into sleep behavior. You know, it's the most important behavioral experience we have as human beings. So making sure athletes understood, you know, that, hey, I need to spend time at bed. I need to dedicate time at bed. And we would kind of create, they understood the reasons, of course, and then we developed some rules around, all right, four nights a week. I'm getting, you know, at least nine hours. You know, we would have some kind of specific rules in season. Of course, we didn't have the technology at the time. No, we were just guessing. I definitely realized, you know, a good decade ago, like, wow,

okay, this is something that we need to start leveraging. We need to start educating. We need to start pounding the drum. So sleep behavior, you know, on the physiological side, training behavior and adaptation. You know, we started using some pretty robust technology to kind of understand heart rate and heart rate variability, you know, epoch. You know, we were substituting off of epoch. We were doing things that no one is really doing even now on the physiological side, you know,

understanding training effect, you know, what is my practice doing to the athlete and how can I position them to be as ready to go toward the end of the season when they need to and keep them healthy and safe during the season. So we were kind of doing that really well. So training adaptation and then recovery behavior. You know, what's that nutrition look like? What does the hydration, you know, look like? And what are the recovery stress rest cycling? You know, we're really into trying to build in, you know, rest throughout the day, just understanding, of course, you know, what that stress accumulation looks like in terms of its impact on sleep and just kind of how that affects your mindset and your optimism and things like that. So that's the

physiological side. On the psychological side, we focused on purpose, you know, so into behaviors, your behavior should always reflect what you say you value. So the exercise around values. And I think if my athletes at the time would probably roll their eyes, oh my God, she's talking about values But, you know, whenever there is an alignment between your behaviors and values, you have that dissonance. And that is where unhappiness comes. That's you can't possibly be present or peaceful, which are two of the most, I think, fundamentally most important things that you can really kind of focus on a day-to-day basis. But having that purpose, you know, why do I play the sport? Why am I at the school?

And trying to be super mindful and conscious of all of that. You know, how do I build in gratitude? And so I think that purpose piece is psychologically is, you know, one of the most important needs that we have. And then autonomy, you know, I wanted them to feel like they had the keys to, you know, to our environment, that they had, you know, stake in what we were doing. And so, you know, feeling like they had some control over the schedule. And that's, again, you know, fundamentally one of the most important psychological needs that we have is that that feeling of autonomy. And you can really lose that in a collegiate and professional environment very, very quickly. So as a coach, I want to just make sure that my infrastructure was, you know, positioned at a way that made them feel like they had some level of autonomy. And then finally, you know, kind of that third psychological fact that we focused on was was efficacy and competency, making sure that they feel like they had the resources and skills to do the stuff that I was asking of them on a daily basis. And also empowering them. Princeton is a place where it's hard to ask for help, you know, and I think getting them

focused on the, do I feel like I have the skills and resources to do what my professors are asking of me? And if I don't, then, okay, what kind of help do I need? to get. And so I really tried to get them to feel comfortable or, you know, just make sure there wasn't a lot of angst around kind of asking for help. So those were kind of the physiological and psychological factors that we focused on. Well, it's an amazing summary. And, you know, you touched on an important concept, which is in an environment like Princeton, you know, there's this feeling at times where you can't ask for help. It's a competitive, high-intensity environment. Student athletes are balancing a lot. People go through periods of depression. I remember I had a teammate

at Harvard and her, unfortunately, her roommate committed suicide. And it's like there's these, you know, these incredible, incredibly sad things happen to student athletes. And I can only imagine over the course of 13 years, you had to work through some of those challenges with your athletes. Like, what would be ways that you would try to approach, you know, a conversation with with an athlete who seems depressed or a conversation with an athlete who's homesick or having serious relationship problems or, you know, drug and substance abuse problems. Yeah, I mean, I think taking it back to your values, you know, is what do I really at my core care about, you know, and do I have an outlet for the things that I value? I think that's kind of the second question.

And a lot of times that happiness is, number one, not being aware of what you really care about are getting too far away from that, you know. So I think just getting athletes to kind of start to ask those questions is kind of the first step. And if they don't feel like they have an outlet for the things that they value, you know, gosh, maybe Prince is not the right place for you, you know. And I think we try to vet all that during the recruiting process to the extent that we can, you know, to make sure that this is really a good fit. You know, I think one of the kind of errors coaches make is they try to, you know, romanticize the environment. So, you know, when reality doesn't meet expectation, that's when unhappiness ensues, right? So, you know, in my recruiting process,

I was like, this is going to be the hardest thing you ever do. You know, I set really high expectations. Super high expectations. Like, if you do not want to be challenged, this is not the place for you. You know, I tried to be as, like, hardcore as possible. Like, we, we're going to demand a lot. We're going to ask you to, you know, take stock of your internal state. We're going to ask you to ask questions of yourself. We're going to ask you to think about your behaviors and your values and is there alignment on a daily basis. And when those things, you know, and if you're not comfortable with that, if you don't want to have that level of self-awareness, this is not going to be the place for you. Right. So I really tried to set this age early. And we're so fortunate in the 13 years

that we were able to work through pretty much everything. We really didn't have any, you know, egregious issues. Of course, we had some athletes, you know, struggle with depression and anxiety. But The most part, you know, is a really healthy environment. And I think we set the stage during the recruiting process, I think, quite well. But just on the mental health side, I think I'd be remiss not to say this, that, you know, a bulk of the mental health issues, in fact, 35% of mental health issues on campus are directly correlated to sleep debt. Yeah, right. You know, so I think if universities want to really create a healthy environment, they need to just rethink sleep entirely.

There's really no one, I think, that's doing it. at the Division I level in a way that is responsible and is really groundbreaking. And I think it's just such an opportunity. But anyway, that's just my pitch on. I could go on for days sleep. But I think just the mental health issues that student athletes struggle with are probably directly correlated to sleep debt. And we know that throughout, you know, there's a mountain of research that it's a causal relationship. Well, a lot of what you just touched upon was the inspiration for me in starting whoop in the first place. Like, I experienced. it as a college athlete where I felt like I just didn't know what I was doing in my body.

And the idea that we could continuously monitor student athletes 24-7 and help them understand their bodies, like to me just seems so obvious. And especially the NCAA system where it's go, go, go, you know, you've got students that are trying to keep up with academic rigors. You've got athletes in turn who are competing in things, crazy travel. schedules, feeling the stress. And it's so obvious that if you give more information to these athletes, if you give more information to the administrators, whatever privacy level that may be, you're going to improve outcomes. And we've already seen this with a lot of the teams that we work

with, the schools that we work with. It just seems so obvious. And so, you know, one of my goals for whooping, I know we share this together is that we will be distributed from head to toe within athletic departments and within schools. Bake it into tuition. That is, yeah, we'll figure out the pricing. But it's like, it's inevitable. Yeah, it will happen for sure. Yeah, it just seems inevitable.

Anyway, it's fascinating. You've had an incredible career at Princeton, and you should be really proud of it. And in the show notes, we'll share some more of your thoughts on, you know, some of the methods that you use to coach your athletes and to really help them perform at their highest level. I want to transition to talking about,

how we met and now your role at WOOP, because both of those are quite interesting. It was interesting for me in meeting you, because if we go back to, I want to say this was summer of 2016, is that correct? Yeah. So summer of 2016, I'm still interested in, and I'm on, you know, kind of the front lines for sales. And I'm looking for how we can distribute WOOP more widely within athletic departments. And I hear, oh, there's this really brilliant woman who was one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history, and she's probably going to take over as this head of human performance within Princeton. And tell me a little bit about what that role would have been. You know, what's the concept? So it's kind of just a director of performance,

essentially. So I would kind of help vet. I was doing a lot of this stuff informally anyway. You know, I was working with men's volleyball. You know, I would speak to wrestling. I would, you know, I was kind of consulting with soccer on various technologies. Which is a sign, by the way, that your value system was really effective because obviously other coaches were saying, hey, Kristen, come talk to my team or hey, what are you doing? I think so. Yeah, I mean, I definitely was, you know, I had been in Princeton for a while. So whenever there's a new coach who'd come in, like I'd always make sure that I got to know them. And yeah, so I mean, I was always interested in kind of sharing my thoughts on human performance and educating and whatnot. So, yeah, so it was kind of a natural, natural type

of fit. But yeah, I mean, that's largely when I wrote kind of that high performance initiative and distributed that to our athletic director, part of that was this kind of organizational chart that we just needed someone at the, kind of at the top, being able to help create an education, right, performance education for the student athlete, something that was a little bit more structured, that would kind of take them through this model where they could, you know, start to choose their level of performance. That was kind of the overarching goal. And then the second piece of that was the technology piece. Folks were really interested in, you know, external load and internal load and trying to figure that out. How do we think about subjective load? And no one really had a good

grasp on that. So I was building that in as well to kind of the overall model and just having someone again to be able to kind of vet it for coaches because it's time consuming, right, to figure out like what do I actually need in my environment to kind of help drive training adaptation and behavior modification and, you know, things that coaches are interested in. So the concept being director of performance, oversee all the teams within Princeton. right and help them manage performance across a number of different things yes and what's interesting is this this was summer of 2016 Princeton was actually fairly forward-looking in that regard because now we're seeing a lot of athletic departments create this role of position yeah of you know director

of performance or something of a similar name my intention in meeting you was like okay I got to pitch Kristen on why she needs whoop for the entire athletic department in order to do her job effectively and And so, you know, we got talking. And the thing that impressed me so much when I first met you was just how much you had thought about all this stuff. You know, for me in presenting whoop to people, 2014, 15, 16, I mean, even a lot today, it still feels like it's the Stone Age is a little bit sometimes. You know, when you're talking to someone who actually is involved in performance, this idea that you would monitor sleep. Like, that's a novel concept still. And whereas for you, that was not a novel concept.

at all. It was kind of table stakes. And you were asking me questions about REM, slow wave sleep, how we were measuring heart rate variability. Well, I was building my own technology at the same time. So you had built this amazing technology. Well, I'm not going to call it amazing technology. You connected the dots. You'd connected rudimentary technology in a way that was effective. It was kind of transforming the data a little bit. But yeah, you guys were just like late years away. But yes, because you had created a system that during practice could accurately measure sort of the load of practice. Right.

