WHOOP Podcast - Recovery: Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo take a deep dive into the WHOOP recovery metric--how it works, what it measures, using it to train smarter & more efficiently, plus tips for better recovery.

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo explain everything there is to know about WHOOP recovery, including how it's calculated (5:39), why heart rate variability is so important (6:25), an MLB study validating it (12:26), the impact of strain, rest and sleep (14:59), active recovery (18:18), why it may not match how you feel (22:01), how stress affects it (26:07), using it to optimize training (28:38), the value of auto-regulation (31:27), working out when you're in the red (32:09), self experimentation and factors that affect it (33:01), what to do to improve it (37:26), and why it's actually better if you're not always in the green (47:25). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve.

What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new Woopstrap 3.0 featuring WOOP Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with whoop and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper. We interview experts. We interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the

Whoop Podcast. How did you work out, but also like, how did you eat? How did you sleep? What kind of stressors are you dealing with emotional and physical? And by measuring recovery through the autonomic nervous system, which is what we're doing, we're getting all of these different inputs sort of mushed into one and creating this holistic measure of how ready your body is to adapt. How are we doing today? The subject of today's podcast is one that I know many of our listeners

will be very excited about. Recovery. Woop VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, and director of analytics, Emily Capital Lupo, team up once again to take a deep dive into another of our defining metrics. Recovery. Kristen and Emily discussed exactly what Woop Recovery is, how calculated and the significance of heart rate variability, the relationship between strain and recovery, and how to use it to optimize your training, external factors that impact your recovery, and several tips for what you can do to improve it on a daily basis. When it comes to recovery, there's nobody more qualified than Kristen and Emily to help you get the most out of your data. Without further ado, here are Kristen and Emily.

I'm Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance here at Woop. I'm joined once again by Emily Capitulupo, our director of analytics. Hello. Today we're going to talk to you all about WOOP recovery, how it works, what it measures, how to use it to train smarter and more efficiently. And finally, some tips for what you can do to improve it. So, Emily, as the mother of the recovery algorithm, is that the right terminology, explain to our listeners exactly what recovery is.

Sure. So recovery is a measure of your readiness. to respond to a training stimulus. Okay. Basically, when you wake up in the morning, you're going to get a WOOP recovery, and it's going to be bucketed from zero to 100, kind of superficially. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, but you're going to get either a red, a yellow, or green. Right. So the recovery score is on a zero to 100 scale. We break it down into the sort of a stoplight scale. So there's red, which is just the bottom third, zero to 33, yellow in the middle from 34 to 66,

and then green to the top third from 67 to 100%. And that just kind of makes it easier to talk about. But there aren't really like hard lines between the different colors. Not like discrete categories. Yeah. You really do want to think about it as like this continuous scale. And it's measuring how ready your body is to respond to a training statement, is how ready your body is to take on strain,

which is related to sort of, you know, how well you handled the strain of previous days and the stressors of previous days. Right. And I think it's probably important for folks to recognize that. It's not just your workout strain from the previous day that's going to impact next day recovery. And we've actually seen this in some of the studies that we've done where the training, when we've measured external load that was happening during a training session, there's actually no direct correlation between that training load and next day recovery, which means that what you're doing during all of these other hours of the day, the other 22 hours, for example, are really, really important and absolutely influence next day recovery. Right. That's kind of why I almost like don't like the word recovery because it makes it sound like sort of if you did something yesterday and then it's like did you recover from that or not. But not everything is like you sort of go into this debt from, you know, workout and then you have to like undo the workout is a lot of this sort of cumulative measure. And so it's like how did you work out? But also like how did you eat? How did you sleep? What kind of stressors are you dealing with emotional and physical? And, you know, even just kind of being like stressed at work can affect recovery. recovery and all these different things. And so it's sort of this by measuring recovery through

the autonomic nervous system, which is what we're doing, we're sort of getting all of these different inputs sort of mushed into one and creating this like holistic measure of how ready your body is to adapt. Let's talk about the inputs. So you mentioned HRV. So what actually goes into WOOP recovery? So it's three things. Primarily HRV heart rate variability and then resting heart rate taken during sleep, HRB and resting heart rate taken during sleep, and then sort of sleep performance, which is a whoop score

that measures what we call duration sufficiency, so of the sleep that you need, how much sleep did you get? So throughout the day, we're measuring how much sleep you need based on things like sleep debt, things like naps, things like strain, and then also your own demographic information, age,

gender, fitness level, and coming up with this sleep need measure, and then while you sleep, we measure how much sleep you're getting, you sort of divide how much sleep you got by how much sleep you needed, and that's your sleep performance score. And the algorithm's biggest input is heart rate variability. And resting heart rate and sleep sort of cumulatively or together make up less than about 15% of the weight of the algorithm. And the reason why we do that is because HRV sort of contains a lot of information. And the information provided by resting heart rate is most of the time redundant to the information we're getting from HRV.

but HRV has more day-to-day variability. And the information from sleep also tends to be redundant. And so they're really only useful in certain cases where they stop trending together. And then we sort of use that information. But most of the time, it's really, like if you look at your HRV on Woop and you look at your recovery score, you'll notice that they seem to be super highly correlated. And that's just because they are. Totally.

