WHOOP Podcast - Maximizing Your Training Outside of the Gym with Todd Anderson

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Todd Anderson. Todd is the founder of Dream Recovery, the co-founder of Synergy Dryland, a training program for world-class swimmers, as well as the co-founder of the Rideout Strong marathon training program. He holds over a dozen certifications in Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, and Performance. Kristen and Todd will discuss Todd’s passion for sport and performance (3:15), becoming a walk-on at Michigan State (8:45), training athletes with injuries (13:25), using data to contextualize how you feel (15:20), incorporating sleep and recovery into training programs (18:25), breathwork and breathing protocols (24:42), the impact of mouth tape on performance (27:48), staying motivated while changing behaviors (31:28), the opportunities for sleep studies and research (34:26), recovery meeting preparation (45:50), sauna and cold plunge (48:40), how Todd thinks about nutrition (54:35), and Todd’s training nonnegotiables (59:28).Resources:Todd’s InstagramDream RecoverySupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, WOOP, VP of Performance Science, our principal scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Todd Anderson. Todd is the co-founder of Synergy Dryland, a training program for world-class swimmers, as well as the co-founder. founder of the Ride Out Strong Marathon Training Program. Todd produces educational content on all media platforms to educate people on sleep and its importance and positive impact on quality of life. He also holds over a dozen certifications in strength and conditioning, nutrition, and performance. Kristen and Todd will discuss Todd's passion for sport and performance shares about his time as a

walk-on for Michigan State football using data to train athletes, incorporating sleep and recovery into training programs. He's a big believer in nasal breathing and mouth taping during sleep. I know those are growing trends cross-country. The impact of sauna and cold plunge on the body. And Todd's training non-negotiables. He shares three things that he tries to do every day. Looking to join Woop, visit our website, and sign up for free.

That's right. the best offer we've ever had, you can sign up for free for 30 days and try the full W-W-W-W-E-L. New members can use the code Will W-I-L, get a $60 credit on W-WIP accessories. If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Todd Anderson. Todd Anderson is a human performance expert and trainer who has worked with Fortune 500 companies, professional athletes across all sports and celebrities on optimizing their performance. Todd is the co-founder of Synergy Dryland, the Rideout Strong Marathon Training Program, and Dream Recovery.

He uses his holistic approach to swimming, running, and sleep to provide athletes with an unparalleled outlook on high performance. Todd's message resonates because it bridges the gap between science and a realistic strategy, given the social pressures of being an athlete or functioning optimally in the business world. Todd holds over a dozen certifications in strengthening, nutrition, and performance. Bottom line, sleep and recovery is the tide that raises all boats, and Todd's mission in life is to help others realize their potential by prioritizing sleep, recovery, and overall life optimization. Todd, welcome to the boot podcast.

Awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're so fun. I'm so excited for this conversation. Same. So, Todd, your passion for health and longevity is inspirational and infectious. I love following all your content on social media. I would love to hear about your early career and, you know, as an athlete and how that might have shaped your kind of outlook on training, performance, and longevity.

Yeah, so, I mean, I guess my, um, my passion for performance started when I was a kid. I was overweight as a kid, you know, so I was always like a little bit overweight. and I always felt like I, you know, wasn't the best athlete. And so I kind of had a chip on my shoulder. And then in high school, I kind of found lifting, strength conditioning, and realized, you know, what changes I could make through that pathway. So that's always been like the foundation of my confidence is the weight room. So in high school, I started lifting to a point where, like,

I was lifting by myself before school because I couldn't get people, do it with me because people are like, oh, I don't want to mess up my shot for basketball, things like that. So my dad was- Some of those myths, right? Yeah, right, exactly. There's always something. But my dad was a teacher, so he'd give me his, like, security code to get in the

school before school, which is probably super illegal, but he's retired now, so it'll be okay. It's fine. You can put it out there. He's not going to, no risk getting fired. I would, I put the security code in and going by myself before school because I played three sports, so after school was an option. So football, wrestling, and baseball. Wrestling, dang, that's another level of...

Oh, I think wrestling is the hardest sport there is. Like, college wrestling is insane. Yeah, I do, you know, pretty limited, but BJJ, and, you know, there's no question that, like, when you're a grappling, I mean, it's, like, tapping out 30 seconds. Like, it's just, like, it's just a different type of, yeah. I can't, yeah, I don't, the fatigue you feel from that

is unlike any other. Yeah, yeah. So I was all state in wrestling, baseball, not in football. Like, that was my worst sport, probably. Ironically. So, yeah, so, you know, that was like the start of it. But, you know, so I, coming out in high school, I had no offers. And I was going to go to Division III school to play football

and ended up, you know, through this wild chain of events, talking to Michigan State's offensive coordinator, and he said they might have a walk-on spot available in the fall. And at that point, I had no business being in Michigan State. I mean, you know, there's some elite athletes, you know, they're recruiting nationwide. They get a lot of good people. I mean, the Big Ten of football is, let's face it, no joke.

Yeah, it's the best conference in the nation. That's right. All those SEC people are on. That's right. I'm ready to make that argument. But so I literally made a pros and cons list with my mom, who was a kindergarten teacher at the time. So she was, you know, very artistic. And we still have the poster.

And it was basically, you know, pros and cons of going to this Division III school or trying to walk out of Michigan State. and what it came down to was, you know, am I going to regret this, you know, at 20 years down the road? There's a lot of risk. Yeah. And my dad went to Michigan State. We went to games growing up. Like that was, I can't even say it was a dream because it was so outside the scope of a

realistic goal that I wouldn't even consider it a dream because it didn't even cross my mind. So when I got the opportunity, I was like, I know I'm going to regret this if I don't try. So, you know, I took a shot. And that's really where my obsession started, because when I got there, day four, I wanted to quit. I called my parents, I was like, I can't do this. I'm so bad, I'm so slow, I'm weak, all the above.

I don't know the playbook, and they were literally like getting my transcript around to transfer to Adrian College because it was so bad. That camp was still the hardest thing I've ever done, like mentally especially. There's just so much information coming at you. There's just so many tests that you have to run.

Like you're not to mention, like, learning like the offense and the defense and that it i always wonder like what the amount of money i would need to go back through that it would be very high but it's because it just taxed me at every level like across the spectrum from an emotional perspective like first time being away physically obviously you know intellectually the playbooks are insane i've never seen a playbook like that and then you know culturally like i'm from a tiny small town we had a blinking red light you know we had bring your tractor to school day and then i walk in to michigan state there's people from all different backgrounds that didn't have any friends like it was a culture shock yeah and um

stuck it out and then you know resorted back to the weight room to kind of build my confidence so that's from my obsession with like performance and you know how can i squeeze every ounce of of ability out of myself started because i felt like i had to do that to compete so i coached at you know division one at princeton for for 13 seasons and i remember my one walk on, Caitlin Donovan, just absolute savage, you know, but definitely was coming into the program really raw, like just beat down my door, you know, to have an opportunity to try out. And I was really like, you know, pretty skeptical. You know, her dad and mom had both been, you know, students at Princeton. Her dad played lacrosse. And, you know, she just had,

she was so, like, gritty. And, you know, had a little bit of a chip on her shoulder because She wasn't a recruited athlete, you know, but kind of came every single day with just like this swagger. And she ended up being one of the best players ever to graduate from Princeton. And her three sisters ended up going and graduating, coming to Princeton and graduating two of the three I was able to coach. One of I recruited. But talk a little bit about that moment where the coach had to make a decision. All right, Todd, yeah, you're going to be on the team. Like, what was that, like, were you already kind of?