And then you had created a makeshift system involving chest straps and ECGs and poor sleep monitors to figure out recovery. Right. And, you know, the underpinning for the WOOP system then and now is this concept of measuring strain and recovery. So I'm saying to myself, yeah, so I'm saying to myself in talking to you like, oh, my God, this woman has created the same exact system of Woop on her own. we must have such an aligned, an aligned point of view on how athletes and coaches and everyone

else should be thinking about training and help. And so for me, that was, that was totally amazing. And I knew right from that meeting that, like, we needed you at Woop. And you had, you had to be here. And anyway, what was, you know, what got you over the edge? Because I was immediately super excited about trying to hire you. Well, yeah. When we met in New York, I mean, I was, I was just like, oh, my God.

This is like my brother, like my soul. I just, yeah, obviously it was a really natural conversation. And then you invited me up to Boston. So I was able to spend the day. And once I got in this environment, you know, I had been cobbling together systems between learning, computational biology at Princeton and the Tiger Lab and and trying to put together this idea. And here I come up to whoop and I'm like, shit, they've made it.

You know, like I'm like, but, you know, and I was able to meet John Capulupo and then Emily Breslo. And, you know, just this incredible team. here at Woop and I was just like, holy cow, I have to be a part of this. And I, it was funny because when I was talking to one of my mentors, Emily Goodfellow, she was like, Kristen, you have this like megaphone, you know? So it's not just doing the thing at Princeton, but you're going to have access to all of these high performing environments that will give you this viewpoint that no one else in the world will have, really, which turned out to be 100% true. You know, I mean, just the vantage

point that I have, like being able to go into, you know, the Yankees. and the pelicans. It's a, you know, all these different places, you know, Texas, it just is, it's incredible because I can really see what they're doing, what they're not doing, and, you know, where the gaps are and, and then really try to help them solve these really interesting questions around human performance with the goal, of course, of helping athletes, you know, realize their potential, really, which is what all, we're all striving for, right? That's just human beings.

Yeah, I remember my final sales pitch to you was on the roof. Yeah. On the roof, Overlooking Boston was, if you stay at Princeton, you'll be able to oversee all the best athletes at Princeton. And if you come to Whoop, you'll be able to oversee all the best athletes in the world. And it came true. And, you know, that was like a half reality when I pitched it to you. But it has come true. Well, it was really funny. I remember, you know, you're like, you'll have, you mentioned a major league baseball player. You know, you're like, oh, imagine you'd have a cell phone. And now it's so funny because I go and. into my contact list and I'm just like, it's just bananas, right? Like the exposure that you have to professional athletes. Yeah, it's crazy. And so anyway, I want to talk about that. So I guess for our audience, summarize what your role is at WOOP in a very succinct way.

Like if you're at a dinner party and someone's like, Kristen, what do you do? How do you summarize that in a quick bite? Okay. So, you know, I do many different things here. So I oversee kind of the account management, which involves helping teams and athletes think about the data, interpret the data, and use that data to optimize training adaptation and modify behaviors to help drive optimal training. So it's kind of that piece to it.

And then, you know, as of 2017, I kind of find a fall out of taking over elite sales. So I kind of drive the strategy and oversee elite sales. as well you know I've always had a creative point of view on building out management teams and and so but I like the fact that our head of sales has a lot more physiology experience and no sales experience because I think that touches upon what we're really trying to do and that's educated teams and athletes and it doesn't ever feel like a sales bet it just feels like it's just in my soul you know in terms of what I believe is like really central to helping drive performance you know

technology is a way to foster performance so I mean there's so many places that we could we could go with this in terms of all the professional athletes and college athletes that you work with and I can see you in the back of your mind kind of racing which athletes can I reveal or not but but we'll keep and we can we can edit some of these things out so if we if we go the wrong direction it's fine the I'd say the the place I want to start is when you are onboarding a team right and let's keep in mind for our audience. This is technology. It's monitoring athletes 24-7. Athletes have access to the data. Coaches have access to the data. What are some of the things that you say up front to the coaching staff and then separately

maybe to the players or the athletes that get everyone bought in? Yeah. I mean, I think making it voluntary is a good place to start. How I always, the best practice is for me to come in and talk to the athletes, tell them the benefits. So how they, is going to transform their performance, right? So give them very explicit examples in their sport on how they're going to, their free thoracicry, are you going to improve, like how, you know, so I kind of give them those examples. And then they just raise their hand if they want to be involved.

Or they sign up on a sheet of paper and invariably pretty much 100% in that every athlete wants to get on the platform after they understand the benefits. So I think that's the best practice in terms of like how to get the athlete to raise their hand. to people to buy in, yeah. And then I think from the coaches standpoint, I said this isn't, there's nothing big brother about this. This is about you having some information that will help you keep your athletes available for selection week to week. It's about keeping them healthy and injury free. And not to mention if you're interested in them, you know, optimizing their potential as an athlete and human being, these are core things they need to be thinking about.

I mean, sleep behavior is so critical, right? Like if you want to have an, an athlete be able to access their resiliency and their leadership and in a positive mindset, like you can't do that with hours and hours of sleep debt accumulated. Well, I totally agree. Okay, so you've got the team onboarded. Athletes are now wearing it, right? What starts to happen after two weeks or a month or a couple months? Like, how do athletes start changing their mindset, coaches have?

Conversations in the environment. As I hear this, you know, almost 100% across the coaches, like, oh, my gosh, my kids aren't talking about the Instagram post, they're talking about their REM from the night before and why, you know, Jack up more than, you know, Joe. And, you know, so there's, there's, the, the conversation starts to shift in the locker room a little bit, which is great. It's around, okay, what behaviors are actually going to contribute to a higher level of performance. So you start to see that, you know, what, what is your, what's your strain, you know, before the game? Oh, gosh, I need to keep my strain lower. You know, they start to kind of talk about

these aspects related to performance that are really important. So after a couple weeks, we kind of see that. And then they start to actually perform better. They start to see their time and bed increase. And this is really not a lot of education or prompting. This is just the app being it's like an elegant, amazing self and really kind of nudging behaviors in a really subtle way. They see when they wake up in the morning and they didn't get as much sleep. they're just not going to be as recovered and their resting heart rate may be a little higher. Their heart rate variability, which another core metric we track, you know, might be a little bit suppressed. So they see the data themselves. And that's the other piece to this platform that

is so, so important that I don't think all the coaches grasp is that the athletes need to have access to their own data. Totally. And that's where Woop has just blown the covers off of of physiological monitoring is, you know, historically it's just been the coach's viewpoint. The coach has access, the athletes don't. And you're not going to drive behavior modification with that kind of setup. And that's where, you know, we see whoop, just these athletes spending more time in bed. We see cardiovascular fitness improving, you know, in very short amount of time. We see them drinking more water. We see them making better pre-bed nutrition decisions because we can see the folks that don't have pretty good pre-bed nutrition, you know, wake up with the night sweats and are, you know,

I'm not saying alcohol explicitly there, but alcohol obviously has a massive impact. And, yeah, big nights out for professional athletes. I mean, we see, I mean, a bulk of the professional athletes that, you know, I come in contact with. They literally really don't drink or they have cut down. I mean, they'll have two drinks or they make sure it's not within three hours of bed. Like, they're just so much smarter about how they drink. NBA player, I mean, once they hit February, I mean, they're really not drinking. Right.