And Emily and I did a podcast on HRV, so definitely recommend that. We're not going to go into too much detail about HRV specifically. But at a high level, it's basically when you're HRV, is high. It means your heart is responding optimally to the signals that your nervous system is sending to it. When it's low, your heart is not as responsive to those signals. And that's kind of we measure that by looking at the time between the heartbeat, essentially, the interval of time. So we won't talk too much more about that. Yeah, I recommend that you go listen to that podcast because we talk all about the recovery score and sort of how HRV and how we use resting heart rate,

how we use HRV and sleep there. Great. So I think one of the, I think the magic of WOOP recovery is that it's completely individualized. I think it would be good for us to just talk about how we get a baseline. Why is that important and kind of how to use that to drive some of your training decisions. Sure. So the idea behind the recovery scores is sort of how ready your body is to adapt to this training stimulus, sort of relative to your sort of most ready state. So over in the fix. term, your fitness and sort of the maximum amount of training stimulus you could respond to is fixed. And obviously with training, you can increase that capacity, but in the short term, it's unchanging. And so what we're really measuring is, like, as a percentage of your capacity, where, like, where are you on that scale of, like, zero to your maximal capacity? And so with the calibration period over the first four days where we gray out those recovery scores,

is that we're trying to get an estimate of what that maximum capacity looks like so that we understand like oh you had a resting heart rate of you know 48 beats per minute in HRV of 92 milliseconds like you know is that good for you is that bad for you because you know with resting heart rate we've like a little bit of a sense of like oh it's in the 40s you're probably pretty fit you know in the 70s maybe less fit but like HRV can vary a ton from person to person having nothing to do with fitness and part of that is because because HRV is actually a signal that originates in the autonomic nervous system and then manifest in the heart rate and that pathway. So it's a function of the heart essentially.

Right. So we're measuring it at the heart, but it's actually a function of the nervous system that manifests in the heart. And so because that pathway can sort of be stronger or weaker, having nothing to do with fitness, you can't just look at a single HRV value of like 92 milliseconds and then sort of say like, oh, wow, like that's this person's ready for something or not ready. You know, if it's like four milliseconds, you might have a sense that they're not ready, but sort of outside of a very extreme value, it's pretty meaningless until you start to build that context. And then once we have this context of like, okay, like when Kristen's really awesome, her HRVs in maybe the like 90 to 100 millisecond range and her resting heart rates in like the low 40s or something like that, then you start to understand, okay, she just had an arresting her rate of 50, which you might think is like really, really good, but for her it's not. And so to start to kind of build out that context, lets us individualize the score. And so what you'll actually see is that most people's average recovery is somewhere in like the 60s. And that's just like mathematically what we force it to be.

So like looking at your average recovery compared to someone else's average recovery is sort of meaningless because the whole idea is that is personalized. And then what really matters is sort of day to day where you are on that scale and like trying to move your baselines in a direction of greater fitness. Right. So I think we definitely get this a lot, obviously, working with teams. You know, everyone wants to compare HRV. And I know we said we weren't going to go down talking about HRV. But I think it is maybe just worth mentioning, again, you know, why would you not want to compare HRV? And obviously you mentioned, you know, heart size genetics. Like what are some of the other factors that are really going to influence HRV? And why should we not be comparing from one person to another? Well, it's just like the data suggests that like, you know, higher HRV is sort of generally associated with better things. And there's a lot of research that sort of see. that cardiovascular health. Right. You sort of cardiovascular health and HRV have this like sort of noisy but you know positive correlation. But what we see is that like just your HRV as like a single measurement does not predict performance on any kind of like athletic activity or cognitive activity. There's no research that's sort of shown that like one single value kind of means anything.

But we have seen a lot of data that sort of shows that when your HRV is higher than like it's been like, you know, on average over the last six weeks or, you know, two weeks, different studies use different kinds of baselines. But, you know, when your HRV is elevated relative to where it's been, that you're going to perform better than when your HRV was, you know, at baseline and, you know, better than you would perform when it was below baseline. And so we try to sort of ignore absolute HRV values completely when we're looking at data across athletes and sort of to say that like, well, your HRV is sort of in a good place. So I can predict that you are going to perform better than you've been performing

in practices on days when it was, like, lower because you had higher cumulative load. And, you know, this other athlete who might actually have a higher sort of in absolute terms HRV than you, but if that HRV is below their baseline, I can anticipate as a coach that, like, they're going to perform less well than they have in practice. And so these kinds of information can be really helpful when you're picking, like, who gets to start in today's game or something like that. Yeah, we've definitely seen the research that we've done internally. I think the MLB major league baseball study that we did in 2016 is probably one of the better

examples where we've been able to take a relatively large data set and there's a very strong positive correlation between loop recovery and some of the things that they track in baseball, we're able to factor out a lot of the noise. You know, so we look at exit bad velocity, exit pitch velocity. So if you want to talk a little bit about that study. Yeah, so it was at least to date, and I believe still the largest study that the MLBs ever done in physiological data. And we looked at players, HRVs.

And for the pitchers, it was like their fastball throwing velocity. And for the hitters, it was their exit velocity. So the speed at which they were hitting the ball. Obviously, weather and a couple things can come into play. But the biggest variability in, like, why, you know, one day your fastball is going to be faster than another day should be you. And so it's, you know, how you slapped, how you ate, how you've been feeling human overload, all those things, you know, things that we try and capture in recovery. And we saw this, this positive relationship for each athlete with, like, their HRB and their either bat exit velocity or fastball pitching speed. but not when you try and like mush all the data together with HRV because then you get the player to player variability.

