WHOOP Podcast - Pregnancy, exercise, and HRV: What WHOOP data says for expectant mothers

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Kristen Holmes, Emily Capodilupo, and Dr. Shon Rowan of West Virginia University detail a first-of-its-kind study with WHOOP on pregnancy and exercise. The research revealed that participants experienced an increase in resting heart rate and a decrease in heart rate variability for much of their pregnancies, but saw a bounce back in those metrics in the weeks before birth. The participants also reported higher HRV scores postpartum compared to their heart rate variability baseline before pregnancy. Kristen, Emily, and Dr. Rowan discuss the exclusion of pregnant women from studies on exercise (4:10), the current guidelines for exercise during pregnancy (8:36), the myths about exercise for women.(12:09), diet and exercise during pregnancy (13:39), the study findings (14:56), HRV during pregnancy (18:09), Postpartum data and HRV increases (22:05), and menopause (30:35).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best, top athletes, scientists, experts, and more, learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what we all can learn to unlock our own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Check us out at WOOP.com. Get 15% off a WOOP membership by using the code will.

That's W-I-L-L. Okay, on this week's episode, we're taking an in-depth look at pregnancy. The fearless Kristen Holmes and Emily Capitaluppo return for a discussion with Dr. Sean Rowan from West Virginia University about a first of its kind study with Whoop. This study followed women throughout the course of their pregnancy to understand the physiological impact of pregnancy and exercise. The research revealed that participants experienced an increase in. resting heart rate and a decrease in heart rate variability for much of their pregnancies, but saw a bounce back in those metrics in the weeks before birth. Pretty fascinating. Kristen Emily and Dr. Rowan also discuss the common misconceptions about what you can and can't

do while you're pregnant, why exercise often leads to better outcomes while you're pregnant, including better physiological data, what postpartum looks like on whoop and how the participants showed an increase in HRV compared to before pregnancy. The role wearables, and particularly whoop, can play in health monitoring during pregnancy and some of the challenges in studying pregnancy and how that has led to a lack of research on the matter. Women's health and performance is a major initiative for us at WOOP. That's why we're excited to be launching in-app teams for expectant mothers.

Moms to be can connect with other WOOP members who have due dates in the same. same month to share their experiences, advice, and more. We also launched the largest ever reproductive health survey available now in the WOOP app, and we look forward to sharing the information we collect. Without further ado, here are Kristen, Emily, and Dr. Sean Rowan. In the last couple of years, WOOP has made women's health and understanding women's physiology a priority. We are investing in research, our product, which we will talk about a bit today as well, and in conversations about women's health. Here with us today to talk about one of our core women's health themes, exercise in pregnancy, is Dr. Sean Rowan. Hi, Kristen and Emily. Thank you

very much for having me on here. It's been very exciting work with you guys over the past couple years. It's great to have you. And you mentioned Emily. Here with us also is our senior vice president of data science and research, Emily Capitlupo. Good to be here. Yeah, really excited to break down some of the work that we've been doing. Just a quick bit about Dr. Rowan. He is a board certified in obstetrics and gynecology, and he completed his medical training at West Virginia University of medicine and continues to work there as an assistant professor. He is clinically active in reproductive medicine, including infertility and in vitro fertilization and recently led a research study exploring how

monitoring pregnant women's resting heart rate and HRV can provide insights to the fitness changes that take place during and after pregnancy. Dr. Sean, we are so proud to be a data partner in this study and I think a testament to the slog that is the scientific process. Our first conversation was back in like 2017 and I'd love to actually start there. What inspired you to reach out to us? It's actually very interesting how we got connected, almost like fate in a way. So my sister was pregnant and a couple other friends were pregnant and they were all getting this mixed signals from their physicians of what they can do what they can't do my brother-in-law and i sat down we were talking like how do we even start

how do we start helping women understand what they can do in pregnancy and we got to talk and it's like well first of all how do we even know what's actually happening physiologically because women have been excluded from everything for so long with these studies and when you look at surveys that have been done most physicians aren't even given the most up-to-date guidelines, right? So one friend of ours was told by one provider don't lift more than 90 pounds. And another provider told her, don't lift more than 25 pounds. And she came to me. It was like, I deadlifted 180 this morning. Did I kill my baby? It's like, no, like this information is so old. And I actually asked the provider that said 25 pounds,