From what, you know, from the exposure that I've had. And look, a lot of this comes back to what do you ultimately want, like you're the athlete. Exactly. You know, if you meet an athlete and they say they want to win and they want to be the best no matter what, then understanding the effect of, say, alcohol or eating crap before you go to sleep or staying up an extra hour or two for video games or whatever, it just becomes glaringly obvious that that's not going to make you the best. Totally. Now, if you're trying to balance being a college athlete with a student with someone who wants to have fun,

okay you're going to find that there's certain nights where you're going to do a little bit more damage to your body or you're going to do a little bit less damage to your body but again you're going to find that balance and that that was the thing that you know in thinking about how to create a loop and how to make it something that's manageable for anyone it all comes back to what you want yeah and so completely i think that's it's such an important it's funny because coaches will say i had a head football coach um say this to me not long ago and you know he said well what about the guys who are going to use the the data against me so they're not recovered enough they can't practice i'm like that doesn't sound like a root problem that sounds like a recruiting problem so i think it's it's a good sure it's totally

but it but it's you know but it comes back to your point of what do you want and what do you want like when you sat on my couch and told me that you wanted to help me want to help this program went a national championship and you wanted to go to the NFL and you wanted to be the best possible athlete and human being you could be in this in these four years then what's it going to take to get there And you're going to have to be aware of what you're doing to your body. And I think that, you know, at a foundational level, that's the opportunity here, you know, is to build awareness and, you know, an insight into how your body's responding and reacting to all the hosts of behaviors that you're, all the choices that you have basically across a day.

And they're either going to serve to upgrade, you know, your performance or downgrade your performance. And that's where it comes back to performance being a choice. As long as you're aware of what the optimal choice is, there's no reason why you can't be the best version of yourself pretty consistently. Right. So you've now got the team set up. They've been on it for months. What are some of like the things we've seen with teams, like some of the amazing impacts that Wupp has had or, you know, like stories that the teams have had where they're like, wow, this happened. Yeah. Gosh. I mean, there's a lot of individual. stories where, you know, athletes stop treating tobacco or stop drinking, you know, just based on the individual data and have a visibility into that. I think it's a funny story around nutrition, you know, an athlete was waking up in the middle of the night with these night sweats

and we kind of were inside the data and we see that. I text them, I'm like, gosh, you know, you're literally awake for like 90 minutes, like every night. What's going on? He's like, yeah, I have to shower, change my sheets, my PJs. Like, I literally wake up in a full sweat. I was like, geez. So, you know, I kind of like. like, what are you eating? And so we kind of talk to nutritionists and sure enough, like he's just eating the worst possible stuff. So he's having like this hypoglycemic event during the night. Like this like nightmare where he's like, you know, sweating. And, you know, so all these like native things are happening physiologically. But, but those are, you know, just a couple examples of

having exposure to the data and then being able to kind of write the ship. Another athlete during the fall season, a freshman athlete just doing unbelievably. she only had like three red days, you know, over a three-month period. Three red recoveries. Three red recoveries over a three-month period in season, which is phenomenal. So doing a great job. Teams doing great job managing training adaptation. She's doing a great job, you know, with her sleep and recovery and, you know,

kind of prioritizing all that, has a very traumatic event over the Christmas break, comes back in the data, and, you know, she's got nine red recoveries in a row. So I reached out, and she had this very traumatic event happen over Christmas. And it turns out she hadn't really reached out to anyone, hadn't got any help. So we're able to get her the help she needed. So it was just really. So that's fascinating, right? Psychological event triggering a response to data.

Completely independent from training, which I think people don't fully appreciate it. Exactly. And, you know, and everything, and I think that's what makes the system so powerful is that, and the core metrics that we track is, you know, everything's going to manifest in variability. you know, every, we'll manifest in sleep behavior. And because our recovery kind of takes in heart variability, sleep performance, and resting heart rate, you know, that algorithm is so powerful.

And that recovery, the recovery is so powerful that it does give us insight into how athletes are responding or not responding to their environment, both mentally and physically. And just to know that it's, it's just this extra layer of support in an environment, I think should be really reassuring for coaches. Totally. what are some breakthroughs that teams have had yeah i mean i think just seeing some of the incredible performance improvements like when we look at you know i think just you know military

i think we've been missed not to talk about that a little bit um we had a kind of a robust six-month study with um the explosive ordinance disposal unit and we were able to see that the operators who had exposure to their data spent way more time in bed than the operators who did not have exposure to their data, they increased their time in REM, and they showed all these incredible performance improvements. So I thought that was really impressive. So to be clear, the people who had access to their work data, and this is the explosive ordinance division, so who is that? So it's part of the Navy, and they basically kind of diffuse bombs. So this is like the guys out of Herlocker? Yes. Like that movie, right? You've got the crazy.

suit on. So these guys are unbelievably, like, unbelievably brave and also just like, and need to perform at a really, really high level, right? It's the definition of need to perform at a high level. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And so they have access to whoop data, or some of them have access to loop data, some of them don't. Right. And the people have access, end up having benefits or what happened? Huge, huge benefits in terms of just what we see with the metrics that we track. So time in bed, for example, increased substantially. And I think most importantly, their time in REM and slow sleep. So getting into the deeper stages of sleep.

So their quality improved in addition to the duration. With that, we're able to see performance improvements. So they improved relative to the group that did not have exposure to the data by up to 27% across all the physical metrics they were tracking. That's fascinating. I mean, we could do a whole podcast just talking about the value of monitoring in the military and that whole world. because if you think about all the challenges that the armed forces go through and the stresses, like there's so much more information that needs to be there to understand what's happening for these guys and like whether they're recovered and whether they're healthy.

And I think especially after they return from combat too, you know, you do a lot of work with the military. I mean, you agree with that. Definitely. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, leading up, you know, getting the training adaptation, where it needs to be leading up to a deployment is important. You know, you don't want the, the operators going into a mission underrecovered, right? It's not, not ideal. So what does that pre-employment actually look like? And what can we measure and monitor kind of leading up to that?

And then once they return home, how long is it take for them to get back to their baseline, right? This is return from combat? Return from their mission or combat. Right. Yeah, exactly. You know, what kind of interventions need to be put in place? How much time do they need off to get back to neutral? so to speak. So having that kind of pre-deployment, post-deployment viewpoint is really important

for the, you know, for the operator. And that's something that we're able to really track and understand. So, you know, I think from a military application, you know, hugely, hugely benefit. And I think you can take that same sort of, you know, application to think about pre, you know, if you're injured, for example, and post-injury, you know, what does that actually look like? You can apply that to cussions. I mean, there's so many things that you can use this information for it to understand if an athlete or an operator or just anyone generally is kind of back up to to their baseline pre-event one concept that i thought was really fascinating in starting whoop and it has slowly come true is this notion of money ball 2.0 right so it's not just how talented

a player is but the status of their physiology that ultimately determines performance right you know would you rather have an all-star athlete when they're super run down or would you rather have a talented role player when he's peaking right that's the concept sort of behind this yeah and i think we're starting to see that in the data i mean you know better than i do but this concept of if you have better recoveries if you have you sleep more right like literally what's the performance outcome on the other side of that it's incredible and i'll give you some So we had an NBA athlete that we looked at in 2016 when he did not wear whoop and then basically compared that time frame. It was a one month period when he was not wearing whoop and then

wore whoop for a month, kind of tracked, educated. He improved a sleep efficiency by 10%. That next month was the same exact time period that we looked at in 2016. The athlete doubled his points. So he went from 11 point average in the year prior, same time without Woop. Next year improved 22 points. His free throw accuracy, his shooting percentage, assist, everything improved. It's crazy. Almost doubled. So this is an all-star in the NBA. This is an all-star in the NBA. And all we did the second month was really just map his recovery. So if his recovery was, if his recovery was low, he played fewer minutes. Recovery was high. He played more minutes. So he's effectively playing the same as he did in 2016 from a minute standpoint, but his effectiveness, his efficiency was

off the charts better. And we just finished some analysis with an NHL player as well. Same exact thing. And we've been able to replicate this across every discipline, from soccer to, you know, swimming. How many different sports have we been able to show this? I mean, at 12, probably, you know. Well, I remember some of the most interesting analysis I've seen was on the U.S. Olympic swim team in Rio, and that was in, I think, 2016, and they were doing these incredible time trials, but they were really focused on how travel affected their times and their performance. And we saw that if they traveled three days before the event and they were going over a time zone, they actually, their recoveries were high the next day when they landed, but they dipped on the third day. They were low on the third day and they had these underwhelming time trials. And so the next time that they traveled, we recommended that they either traveled the day before or five days before.

Sure enough, they traveled five days before. We saw the recoveries dip and then we saw them all come back up. And so they were peaking on the day of the time trials. And, you know, as a result, they had incredible time trials. And so that, that for me was really, really encouraging. And to your point, I mean, we're now seeing this across a lot of sports. It's interesting, especially to look at performance data of endurance sports, because endurance sports have, I would say, less variables to determine why someone did well.

Right? The basketball analogy is fascinating. although you could argue that the guy had an easier schedule or something or weaker defenders or whatever. Free road percentage is interesting because in that example, that's isolated, right? So that's pretty compelling. Anyway, I think this is where the future of sports is going. And physiologies is going to play this enormous role in performance and how people think about performance. And, you know, ultimately it makes what we do every day really fun.