So if you normalize all the HRV data relative to each athlete, you see this beautiful, strong correlation. But if you just sort of mush speed with the fact that his HRV was like 82 today and someone else's speed with the fact that it was 64, like there's nothing. So it's pretty clear from analysis like that that HRV is not all by itself a useful metric. It needs this context and the recovery scores really comes to provide that concept. Yeah, and I think that's where there's enormous opportunity, you know, for, for number one, just to be aware of how your body is trending, right, and how it's responding and reacting to not just training stimulus, but all sorts of other lifestyle factors, right? They're going to influence your HRV or your resting heart rate. And also the quality of your sleep, which is, again, together is Woop Recovery. So I think what's interesting is, okay, we've got this, we've got this MLB study that shows this positive correlation. I'd be remiss not to point out that we, you know, we see this really anything with the finish line. So in the pool, the track, we were able to kind of factor out. a lot of the noise. We see this on the free throw line. And honestly, I think that's what makes Woop Recovery so sticky and why we're so successful operating within teams is that there is this correlation. And the fact is, when you've got a couple days where, you know, you're in the

green, I think most people I've spoken to, they feel fabulous. You know, so it's kind of worth getting yourself to a point where you are actually firing on cillars and you understand what that feels like. So you can line up your behaviors to try to replicate that. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about just this relationship between strain and recovery. And one of the popular questions we get is, why does a rest day not always improve my recovery? And this is a little bit softball for us, but let's tackle it. Sure. So a couple of reasons, you know, recovery, like we said, it takes into account everything. And so for a lot of people, a lot of the time, you know, the strain that we accumulate while exercising can be the most significant strain in your day, in which case you

would see this sort of cleaner relationship between strain today and recovery the next day. But for many of us, there's so many other factors. And even if for your typical workout, if you're working out an hour, hour and a half per day, that's such a small, you know, five, six percent of the day. If you're only something that you do five percent of the day isn't going to be the only thing that it reflects a metric that sort of reflects in a metric that's a summary of the whole day. And so it's, you know, how did you sleep that night? That's going to really. affect, like, if you didn't work out, but then you also sort of, like, use the fact that you had this day off to go out with your friends and stayed up late and then slept poorly, you know, ate

poorly, all these things. Your recovery is going to be bad reflecting those choices, and it's going to sort of, the fact that you didn't work out is sort of dwarfed by these other things. Things like hydration status, things like mood, even just like you could do absolutely everything right, but you're fighting a cold. And you may or may not know that you were exposed to a cold for a few days and you might not actually ever get sick. You know, maybe the reason why you didn't feel like working out yesterday and sort of took that rest day is because you're actually like sort of run down because you're fighting something. And so then like, you know, you're still fighting that the next day and that gets reflected in recovery too. So I think in

general, we do see a relationship between strain the day before. It's silly to think that something that you're spending 6% of your day on is going to perfectly correlate to something that's summarizing the entire day and everything before it. Right. And I think that's what makes this concept of day strain so powerful, you know, is that you're seeing kind of in real time, how you're responding to various stressors, how hard your heart is working across the day. And I think it's really, if you notice or if you wake up and your recovery is lower, you know, the fact is your body is just not going to work quite as efficiently. So it's really an opportunity just to prioritize, you know, some of the things Emily mentioned. Maybe you're going to pull in,

going to really think about your hydration, for example, you know, get a lot of water on board, make sure you're eating healthy, whole foods, non-processed. You want to give your body the opportunity to put all of its resources toward recovery. and regeneration. And if you're putting a bunch of crap in it and you're not prioritizing these different recovery type opportunities, you're going to basically potentially delay tomorrow's ability to kind of be at what would be your maximum recovery. Yeah, I think that's a good point to you. And I think like if you define a rest day as like the day on which I skip my workout, you're sort of thinking about it wrong, right? Like you want to take that hour and a half that

you're not spending in the gym or that hour that you're getting back and like actually put that towards recovery. And then you'd expect to see that like after a rest day you get a a better recovery. But if you're sort of skipping your workout, just like watching an hour of TV or sort of like doing nothing with that time or kind of worse, like using that hour to like do yard work, which is just, you know, exercise in a different form, then like it's sort of silly to expect any kind of recovery boost as a result. You know, it's totally fine to do yard work. But I think like one thing we saw that was really funny when we did analysis of taper in collegiate sports teams that like a lot of these athletes, it's like they're schedule. are so packed all the time and all of a sudden they're in like this taper period prior to NC2A championships. They have so much free time. And they like use it to like go have girl time and like go shopping and like do all this stuff. And that their day strains were actually like just as high as when they had, you know, team practices because they have all this energy and they're using it to do things instead of saving up that energy, which is sort of like the point of a taper.

And that was by the way, just a phenomenal to be able to show the data and actually be able to kind of we're able to correct it kind of five days in. We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, your strain is so high. We need to dial it back. You need to think about your how you're spending your day way differently because right now we're actually not tapering. So, but yeah, I think that that. I think, yeah. So, like, a rest day is sort of just the baby version of a taper. That, like, if your goal of your rest day is to boost recovery, then you actually have to take actions towards that. It's not merely like the inaction of, like, not going to the gym. Right. And one of my favorite teams on the platform, their rest day is just littered with different recovery. remodalities. You know, I mean, all the athletes get into the, you know, they're in the training room more on an off day than they are, you know, almost when they're training. So this idea, when you are struggling to kind of rebound from the various stressors and stimulus that you're putting on your body, you know, it's just you have to actively recover, you know, and that's really, I think, where this data can kind of help you understand what path to go down. So you're positioning yourself a few days later to be in your best possible spot, you know, to perform. Yeah.