like, where did you come with, where did that come from? He's like, I don't know, it just sounded like a good answer. And then just diving into the research, there's just not much out there. And then it just seemed like a perfect fit to get women who are already exercising, put loops on them, let them continue to exercise. That way they're becoming their own control group. So we see what their heart rate variability is while they're not pregnant, while they're exercising, have them continue to do their exercise. So we're not, you know, as far as an IRB is concerned, we're not prescribing exercise. We're not, you know, messing with anything there. and then just kind of follow them and see what happens and that was uh that's kind of how the study came

about i can't remember how i finally got connected with you guys i think i just said an email and and you guys have just been just been amazing you know responded right away let's talk and i think we got on the phone and and here we are like you said what about four years later so obviously we're you know super honored to have gotten to work with you on this but i'd love to talk a little bit more because i think most people don't know this about like why it was that we had to get so clever and scrappy to get this research done. You know, I think there's this really interesting kind of double-edged sword where pregnant women are considered a protected class. And so it's actually really hard to do research on them. But, you know, the other way to look at that is we've almost created

these policies that are discriminatory in their nature, right? Like, you can't do research on pregnant women to protect them. But at the same time, like, that means that we're kind of okay with really not knowing what's going on. I think you use the right exact word. I think it's discrimination in a weird way, right? So we were saying we can't do these studies on women when they're pregnant to protect the baby, but yet we, for years, how much, how much if we lost, right, and not letting women know what is safe and giving them bad advice. If you look at even drug studies that are out there, it's something like 98% of drugs approved have had no pregnancy data. So we're just guessing, or we're using data from non-pregnant states, or we're just, hey, this person happened to be on it,

Now let's look back and see if it worked or not. So, you know, there has been, luckily, over the past few years, a little bit more of a push to start including women, and in particular, pregnant women into studies. But a lot of people are still just scared. You know, IRBs are, they're real nervous to be the first ones to do something. So that's why we kind of decided to be a little creative with this. What I'm hoping is now, I guess I can go ahead and start getting into some of the details, is we were able to get 18 women to go through the entire study. So that doesn't seem like a large number,

but when you're looking at whoops amount of data that we have is just astounding. And it took us years, right, to get these women who we could get enough data from them before they were pregnant. Then they had to get pregnant with working in the infertility world. We know that 20 to 25 percent of all women are going to have some infertility issues. And then getting them to continue to wear their whoop, it continued to exercise through pregnancy. So 18 women took us a long time to get there. But now we have all this data from women through pregnancy,

all of which we're exercising because we sent out monthly surveys, checking in, and we have things to the whoop platform. We're able to actually detect activity. What were their heart rates? We could show that they continue to be physically active throughout their entire pregnancy. and we can now say here is a baseline of health, right? All of our women, all 18, delivered at term, which is pretty impressive. So you have this control?

Yeah. Like you have this incredible control, really, of just what's normal. And hopefully now other people can look at this and they can take it to their IRBs and now we can start to explore so much else and just kind of opening up, if nothing else, just having these conversations, just being on here talking about it, letting people know that, hey, you can study this and let's do it. Maybe it's a good place to just start a little bit or talk a little bit about the guidelines that are put forth by the American College of Gunicology.

I think that that is a nice framework to start to understand, like, what is actually being prescribed to women? You know, what are those guidelines for exercises they stand today? So the guidelines from American College of OBGYN, their first ones, I just want to double check my dates, 1985 was the first committee opinion on exercise that came out from the American College of OBGYN. And sadly, what came out in that 1985 bulletin is what we still hear a lot. You know, this, don't let your heart rate get above 140. That was 1985. 1995, that was removed. It's been removed since 1994, and yet we still hear that all the time. What can my heart rate be?