What are a couple other examples that come to mind, if any, for sports teams or some of the athletes that you've worked with that have had breakthroughs? Yeah, I mean, I think the player efficiency with looking at the NHL can expand on that a little bit. Sure. So just puck touches almost double when they're above their average line of recovery. So if you take kind of their average and you just kind of draw a line, if you're below it versus above it, which is interesting. And this is another all-star? one of the best players in the league yeah yeah right so it's you know it's fascinating and the powerful thing is that you know who you're talking about in this case when you put that data in his hands

you know he'll even say like now all i need to do is have a high recovery every game because i know what an edge that's going to give me right i did work uh and this may have actually been before you joined woo with one of the best players in the NBA and i remember we were looking at his performance data on the days where he had a high recovery versus a low recovery. And this wasn't like month this year versus month next year. It was just literally day to day looking at, okay, green recovery, yellow recovery, red recovery, what are the results? And this person went from having like 22 points per game with a high recovery to 18 points

per game with a low recovery, one turnover with a high recovery, seven turnovers with a low recovery and it was just you know it just hits you kind of over the head yeah how stark and it's like if you have a high recovery you're an all-star max contract player in the NBA if you have a if you have a low recovery you're a role player in the NBA coming off the bench and by the way from a dollar standpoint this is how big your contracts were I know versus that you know not to mention just the longevity of the athlete if they always have high recoveries versus low recoveries how much longer are they're going to be in the league? How much less risk are they going to have an injury?

Yeah. So. And if you look at the NBA right now, like you look at the top 10, I think most highest point leaders, five of them wear whoop. Oh, really? Yeah. That's a fun experiment for people at home who want to guess who wear whoop. I mean, this is incredible. Yeah.

So, no, we've been really fortunate to work with some brilliant athletes. And look, compliments to them, you put technology in their hands and all of a sudden, they're making changes, right? Like, these are guys who are already the 1% of the 1% and they're willing to make fairly disruptive changes to the lifestyle to get that additional, you know, millisecond, that additional fill in the blank. And I really credit, you know, some of the older athletes in the league,

you know, who kind of talk about sleep being really important, like a Kevin Durant, for example. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think that, I think that has an impact on some of the younger athletes that, hey, you know, gosh, if I think about this, maybe I can have a career that's as long as someone like LeBron James, you know. Well, the amazing thing about LeBron James was just how, again, talk about a guy who's at the peak of his powers, you know, we first got introduced to Mike Monsias, who's

LeBron James's trainer, I think in 2015. And so this is a guy who's literally at the top of his game. He's trying to chase down NBA championships at that point. And, you know, he was willing to put on whoop and wear it as like, of our first users, you know, because he wanted an edge that badly. Now, obviously, Mike validated the technology and said, hey, you know, this is interesting data that I think we can use in a productive way. But it's powerful that LeBron was willing to wear it and get benefit out of it. We saw the same thing happen with Michael Phelps and going through

Kenan Robinson, who was Keenan Robinson was Michael Phelps' trainer. And this is, like, again, similar time frame, 2015, 2016, Michael Phelps' peak of his powers again. I mean, he had a really long peak, but like, it's just interesting to me that these guys who are so, you know, like generational athletes, we're still willing to keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking the things about their lives to ultimately compete and perform at a higher level. So anyway, it's been fascinating working with athletes like that. I want to transition, Kristen, and talk a little bit about you and how you think about your own

personal performance and your lifestyle. I can say, as someone who gets to work with you every day, that you've certainly helped improve certain things in my lifestyle and how I think about my body and using wood data. So let's start with what does your morning routine look like. Yeah, so I wake up around 520 and, well, let me back up. Okay, back up. Before, so my, I usually go to bed. My kids, I get my kids kind of tucked in. They're pretty much asleep by 8.30 and that's basically when I start my bedtime routine. It is during playoff season, difficult to maintain that because it's hard not to watch the playoffs. But, um. Or you're getting late night phone calls from people in the playoffs. Yeah. Continue. Yeah. But 8.30.

Generally speaking, I put my phone on airplane mode and I start to kind of wind down. Usually a little bit earlier if I can, blue light blocker, filters on everything, glasses. So I'm making sure that I'm not exposing myself to blue light because that three hours, even three hours before bedtime, that can have an impact. So I try to shut that down as early as possible. So, Loua, let's just focus on that for a second. So you're putting on special glasses that are cutting out blue light. Right. Plus, in addition to that, filters, I use the filters that exist kind of on my devices.

Is there a specific model that you use? Swanwick. Swanwick. Yeah. And we can put this in the show notes for people listening if they're interested. I think that's a good brand. There's lots of brands out there. And I had breakfast with a professional athlete yesterday who said that he now wears these glasses.

So you've got an incredible influence on a wide population of pros to convince them to wear. And they're like somewhat goofy, right? They're a little goofy. Yeah, well, I mean, might have like orange lenses, but they actually make them now with like, I just need to kind of reinvest in the ones that. So they make ones that aren't orange. That look just like glasses. Okay, cool. And they're kind of, you know, they're just normal.

So you put these glasses on three hours before bed, cuts out blue light. Explain to our audience why blue light's bad. Yeah, so it just, it blocks the melatonin production, basically kind of mutes the release of melatonin, which is what will make you feel sleepy. Okay. It's chemical in your brain that makes you feel sleepy. Um, so you want that to kind of occur naturally. So, you know, my natural biological preference for sleep is around like I'll feel sleepy naturally nine, nine 30. So I'm kind of an early to bed early to rise. That's my chronotype. Does that go back to your coaching days or is that something that's

changed over time? Oh no. That has changed over time. I used to push past that. I mean, I was the typical a decade ago talking like 2007. I started to kind of change my behaviors. But yeah, I mean, I was burning the candle at both ends, like, you know, thought that was, I was wearing that as a badge of honor. My sleeve, you know, I really changed, you know, once I realized that I was putting my health at risk and not being as good a mom as I could be your coach and, you know, by compromising, you know, my sleep and some other behaviors. So, yeah, so I really started taking you seriously, you know, about a little over a decade ago, really started getting just kind of sleep. But, yeah, so I'm really careful about kind of what I eat at night as well. I know if I have a carb heavy meal,

I will just not sleep as efficiently. So I really try to kind of manage that pre-bed. We'll have a little bit of natural serotonin, potentially, you know, some raspberries with a little bit of yogurt. If I feel hungry, some walnuts. That kind of helps prompt the serotonin helps prompt the melatonin production. And so you're having this well after dinner. A little, I mean, I eat like, you know, I usually eat like 630. So maybe, you know, just a little bit of a snack kind of eight-ish okay eight o'clock yeah um generally speaking kind of that will be the routine and then yeah and then i uh i kind of wind down i i sometimes all i'll read a little bit on my nook uh sometimes i won't it just kind of depends and you'll keep your

glasses on uh yes absolutely so keep those on until it's time to shut it down so i really once i feel sleepy you know i generally am feeling sleepy around nine nine 30 so i just yeah i get I get my room and just make sure, you know, my phone again, airplane mode. So I'm not really in checking my phone after that time. And there's a lot being written today about phone hygiene before bed. Are you someone who's comfortable having it in the bedroom as long as it's on airplane mode? Yes. I put it in the bedroom.

You know, it's my alarm. But it's it's in airplane mode. Do not disturb. Okay. And talk to me about the environment in which you're sleeping. Yes, very cold. 64 degrees, which is really cold. That is cold.

It is cold. But, you know, I have my weight, my blankets is, like, perfect, like, you know, everything. Like, once I get in my nest, I am, like, good to go. Like, there's, I don't feel cold or hot. Do you have any kind of special blankets or anything we should go? I mean, not, you know, I just use a medium weight down. You know, I have, I get high, high quality sheets. And then I have a, you know, another blanket.

And then I kind of have this, like, five-pound blanket that I put on, depending on kind of how I feel getting into bed. Summer, I don't need that. But, you know, now this time. time frame, I kind of feel like I do. Even though the temperature doesn't really change for some reason, it just summer, I don't know. It's just, it does get a little bit warmer, you know, throughout the night. But wintertime, I usually use that five pound like it. And I make sure my feet are warm. So I usually put my socks on halfway. So they fall off during the night. That's a real veteran move. And Emily, who oversees analytics, and by the way, wrote our

sleep algorithm at Wu, she also believes in the, you have to wear socks to bed. Yeah, you just don't, if your feet are already warm, it's fine. Well, you just, yeah, cold feet, cold hands are going to impact your sleep. So you're just going to create disturbances and make your sleep not as efficient. So, yeah, kind of, but if your feet are warm going to bed, like you really don't need socks. But if your feet, that's why I kind of put them on halfway, usually if they're cold, because my feet will get warm during the night. And they just kind of fall off now.