Yeah, so I kind of, you know, I had. So Coach Dantonio, Michigan State, it was his first year there. So they had kind of a hard time finding a lot of people to come and try to take an opportunity to earn a scholarship early. They call it gray shirting. So they had a couple spots on the roster. So when I showed up, everyone else had been there all summer, I knew I would have a spot at least for the fall. Okay. But I knew I'd be redshirted so I wouldn't play.

And really it was like you have a spot in the fall, but like nothing's guaranteed beyond that. Yeah. So, you know. What were your biggest, like, what did you, when you kind of went through the calculus of like, all right, what do I actually need to do to contribute value to this team? Because you said you're really broken after camp. Yeah. And like, had it, you know, so you and you said you kind of resorted the weight room was like, all right, this is going to be my go-to. Like, I'm just going to get us strong and fast as I can.

If I'm being honest, it was pure survival that first semester. It was like... No plan, really, just survival. It was day to day hour to hour, you know, like getting up at 5.50, we have 5 o'clock lifts, practices. I mean, I was so tired, tutors, you know, everything. I was a math major at the time, which was like the worst decision ever. I'm like, I'm taking Kelk 3 in my first semester there.

I'm like, just drowning. So that was survival. And then in the spring during spring ball, I got moved to defensive end. and, you know, I've gotten a lot stronger just from our strength conditioning program and then started going and doing extra lifts with my roommate, Adam, and we would, you know, add two extra lifts on a week and just kind of became obsessed with it. And then started to see some improvements in the spring. I started making some plays, you know, running with the second string. Like, a lot of good things started to happen. And that's the point where I remember I'm like, I think I can actually

do this. Like it went from, it went from, I just hope to play on a special team my senior year to like I think I can you know play here consistently so and I credit a lot of that to the weight room just because they put in this extra time and even if it didn't help the performance on the field like mentally just knowing I did more than everybody else yeah it made me feel like I could yeah there's a lot of adversity to overcome because then you know going into that fall I pull my quad got out of the shower slipped and tore it like I mean I mean it's still like you can see like there's a massive ball in my leg but that's your leg yeah it's not something you're wrong in there no no it's gnarly um slips fell ran our

conditioning test i didn't want to tell anybody about it ran our conditioning test because i'm a walk i'm going to get a full ride probably the ran our conditioning test woke up the leg was black and blue so i'm out for that season next season you know so medical you actually can't medical redshirted at that point because you obviously redshirted so wow next year coming into default camp i'm running with the so we'd get a scholarship again three days or four days before our first game i like cut and practice feel something my knee pop ended up you know chipping off some cartilage on the head of my femur had to have surgery so i just remember now from three years in i went to the game so i had surgery the day before the game i remember going to the game our first game that i'm supposed

to be playing in and in crutching away from the stadium because i couldn't be on the sidelines because they'd want me to get hit so yeah i'm crutching away and i can like hear the crowd it was like a movie scene like by myself and it was just horrible so now I'm three years in haven't played good enough to play everybody in my hometown thinks I was crazy for going there anyways and I haven't played it down and you know people are you know assuming I'm just not good enough to play and I'm like I swear I'm good enough at this point yeah so then the next year you know I finally stayed healthy I was starting on our third down package played defensive end but ended up switching to fullback and that's really where, you know, I shined.

That was my natural position and just kind of became like the sledgehammer of the offense. Wow, I love that. You know, it's, you know, and I think about kids who go through cancer, you know, end up becoming doctors, you know, or have like some traumatic event, you know, mom suffers cancer passes away at the end of becoming doctors, try to solve, like, the cancer problem. Like, you know, going through three really traumatic injuries. Yeah. Like, you start, you learn your body in such a different way.

have to learn your body in order to kind of overcome because there's just there's only so much time with athletic medicine right like you're like you're on your own you know 22 hours of the day what you know just when you think about the injuries like how does that inform how you think about your approach with athletes today i think that i mean listening goes a long way i think athletes athletes are so in tune with what they're doing and how they feel for the most part and every single time i thought something was wrong it was yeah and i think athletes probably have even better litmus test of how they're doing. So I think having empathy and being relatable to how they feel.

And, you know, I think when someone gets hurt or goes through something like that, everyone wants to act like, tell them why it's okay and why they're going to be fine. It's not okay. You're pouring your heart and soul into something. So telling somebody it's okay is the last thing they want to hear. So I think understanding that like it's okay that you're pissed. Yeah. And it's okay to embrace that feeling.

Those are normal emotions to feel. Definitely. And you can kind of, you know, refocus and use that energy to, you know, build your comeback and rehab and get back to where you were. But I think just, you know, being able to understand exactly what that feels like is powerful of anything. It's just being able to relate and have a conversation and, you know, tell them it's okay to feel the way they're feeling. Yeah. You were a very early adopter with WOOP, so you've been on the platform for six years. Yes. You know, talk about, you know, you just mentioned, you know,

athletes know their body. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting, you know, when I was coaching, I was, you know, and I was an athlete, you know, subjected to a lot of different types of questionnaires, which are great to try to assess, you know, how actually am I feeling and how that might correlate to what I can do and how I can train that day. You know, I'm wondering, like, how do you see data as like a nice bridge to kind of help contextualize potentially how you're feeling, you know, because that's like an interesting,

you know, you're coaching athletes who are who arguably, you know, at the very tip of the spear, you know, you think about your wife, Katie Hoffman, or like, you know, a marathon and triathlet, like, I can ride out. Like, I mean, you coach some of the best athletes. Like, how do you think about using data to inform that kind of conversation? I think for athletes, focusing on, like, I love the monthly reports and the yearly reports, because, you know, you can look at, you know, your training cycles meets, you know, maybe it's a relationship thing going on. Maybe it's a move, different coaching, whatever it could be. And you can kind of, you know, correlate what's going on and, you know, what your recovery looks like,

your strain, and, you know, even like your sleep quality quantity and look at how those life events are affecting, you know, the outcomes and your recovery scores. Because the day-to-day, it's useful, but there is part of being an athlete and just getting it done. It doesn't matter what that number says. Yeah. And you have to perform. So those weekly trends are actually a little bit more informative than kind of the acute kind of perturbations because there's going to be if you're training hard. and you're an elite athlete, those perturbations can be, I mean, the fitter you are, arguably the kind of the less perturbation you'll see

if you're in a maintenance phase. But when you're in functional, reaching phases, there's going to be a lot of perturbation. And, you know, reds, you know, lower end of the spectrum on yellows. And that can be off-putting, I think, for an athlete to your, I think, to your point. Definitely, yeah. And I think a lot of people, depending on the personality, we'll actually have them not wear it or not look at it two days prior to meet day.

because. And we now have a future where you can actually hide the various aspects. Isn't it just amazing? Yeah, because like I said, regardless, if you wake up and it's, you know, the national championship and you're a 4% recovery, like one, something's probably going on, but you're going to go out there and play and you have to get it done. Yeah. And I always tell people, the body, like we were saying, the body is very adaptable.

And people can do amazing things even in bad conditions. So as much as we like to optimize everything, like Michael Jordan used to stay up all night and then drop 50 points. So you can get it done, and there's something to the mentality of just performing it in whatever situation you're at and not really worrying about it. Yeah. So I think that using it individually and tailoring the approach and the conversations based on the person's personality is the way to go. Yeah, I think so. I, you know, it's, I try to, I talk to my son, you know, is just getting on to Woop pretty recently.