Another really popular question we get is, you know, I had an awesome night's sleep. Why am I not in the green? Yeah, that is a common question. So for a couple of reasons. So I think there's sort of two separate questions that are related but a little bit different in there. And I want to answer both of them. So first is like, how is it that I could get a perfect sleep score and not a green recovery score? And I think it's worth pointing out that our sleep score is just measuring like of the amount of sleep that you needed. Did you get that sleep? And it doesn't explicitly. sort of measure the quality of the sleep. And so we have other measures for that. We have obviously time spent in slow wave sleep and REM sleep, which, you know, we encourage our users to look at. We have sleep efficiency, sleep consistency. And so you want to make sure that sort of sleep across the board is sort of as good as possible. It is possible to sort of get the sleep you needed, but not sort of have gotten the restorative benefits that you needed. And sometimes that's because you actually are more than one sleep away from recovery, right? Like, you know,

we all know that like when you're feeling sick, you sleep a lot, but it can't just like expect to get over a cold by tomorrow because, you know, I got my eight hours. It doesn't really work that way. So sometimes the amount of like accumulated recovery you need can be greater than what can be repaid in a single night. And one of the things is just physiologically interesting about sleep is that like you can only get a certain amount per day. Our bodies will not let us just like stockpile sleep or like get more sleep than we need. There's a point of no return. Yeah. So we can in fact be accurate that you did in fact get. all eight hours that you could possibly have benefited from, and you wouldn't benefit from getting another hour or two. So the sleep score is correct. You got all the sleep you need, check that box. But the reality is, is like, you know, you really have been beating yourself up for weeks or, you know, for days or whatever it is, and you're not eating well. You can't just sleep and ignore nutrition and ignore hydration and ignore all these other things and then expect to be green. So some of it is just like sleep is a huge component. We can pretty much guarantee that you're not going to be green if you're getting horrible sleep, but it's a big one, but one of many things that contribute to

a recovery. And so if you don't have these other pieces in there, yeah, you slept great, you might feel rested. There's still other need for recovery. The other piece that's sort of in that question is sort of sometimes you're going to wake up feeling great, like you feel really rested, really ready to go, and the recovery score doesn't reflect that. And that can happen for a couple of reasons. Sometimes our bodies are really, really good at compensating. And so, So we will be sort of almost like hiding from ourselves the fact that there's this like bubbling up need for something. And it's sort of like how when, you know, we get exposed to some disease or something, right? And then it might take us like four or five days to actually get sick.

That whole time our bodies are actively fighting off the infection. It just takes like that long to start sort of losing and then you start to feel bad. But what we actually see often is that like HRV and there will tank and therefore recovery, tank a few days before people start to report that they're getting sick. So sometimes it's just that your body's working really, really hard to sort of compensate. It's not always disease. Sometimes it's it's just physical stress. Like you worked out really hard. And so there's a lot of like inflammation and repairing processes going on. But we're doing a good job at those things. So while those things are going on and we're sort of yellow or red because of it on the recovery score, we're able to sort of

rally enough resources to be productive and to feel good. So we see that a lot that, like, Like the recovery score can be more sensitive to what's going on in our body because HRV is more sensitive to these things than we're often consciously aware of. And usually within a day or two, you almost like catch up to your recovery score. And you're like, oh, it all makes sense now. Yeah. We actually hear that a lot. I think I told this story on a previous podcast.

But like we had, you know, one guy was like really mad that his recovery score was all wrong because he felt great. And it kept telling him he was read. And then like a few days later he was diagnosed with mono. And it was like he felt really good and was like sort of. of incubating this kind of really unpleasant disease. And the recovery score is showing that like a few days before. And so I think like, you know, what I sort of always tell people and what's definitely been true in my own data, six plus years I've been on loop, is that like nine out

of ten, if not like, you know, 19 out of 20 days, you know, you should wake up and like kind of already know what the recovery score is going to tell you. Because if it's like more often than that, like you're probably just not very in tune with your body, which is not a good thing. But But, like, I think in the normal case, most of the time you're going to wake up and your recovery score is going to say something and it'll be like, yeah, I knew that. And it's those moments when the recovery score surprises you that it's the most valuable, you know. And so to have that moment of being like, this isn't wrong, what's going on and what might be going on and how can I respond to this in a way that's going to let me take advantage of this. Because if every day, 10 out of 10, 20 out of 20 days, you looked at your recovery score and you already knew what it was going to say, then it's actually useless. right you don't need something to tell you what you already know and it's those real like little moments and if you can kind of action those I think that's where you can really get the most benefit from tracking something like this yeah I mean I think you know context is always extremely important right when you're looking at one single day and one single value with recovery is you know chronically low you know a few you know a few days in a row for example you know look at your training okay maybe my body isn't adapting to the stimulus as well as I thought it can kind of evaluate your programming or as Emily mentioned looking at