I kick them off, you know, without knowing. That's cool. Yeah. I feel like that takes a little bit of training, but I'm going to still practicing that. Okay. And cold room. Now, there's a little bit of conflicting feedback on light in your room. I've heard actually some people tell me that they really value waking up to natural light.

On the flip side of that coin, pitch black is the best, right? So where do you fall on that equation? And what's your point of view? Yeah. From my standpoint, like, light impacts my sleep. So I wear with a mask. light is bad light is in my view is bad and i and i think there's there's quite a bit evidence to kind of support that uh but yeah definitely mask i i filter out all the lights um dark dark dark dark and uh yeah

and that that to me that that's been the the game changer like once i started wearing a mask in terms of just well that's one way you've influenced me i mean i started i started wearing a mask at your recommendation and i mean i can just see it in my data it's like 10% more efficient my sleep since I've started wearing the mask. Spend more time in deeper stages of sleep, you know, just not interrupted with, you know, light is going to wake you up. It just will. Yeah. I mean, you definitely feel a little bit goofy wearing it.

And, you know, if you're listening to this podcast and you're single, it might not be the best first impression. But, but, yeah, but, uh, but it's amazing from a sleep standpoint. And especially I find when I travel because you go into a hotel room, sometimes the shades are disaster and and that's another thing by the way I've heard from you know some of my some of the athletes that I've gotten to know who obviously work with you they're like yeah the sleep mask is a game changer yeah it's it's good so I definitely recommend that to anyone to anyone listening and we've got a lot of data points on sleep masks working

is there a specific mass that you think is better than others I use I actually use the silky one it's from the airport what's that spa call express spa i think okay well i'll put it in the i'll put it in the show notes and it's very it's highly personal uh i have a really long eyelashes and so that that that kind of comes into into play it kind of has a little bit of a an opening kind of where your where your eyes are so yeah for women with longer eyelashes i i definitely recommend that and then i wake up usually around 520 and i will work out and oh i wake up you know we'll do a couple of minutes of journaling you know so just usually before i go to bed i'll do some journaling uh anything that's kind of on my mind and you do journaling

just writing into i just write yeah i just write into a notebook you know anything that's kind of on my mind that might be that i feel it could influence me negatively like during sleep or like a problem i'm trying to solve that i want to kind of meditate on i'll i'll write in in a in a journal and and And then when I wake up, you know, usually just a couple of thoughts, you know, I try to express gratitude when I wake up and when I fall asleep, you know, that always seems to help just that positive. Well, there's a ton of psychology for our audience on the importance of gratitude and how it, like, changes your mindset.

It just is so powerful. It's just the lens with which you look at the world shifts, right? That's really important. So I try to bookend, you know, my sleep with thoughts of gratitude and I think writing it down. I think it's really powerful. So I wake up. I do some journaling, a little bit of meditation depending on if I actually wake up at 520, sometimes, you know, it's more like 530. What wakes you up? Do you wake up naturally or an alarm? No, I wake up with an alarm. Yeah. But actually, I have like a dumb alarm, so speak. I will say now that I've really been

dialed in, you know, ever since that article came out in in June around consistency, I have dialed in on the consistency. And I wake up before my alarm, if I don't have any sleep debt, I'll pretty much wake up before my alarm, like on cue, like 5-10, you know, sometimes it was a little bit earlier than that. But the sleep regularity has been, has been massive for me. And by the way, for our listeners, this is a study that came out in June. I think it was the National Institute of Health that released it. I think so.

And an enormous study, breakthrough, really. and it emphasized the importance of sleep consistency. Right. So the time you go to bed, time you wake up, making that as regular as possible. Making that the same. And we actually saw the study and then we went and looked at all of our data on WOOP. And we focused on, okay, did the person go to bed and wake up at the same time they did last night? And when Emily and the analytics team did that analysis, we found that their physiology of individuals, independent from how.

long they slept, just how consistent their sleep was, was higher when they had a high consistency score. So we literally saw the results of this physiological study, which I think was on a few hundred people, which as far as, you know, academic research goes, is an enormous number of people. And then we ran it through like a million data sets, which of course is a much larger sample size. And we found the same thing. And since then, and if you're a whoop user and you're where in the sleep coach now, you'll actually see recommendations that are related to sleep consistency. So when you go to bed, you're going to get a push notification that's actually telling you what the optimal bedtime and wake time is based on your goals to actually get

consistency. And if you meet anyone in life who says, I only need six hours of sleep or some low number of sleep, inevitably are someone, you know, it's someone who has a really consistent bedtime and wake time. So it doesn't surprise me at all that you're super focused on that. And that has really changed. You know, I've seen, I mean, my training adaptation has been more positive. Like I've gotten fitter. My HRV has, you know, increased. My risk of heart rate has decreased. And I generally feel better, less groggy in the morning. Like, there's been so many positive outcomes just by dialing in on that one one piece. Because I was so hyper focused on a lot of the other, you know, the efficiency and the duration and the consistency has just really changed.

everything for me. So that's, it's been huge. So yeah, so once I wake up, you know, I kind of go through this little process and then, and then I, I see what my recovery score is. And, and that kind of helps drive. Will you look at your recovery before you journal or before you meditate? After, after meditation, after journal. Yeah. Yeah. Once, you know, I'm kind of getting to the bathroom. As I'm getting dressed, I'll, for my workout. And what kind of meditation do you practice? I just do passive mindfulness where I'm just, you know, kind of, I focus on my breathing and usually kind of a body part and yeah and just try to be as you know as at peace as possible and just try to stay very much in the present so just you know very simple kind of way

of thinking about mindfulness and that's generally what I practiced during the day as well and how many times throughout the day will you repeat that I just I probably three to five times a day on on average and it's usually you know not more than you know saying anywhere from a minute to three minutes. But I think what's important is that you're doing it throughout the day. I think if you only do it one time, you know, you're not going to see the same kind of benefits as if you kind of build it in and use it to mitigate stress accumulation throughout the day. It's really important. And there's lots of research that supports practicing mindfulness throughout the day as a way to mitigate stress accumulation because that really does impact sleep onset and sleep efficiency. So if you can

kind of practice it throughout the day, I think you do position yourself to, you know, to have a more efficient sleep and fall asleep faster. I completely agree with you. I mean, meditation actually changed my life. I've never really talked about it in full-in. But I think it's so important. Any kind of meditation I think is probably good. I do transcendental meditation, which is longer.

It's like 22 minutes. Yeah, that's a commitment. Yeah. And it's a skill. I mean, it's, you know, being mindful and present is such a skill. It's so hard. I find it hard. Yeah.

It's hard. I mean, I've been doing it for five years now. And it's still hard. But I think that's in part why I know it's a good thing to keep doing. Totally. You know, that's like the sign that you still need to do it. I know. So true.

And so have you ever done any analysis on, like, okay, you look at whoop data all the time. You're working with teams all the time. Like, what kind of data's out there on the benefits of meditation? In 2017, in January, I, you know, I was really, I had been practicing mindfulness and really trying to work on the skill of being present and being aware of my internal. stayed and taking stock and all that. And I decided to do an experiment because I had this feeling that it was really powerful and in the data suggested that it was powerful. And so I decided to take it away for three weeks and not do it at all. So my three to five times the morning, the evening in the morning cut that out, literally stopped doing it entirely. And my, my HRV, my resting car

rate, my sleep performance and recovery were all off my baseline by, I think on average, 12% which is massive right yeah yeah so so this is three weeks where I really I deprived myself and nothing really changed during that time obviously this is not perfectly controlled scientific study but you know I wasn't really traveling a ton during that period I nothing really changed in my life so the only thing I did was kind of take out this this practice of mindfulness so I think that was just a really good example of I think of the power of mindfulness and sure enough when I put it back in, you know, things slowly start it right themselves, whether it's a plea, you know, placebo effects, you know, is, is powerful as well.

Pacebo works. It really does. I mean, it's, you know, when you look at it, you know, from a pharmacology standpoint is the most applications, like, of all pharmacology is the placebo effect. But, yeah, but it's, it is, there's something to it for sure. And so it's now, what, 545 in the morning or what time is it? So by the time I kind of get out the door, it's, it's about 545. 45, yeah, and I'll usually do...

And the first outfit you're putting on, by the way, is workout clothes. Workout close, yeah. And will you meditate in workout clothes or in, like, whatever you were to bed? Yeah, whatever I were to bed, you know, and then it's usually the timing. So by the time I, because I don't have my phone on during the night, I have to, the data is catching up. So by the time, you know, I kind of have, I kind of like brush my teeth and, like, have some water and kind of the bathroom and get dressed. By the time I've done all that, my recovery score is pushed. So at that point, I kind of know what my body's up for that day.

And will you change your workout in the morning based on whoops recovery? It just depends on what I have planned. I will change it if it's, you know, maybe I'll cut out some of the strength portion. I won't run quite as far if my recovery is a little bit more suppressed. But usually. But your data, for the record, is always really good. So I feel like that's why this is like, it's a special question for you. I mean, I think for the most part, you know, I'm in that.