Do I need to keep my heart rate down? Acog, the American College of OBJN or ACog, then went on to 2002. They actually started recommending 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week. So they went from just saying, what is safe to actually say, okay, let's start doing it. The most recent guidelines were in 2017, and like I said, they've still, they've kept the whole idea of heart rate out of it and recommending we use more of the exertion scales than worrying about heart rate and recommending exercise at least three to four times a week up to a moderate level. And, you know, this whole idea that if you weren't exercising before pregnancy, you can't start during pregnancy, that's gone too. But we still hear that, right? We hear that a lot.

Are there other kind of, you know, misconceptions or things people are hearing that, you know, might be untrue or just are unfounded? You know, what are some of the things that you hear in your practice? I think a big one is the can I start a new exercise regimen? I wasn't doing anything before. Can I start now? And there's no reason that you can't. I think we hear don't do, you got to continue doing what you were doing. The heart rate temperature, we hear that a lot. Should I monitor my temperature? Can I get my core temperature up too high? Your body physiologically would be very difficult unless you are doing yoga on a beach or some, you know, some of those things. A lot of is just common sense, really, if you just think about it. Keep your body cool. Stay hydrated.

So a lot of those are the things that I'm hearing is really, what can I do? And that's where we've got to go. You know, we've got to get to the point that we can actually lay out there. What can you do and being a little more aggressive and letting women know what you can do. I think, you know, one of the reasons why I'm so glad that we're doing this research and, you know, your research is so, so important is actually in preparation for this podcast, I googled it, like safe exercise during privacy. And the stuff that comes up, first of all, like, none of it's cited by anything. It's all like, you know, random women's magazines and stuff like that.

And it's like, keep it moderate. And I was like, well, what does that mean? You know, it's so generic. It's like, you know, don't do anything you're not used to, but it's probably okay to keep doing what you're doing, avoid hot yoga. It's so hard to take that, you know, as a pregnant woman who's been sort of trained to be afraid that, like, you're going to overtrain and, like, cause a miscarriage or something. Like, it's really hard to find good guidelines out there.

Yeah, they just don't exist. And even if the guidelines do exist, you're fighting mom and grandma who they know that you shouldn't do these things, right? Just recently, I had someone say, please tell her she needs to quit vacuuming. I'm like, no, I'm not going to tell her that. And then I had a patient, her husband said, tell her she, the 10 pound dumbbells is all she can lift. I was like, nope, not telling her that. Like, there's no reason that she can't lift more than 10 pound dumbbells.

So, you know, we're still hearing this constantly. It's kind of astounding if you even look back at, you know, how exercise of any women was looked at even, you know, 40, 50 years ago, you know, where women weren't even allowed to run marathons because they literally were told your uterus is going to fall out. run a marathon. It's just, it's just astounding that it's really in recent past that we've even started letting women exercise without it being focal on people looking at it in a bad way. And I think like that's such an interesting anecdote too. Like this whole story, 50 years ago, we couldn't run marathons because our uterus was going to fall out, right? So there's this sort of fear of the unknown and so obviously adopted this extremely conservative approach. You know, we don't know it's safe, so we're basically going to scare you into doing nothing.

And it seems like that's what's going on with pregnancy, too, where it's like, we don't know what's safe. So, like, better safe than sorry is, like, equating to, well, you better do nothing. Like, don't vacuum. Don't lift more than 10 pounds. But, you know, I think what's so dangerous there is we actually do know, and there is good research, that, like, women who aren't totally sedentary during pregnancy have better outcomes. They have, you know, shorter labors and seem to recover faster. So, like, it's unfortunate that sort of this default, one, that, like, we've made it,

so hard and so deprioritized doing this research, but sort of in the absence of any knowledge, we're saying, just stay on the couch and chill. Right. And not to get too into this, because it starts to really get outside my expertise, but there's pretty good evidence that diet and exercise during pregnancy isn't just affecting the pregnancy outcome, but it can actually be changing how DNA is methylated and things of that sort that are leading the children into more likely to be diabetics and have a high blood pressure, that they, they, they then have to work really hard to overcome. So we may be affecting the next generation, you know, in so many ways. And how many generations have we affected and kind of left behind