at the restorative sleep, looking at your sleep consistency, am I accumulating sleep debt? All of these things are housed inside the app for you to look at. So if you are struggling with recovery, really dig into the quality of your sleep because that could be potentially the answer for you. Because you could be, again, meeting sleep need, but, you know, potentially not actually getting the type of restorative sleep that you need to actually position yourself to recover properly. And then again, you know, looking at your training as well. So if recovery's low, look at your training, you know, what kind of stimulus are you putting your body, potentially you're not adapting, and then also toggle over and look at your sleep and a little bit more in depth, and that can kind of

potentially give you the keys. And then there are these other factors, you know, like the hydration and nutrition, and are you matching your stress throughout the day, appropriate amounts of rest? I mean, these are all things that, again, kind of come together to help position you to optimally regenerate. Yeah, and I think like sort of to add everything you said is true, but to add to that kind of the emotional piece as well. Right. And sort of that mental health piece because sometimes, you know, when you're, like, dealing with a lot of psychological stress, you know, you can rally and you can get through a workout and you can like feel relatively good. But, you know, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, like what we're really

measuring with recovery is your ability to action a workout, not necessarily to like, you know, grit your way through it, although that's related. But like when you do work out, you're not getting stronger, you're getting weaker and you're creating all these little like micro tears and your muscles and you're sort of doing damage. And then fitness comes from when our body comes in and then like repairs all that damage and builds us back up stronger. And so that process that happens after the workout and primarily, you know, when we sleep after the workout is a tremendously demanding process.

It uses a lot of resources, which is why it's really important to like hydrate and eat well and all those things after you work out. And like your ability to sort of allocate those resources to those processes so that like the input of like one run equals like this much, you know, more running fitness. You need to be in a state where your body can do that. And so if you're really kind of like emotionally run down and like all this like stress and high cortisol as a result, we don't then allocate those resources to the rebuilding. And we sort of either don't fully rebuild or we don't rebuild stronger. We kind of do this bare minimum. And so for all of the training inputs that you're doing, you don't get the fitness gains. And so it becomes like a

less efficient way to train. And so there's a whole bunch of pieces. If you are sore and then you wake up not sore, you know, your legs feel good. But like that ability to sort of action that workout stimulus and like build that muscle is sort of different from like, or your legs not sore anymore. And so I think sometimes too, like when people sort of say like, oh, I like slept well or oh, I feel good, it's because they're focusing on one thing and maybe something that like had been bothering them and now is feeling relatively good. And they're not sort of taking that moment to zoom out and like looking at all these other pieces. And what's so cool about HRV and like why, you know, whoop doesn't shut off about it is because it like it takes all

of these inputs and it like mushes them all into one place because that's what our autonomic nervous system does. And it says like this is the like high level view of like where your body is and like how ready it is to be challenged. And when you think about, you know, and this is what we do with elite athletes, you know, every day, you know, on the team platform. form is we're using HRV to understand exactly how a person is adapting to training, as well as all these other external stressors that we're talking about, right? It's not just training. It's how are they managing all these other lifestyle factors. But I think in terms of smart training, using this data and looking at your trends to see how you're responding to different stimulus,

depending on, of course, what your physiological intent is, what am I actually trying to get out of this training block? Am I trying to get fitter? Am I trying to maintain? Am I looking to taper for an event? this data can be really a powerful way to get the most out of those training blocks if you understand how to use it. And really, it's just looking at your trends relative to your baseline. When there's a big deviation from your baseline, that means your body's probably not adapting, your prioritize rest. And it's not quite that black and white or that simple, but that's the gist. And I think that's how the common person doesn't have exposure to coaches and sports scientists. I mean, that's how you use the data.

Because the HRV, for the most part, you know, we've already been able to validate that we're really good at taking HRV from the wrist. And so you can kind of trust that, if you're wearing Whoop correctly, you're going to get really good feedback on how your body's responding. So it's a huge opportunity to train smarter. There's also some really good literature out there, Emily. Do we want to point people to some maybe some papers where, you know, people can go to look a little bit more deeper and how to think about HRV and training adaptation? There's a white paper on our website, whoop.com slash validation, where we talk about how we came up with. So for those of you who are members already, you know, the weekly performance assessment that you, you get on Monday, that very first graph that shows the relationship between recovery and strain

and sort of maps various areas on that graph to under training, target training or optimal training, and then overtraining. So all of the sort of research that went into sort of the development of those curves and sort of all the literature that inspired that can definitely be found there. So I'd encourage people who are interested to go look there and dig deeper. And I think that's, you know, when you think about technology just as a way to foster performance, I mean, it's really, it's helping you understand, it's, I think helping to bring to light questions, you know, that you maybe wouldn't otherwise know to ask about your body. And I think that's why I love being in this space, you know, is there's always something new to learn. And maybe that's a good segue into kind of our next piece, you know, talking about, okay, how do we make improvements in recovery? You know, how do we accelerate? How do we facilitate recovery? And, you know, there's a lot of different things that, you know, gosh, that I've learned just being in, this profession for as long as I have in terms of trying to, you know, win games and optimize potential and things like that. And then, you know, being in this space where I'm more kind of consulting with teams. But I think there's a lot of things that we can do during the day to set

our system up to really optimize the regeneration process. And I think I'll maybe just start off talking. I think auto regulation is probably one of the most important factors. You know, when you think about setting your system up to work efficiently and optimally, you know, it's food timing. it's, you know, exposure to light and sleep wake timing. I think those are, you know, three of the things that I encourage listeners to research, because if you can auto-regulate your system around those kind of three pieces, you'll be basically giving your system the best chance to focus its resources on regeneration and recovery. So I think those would be three areas that I would encourage users to dig into.