You know, I want to try to, you know, if I'm trying to get fitter, like, I want to see a suppression in my heart variability, and I want to see an increase in my wrist and heart rate. And I know that my body's taking on stimulus and it's adapting. I think for me, what I look at is, okay, how am I rebounding, right? And what is that, is there a meaningful increase off my baseline, you know, after I go through that little taper period? So just to explain what you just said for our audience for a second, like you're explaining effectively, intentionally putting enough stress on your body so that your recovery the next day will be lower, so that you then can rest more, and then in turn, your physiology bounces back. Yes. This is the phenomenon that all great coaches are trying

to apply to their athletes. Right. And this is what we're doing with all the elite teams that we're working with is we're kind of doing this in very intentional way, looking at training phases and functional overreaching and kind of how athletes are adapting and responding to stress and the stimulus. Is the physiological intention actually matching what's happening to the athlete, you know, is what the coach is intending to do to the athlete actually happening. And that's what we're able to evaluate. So that's what I'm, you know, I'm doing my own date every day and, and been really focused on this since last April. And I, you know, I've gotten, like, substantially fitter kind of applying this, these principles of my own

training, which seems obvious. But, yeah. Has your workout intensity or the types of workouts that you do change as you've gotten older? I always try to stay. I want to stay fast, like for my whole life. you know, I want to be fast and strong. So I always, you know, a weekly basis, I'm always doing at least a couple strength sessions a week. And I'll do one sprint workout a week as well. That involves multi-direction, you know, as well as full out sprinting. Have you ever read the book Younger next year?

No. Okay. So, well, I was just talking with Strauss-Zelnick about this. And we had Strauss on the podcast recently. And in some ways, you remind. me of Strauss and that you both have this mindset of younger next year, which was what this whole book is about. And the concept just at a high level is that there's this sort of common perception that you just decay slowly over time and then you die, right? Whereas younger next year says,

okay, if you apply the right philosophy and the right techniques and you don't eat crap and, you know, you exercise almost every day, you actually can feel the same or even better. better over time and it's this concept of younger next year so it sounds like you implemented that kind of a mindset in your life strength is really important and strength by the way is a big a big concept in this book and I'll get you the book because I think I'm the only I was the only 21 year old to ever read it but it was like it had a big effect on me because I was like god that's awesome like yeah as a mindset it's awesome to think that you can just keep getting better and younger We see that with professional athletes on the system, you know, who are in their 30s and get better.

Yeah. Because they're actually starting to dial in on some of these factors that are going to influence, like, how they age. Totally. So, yeah, I mean, there's 100% delay aging by doing the right things. I don't know yet if, like, fans have fully, it's fully registered for fans that we're starting to enter into a period of time where your favorite sports star, if they actually treat their body. properly will have like another year or even two years in their prime that previous generations just never had yes and it's because it's one it's mindsets like younger next year but two it's then applying data like whoop to say wow this is how i have to think about recovery this is how i have

to think about travel all these different things and things in your life are going to change right you're going to have events in your life that are going to impact your sleep behavior you're you know you might have a child or you know you're trying to get sick or you know you might have a relationship issue or, you know, things change. So having that data can kind of help you understand how these really important things might be shifting and what you need to do to kind of write the ship. So it's not six months from now I'm taking action, but it's 12 days from now. I'm going to see changes in these behaviors that I can then take action, you know, as opposed to kind of waiting and just being in the dark about what's happening in terms of sleep behavior or kind of how I'm

building strain or, you know, what my recovery looks like. I mean, just that insight can give you just incredible feedback on how you need to shift your behaviors, you know? I totally agree. Okay, let's go back to your day in the life of Kristen. So you get a workout in, you go to work. Like, how do you think about breakfast? How do you think about nutrition in general?

Yeah. So I think at very high level, I asked myself kind of three questions, why am I eating? which I think is important just to be really mindful about what you're putting in your mouth. And I haven't always done that. By the way, once you started asking yourself that question, you told me this maybe two weeks ago or a month ago, and I started asking myself that question, it kind of fucks with you a little bit if you never asked it. And it's an incredible mindset shift. You know, I'm someone who's always had a very fast metabolism.

I would save all the things in my life that I'm like slower to make big changes in. The diet's probably the furthest. And that simple question of why am I eating is a phenomenal question. And then that triggers breathwork. So why am I eating? And then before I can eat, I try to breathe for 30 seconds to a minute where I'm doing some mindful breath. Okay. That's fascinating.

I don't think you've told me that. So that's part of my routine. Okay. So usually ask this question around. You're saving the secrets for the podcast. Yeah. Okay. That's fine.

I mean, that's part of, I think, you know, if you're trying to change your habit, or if you're trying to build in a habit, you need to put it around things you're already doing every day. So this was just a forcing function for me and what I kind of tell all my athletes I work with. I'm like, if you want to start breathing, you know, what, do it between class. That's becomes like as you walk from class class, you're breathing in for three seconds, holding for two seconds, breathing out for three seconds. Wait, slow down on that. So how, how exactly do you breathe? Uh, it, it kind of depends. If I'm, uh, if I'm looking to really activate the parasympathetic branch of my nervous system, I will breathe for about four to five seconds. Hold. Like, breathe in. Through your nose or your mouth? Uh, through, I breathe in through my nose. Okay. So you breathe in for four seconds. Hold for two to three seconds. Okay. And then breathe out through my nose. breathe that through your nose okay and I will do that for 30 seconds to a minute before

you know before my meal essentially so that kind of puts me in this really mindful state it helps kind of and then I know at least three times a day I'm going to be breathing right you know interesting thing about breath I read you know the whole expression uh when you're angry like take a deep breath yes so I'll be like hey take a deep breath it actually turns out it's not one deep breath that changes the nervous system, it's six. And I thought that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. But that makes sense.

And this concept of doing it for 45 seconds or a minute, really powerful. Kind of puts you in that sweet spot of getting a leis express. And now, have you gotten so good at breathing? Like, what you just described, I tried to do it while you were talking and I sort of screwed it up. Like, is that something that you've just done now so many times that it's second nature? Like, you could be, you could be sitting at a dining room table or at a restaurant and, like, the food comes out and little does everyone know that you've just done this little breathing technique

for the last 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm very good at it. Yeah. I mean, I can be standing at my desk, you know, and I'll be breathing and I don't think anyone really knows. And will you breathe like that just as a normal breath? One thing that's been interesting in talking to professional athletes is they will intentionally change their breathing at different moments of a game or a competition. And you strike me as some who might do something like that. Well, I think your breath, you can start to associate it with different, it can create a different kind of physical effect, right? Like that it becomes like a cue almost, right, for something that you want to do next. So yeah, I think so. I mean, if I were about to shoot a foul shot, for example, I'd be breathing very differently than if I were, you know,

just trying to mitigate stress during the day. So I think there, you know, there are, and it's highly individual. And I think that's why athletes kind of need to play around with it, you know, to figure out what breathing technique is, is most beneficial for these different moments throughout the day. Amazing. So, okay, so back, so back to your food. Yeah. So why am I eating? Why are you eating breathing? Is it, you know, nutrient rich? Is it chlorically dense and nutrition, you know, nutrition, you know, nutritionally nutrient rich? And then can I digest it? You know, there's a lot of food out there that is not really digestible. So I try to avoid stuff that's in like packaging and, you know, try to eat as, as like naturally as possible, like a lot of raw food

as much as possible. I mean, I love snacking. So I really have to. to, like, think, be mindful about that. So, what are snacks that you think are healthy or appropriate? Amends. I eat a lot of almonds, raw almonds. I definitely will start the day with a, I'm a butter coffee kind of gal. So I'll have, you know, some brain octane with butter and blend that and into coffee.

And that's usually, like, what I eat for breakfast. So I don't generally eat breakfast, which I know is kind of atypical for women. And I think Tim Ferriss did some sort of study or in his Tools of Titans book, which is an awesome book. I think it was more just anecdotal. It wasn't like this research project necessarily, but women tend to eat breakfast. Men don't. That is something that emerged of all these high performers that he kind of talked to. But I'm definitely like not a breakfast person.