because we didn't study this sooner? We got a lot of catching up to do. I think that's what's been amazing about Woop and your guys' platform and allowing us to work with you and get this information out there. I think that now we just got to start getting people involved and getting people interested in this. Yeah, and I think we can brag that this is actually the first wearable study examining pregnancy and exercise. So I think that, you know, just to highlight how groundbreaking it actually is. And I think, too, just Sean, like the courage to like actually go through the process and, you know, to knowing that you were probably going to have to fight a fair bed to get this through IRB, you know, just says a lot, you know, in terms of your passion for this topic. And, you know,

and I think now we have a really cool platform to be able to talk, you know, have a baseline conversation about what exercise looks like in pregnant women. So maybe we can use that as a framework to kind of launch into just some of the details and the results of the study. So you mentioned 38 participants to start once you filtered and got everything cleaned. It was like 18. We're kind of looking for in the study and then the results. So the initial idea was just to do a study, just to get something started,

to get something that we could then use to get more studies started down the road, get information out there. And then once we really started to get the data, there just wasn't much done. So HRV has been looked at a few times by other ways. It's been 24-hour Holter monitors once per trimester or just kind of random 15-minute blocks here and there throughout the pregnancy.

And what those studies have shown is that there was an increase in resting heart rate and a decrease in heart rate variability throughout the pregnancy. And we saw that, but we saw that. but we saw a very interesting trend that wasn't seen before because of the ability to do continuous monitoring of heart rate variability. If you look at it by trimester, we saw that same trend. We saw the decrease in heart rate variability, the increase in resting heart rate. We saw a few other things.

One that we haven't really defined statistically, but one thing that was interesting is I had a few people reaching out to me that were in the study that were really paying attention to their dad or like, hey, something's going on. I think I'm pregnant. My pregnancy test is negative, but my data has really flipped here. And lo and behold, they did get pregnant. They were pregnant. I had a positive pregnancy test a few days later.

So we're not to the point that we can say that WOOP can detect pregnancy, but for people that are really paying attention to their data, they were able to see the same way that you guys may able to see that people had COVID before they tested positive. And people have illness, you know. So you saw a big decrease. So these women saw big decreases in heart variability. okay. They went into the red for no reason. Okay. And maybe just real quick. I mean, most of the folks listening are members and are fully aware of HRV, but maybe just real quick, because we'll be talking about it a fair amount. You know, what is heart rate variability and, you know, why does it matter and what is it really telling us in these situations?

You guys are probably to find that better than me. That's your world. But I'll do my best. You know, the way I like to think of it and kind of the basic way that I describe it to patients, especially getting enrolled in a study, or are they? the people that we talk about the study is that if I'm sitting here with a heart rate of 60, my heart is not beating every second on the second. If it is, or the closer it is to that every second on the second, the less well I am today. Some either I'm getting sick, I am sick, and maybe I'm wore down because I did the open workout twice this weekend, you know, those sorts of things that have me kind of, kind of wore down. But it's really probably, my heart is beating 0.6 seconds, then 1.2. And what is that change? And, the more ready I am to take on strain for the day, whether that's physically, and a lot of times

even mentally, those sorts of things that my body is ready for emotionally. How did I sleep? All of that stuff is going to play into where I am. And that's what heart rate variability is. And if that heart rate variability is narrowed, so when we say that heart rate variability decreased throughout pregnancy, there was extra strain going on, even though they were maintaining the same activities. Which makes a whole lot of sense, right? Because the body is mobilizing lots of resources to take care of this little baby that's growing inside the belly. But the thing that we saw that wasn't seen before because of the ability to continually monitor, even though we saw that if you took each trimester as a whole and you just took that data, we saw that trend. But

when you actually broke it down by week, it was somewhere around 50, 56 days. I think prior to delivery, we saw a complete reversal. We saw the heart rate availability start to go up. We saw the resting heart rate come down. And that continued through the postpartum period. So absolutely fascinating is that women's bodies, even though they've had this strain for all this time, all of a sudden, around that 50-day mark,

right around seven weeks prior to delivery, no matter when they delivered, we saw this reversal. And that's never been defined. And why is that? There's so much more we can dive in. to figure out what is actually happening. And is it happening only in term pregnancies and is it only in women who are exercising?