And then we can just maybe go down a laundry list of tips, you know, potentially on. Do you have one you want to share? We just go back and forth. say before we like sort of jump into this I think you know so much of like I think what a lot of our users ask about it's like oh if like I have this recovery score what does that mean about how I should train and it's about like reacting to the score and I think it's so important to like highlight the fact that like your recovery score isn't like this sort of like randomly generated prescription every day in that like you just sort of like the weather just sort of happens and now you have to

respond to it. This is like so completely in your control. And so thinking about it, not from this perspective of like, whoop told me I'm red, I shouldn't train, but thinking about it from this perspective of like, I need to be green on Saturday. How do I make that happen? This is something that it shouldn't be random. It shouldn't be surprising. Obviously, sometimes we get sick and you just get saddled with a red score despite doing everything, right? And that's just a bummer. But you can be green three days in a row if you're intentional about it. So. And that's, and that's what it goes. back. I think in order to be intentional, though, you have to understand the factors that are actually influencing your performance, you know, and I think that's, you know, that's where we come out.

Okay, what are the things that actually influence our performance? You know, what is going to influence my ability to get a green recovery in three days? And to Emily's point that, you know, it is largely up to choice. You know, there are external forces that we potentially can't control, but for the most part, if you have the information, it's just a matter of like making all these little micro choices throughout the day that are going to set you up to be kind of your best version. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's so many things. we can just sort of tell people, right? Like, you know, if you drink alcohol, not going to be good for your recovery.

If you, you know, aren't sleeping consistently. If you have a heavy night out, like, it is going to take you a good five days to get back to your baseline. You know, if you're not sleeping consistently, you're not sleeping enough, that's going to hurt recovery. If you're not eating well, that's going to hurt recovery. But one of the things that sort of I love about whoop is that, like, you know, there are these, like, great rules that apply to everyone. Like we haven't found a single user who benefits from getting hammered.

Like they're not out there. You know, but there are all kinds of things that are sort of your unique microbiome and genetics and, you know, environmental factors and all these different things can make things that are, you know, globally harmless or beneficial, like problematic for you. Like one of my best friends, like can't have walnuts, which, you know, if you go Google health benefits of walnuts, like. You're going to see very little, you know, short of, like, nut allergies. It's going to tell you, like, oh, avoid walnuts, right? But, you know, for her, like, there's this, like, weird food sensitivity thing. And so playing around with, you know, oh, I heard this advice, what does that do to my whoop recovery? And, like, using the data to help, like, refine.

So, you know, you can start out with these, like, great overarching sort of universal things. Figure out your sleep. Don't get hammered before a game. That's not that hard. But I think like where you can really get a lot of the benefit is figuring out, you know, how does Kristen respond to these things? And like, do I actually have? Would I benefit from eliminating gluten? Would I benefit from eliminating dairy?

You know, if I go on a keto diet, does that actually affect my recovery? And, you know, I think the reason why, like, you can Google these things and find smart people who say that this is the best thing ever. And smart people who say that this is bro science junk is because, like, it actually. does work for some people and not others. And sometimes the only way to know which one of those you are is to give it a try and then to sort of watch your whoop data, be really intentional about how you run these sort of personal experiments so that you can figure out that like, oh, you know, I spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to go keto and it didn't work for me. And, you know, I spent, you know, somebody else spent a lot of time and money figuring out

how to do it and it's, you know, paying off a ton. And then, like, you know, not looking at your neighbor and being like, oh, I must be doing it wrong, but sort of understanding. that like our bodies are different and you know we have different needs yeah i mean just on the nutrition side i mean it's highly complex and an individual it's you know your genetics you're there's so many factors that go into you know how you're going to respond to certain foods and i think emily's points like a practical thing too right like if a diet's going to take like 40 hours of like meal prep and like all this stuff but like you're not sleeping because you're doing like i think some of it too it's just like what actually is going to work for you what can you change what's practical what's

practical and like what else are you sort of giving up to make this happen or not right i mean i think fundamentally it's just it's understanding okay what are the what are the principles right and then okay i understand enough of what these principles are and and then yeah a lot of it is just figuring out what's going to work for you especially as it's really i think to nutrition you know and there's lots of folks you can you can meet with there's lots of tests that you can take to try to accelerate your learning and in terms of what your body is going to respond to what it's not going to and i definitely would encourage going to that path you know so you're basically cutting down your experimentation a bit. But yeah, being able to use the data, and it's not a

perfectly controlled scientific study by any means, but you will usually see it will manifest in your sleep potentially. It will certainly manifest in HRV. Again, HRV being just such a sensitive marker, you know, it's relates to all these different inputs. You know, everything that you're kind of doing to your body, it's going to react and respond to. So you can kind of use that as a marker of how you're responding and reacting to these various modalities are just ways of living. Maybe we just, you know, talk, maybe our three best tips on how to improve next day recovery. Okay. So going to bed at a consistent time.

Yes. Sleep consistency, massive. It's in the app. Yeah. It feels really boring to say like sleep consistency, I know. Sleep, wake timing. I know. Like hydration and diet.