And, you know, he's got big starting his ice hockey weekend. so kind of opening weekend and you know hasn't played plays a lot of golf at a pretty high level and hasn't played a ton of hockey over the course of the summer I'm like dude you know like just embrace it it's gonna you know but being able to kind of hide the data I think is just such a it's a game changer definitely you just you can just focus on what you need to do and and one of the things I always try to tell tell anyone I talk to work with it's it's like the sum of your behaviors you know it's like try to just be as consistently you know optimize as you can and then when you do

have these perturbations, these stressors in your life, you'll be more resilient to kind of manage those. So how do you think about, you know, when you're training, you know, athletes and you're thinking about sleep and recovery component, you know, how do you frame up that conversation with athletes? And what do you, what do you focus on first? So kind of go through that diagnosis process. Yeah. Yeah. That process is, I would say it's different for every person, but I think that I think the psychology surrounding sleep is probably the thing that's lagging most in the world of recovery and just people's relationship with sleep. Like data is great, but, you know, your feelings towards it and the thoughts you're having surrounding it and your environment are so, so powerful. And people don't really want to talk about that very much.

You know, it's usually just like, what are my sleep cycles? Like, how much am I getting? What's my score? Which is great. But, like, if you're thinking about sleep, chances are it's not going to go well. right when you're actually in the moment so I think the first thing we we start on is just some self-assessment and we have them write down a notebook just when they go to bed and when they wake up or you know you can use a tracker and then just rating one to 10 like how they feel in the

morning and then just like a you know quality perspective one to 10 how they think they slept and so if it's a simple baseline very simple and just getting it you know a baseline and evolving from there of just so if that number that their perspective on how their quality of sleep is is, you know, less than six or so. You know, above an eight, usually a pretty good place. Then we start peeling back the layers of why they're feeling that way and what we can do to make it better. But let's say, you know, we're looking to improve on some things. From there, we usually turn to the environment and how they're feeling.

So environment could be, that's a low-hanging fruit. You can tweak things and it's not very, you know, time-consuming or thought-consuming. and then, you know, that they are having issues, talk about why they're having those issues. Because people will tell me all the time, they're like, I'm a horrible sleeper. And then you peel back the layers, and it really has nothing to do with sleep. It's about stress management. What are they thinking about when they wake up in the middle of the night? And actually confronting those issues head on.

During the day. Yes, yeah, yeah, during the day, not in the middle of the night. And, you know, that or they're sitting there thinking about how much sleep they're getting. They wake up and they're like, you know, oh, man, I have practice in the morning. I've only slept three hours, practice is in two hours, like I'm going to feel horrible, and then this thought process just goes in a circle, and they can't fall back asleep. So that's what I'm talking about with their relationship with sleep. And, you know, one of the best things to do is give them case study examples of people who haven't slept well and done amazing things.

And it's, okay, if you can't sleep, you can't sleep, get up, take your mind off, but don't lay there for 30 minutes and beat yourself up. Then all of a sudden they tend to have a much easier time going back to bed. Yeah, I love your, you know, I think your approach is a very empathetic one. And I know you trained and work with Dr. Jennifer Martin from UCLA, I believe, who's just an expert in insomnia and I think she's in geriatrics, right? But I know her work is sensational. I imagine she was very influential in kind of helping you develop a framework around folks or an empathy for folks who maybe are struggling with sleep. Yeah, I think that, you know, because she comes from like the psychology background.

yeah background yeah and I think it it from the get-go it morphs how I thought about sleep as opposed to you know what supplements can we take what bed what temperature like all those things are great but I think the psychology side of it has such an impact and that's really where 90% of the problems lie there's no question you know yeah it's it's not like there's some physiological thing going on it's it's your relationship what's happening throughout the day and then you know the impact is having on your body. Yeah, a new feature on WOOP, the stress monitor. I don't know if you've done into that, but I mean, it is wild to see the correlation

between your stress during the day and how that is relative to your baseline. As you know, it's on scale one to, it's on scale zero to three. And I notice, you know, the more minutes I have in a higher stress zone relative to my baseline, sure enough, it kind of rears its head in my sleep and that I don't end up getting into those deeper stages of sleep. So understanding, I think, you know, one of, I think our, one of the biggest contributions I think, you know, Woop is going to make in the scientific literature is being able to show the relationship between daytime stress management and the quality of your sleep at night. There's not a lot of literature around that, but I think, I think to your point, like, I think if people can recognize that connection and recognize that, it's what we do during the day that is going to, and how we manage our relationships and our connections. you know, the degree to which we're living with purpose and the degree that we feel efficacy,

you know, that we can have the skills and resources to do what we're asked to do and have a sense of autonomy, like understanding that those kind of simple frameworks during the day are really what influence our ability to get quality, you know, sleep at night. 100%. And I think that that's, but I think the hard part is with that is that's a long process to correct. It really is. It really is. Yeah.

And so I think people shy away from that because they're not quite ready to go down that journey or that path. How do you get people to do the work? Like, that's what this is about, right? It's the interior work. Well, I think it's very similar to how you would coach someone in nutrition, you know, from a dietetic perspective. I think, you know, building habits along the way, very small, tangible habits, you know,

for multiple weeks of the time where it literally could be just writing down when time you went to bed, something that small or it could be, you know, turning the lights dimmer at 7 p.m. Little things like that. I think you have to establish it in these small habits. it's because you can't make massive changes, especially at the psychological level overnight. And it's going to have to be ingrained to the point where it's subconscious. And so it's a long process.

And I think people don't want that. So all of a sudden, like, people start throwing supplements at it. And they start throwing all these different, you know, modalities. On top of an inefficient system. Yeah. And it's just, most of the time, it's just, it's creating more of an issue. Right. So I think, you know, I've always, my thesis has always been, like, the one of the, the path

ways to improving our psychology and our mindset is actually through our physiology. And I know you think a lot about respiration and breathing. Let's kind of talk about, you know, how we can think about controlling our breath throughout the day as a pathway to improve our sleep. It's kind of like backing into sleep without focusing on sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think for breath, I think in the space right now, it's borderline overwhelming with all

the philosophy. Oh, my gosh, it's wild. Like, you know, if you search like breathwork, you're going to get just 18,000 different protocols and stuff like that. And it's conflated with mindfulness and meditation. I'm like, okay, those are different. Like, you know, it's just tough for the labor. And I think it is a little bit, I would say, especially, you know, for the athletic

population, it's not something that people are excited about or want to jump into. So I think getting that buy-in is very important. And, you know, obviously we use the mouth tape, you know, with three recover. that's that's our main product but I think the mouth tape is a really useful way especially for somebody that's not fully bought in already to experience some of the changes without having to necessarily be really dialed into protocols because your body naturally has to it's almost like bumpers for your for your body you know so it allows your it forces you to kind of calm your nervous system and control your breathing so we love doing that because we find it a hard time

especially with younger athletes to fully get the buy-in from from a breathwork perspective especially if they're on their own. But I will say just bringing awareness similar to sleep or nutrition, like, you know, logging your food, bringing awareness to your breath is such a massive step. I think most people don't even think twice throughout the day. And it's free generally. Very free. I mean, I think people undervalue like the democratically available modalities like the breathwork

and the sunshine. And it's a direct link. It's not just roundabout way. Direct link to your nervous system. It's such a fast path. And I think with all this stuff out there, people don't realize like when it comes to our nervous system, it's just a sliding scale. Yeah.