So I usually, you know, kind of fast until, you know, 1130 and then I go get my lunch, which involves just kind of super greens with. with a kind of full protein, you know, definitely tons of vegetables, tomatoes, some nuts, potentially. You know, I know so many high performers that don't eat breakfast. And it's fascinating because for me, I find breakfasts like the most valuable meal of the day. I do love breakfast. If I don't eat breakfast, I feel like I personally feel like a little bit sluggish. and definitely if I exercise midday or even if I exercise in the afternoon but I've only had lunch I can just tell it's not at the same performance level if I haven't had breakfast now on the

flip side if I miss lunch I'll actually feel like pretty aware in the afternoon like I'll still feel high energy in the afternoon and if I miss dinner it's not going to affect my sleep now I almost never miss lunch or dinner so I'm just yeah sort of riffing here I think nutrition is just complex, right? And it's, the science of nutrition is really complex. And I think performance in general is so unique to each individual that I think it's finding what works for you. You know, I think using fat as fuel for me in the morning taking on like almost 20 grams of fat in the morning, right, 24 grams of fat. And I'm using that as my fuel up until breakfast, up until lunch. And that tends to work for me. I feel really alert. I feel high energy. I feel good. I mean, I'm hungry when lunch rolls around, but really up to that point, I'm not hungry, and I feel good. It's very alert. Well, I'm so curious, like, actually how you think about nutrition being incorporated into whoop. You know, it's interesting. I get asked that all the time by whoop users. And by the way, it is super important. Like, nutrition is a huge

piece of the puzzle, as we're talking about right now. I think the challenge of nutrition that we're also talking about is that it's so personalized, you know, whereas we can definitively tell you whether the amount of slow-wave sleep that you got last night was good or bad, or whether your heart rate variability today is good or bad, or whether your workout was hard or not hard. Like, those are black and white answers. With nutrition, it's very hard to say that you should or shouldn't eat that, you know, without knowing a whole host of other information. Now, fortunately, for whoop, I think we collect a lot of that other information. Yes.

So it is interesting in combining these data sets. I just think that in terms of focus, you know, with any startup you need to focus, our focus, you know, out of the gates and up to this point, it's been on, okay, what are the outputs that your body is showing? And I think of nutrition as being an input. The same way alcohol is an input, the same way stress in your life is an input. Nutrition's an input. And so I think over time, I foresee a way in which we're going to pull the, you know,

this nutrition information into our app, and whether that's partnering with another company that's out there that does a good job of nutrition tracking, or whether that's building something ourselves remains to be seen. I also think, by the way, that nutrition tracking today is incredibly clumsy and just cumbersome. You feel like you're, you know, you feel like you have a weight problem, just trying to enter the stuff in. And some people are trying to lose weight, so that's reasonable. And by the way, the act of nutrition tracking, then in turn comes, more aware makes you more aware so i'm not criticizing nutrition tracking in that form i'm just saying that it's it's cumbersome yeah great did you cover everything on your nutrition piece yeah pretty much i'm

really kind of i i don't really track necessarily i i try to pay attention to how i feel and my body usually tells me what i need i don't really have a lot of supplements i take fish oil almost you know 3 000 milligrams a day so that's that is a supplement 20 yeah 2 000 or 3 000 so i i definitely have a lot a lot of fish oil and every now and again I'll kind of take a multivitamin when I hear a nutritionist talk about it and they really are proponents of it so I kind of break down but largely speaking like I'm not like into supplements and things like that so are those the only supplements or outline all the supplements that you take yeah it really just fish oil every now and again I'll build in a vitamin now you mention some mitochondria kind of supplement that that helps you use mitochondria

more efficiently. You mentioned something in your coffee, brain octane? Brain octane, yeah. So Dave Asprey, Bulletproof product. Do you believe in that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's like 18 times stronger than MCT oil. So it, you know, breaks the blood-brain barrier. So you basically can kind of convert that fat as fuel.

And I definitely, I mean, I feel like a million dollars when I take that. I don't know. I recommend it. Well, it's a good advertising for asking. I know, I know. All right, we'll put that in the show notes, too, so if people are interested in brain octane. I've never tried that. And actually, I don't take hardly any supplements, which surprises people when they talk to me because they assume that I've got all these different

hacks. But for me, I think in some ways, one hack is like letting your body develop this stuff naturally. So I'm constantly balancing this concept of like, I want to try things and test my body with the fact that like, okay, I think my body's pretty optimal right now as it is. So, you know, you never know when you're fully optimal in that regard. I think getting tested is a good thing to do, you know, understanding your gut microbiome and, you know, how your body, how your body's responding to bacteria or your gut. What are certain tests that you would recommend a professional athlete take or, you know, even a woman in her 30s or 40s? Yeah. I mean, I think the Accela is a good, is a good place to potentially start. You know, there's lots inside tracker. And there's lots of different types of companies out there that help you understand kind of how your body's responding to,

the bacteria that's in your gut. I think that's an important, probably, a place to start. But, yeah, I think, again, where are you from? Like, what are your genetics? I think how you kind of metabolize food is going to vary based on your genetics. I think understanding that is probably the second place to go. I think once you kind of have those two pieces, then you can kind of take that information to a nutritionist

and they can kind of develop a plant-free that's maybe optimal. But understanding what you're missing is important. Do you need more magnesium? to need more. I think understanding those areas are important. And if you can get it from natural foods, that's ideal. But a lot of stuff, you can't. And that's where supplements can come in and be valuable. You travel a lot. What are your tips for beating jet lag? What are your tips for dealing with planes and airports? When I travel across time zones, I try to stay on my East Coast time clock as much as possible. And we did a cool case study with one of our soccer teams where we

saw where we kept them on the East Coast time. So one of the two most important influencers and your circadian rhythm is your sleep wake time, obviously, and your food. So I try to eat my meals on East Coast time, and I try to go to sleep on East Coast time to the best of my ability. And usually I can do that. You know, I'm able to get my business done during the time frame when I can get back to the hotel and time. And expand on, you said you did it with a certain team. Yeah. So we kept them basically on East Coast time clock. They traveled to the West Coast for a first and second round game. And they went out just a couple of days before.

And they basically woke up and had breakfast on East Coast time. I know, same with lunch, dinner. So they kept all their meal times exactly the same that they would on the East Coast. And fortunately, their games were at 1 o'clock or 4 o'clock and 1 o'clock. So perfect. You know, it wasn't like they were playing at 7 o'clock at night or 8 o'clock at night where it becomes a lot more difficult. So we're real lucky in terms of the game times.

and yeah there was no physiological changes so you talked about you gave that example earlier in the in the podcast about just changing one time zone and what happens physiologically just even within a few days and yeah they showed literally no change in their physiology across the team that's and that's awesome recoveries were perfect um the coach said that's the best that they've ever performed really in the first and second round game will you ever nap on a plane or will you ever even nap in general i do like napping generally i don't feel sleep during the day because i'm meeting my sleep need i don't really kind of accumulate sleep debt so i don't really feel sleepy during the day uh if for my athletes we definitely

recommend they do not sleep past three o'clock because once you nap past three it will impact your biological sleep which you know it can have repercussions up to 20 percent in terms of sleep efficiency that's kind of what we see the data and that in the outside research supports that as well so uh definitely no napping after three o'clock so when we kind of help coaches teams with travel, help them think about travel, we really bake a lot of this into their itineraries so they can understand. So athletes really know when they can sleep and when they can't sleep. And we even go so far to kind of help them understand, you know, at the highest level of support and service on our platform, we help them understand if they wake up with certain

amounts of sleep debt, it's mandatory, you nap, basically. And when is going to be the optimal time, you know, relative to when they woke up, because it's usually seven hours or so. I want to talk to you a little bit about recovery modalities. So obviously you're on the front lines with all these athletes and teams using recovery modalities. I'm going to run through some that I've come across and you tell me if you've seen teams get a lot of success about this. And also, if you've used them personally, you don't think they're up to snuff or it doesn't work for you. So let's just run through these quickly. Foam rolling.

Yes. to wear by it. It just works great. It works great. Athletes love it. I haven't met one athlete doesn't love phone rolling. Yeah, if you don't like foam rolling,

you're probably not that serious of an athlete. I agree. Okay. How about compression suits? Yes, for travel, reduces inflammation, keeps the blood flowing. Yes. Yes, on compression.

Newer technology. So this is the Hypervolt or the Therogun, the machine gun. type thing that's vibrating and kind of punches your muscles. Athletes love it. Yeah. The Spector Series athletes, you know, Johnny Bob and Caleb, Navy SEALs, yeah. Navy SEALs, love that thing.

I haven't really had exposure. I haven't used it myself, but the athletes that I've come across, you use it really, really like it. I've just started using one recently late. I like it a lot. Cryotherapy. Some athletes swear by it. Other athletes think it doesn't have any effect.

we definitely see the athletes who say they love it, tend to fall asleep faster, which is interesting, and they are spending more time in deeper stages of sleep. On days where they do cryotherapy, and this is a very small sample size. One of our teams who actually won a national championship last year was using cryotherapy, so I was able to kind of go back in the data and look at it. Interesting. So it was kind of interesting. Acupuncture?

I'm not sure about acupuncture. have you done it personally i've never done it interesting and i don't have enough athletes who have done it where i could confidently say yeah this is having a positive impact ice bath contrast therapy sauna yeah i think the warm is uh feels good generally for for athletes and and lots athletes swear by the the ice baths as well i think i'd largely preference i think neither like neither one do you want to spend a lot of time in so i wouldn't say you know you'd want to spend you want to go beyond five, six, seven minutes in a nice bath. And I would say the same thing with sauna. But I think short bursts, I think can be really beneficial just to kind of temporarily

stress the system a little bit. I think the sauna and steam, kind of that warm can be really good prior to bed just to actually, it kind of pushes the blood out to the extremities, which reduces your core body temperature, which will help you fall asleep faster, which is kind of counter to what you would think intuitively, but that's actually what's happening. So those warm showers are something we always recommend for athletes pre-bed. Do you take cold showers? You know, I did this summer, and I definitely liked it. I kind of got out of the habits.