That's something to be determined. And I think that'll be fun to figure out. I guess I have two questions. One is, do you think that that's evidence that, you know, women are finally getting good at this and sort of, like, mastering the demands of pregnancy right before it's over? And two, like, do you think that that's potentially something that, you know, women who are pregnant can be looking out for, like, you know, if I start to see it coming down, then I'm 50 to 55 days away from delivery.

Like, could you? Is that an interesting indicator? I think we've got to be careful there, right? So I think it would be interesting to determine. I think if we did the same study adding in women with the history of preterm labor, women who are going to be more likely to go into labor earlier, and we saw that same trend, and I think that definitely, that can change so much. we can then get a much better idea of get steroids on board do the things that we need to do

what you don't want i think is to have everybody monitoring that on their own because especially they've had a preterm delivery and they start to see that that change it's going to create a lot of anxiety and then what is that doing to heart rate variability are we going to change it just because of the anxiety are people going to be sitting there watching this constantly and i think i don't know if it was you emily or someone had brought up the idea of how much stress and the idea of getting pregnant, how much was that affecting heart rate variability in the antipart, or in the pre-pregnancy period too.

So, you know, that'll be an interesting thing to weed out eventually. But the fact that we saw it across all 18 people would make me think that that didn't play a huge role in them being their own control and that they are good controls. But I think anything that we did do to add anxiety, we'd have to be careful too. So is it something that we could look at, you know, know, if our clinic had the data and there was some way to alert us that, hey, this patient

is starting to have this change, then we can tell them, as opposed to them watching it on their own. And we do this with athletic teams. You know, we kind of have these risk numbers and risk reports that kind of just let the coach know. And an athlete is kind of trending over a few days over the course of a week. You know, they're kind of trending in a potentially harmful direction. You know, coaches get alerted.

So I don't think it's certainly not all the realm of possibility that we can start to kind of create potentially these little algorithms that kind of help you identify when there's these potentially harmful trajectories. I think it's important to just remind folks that whoop is not a medical device. That's a very important disclaimer for us to make here. You know, we're not trying to, you know, diagnose or really prescribe anything at all. How long did you look at the women in our study after, how long did they have whoop on after delivery. We asked them to continue to wear it up to at least 12 weeks. Some of them have continued to wear it. I know of at least two people that are on their second pregnancy. We've been

done this a while. So we kind of close the data, but they're continuing to wear their loop, which is interesting. So at least the six to 12 week, most people consider 12 weeks out to be the end of the postpartum period. A lot of things are kind of defining that first six weeks. There's always kind of been this anecdotal idea that women actually achieved gains in fitness throughout pregnancy. And if you believe that HRV is a good marker of that, we are seeing that women in our study had a higher HRV in their postpartum period than they did in their pre-pregnancy period, which would suggest that since they continue to work out, even though it wasn't a lot of them, you know, we had monthly surveys. A lot of them were telling me,

they, how they change their exercise regimen, they're not working out as hard, but they were still doing something that they were making fitness games. And I think, I think that if we can continue to prove that in a bigger study, that then so many women that, well, I don't, I've made amazing progress. I don't want to have a baby right now because I don't want to hinder that progress that I've made. If we're able to say you're not, if anything, you're actually increasing your progress by getting pregnant, you know, I think it'll allow women to have that peace of mind that they're not going to lose all those gains they've worked hard for what did you find between kind of exercise duration and intensity does it matter you know what did you find in the study

it appears that the more women exercised minutes increased HRV more in that postpartum period so we saw it for everyone across the board but when you actually extrapolated it out by amount of time we saw an increase more so than we did with the intensity during that time So minutes of exercise was very important. Wow. Interesting. I think that those kinds of results are really exciting because, you know, what it means is like you don't need, you know, maybe you're not feeling up for it, you know, at every part of your pregnancy or you're tired. But it's like just go for a walk. Just go do something that like some amount of movement is correlated with benefit.