You know, it's not like binary where you're either, you know, sympathetic, parasympathetic. It's a sliding scale. And basically your breath is, you know, your finger sliding this bead back and forth on that path. And so, you know, if your inhales are longer than your exhales, you're going to slide it up. And if your exhales are longer, you're going to, you know, downregulate. Right. And it comes down to being that simple. So I think once you build awareness, then you educate somebody.

on exactly how those inhales and exhales impact their nervous system, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Right. And now you can get into some more in-depth protocols, but for the most part, you know, especially somebody's starting out, I think just having a little bit of education goes a long way. Yeah. I think that's so well said. Talk about, I know that, you know, and just for folks who are listening, scientists here,

so the difference between a peer-reviewed study and antic data, they're totally different. We're going to talk antic data right now. So, um, it's probably like your worst nightmare sometimes. Yeah, I totally. I'm like, ah, no, but, but I think we have, we have unprecedented access to seeing the relationships between some of these modalities that were, um, interventions that were deploying. Yeah.

When we're working with clients and seeing the impact on the objective data that we're tracking. So I know you have some really interesting case studies. Yeah. Yeah. Where you have seen folks tape their mouth. Yep. And you see changes in, in sleep architecture.

So talk a little bit about the relationship. there. Yeah, I think what's been the most interesting from case studies is a lot of the people that we're working with are very aware and from a compliance perspective and, you know, all these different applications we have surrounding sleep, they are high compliance and they're doing all the right things. Yeah. Right. So you're trying, you're squeezing efficiencies at this point with a lot of these athletes. But what's, what's been amazing to see is, for example, example, my friend Rebecca, she's a, she's a national level weightlifter. I mean, the most dial-in person I know. Like everything down to the hour, never drinks, does everything perfect.

Like I would have, I would be, I was actually shocked if we could help, to be honest. That's how dialed in she is. And she started taping her mouth and her, like her slow wave sleep increased close to 15% a night on average and with her REM. So the restorative sleep in general went up almost 25% on average throughout the first week. Yeah. And that's somebody that never had a sleep issue, never, you know, has done breathwork, does it pretty regularly, very regiment of workout routine, you know, getting nine

hours of sleep a night, great nutritional plan. So we've seen that dozens of times. And I think that, you know, sometimes it can be. psychological or you know things going out throughout the day but also can be structural and just just our airways and our pathways and you know how we we breathe and like we're talking the thing is we don't really have perspective it's it's one thing that we've only slept as ourselves our entire life so when people are like how do you sleep if you're able to go to sleep and you sleep you know seven eight hours most people say I sleep well yeah and that's what I thought about myself too

but it turns out you might not be sleeping as good as you could be even on the table yeah is like, and that's like when I, you know, when I interact with the very best basketball player in the world, let's just say. And they're like, hey, I'm already really good. What can you actually do for me? I'm like, well, how do you know what you might be living on the table without actually looking at some of this objective? Especially sleep. I mean, I feel like getting a window into your sleep is just the optimal, like, power play. Oh, yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's been, it's been life changing for me. Yeah. Over the last three years, really, um, I'm taking it to another level and trying some different things,

and I feel like I'm to a point where I really have a good perspective of what my body does and needs and, you know, how it's going to move it around. Yeah, you know, exactly. And so, I mean, it's been, it's revolutionary. So I think that, I think it's also, there's quite a process for people. Yeah. It's not like you just jump into it and figure it out. You have to be like, you have to commit to it.

You know, like there's nothing like, behavior change is really hard. Like, and so just figure out, okay, what are the foundational elements, you know, and that's what I love so much about your work pot is like, like you get at the foundation, right? Definitely. I think to the earlier point we were, you know, discussing, like, if you don't have, like, sleep and recovery dialed in, like you are layering, you know, shit on top of shit. Like, inefficiency on top of inefficiency.

And it's like you just have to, you know, and there is going to be, I think, a moment where you have to kind of grapple with some truth that can be distressing. Yeah. You know, so I'd love for you to kind of just, we talked about it briefly, but just tap into that a little bit more because I think, I think for folks who, you know, Like, one of my buddies just got onto the platform.

He's been in special operations, and he's like, oh, my God, I know it's going to be really shitty my data, you know? And it's like kind of confronting that. How do you advise folks to just be open to, you know, this might not look great? Yeah. I think that, well, I think just explaining just that, I think that explaining, like you said, what are you leaving on the table? And I think circling it back to that why and why?

what they're trying to get better at because it's almost like when people don't want to go to the doctor because they're nervous, which is actually like the craziest philosophy because I'm like, don't you need to know. Like I'm like, how do you not want to know? But I get it because things are going okay. Yeah. Why do I want to upset the apple cart? And the other thing that always blows my mind with that is I'm like, sleep is like a pretty enjoyable thing. I'm like, I mean, we're not talking about doing like, you know, assault bike sprints here. We're talking about sleeping more and relaxing and people like sometimes really are resistant. But I think they're resistant because oftentimes they know the underlying cause it could be you know emotional

stress relationship stress whatever may be and that can be a painful process but especially with athletes I think you know bringing it back to the why of why they're doing this why they're training what they're what they're shooting for and then relating that to specific performance metrics that you know certain studies or data is shown is really useful and that when I go talk to teams a lot of times I try to bring in studies and case studies about performance metrics that they care about and related to sleep. And then it might break that barrier. Totally. Because you have to, you know, you have to appeal to the person you're talking to. And it's a bit of a sales pitch. Yeah. Because they don't have to do this. They're sleeping on their own. So it's going to be something

they're, you know, layering on to their day to day. So you do have to kind of sell them on it and get them bought in. And so I think that, for example, you know, there's been studies at Stanford about start times off the blocks with a certain number hours of sleep. Yes. And when I go talk to the swim team, you know, they could be barely listening, but all of a sudden you pull something like that where, look, you can drop 0.15 seconds just by sleeping 8 and a half hours at night. All of a sudden, you have their attention.

And some of those issues, they might not have been willing to, you know, face head on. All of a sudden, you know, the conversation starts and they can, they're actually open to dealing with. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like those performance metrics are just really critical, you know, just doing research across, you know, with frontline healthcare clinicians, you know, what is the metric that they actually care about? You know, they care about surgical errors.

They care about, you know, so kind of having some of that context can definitely improve the motivation. Yeah. What's wild, though, is we're still pretty early in sleep study. Like, there's not much out there. No, there isn't. It's like, you know, I would say up until what, maybe five years ago, 10 years, I mean, let's say 10 to be safe, But up until that point, there's even very little on, you know, direct relationships with performance outcomes. Most of it's just clinical, you know, apnea, things like that. But as far as actual, and there's still not that many.

Like, especially in sport, like specific sport outcomes, very minimal across the board. We're about to publish some, a study that we did with UCLA. Oh, nice. Yeah. They're really. They're on the front line of a lot of this. They really are. It's been such a joy to work.

work with them. And, you know, we're, we actually, with their football team and a bunch of teams, but we're looking at reaction time and sprint times and, you know, all the performance metrics that these folks care about. We looked at GPA. We were trying to replicate a finding from that Andrew Phillips did with Harvard looking at four years of sleep subjective when you go to bed and when you wake up and they were able to correlate sleep consistency with GPA, which is not surprising given that we know sleep consistency drives quality of sleep. Yeah. Quality of sleep. sleep is where all the magic happens, you know, physically, mentally and emotionally. So I thought that was really interesting study.

The other one that we saw, and, you know, that was, I think, really kind of an epic finding, again, linking the psychology and the physiology, which is a lot, you know, what I love at whoop is we're so well positioned to kind of do this type of research at a scale that is unprecedented in the field. And we basically found that the sleep deprivation of the leader correlated to the psychological safety of their team. Wow. So how psychologically safe the direct reports of the CEO felt was directly correlated with

the amount of sleep debts that they had. What setting was that? CEOs. So these are kind of CEOs who are clients of McKinsey. So there's a hundred person study. That's amazing. That's a really big day. Yeah.