But yeah, I mean, I like kind of how I feel after a cold shower, for sure. You know, for me, it wasn't something that I really ever did until about a year ago. And I was talking to an athlete who, swore by them and it was someone I respect and so I started doing them and in part I kept doing them because I hate them so much it just feels like it's yeah I kept you know sometimes I'm drawn to things that you're like trying to overcome yeah and now it's interesting being able to make that shift where I distinctly remember how much I hated cold showers and now I can't even imagine not ending like my morning shower cold it just makes me feel so much better in the morning

interesting so many people say that yeah so it's one of those things maybe you have to train your body even to like because i can definitively tell you my body did not like cold showers and but now you crave it almost crave it yeah so interesting and and after i work out always i'll end cold too so you know that's something for people to think about if they've never done cold showers i was listening to tony robbins and he was saying that he does this thing in the morning where he jumps into a cold bath and that seems really cool i mean you have to have one of those things installed oh for sure like you're jumping into water that's like 45 degrees for like 15 seconds and popping right out i can only imagine what that does to your nervous it's got to shock your nervous

system okay let's go back to some of these recovery modalities cupping yeah i i think there's a lot evidence that helps and athletes seem to love it uh e stem which is really more for injury recovery Yeah. You know, not an athletic trainer, but yeah, it seems to work. Flow tank therapy? Well, it will be interesting. We're doing a study with the Air Force Research Lab, and we have 144 operators that were testing in float tanks. Oh, cool. And we'll look at their, you know, woup physiology and see, trying to test the efficacy of these flow tanks. So there's really not a ton of evidence out there that supports the use of flow tanks.

So it'll be interesting. We'll have some evidence here in the short term. So excited to get that study launched. But yeah, I mean, people, the sensory depth, but people feel, some people love it. Some people feel claustrophobic and hate it. So I think it just depends on what your take is. I think that has a huge impact on the physiology. How do you feel about Norma Tech?

Love it. And that always rises. Norma Tech massage, like passive massage, not deep tissue, are the two top recovery modalities that we've seen in the folks that are kind of researching, you know, what the impact of next day recovery and these recovery modalities. Have you done any studies around that? Yeah. I mean, it looks like, you know, in terms of Norma Tech massage combo, you give yourself an 80%

chance of increasing next day recovery by 20%. So really the recommendation that we've... So this is, you do Norma Tech and you get a massage. Yeah. Really any two recovery modalities that you kind of listed will... give you a good chance of improve an extra recovery by roughly 20%. Do you drink a lot of water? Yes.

Yes, lots of water. Me too. You know, you've, Chris, you're someone who's got, I think, an amazingly positive attitude. You also, you know, work with all these athletes, all these coaches. You're constantly surrounded by thought leaders in some ways. Like, what influences do you listen to when it comes to hell? and nutrition and performance, some of the things that we've been talking about.

You know, what kind of resources do you recommend? Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Tim Ferriss, Ben Greenfields. They are definitely staples. I listen to a lot of their post podcasts. I think Joe Rogan has some really cool,

fascinating characters on his podcast. He's had a great run. You know, I love Dr. Matthew Walker, Dr. Russell Foster on the sleep side. Walker's sleep. Yeah, Russell Foster's sleep as well.

So I find him to be an incredible sleep side. scientists. I think most importantly, they've been able to take the research and, you know, distill it down and make it consumable for folks to understand. And they're just evangelists for, you know, spending more time in bed and really starting to think about your, you know, your sleep as the top priority in your life. And so I just, I've followed them and try to read everything that they put out. Yeah. So those are a few that I get my go to. Dave Asprey. I really find his stuff interesting and love the way he thinks about. Yeah. You have to tip your cap for. I think it's just innovating and trying to push, yeah. Yeah. And the folks that he brings on are just, they really are. And at the very kind of edge of their field, yeah, so he has a really cool host of characters on his show. What books have had a big impact on you? You know, I love Jared Diamond, you know, collapse, gunstrip, and steel.

I like, I'm very interested in kind of why societies kind of fail and succeed. Oh, interesting. I find this interesting. Any kind of productivity, efficiency. see books. I've mentioned tools of Titan. Titans, you know, I love Stoke philosophy. So, you know, Marcus really is kind of a huge fan meditations is something that I read, you know, frequently. I think it's very grounding problems that exist, back then exists now. And, you know, it's kind of comforting that, you know, we're all kind of trying to solve the same things, you know,

in our, in our work, lives and relationships and things like that. So I love, yeah, I'm just like looking, I look at my little Kindle here. Yeah, Caldini influences one that I read recently, you know, Sapiens we talked about. I love Cal Newport, so good they can't ignore you. That's like one of my favorite books, you know, skills, trump passion. And I just, I go back to that all the time because I'm around young student athletes and athletes a lot in it. I think sometimes we try to, you know, just kind of jump. We feel like we're, you know, we're supposed to kind of be hit with this lightning bold in terms of.

it's really it's like get in the trenches like build skills and and that passion is is going to it's going to emerge after you kind of build the skills so i think we often have that you know the way we think about that we it's kind of incorrect um such an important philosophy yeah um by the way i'll credit you for also convincing me to buy a kindle which you know i think is maybe the best hundred dollars you can spend now i've bought one because i was someone who used to always start books and kind of toss them aside and then start a new one. And then think to myself, oh, maybe I want to get back into that book. Yeah.

And, you know, who knows where it is is in my office, is a apartment, and somewhere else. And now just being able to go back to the Kindle has been amazing for me. And I'm reading a lot more as a result. Oh, totally. Yeah. And so if you're someone who travels a lot, I totally recommend that. Yeah, I think that the Kind of whatever, e-reader, is just so important.

And, you know, you should try to, gosh, read at least an hour a day. I don't probably hit that. I'm more probably like 30 minutes. But if you can find a podcast, I'm definitely probably at least an hour, an hour a day. But, you know, Naval Robbie Khan,

who I find really fascinating. Yeah. He just, he said something one time. It made me think, uh, just treating books more as like kind of throw away, like not feeling you have to get through every book.

Yeah. He's got a healthy point. of you on reading he really does and that it was like such a relief because i always felt like i had to just i bought a book i have to read the whole thing and and that was kind of intimidating you know but now i'm like you know what if it doesn't like pull me in then i just whatever i'm on to the next one and i've read more as a result so i thought that was like a great piece of advice yeah he's also made me i would say more fast and loose about buying books yes because and by the Kindle, that will do that to you because you got one

hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Yeah. But the point is like, you know, you can spend $19 and it might change your life, right? Like that's a pretty good cost equation. 100%. So anyway, it sounds like you've got a very interesting reading list. And thank you for the Kindle recommendation. Yeah, you're welcome.

When you hear the expression optimal performance, who comes to mind first? Will on it. oh that's gosh that's that's a really good question i literally the first person that came to mind was tim ferris and i can't you know i i think just because you know a guy that experiments is hacking is always trying to understand the foundation of human performance and really is just kind of trying to learn you know the ins and outs and you know the habits and the routines and so yeah i think he he was the and i was like gosh should i say that but i've said it and Yeah, Tim Ferriss.

What athlete do you admire most all time? I mean, I loved Larry Bird. Oh, cool. You know, I... What to appeal to the Homer crowd in Boston? Well, I'm from the Northeast, so I grew up, you know, I was in Maine and Massachusetts. I moved around a lot, but I definitely did identify as a New England fan. But, yeah, I mean, I just, I love the way he, he's a classy guy, and I love the way he led his team.

I love the way he thought about the game, and just love watching him play basketball. Kristen, is there anything else you want to plug or talk about? I think if I'm to end with anything, I think it's going to be about sleep. You know, it's just find time to prioritize, measure your sleep, understand your sleep, and be selfish about it. Because it's the less you sleep, the quicker you die. And there's just, you know, a mountain of evidence to kind of support that. It's a root cause to all mortality. So, you know, if you want to better your chances of limiting cardiovascular disease and cancer and

psychological disorders like they think about your sleep well good advice and and this has been really fun and i want you to know when i was first starting who uh someone told me you know you'll build a great management team if you're hiring people who you would want to work for and in every bit you've been uh you've been that way as a member of the whoop team and you're doing phenomenal work with all these professional athletes and college athletes so keep it up thank you all and thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me. This was an honor.

Thank you to Kristen for coming on the WOOP podcast, really insightful conversation, and Kristen knows about as much in this space as anyone I know. If you're not already a member, you can join the Woop community now for as low as $18 a month. We'll provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, and more. The membership comes with a free Woopstrap 2.0. And for listening to this podcast, folks,

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