But I really would say it's those. And then if we're sort of going beyond the like boring, obviously. Like it creates, like when you can regulate those and I guess it's going. back to my original point, like if you can regulate those three things for the most part, you're setting yourself up, like you, you know, you're basically, your body, there's just a bunch of clocks, right? And, you know, if you can, if you can regulate your sleep wake timing, okay, that's one clock, right? And then that's going to basically set off all these other clocks, you know, relates to your gut and your brain and your hormones, right? So I think

the synergy that's enabled when you get your sleep wake timing as consistent as possible is just it's through the roof. It's, it is the lowest hanging fruit. And I know we've talked about One thing that's super cool. So like obviously sleep consistency helps maintain the stability and health of your circadian rhythm. And one thing that, you know, my mentor told me like a decade ago is that, you know, every single cell in our bodies has a circadian rhythm. And so, you know, a lot of people say like, oh, circadian rhythm, that's sleep wake timing. But it's not. Like circadian rhythm, it just literally means like it's like Circa Dia, so roughly one day.

Yeah. So it's just like, you know, that's your just 24-hour rhythm and it exists in every single cell. And so it's like you said, you know, our, we anticipate food and, like, release certain enzymes in the timing that we're expecting food. And so if we eat at these sort of random times and our bodies can't anticipate the arrival of food, then, like, we don't digest as smoothly. And so you're more likely for, like, the same meal to sort of not digest it as smoothly. So then to, like, to feel bloated or, like, heavy or just, like, you know, constipated or down. It's just all these, like, things that come from, like, when you get this sort of big task, like, you. It's like anything else, right?

Like, if somebody tells you, like, hey, I need you to do this next week, prepare for it. You prepare for it. If I just dump it on your desk and I'm like, do this now, you're like panic and you don't do it as well, right? Like, our bodies do the same thing with this, like, arrival of a meal into our gut. You know, even things like when we start to do things like growing our hair and nails, like, which is happening all the time. And sort of when we start to put resources into, like, you know, maintenance versus like, you know, so it's like anabolic state. This catapolic, yeah. And we sort of, you know, you can do these things more.

If your body is able to sort of know, like, okay, I have like a break from digestion now so I can go and do these other active things with those resources. Then all of a sudden it's like more food arrives and, you know, it's panic mode. So, Emily, would you say that it's possible for if someone's struggling with recovery, right? It's really inconsistent. They don't know, you know, they have no idea why. Like if I'm green tomorrow, like I know why I'm green for the most part, right? You know, I can pretty much predict what's going to happen tomorrow just because I'm so in tune with my behaviors. But would you say that just this concept of the signals that you're sending to your body and being able to regulate that is a path to being able to understand what's going to happen tomorrow, right?

Like the less regulated you are, the more random it'll feel. The more random it's going to feel. Of course, it's not actually any more random. It should feel more. Yeah, totally. But yeah, and I would say, you know, there is, there are exceptions just like, you know, any perfectly planned thing can just go south. But for the most part, yeah. So light exposure, maybe we just talk about it is massive, right?

So when you wake up in the morning, expose yourself to the outdoors, doesn't mean it needs to be full sunshine to get the benefits. But you want to, again, cure your body that it's time to release all the hormones that are telling me that I'm awake, right? The other thing just as it relates to recovery, and just I'm thinking about this because I'm talking about the morning timeframe, you know, if your system is not recovered, you know, maybe consider not layering on. stimulants. So it may potentially, you know, taking not having coffee. And we've done some work with one of our soccer teams, professional soccer teams overseas on just this concept of stimulants and recovery and what that association looks like. And it's definitely, again, you know, you're asking your body to do something that it's not prepared to do. So you're diverting resources to dealing with a stimulus when you actually want to be like recovery and regenerating. So that's just one concept.

Allowing the natural release of these hormones like cortisol, for example, like give yourself a couple hours before you have that first cup of coffee. Again, I'll let your body do what it's naturally meant to do on its own and by prompting it with these simple environmental cues so you can get yourself in this kind of regulated state. Yeah. One thing I find like kind of funny about, you know, this kind of advice is that it seems like new parents really intuitively know this about their babies and then like forget that it still applies to us when we grow up, right? Like with little kids, it's like, you know, we do like bath time at four o'clock because it helps them calm down and then like, you know, we put them in their pajamas and we read them a story time

because it cues that, like, you know, it's nighttime and we make sure that like they've eaten, you know, at these regimented times because like, you know, it keeps their, they're in balance and they're happy. And like, you know, we have these like strict schedules and we like, you know, cue them that like, you know, night night time is coming and like with this whole ritual and then we have a morning ritual and, you know, we help ease them into the day. And then it's like, you know, we think we like grow out of that. And what's so funny is like, you know, these same parents who are doing such a wonderful job with their infants are then like, you know, grabbing a granola bar

where they can and like not eating well and, you know, sleeping like, you know, just like passing out, you know, all these kind of random things. And like, we're actually still the same species as those babies. We haven't grown out of that. It just gets harder to do it. But, you know, it's still every bit as important. And if you sort of had that regularity, which is socially difficult, I don't want to sort of dismiss that. You know, it is harder to do it when, you know, you have a more demanding life than that of a six-month-old. But sort of if you can make yourself do that, you're going to get those same benefits that we see, those infants kind of, you get cranky when you're off schedule. Like, it just manifests differently because you've better coping strategies. But, like,

all that same things that, like, make a toddler cranky, like, it kind of, they mess with you, too. Absolutely. Yeah, that's such a, that's a great way of explaining it. I just like, what I sort of love about forcing people to think about it that way is that like, this isn't like this weird like newfangled whoop thing. We're sort of, we know this and then we just like forget to apply it to ourselves. Right. This is sort of wisdom from forever. Yeah. And that's why, you know, I think it's funny because I think most folks who wear who use whoop just get completely addicted to the data, right?