I'd love to see that in a team setting. Right. And this is what I think, I get goosebumps when I think about it. You know, you think about how underslept and under recovered coaches are. Oh, I mean. Football coach is insane. Mind-blowing, right? And to think about the mental health issues that those folks face, you know, that are well-documented, you know, I mean, you think about urban.

And, like, you know, all these guys who are just- Actually, I talked to Coach Tucker at Michigan State about his sleep. Like, he's, I mean, I don't know how they do it. Yeah. So I think that there's an incredible opportunity for leaders of teams to really lean into sleep. 100%. Knowing that they're, you know, athletes, their soldiers, like, whoever they are leading, their surgical teams, is going to be far more productive when you are carrying less sleep debt. That's just like opening my eyes to like how many cool, you know, studies and correlations

you could do. I think football is an awesome sport to do it because it's an extreme. Like the schedules of coaches are wild. Oh, it is wild. And, but I would be interested even to take it a step further and look at records compared to the, and I also am curious just from a team dynamic perspective of would the amount of sleep correlate more in the safety of the team with the captain or the coach who would have a bigger impact wow i mean i think there's got to be maybe really interesting to look at but i'm sure there's

it's really powerful combination of the two yeah yeah no no question about it and and you think about you know the more sophisticated you become as a leader the more you can probably hide it but what was really cool about the study is that these are the cream of the crop CEOs like these are these are sophisticated human beings and to be able to see an effect With those folks, imagine the less sophisticated individuals who are carrying sleep dead. And I think about this, not just in the context of, you know, your soldiers and your teams, but what about your kids when you come home? I talk about that all the time.

How psychologically safe is your home environment? 100%. And I always, you know, I have this conversation and people think of sleep as this selfish thing. Like, oh, you're lazy, like you're going to sleep nine hours. But I think it's actually the most selfless thing you can do because, If you're a coach, a parent, a husband, or wife, whatever it is, when you're accepting the fact that you're going to be chronically underslept, you're accepting the fact that you're going to be, you know, 75% of the spouse, the coach, the teammate, the wife, husband, wherever it is, you're accepting you're going to be 75% of what you could be. Yeah. And so it's actually extremely selfless to commit to sleep.

And I think that you're able to show up for people on your team so much more, like you said, makes sense of the data coming out when you're optimized, especially in sleep, because people don't realize, like, I think sleep, people often associate sleep with feeling tired. But a lot of the, a lot of the effects are subconscious where you're probably not even noticing, like, you know, your emotional intelligence, reaction times. Exactly. Your eyes, how you remote. Exactly.

And how you read people's faces even, you know, there's stuff on that. So it's like, you're not going to realize the impact is happening. It's not like, oh, I'm tired today. No, no, that's the tip of the iceberg. Truly the tip of the iceberg. It's how am I going to react. You know, how do I look, how to respond, you know, my mood stability, all those things. And you're not going to really realize that's going on until some of the things start to deterior in your life.

Yeah. And we actually just finished some internal research looking at sleep consistency. So when you go to bed and when you wake up and how stable that is. And we saw basically after 45 minutes of variability, every minute we see decrements in HRV. and resting heart rate. Wow. So like 45 minutes. Like almost predictable?

Yeah. So we can predict your recovery next day and the knock on your recovery after 45 minutes. Wow. So it's so that that window of it. So knowing kind of the, you're right and left flank. Yeah. I try to stay inside that window as much as possible. Right.

Because I know that after, you know, every minute after 45 minutes, like I'm going to start to see a decline. And we see this with, with executive functions. So looking at mental control, every 45 minutes, every minute after 45 minutes, you get stupider. Yeah, yeah. But what percent of the population is doing that every single Friday and Saturday? Exactly. So, and that's a whole, we, social jet lag is a whole other conversation, right?

Like when you have, and basically for listeners, social jet lag is essentially, you've got the five days during the week, let's say, where you're pretty stable. And then you're like going out and, you know, we can talk about your bachelor party that you just went to and your date on around that. But you, you know, what happens when you go, when you're basically, you've got the five days where you're relatively consistent and then the weekends, you're just like, you know, wildly inconsistent, you know, we're talking hours and hours, you know, and compared to your kind of weekday consistency, that has an enormous impact on your system in the form of, like, stress. You know, you can't, you can't feel, there's no more, you're feeling so unsafe. Yeah, I felt it. We battle with this with especially young athletes, like high school athletes. because like on the weekend for example right like there's a balance of also like being a kid and having friends and things tend to be late right so and then also right they can sleep forever and oftentimes you know a Sunday is the only day they don't have morning practice so sleep until noon

yeah and it's finding that balance where they probably you know are sleep deprived especially by the end of the week if they have morning practices and chances are they're probably going to stay up late and it's like yes you know like you're saying consistency is probably more important than we even realize at this point but on the flip side you know having those relationships and hanging out your teammates and being a normal kid or even adult yeah that balance is tough and it's I think it's hard to draw that line I don't know exactly where that line is but you know I think I think really it's you know meeting the person where they're at and then trying to gradually like pull them closer to that midline but you know we struggle we battle with that and I

think that it's tough. It's tough to prioritize some of those things. Yeah. And I think, you know, modernity has not helped in that we have access to food and lights, you know, 24-7, right? But I think for me, like, where, like, sleep health equity, like we need to kind of get back to a place, though, where we're within neural bounds, you know, like you think about the mental health disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, like all of our behaviors when we're younger ladder up to kind of how affected we're going to be by and how vulnerable we're going to beat a disease. So I think that while, yeah, it's like being a normal college kid, but, you know, is binge drinking on the weekends, I don't think that's something we should normalize.

No, but it is. Oh, but no question about it. You know, so I think that we lack the courage to take like a real stance on college campuses and like what is actually normal. Like, you know, so I get not to get it on my soapbox, but I think it's, I think we have to understand. And that's why I do the research that I do is I want to understand, okay, when I go a minute after, you know, if my sleep-wake variability extends beyond 45 minutes, there is going to be a cost. You know, we look at non-suicidal ideation, for example. I mean, the folks, the college kids who have the biggest nighttime variability, night-to-night variability, sleep-wake variability,

are more vulnerable to non-suicidal ideation to the kids who aren't experiencing those big variability, those big swings in night-to-night variability. So there are, it comes at a real cost. Yeah. So I think, you know, we need to be way more overt in educating folks, you know, younger. So they understand where are these bounds and at what point? Because we've never been at a more exciting time in human history where we actually have these data.

Yeah. Yeah, I think, though, I will say, I think the movementist. started. I agree. With kids and knowing kids and knowing what it was like when I was there. Yeah. And we were, we were, you know, the outliers where we even thought about sleep. Yeah. Or not doing it for a workout. Something like that. So there's kids now, you know, and credit a lot of the professional athletes, you know, guys like LeBron for taking recovery seriously. Pat the Holmes. Exactly. Like it's, it's cool to take care of yourself now. Yeah. That was never a thing. Right. It was like, you know. Like burning a candle to both ends. Exactly.

have as many shots as I can. People would be, you know, if you're going to be the man at night, be the man in the morning, as though I say. But now, I think, you know, normalizing, taking care of yourself and, you know, all the recovery modalities and all that stuff, I think that that's starting to revolutionize things. And not only for young athletes, I think that for society, I think that I bet over the next 10 years you're going to see tons of mocktail bars.