It doesn't have to be necessarily like an Instagram worthy impressive workout just move a little bit and you get those benefits. Exactly. And I think that we'll help us guide our guidelines, right? So instead of saying, go do something, now we can say this many of minutes is really critical. Do something for 120 minutes a week, you know, come up with some sort of number that gives people that goal to reach, as opposed to saying, like, Emily, you said, Google said, do moderate exercise. So now we can say, well, you know, moderate exercise, if you're looking at, like, the exertion scale, which a lot of people aren't familiar with, it's kind of like how you are feeling. healing. You're not, you're not exhausted having to lay on the ground for 10 minutes to recover afterwards, but you're also not, not feeling anything. So you're kind of in that middle

where you, you know you did something, but you're not exactly wiped out either. And how many minutes are you supposed to do that? And at the minutes, it's probably more important, going for a nice brisk walk, getting on a bike or a rower or whatever your form of exercises. And we didn't, we didn't limit it. We let women choose whatever they wanted to do. We had, We had some power lifters. We had some good bit of crossfitters, bikers, marathon runner. So we had a wide array of people, some who were more on the elite fitness side, who were really, you know, pushing some good numbers on marathons to some more just kind of

day, you know, just daily exercises that weren't really trying to hit any specific goals. They just wanted to move. And that's what they've been doing. Dr. Rowan, just looking ahead, what would be your kind of your laundry list, you're of wishes on things that you would want to study? What are some things that you're most excited about? Well, one thing that we still have left from this study to look at is we're going to dive into some sleep data.

So I think that's going to be exciting. It's going to be real interesting to look at that. And then I think next is to start to open up a bigger study where we are prescribing exercise. So maybe taking women who aren't exercising. So the nice thing about this study is these women were, for lack of the better work. healthy you know they had healthy pregnancies now let's start taking some of the women who aren't

exercising and are more likely to have some poor pregnancy outcomes or and how do we how do we start getting them involved in exercise and what happens then do we see that same trend i'd be very curious to see do we still see that same trend if we get them to start to exercise because if they're starting out with kind of a low HRV because they're not you know in the fitness spectrum more on the well end, they're more on the sick end to start. If we get them to more towards the wellness on that continuum, did we start to see some changes there? But I think it'd be very interesting to find out. You know, honestly, like your research has really inspired us so much at Woupbaum, so much so that in honor of Women's History Month, we're actually going to launch the largest

reproductive health study, which is going to cover all sorts of key milestones around pregnancy and menopause. So Dr. Rowan, I know you kind of are aware of this, and we're excited to have you involved in this groundbreaking research. Emily, do you want to talk a little bit more about, you know, what folks can expect and what you're excited about with this study and how we're framing it up? Absolutely. So throughout Women's History Month, which is the month of March, we're going to have available in the journal a link to participate in our survey. And so we're looking for anybody who's trying to conceive pregnant or in the first 12 months postpartum, as well as people who are beginning to experience the symptoms of perimenopause or who are postmenopausal.

So different surveys for all of those different groups. But what we're looking to understand is, you know, on a larger scale, what does normal insert whatever phase of reproductive life look like? So, you know, what does it look like when you're trying to conceive looking at people who are trying to conceive naturally as well as using different things like, you know, IVF or different assistive technologies? And, you know, throughout pregnancy, looking through all of the different. trimesters each month as a kind of bonus for anybody who participates in the pregnancy part of the survey, we're also going to have the ability to join different communities with other Woot members who are due the same month as you. So you can kind of follow along with people who are going through what you're going through and hopefully learn from each other. But really

we want to understand first and foremost, what does normal look like? And then overtime, you know, what can we start to see about what's not normal, any research we can do, around, are there warning signs of things before they become abnormal? So, you know, how does the way that you're sleeping pre-pregnancy impact your pregnancies? You know, an interesting question. How's the way that you're exercising both pre-pregnancy and throughout pregnancy affect, you know, the post-partum period? We were definitely lucky enough that, you know, in this initial study that we did with you, Dr. Rowan, that, you know, everybody had, like you said, pretty typical, healthy, full-term pregnancies, but, you know, at a much larger scale, we'd expect to see more variation.