Because life is constantly changing, right? Like you might have a baby or, you know. you get married or, you know, whatever, there's all sorts of things that happen in life that shift us and that are going to change our routines potentially. And I think having just exposure to this data helps us understand how we might be coping with some of those changes. Yeah. If maybe we're not coping as well, okay, we have, we can take steps to improve it. And I think what's really cool and I see this with elite athletes all the time is that it's not going to take you four weeks to realize that you're trending in a poor direction. You know, it's within

within a week, you're going to know, okay, something's not right. So it gives you this opportunity, I think, to course correct within a week's time potentially if you know that your body's not adapting to whatever it is that you're doing to it. And then you just have a choice for the most part on how you shift things so you can hopefully prioritize recovery and get yourself back on a good path. Great. Well, Emily, is there anything that you want to add about whoop recovery? So one question that we get asked a lot is like, okay, I'm red, what do I do? Or okay, I'm green, what do I do? And I think that, you know, one thing that's really worth emphasizing here is that the recovery score is this measure of your state. And you can sort of use it as like a training

prescription, but that's not really what it's meant to be used for. It's meant to be used in conjunction with your own understanding of what your goals are. So you're just because you're green, if you're supposed to be tapering right now, that doesn't mean like go all out. It means that you could safely go all out, but sort of that, that would be optimizing for too short term for most people. So it's like if you have a game on Saturday, use that green as an opportunity to know that like you're doing a good job recovering, you're doing a good job with your taper, but it's okay to take a rest day when you're green. And sort of similarly, there are times where it's totally appropriate to exercise when you're, you know, yellow and red. It's just you have

to understand that like if you work out hard, say when you're yellow, that like you're sort of that much less likely to be in this easy situation to action that. So, you know, trying to take that opportunity to support that exercise by being extra mindful, you know, with these other things that we've been talking about for the last hour, things like, you know, hydration, nutrition, active recovery modalities. So, you know, taking extra time to, like, do whatever it is you do myo facial release and, you know, stretching and all that good stuff. and then, you know, when you're red, you know, you also don't need to, like, stay in bed.

Like, you can focus on technique. You can focus on doing, like, a lighter exercise, you know, active recovery type stuff. If your recovery is, like, in the single digits, you probably don't want to get too active, but you don't have to sort of do nothing just because you're red. And I think also, you know, if you're intelligent about it, you're just sort of aware that your risk of injury might be elevated and that your body's not going to have a good response, you can also think about it as an opportunity to like train a slightly different system. So you're not going to necessarily when you're read get the most fitness gains for the exercise input, but you're also training when

you're tired is a really important part of your marathon training. It helps train for grit. It helps train for like, you know, the last six miles. So that mental component of exercise, if we only ever work out when we're 90 plus percent recovered and then on game day, we're 70 percent recovered, well, we've never trained in these conditions. So how can we expect to perform in them? So the recovery score is this really great guide, am I globally sort of doing too much, too little? You know, if I'm green every single day for a month, I'm probably not pushing myself that hard. You're not making fitness gains, right? I'm certainly not making fitness gains. If I'm red every so often, that can actually be a really good sign. It means that, you know, I had this tough

stimulus and then I sort of bounce back from it. Sometimes bouncing back happens within a day, and sometimes it takes a day or two, and that's fine. And so if that red is from actually like a training stimulus, you know, if like you got hammered last night like that. obviously. Clearly. So, you know, if you're in this period of, like, functional overreaching and you have red and yellow days. You're going to be living in the yellow. Yeah, and that's normal. And so, like, you can train in those situations, but you just need to know that, like, you're adding a lot of this cumulative fatigue. And so you need to respond to that intentionally. And if you're sort of don't believe yourself to be functionally overreaching and you're getting all these red and yellow

scores, then, like, why does my body think I'm working harder than I am? And that's, like, a really good opportunity to have this kind of like check in with yourself, you know, check in with your coach if you have one. Similarly, if you think you're like functionally overreaching and you're green, you're not. So like having yourself harder. So like having these kind of like this moment to say like is the response that my body is having to what I'm doing consistent with what I like think I'm doing is a way of saying like, is my training plan in fact effective? And so am I going to get out of this block response that I expect to be getting? And to not, and while like on every day there's this opportunity to action the information so that like you can control where the trend goes.

I think, you know, if you're sort of super like hyper-acued into like, oh, I'm red, I shouldn't leave the bed and oh, I'm green, I need to go run 15 miles. You're sort of missing the point. All right. Awesome. Well, Emily, thanks for the conversation today. This was super fun to be able to talk about recovery and hopefully the listeners got a lot out of it. And certainly any questions that you guys have shoot them our way and we'll make sure we get them answered yeah so this this podcast was inspired by questions from our users so if there's any questions you guys want to hear ask us and maybe they can show up on our next podcast thanks again to Kristen and Emily for another great podcast and make sure to listen to their previous episodes on strain on sleep and on HRV if you're not

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