I have a pretty cool concept that I'm not going to say it on here, but it's going to be pretty awesome. It'll be in Nashville, hopefully. But, you know, I think that, I mean, that's why I think with the sauna cold, that's why I'm so attracted to it because the reason why people gravitate towards alcohol, you're kind of mimicking those responses from a neuromodulated perspective with those modalities. So people when do a sauna coal punch, you get some of that same response with the dopamine hit, you know. Extreme.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And it creates more of a social connection. You want to be more talkative. Yeah. And you're also stuck in a space, no phones, and you're, you know, four feet from each other and going through a little bit of, you know, controlled adversity. Yeah.

And a lot of the same connections are made that people use alcohol for. So I think it's an awesome way to combat that. Ah, that's such an amazing analogy. Okay, let's dig into recovery. Yeah. I mean, it was really, I think, amazing insights on the, on the sleep side. How do you think about, you know, when you're training athletes, do you have kind of a taxonomy in terms of what recovery modalities

seem to move the needle the most in terms of, you know, sleep and kind of markers of inflammation and recovery. We tend to reframe it and we really use it as more prep. You know, we don't like to talk about recovery necessarily as much as preparation because I think, yeah, I think preparing your body for what you're about to go through is far more powerful than being reactive posts because we can do some stuff, but it's limited. It has a limited, you know, response, especially in competition. So I think, you know, really preparing yourself for what you're about to go through.

is the framework we like to use and I think I think you know we try to I'm we'll sleep again sleep is a foundation right so like that's the ultimate recovery we hammer that like like and I don't think people realize like people were thought even like son a cold punch all that stuff but like that that's a sliver compared to what sleep's going to have what sleep's going to impact so we make that very very clear we do a sleep presentation within the first two months of every new team we work with or every athlete, just talking about the science behind it and trying to relate specific studies and education to get to more. Yeah, so whatever sport we're working with, we're going to pull, you know, the best

data we can surrounding that specific sport to really try to get them bought in. And it actually works pretty well. You'd be, you know, it's amazing, especially when I go to college campuses. And I, a lot of times I'll have the coaches leave the room and we're going to have an honest conversation about alcohol, THC, nicotine, caffeine, right? And so they feel comfortable asking questions. But when you educate the kids and they're listening and bought in, like, they want to be the best they can be. And even more now than ever, because I think with NIL, the amount of money involved.

Oh, yeah. It's serious. Kids want to be the best of the best. And it's amazing when you give them the education, what changes they make. Yeah, I agree. I've just seen just insane changes that lead to championship. I mean, FSU. I mean, we were on five national championships.

We're going to cross softball and soccer. and like it's just like it's wild but it's hard to like unlock the key of the kingdom by getting that buy in yeah and i think you know the you can have it every expert come in and if they just tell them you know don't drink don't do these things it's bad for you they're not going to care they've been saying that for 20 years exactly but if you can relate to them and find something that really like intrigues them and relates to what they're trying to do and it's going to get them to the next level all of a sudden they went from not even thinking about you know drinking or smoking on the weekend to you know trying to stay within that hour or

their normal day time. And it has been amazing, you know, the messages I get when people make those changes, and often you see them excel on the field. Yeah. And it's really cool. Yeah. I love it. Talk a little bit about sauna and Coal Plunge. Like how do you think about those modalities in the context of training? How do you stack them? What is the timing? Yes. You know, circadian's implications to both. Definitely. I, um, it's funny because I think right now, like the, obviously the cold plunge is very trendy. It's so trendy. It's trendy, and you're not allowed to do without a video.

Those are the two rules. But I think that, like, so, you know, the studies have come out about, you know, the metabolic response from the cold plunge after training and after lifting. And I just, people have really run with that. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay. It's gospel at this point. This is pure hypertrophy and the chances that you're, like, maxing out the intensity for that

work out to the point where that's even going to impact it or probably low. Yeah. And then also I'm thinking like, okay, that's pretty, it's going to have pretty minimal impact on your hypertrophy. And then also, if it's, if it's the choice of doing cold therapy or not, it's probably worth doing regardless of if that's the only time you get it in. So people are really like to split hairs or I'll get people that message me and they're like, do you two, two minutes and 30 seconds in the cold or three minutes.

I'm like, you had 12 beers on Saturday. like this is irrelevant just like get in there like just be cold for a while like that you're that's the least of your problems you know and uh but in regards to training i think that you know we do like to use the cold that's more of like a prep like a like a you know pre-workout type spike in the morning yeah usually in the morning or pre-practice if people are up for it we've been i've been experimenting that with that as well with some of the like some of the guys in the NHL last season in like just like a 30 second like quick like you know just to get the endorphins going yeah the dopamine hit and yeah it seems like it's it's the guys like loved it yeah i think it works

super well and if you look at 30 seconds yeah and if you look at what's going on like in the brain i mean it makes total sense to do it then and then we also use it um you know in swimming there's prelims finals and it you know two swims in a day so it's super useful um between sessions to keep inflammation low and then also it allows us to kind of mimic caffeine in the sense of like the dopamine before their night swim but not impact their sleep that night, which is a huge issue. A lot of guys will come in and, you know, take a pre-workout energy drink prior to their night swim, but they have a big swim the next day. And that's going to cascade day after day.

So we can use the cold therapy as a way to give them an energy boost. It's a proxy for like just like a stimulant. It's super useful. But I think, like I said, though, if you're not prepped and you're not sleeping well, you know, you're just going to be, you know, putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. And it's not going to end up well. I think Sana is more of a consistency thing we like to use. And we do, I tend to recommend people to actually, we don't do as much contrast as most people do.

Reason being is a lot of the data, I think, they are separated. There's actually not, there's very minimal data on contrast therapy. and what I like about separating them is the timing. You know, you can be very specific with what outcome you're trying to get. And then two, you're following the data, you know what you're going to get. And I think the reason a lot of people do contrast training is it makes it just easier. Yeah. If you go in the sauna or the hot tub before you go in the cold,

I think that you're probably not getting the full impact of either modality because you're getting a little bit hot, but then you're so hot. You don't have the shock. Exactly. you're not you're not so so i think that there's um there's probably some more long-term longevity outcome um benefits but from an athlete's perspective we tend not to do as much contrast and separate them just so we're getting like the the pure isolated form and we know like you know the adaptations that are happening as opposed to kind of you know ending up in that middle ground of you know your

your core body temperature just kind of you know staying relatively even i live in the north so you know i'm in like the boston area and the lake gets very very cold yeah you know So we're like, 37, what's that? You jump in? Oh, yeah, I know, I definitely do. But it's funny because I, you know, I'll get my hot, my car like all nice and hot before. And I'm like, all right, I'm kind of cheating right now. Yeah, yeah, you know, like I'm muting the response, I think, a little bit.

Like, it's not as painful. So I'm like, all right, just get in my car cold, keep it cold. And I just like, yeah, so I kind of play those mind games with myself. But last weekend we went down to my good friend, Jesse Itzler's house and he just built a new cold plunge. And this thing, he was basically like, give me the, I want the best of the best. It's in ground. It's like 10 by 10. Wow.

The chillers on this thing, it's in like a little, you know, bathhouse type thing. I mean, they look like air conditioners. Like, there's like three. And so the water coming out, I bet, is 35. And the jets are as strong as a hot tub. And I have never experienced. I've been in, I literally took it. But the folks don't know.

When the water is moving, that is a whole different experience from the water still. I mean, I literally, it was 10 degrees outside one day in Michigan. I took a chainsaw, cut a square in a lake, and went in there for three minutes. That's legit. Not close to this coal plunge. It was the most gnarly thing. It's the water circulation. It was crazy.