And so being able to answer some questions that we weren't able to answer with this first study. And so, you know, we really want to see can we use the power of wearable data and this ability to do these large-scale longitudinal as well as like cross-sectional studies to just uncover things that traditional academic research hasn't been able to do because of all these restrictions that they have in research on pregnancy. And I think really like we want to, you know, we want to take these, you know, insights and everything that we learn and just create a like a smarter, more personalized experience, you know, for our members through like these innovative features. There's obviously so much potential just from an academic side to contribute to science. But definitely the end goal, obviously, is to create the most beneficial experience for our members and our customers as they move through these different phases of life. So we're pretty pumped. But. Dr. Rowan, do you have kind of any comments on that and like kind of maybe just share what you're excited about? We're trying to inspire people too to like be involved in this study and take the surveys and be citizen scientists and yeah, to kind of help move this research forwards. Yeah. So I do a lot of infertility, but I also do a lot of reproductive endocrinology. And with that is a lot of menopause. And for me and for the patients, it's one of the most

frustrating things that a lot of women have just been told, well, this is just the normal part of life and then you just have to deal with it and I just don't think that's right and it's not been studied just like pregnancy it's an area that we just don't know enough and so many things are changing in the body around the time of menopause so I think even though I'm excited about the pregnancy stuff I'm really excited about the menopause stuff too and the perimenopausal phase and seeing if we can start to dive into that my wife is always telling me she's like if you're going to research something research this parametopausal stuff that we're all going through so so you guys are doing that and that's

I know. It was funny. I'm like kind of alluded to this, but yeah, as I think we're both preparing for the podcast and like doing kind of our lone little mini lit reviews, it was like the easiest preparation possible because like there's literally no literature that exists. You know, that has like, you know, any objective quantifiable data. We're just super pumped to start to get these questions out into the world and see what comes back and start to see if we can see some, you know, the mechanism behind what's happening across. these different states. And I think just to add to that, I think we're really excited about not just doing the research, but Kristen, you kind of alluded to this, but like bringing it into the product. I think one of the things that I learned a lot about when building our menstrual cycle coaching feature and all of the research that went into that is I think so many people think about like reproductive health as being relevant to pregnancy, right? And it's like, until you're trying to conceive and pregnant, it's like, who cares, right? But then you start to realize that like your menstrual cycle and like all of these different your hormones as they

change throughout your mental cycle and then perimenopause and menopause for sure like it affects how you sleep it affects how you can train affects how you recover your emotional well-being and all these things and if you start to understand these hormones as just like hormones that are throughout your body and not just be like oh it's only relevant when I'm trying to get pregnant like all of a sudden you realize that this is stuff that it's so relevant to everybody not just one brief period of your life. So I think that you're figuring out how you can bring it into the product and help people make better sleeping decisions and training decisions and all of those kinds of things and really understand how to work with your body and not just sort of, oh, like perimenopause

is the worst and it's just ruining everything. But no, there's probably better ways to train. That's like more in tune with what's going on in your body and all of that. So being able to bring those insights in is something we're really excited about. I think using the results of this research as a platform to educate people about this continuum, you know, and hopefully inspire people to just ask better questions about their body. You know, I think at the core, you know, it's really what I think we aspire when we think about our aspirations for the product. You know, we want people to understand and ask better questions about their body and use the data for those purposes. And, you know, I think this is just another way to kind of get that conversation going. And

obviously we're really excited to see where it takes us. Dr. Rowan, thank you so much for joining us today for this really exciting conversation about pregnancy and exercise and just huge thanks. On behalf of Woop for all of your efforts to kind of make the study happen and for just being willing to kind of work so closely with us and over the course of these last few years, we're really grateful. Well, thank you guys for all you've done. I think Woop has been an amazing partner in this. And just what the things that you're looking forward to in the future is astounding and just excited

about what we can do for learning. to talk. Emily, thanks so much for all your insight today, too, just a star. And thank you, Dr. Rowan, for probably all your partnership on all of this. Thank you to Kristen, Emily, and Dr. Sean Rowan for coming on the WOOP podcast. A reminder, subscribe, leave us a rating. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. And you can get 15% off a WOOP membership, which includes the brand new WOOP 4.0. If you use the code, Will. W-I-L-L. Okay, that's it for now, folks. We'll see you all next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green.