And it's not like, you know, if you go in the, you know, some of the plunges, it's a little bit of circulation. This is like, blow your face off circulation. And it was, by the end of three minutes, we were absolutely, like, shivering to the max. I've never experienced the jets before. I have, I don't, it might be one of one. I don't know if anything is as powerful in, like, the world, to be honest with you. Oh, man. Okay, that's like next level.

Yeah. I'm going to find one of those. Yeah, get down there, Atlanta. Yeah. All right. All right, I want to talk a little bit about nutrition just as a recovery modality. So when I think about recovery, you know, sleep is in that bucket, you know, nutrition, stress, stress management. So nutrition is obviously very barbed wire topic in terms of just like it's really hard to figure out like what is the best.

nutritional plan is highly individual like how do you think about that with clients in terms of like this overarching framework that you've been yeah i think or do you even touch it uh we tend to take more of a behavior change perspective on nutrition so meeting where they're at and then and changing you know small steps i guess we we don't necessarily go after an end goal right away and we kind of see where it takes us but i mean we're pretty um i would say open-minded and uh we don't like have a specific strategy necessarily like we don't push them towards a certain i mean you know you know the mediterranean diet is is awesome and we tend to gravitate towards that but i think that um i mean just having people a lot of times just having people have have you know greens and water is a great

place to start but yeah from a nutritional perspective too you know so what there's a couple new studies that came out what two months ago and talked about you know high fat content diets and impact on slow wave sleep and just how it can even impact the architecture of people sleep so you know there's the education side of that but getting good fat is really key for the brain right so there i'm not surprised that there's a relationship between high quality fat during the day and how them on impact rem yeah your body your brain's going to tap that definitely and i think so i think it's more about you know are we getting you know well-rounded we start with literally like what your plate should look like in regards to you know fist sizes and things that are tangible for especially for kids

to hang on to and then also just like the male female breakdown to make sure it's individualized but we actually tend to bring in we bring in dietitians for most of that stuff because I'm a big believer of people like being specialized in like a certain thing for sure and you know the way that nutrition is so individual they're backwards also people have access to and I think that people dietitians do not get enough credit like their background is amazing and what they have to go through to be an RD and it you know with these like nutritionist type certifications nowadays like you know talking to you an expert and I think I think what they do best is kind of see through the weeds and really focus on the things that

move the needle as opposed to like there's so many trends and you're going to hear a million different things so you know following the data and then you know really almost like a funnel starting start starting at the plates and then funneling it down to really maximizing performance for the individual but I think that a lot of people try to make this huge huge overhaul or go after a specific type of diet, and then it fails like 90% of the time, you know, especially even with an athlete that's extremely motivated. And I think, I think that perspective of everybody, when people are trying to make an overhaul, it's almost like sports betting, right? It's kind of a weird analogy. It's probably because I like this

sports bet, but, you know, it's like, you know, you could take a bet that's like a 10 to 1 odds and you're going to win like all this money, but you don't because the chances are so low. and I think people don't think of it that way when they're trying to make a change in their life like the keto diet for example a compliance rate is extremely low and like the outcome could be amazing but it's almost like a bet

but the chances of you succeeding in solo why are you even taking that bet why not take a bet on something that's a lot higher chance that you're going to do it maybe the outcome takes longer it's not exactly what you're looking for but you'd rather win a little bit of money than lose it all and I think that's the approach

and I think that that's why I tend to gravitate towards sleep and sauna so much is because those are high compliance things that people enjoy, right? So if you can communicate them and educate them on why it's important, people aren't going to shy away from that. And the compliance is high, and then it creates momentum. You know, it creates momentum as enjoyable.

In other areas of their life. Right, and they start sleeping better. They have more capacity to exercise. They start craving alcohol less. Like things start happening without them even realizing it's happening, and it's amazing. Momentum is a real thing in sport and in changes, and psychological changes.

Yeah, I think back to the earlier kind of conversation around the entry point to the psychology is actually via the physiology. Like I just really believe that you can just make small changes that impact your physiology. Like you will see changes in how you view the world and your just perspective and your mindset. Definitely. So yeah, I think finding those like low barriers to entry, you know, that are just like, it's just so key. But I think there's something from a society when it comes down to like body composition, weight loss, performance, where people tend to go after the highest.

Like heart. compliance stuff first like the hardest stuff and I'm like why not start with the low hanging fruit that's actually going to get the ball rolling yeah and everything else gets easier literally if you if you sleep well you in a sauna like who doesn't like to go in a sauna for a little bit and then all of a sudden like mental health perspective like your workouts you feel better and you just stack those bricks and people tend to start the other way and then things fall apart what are your kind of non-negotiable bricks like if you were to kind of think all right you know they're obviously just to be outliers when you're going off and doing certain things like you know bachelor party whatever like um but what you're What, you know, what are kind of the bricks that you kind of put in place for yourself personally? Yeah, I mean, sleep is a non-negotiable for sure. So I prioritize that. You look very well rested, Todd. I appreciate that. Yeah, it depends.

You can catch me in a bad time. I won't be. But sleep's a non-negotiable. Sona is almost a non-negotiable. It's on a cold punch I do every single day. You know, if I'm in a city, I search for it. Yeah. Those are non-negotiables.

And then, you know, I really enjoy any. type of cardiovascular training from a mental health perspective it makes me feel so much better so I try to get at least minimally I'll get 30 minutes so like steady state in the day and then I'll strength train four days a week so that's pretty much like my my non-negotiables where I'm gonna probably do that regardless of the situation yeah beyond that everything else is kind of sprinkled in but you know those are I'm very regimented with that stuff and I seek it out like I'll make a point to do that because there's been times where I've done

that when it's convenient and i would say over the last year or so i've been able to you know i'm fortunate enough to have all the stuff in my house and i can do it on a regular basis and i feel substantially better so now it's become like a non-negotiable yeah and i think like that's what are yours i'm curious yeah for me definitely you know polarized training is huge and strength training and same like i will pretty much lift every single day um just a different body part like i don't like to spend you know an hour and a half lifting so I just kind of think over the course of six days like what kind of what body parts am I going to tackle like each day and I usually do that um prior to

a sprint interval workout I'll lift beforehand um usually after my zone two I'll lift afterwards and you know I try to like I mean I just feel so much better when I'm working out and there's really nothing I can do to my body that is going to um hurt my recovery next day and and so I think from and that's where whoop has been really powerful for me You know, is I can kind of see that, all right, you know, I can pretty much, you know, in an hour, hour and a half, you know, I'm really not going to be able to do anything in my body physiologically. That's going to impede my recovery tomorrow. It is how I sleep. And that's my other non-negotiable is definitely like stabilizing when I go to bed and when I wake up and really trying to stay within that 45 minute window to the best of my ability.

And again, it's not about being perfect. Like, I can't do it all the time and that's okay. But, you know, 25 days out of the month, like I'm really trying to stabilize knowing that that's going to ladder up to, you know, preventing. cognitive decline and Alzheimer's and cancer-proneness, like it's just there's such a strong metabolic dysfunction, like insulin resistance, like there's just such a strong correlation between night-to-night variability and all of those things. I think it's actually probably the most impactful human behavior based on like all of the literature and just my my work and I mean that's that's why I just I become literally obsessed with it. I know I know and sleep

like variability like or timing you know really drives like restorative sleep as well. So I think that just knowing that there's these. connections. It's really powerful. It's a sleep-wake time. And then I'm a huge fan of hot and cold and really try to build that in. I do, you know, kind of the minimum viable dose. So kind of 12 minutes across the week of cold. And then, you know, and then I have a sauna, you know, in my house, which I feel really fortunate to have that. So, you know, do about 60 minutes a week of that. And then, you know, I would say hydration, you know, stuff that I see at a population. You know, it's stuff that I see at a population level really move around our metrics and then finally um definitely time restricted eating

is massive so i really try to stop you know my final calorie is going to be three hours before when i before i intend to sleep that that for me it makes a huge difference and i will say on the nutrition side like when we're coaching like you know we're talking to folks i said you know quality and content of food is is can be hard to change but i think it's like a you know one brick to lay that will like lead to more positive changes is just we're restricting the your feeding window yeah definitely oh yeah I mean I'm curious I'm gonna have a phlebotomist come in and we're gonna do all this blood worker and we're gonna like literally you saw on a cold punch lift um not a before bed and then wake up and take you know growth hormone

measurements try to do some really cool stuff yeah there's a company with blokes I work with and we're gonna try to do all this different stuff I'm super stoked about it because I'm I'm always curious you know again limited data but I feel so much different I sleep so much better when I give that gap and I guess that's a other struggle with athletes sometimes is from a caloric perspective of like let's say you know knowing the impacts that having that window provides but also knowing the impacts of you know just from an energy balance perspective what takes priority I think that's very difficult you want to distribute those calories throughout the day right and that's where I think athletes hurt themselves and why they feel

like they have to do this pre really massive pre bed you know bolus if you're eating the right amount of calories throughout the day you don't need to do that right but it's hard because a lot of athletes, especially I know in swim, their PM practice will end the APM sometimes, depending on the schedules. So they need to have. So I think that's a challenge. And I think it's, you know, coaching them on even just having it pre-made right after practice as opposed to having to make it.

Like those little changes make a big impact. Or having that big, their biggest meal maybe at lunch that day for an 8 p.m. So they're getting, you know, big, big balls of calories like, you know, in the midday. And then before sleep, they're having more of like a bioavailable, like a diet. digestible, kind of protein, rich, yeah, fat. It's hard when you're fighting social norms. I see that. That's probably the biggest resistance we get.

Like the weekend stuff, the weekend stuff is very, very hard for people. I think when you're... That's the competitive advantage, though, baby. I know. Like, if you get athletes who are really trying to do hard things and compete at the highest level, that is the competitive advantage because that's when all your competitors are just, you know, they're doing stupid shit, you know? Yeah.

And plus, you know, especially in timed sports or individual sports, it's like the margin of victory is insane. It's so small. So anything you can do, at least from my perspective, I would do literally. That's how my wife was like anything you could do. And I couldn't live with knowing that I left stuff on the table. It would be horrible to live with, especially if you came up a little bit short. So, you know, I actually think that athletes are better at that stuff. I think the weekend thing for the general population, tough.

Yeah, it was tough. But you think about, like, I always think about. about a perspective of, all right, like I, you know, again, I'm going to have those weekends, of course, you know, and I love it and I brace it when I'm in the moment, but, and I think about how it impacts my Monday, Tuesday, I'm spending three days just to get back to neutral. Yeah. You know, and I'm like, it's just like not worth it to me. Yeah.

Like, I can't. But I would say that's 80% of the population. There's no question. There's no question about it. And, you know, and it's, it's not, everyone's making a choice. Again, and I'm not, like, I'm not saying that my choices are better. I'm just saying, like, I know my values. I want to wake up with as much joy and energy as humanly possible so I can be

president for my family, my loved ones, and the things I want to think about. And I know that there are a set of behaviors that is going to ladder up to that or not. And it's very binary, in my opinion. Like there is the principle of non-neutrality. Either your behaviors are laddering up to enable you to live your values with joy and energy or they're not. And it's like you just, then you just, you make conscious choices. Yeah.

And I'm not judging those choices. I'm just saying like you just figure out like what you're judging it a little bit. might be able but yeah but I'm not judging you but I'm not no no no but truly like people have different values like different sets of priorities and in commitments and so I'm I actually really am not judging I'm just saying you know I just I think coming to that conversation naive though and not understanding your choices and how they're impacting the things that you say you care about and that you stand behind like to me that's the conversation that I think people aren't as happy to have they're not well no they don't want to be hitting the face

with that because that's uh i think when i think i think i think honesty and self-reflection is a very rare strength when people are able to do that because i think a lot of people avoid that and they actually don't they're not honest with themselves about what is important to them and what their value i think if in their head their actions are probably much different than actually what plays out on paper yeah similar to if somebody locks their food but i think if you wrote down all the behaviors what's important to them what they're trying to achieve in their life chances are especially regarding sleep, they think things are a one-off or it's just a Saturday, whatever it may be, but when you actually spell it out and write it out and do some self-expiration, it's a majority

of their life is in that place where they don't want to be. But I think it's easy to slip into that and not be aware. I think honestly, with sleep, a lot of times it's, I think awareness is probably 90% of it because it's not something people often think about up until three years ago. Like, you'd be, you would sound like a crazy person talking about this stuff. I mean, look at like, Huberman, for example, like, the fact that his podcast has exploded just shows the shift in the population. I know. I mean, that would, 10 years ago, people would be like, what is this?

I know. And now, you know, people are into this. And just, you know, your average person. So it's really cool. He said, one of his quotes was like, you know, I think we're at a time in human history where there's like this called arms like from Mother Nature where we just need to take back control over. autonomic nervous system, you know? And I just think that is the most beautiful quote. And I use it all the time, citing him, of course. But, you know, it's like, I think the competitive advantage in this world is either you're going to understand and be able to control your physiology or not.

And if you cannot control your physiology, you are going to get left behind. You are not going to evolve and survive. And you can't, you can only fight it for so long. Yeah. I think people don't realize that. It's like willpower and motivation, all that stuff. When you're fighting your physiology, it's going to chip away. Yeah. It's almost like the person. You can't talk yourself in a better future for a little bit of time you can yeah you know it's almost like the uh the persians and the spartans it's like it just kind of chips away and eventually you can only hold for so long you know that's right that's right um Todd what are you obsessing over right now what am I obsessing over right now and you do you mean in my life or like from a from a

physiological perspective yeah we just we kind of ask all of our guests like what they're obsessing over right now. So you can take it in whatever direction you want. I mean, I'm obsessing over our dream mouth tape. It's been, it's exceeded my expectations and the feedback we're getting from people and the positive impact of having on people's lives. It's so, it makes me so happy because that's the experience that I had. And, you know, whenever you're helping people out and doing something you love, it's the best feeling in the world. So it's similar to like when an athlete does really well, but we've been able to reach so many people. So we're just focusing it, focusing on that and new products and, you know, tweaking products and making things better.

It's been super fun and, you know, beyond grateful for the support. People like my friends and even people that I haven't met, like the support's been overwhelming and, you know, it's always humbling when that happens. You're impacting a lot of lives. That's the goal for sure. Yeah. Thank you for all your good work. It's been super fun talking to you today. Yes, it's been awesome.

And I don't get that chance to do a lot of, like, in-person podcast, so appreciate the conversation so much. Yes, is great. Yeah, incredible. Thank you to Todd Anderson for sharing his best practices and insight on training, longevity, and sleep. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please subscribe to WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952.

you can join whoop for free for 30 days that's our free trial at whoop.com new members can use the code will w iLL and get a $60 credit on loop accessories and that's a wrap thank you all for listening we'll catch you next week on the whoop podcast so is stay healthy and stay in the