WHOOP Podcast - Strength Trainer: The First-of-Its-Kind Way to Quantify The Impact of Your Strength Workouts

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

This week’s episode is all about the newest feature on WHOOP, Strength Trainer. WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by WHOOP Chief Technology Officer Jaime Waydo to give an in-depth look at the science behind the new feature that tracks exercises, reps, and weight to calculate the load you put on your musculoskeletal system. With Strength Trainer, that muscular load is now going to be factored into your overall strain, giving you a more comprehensive view of the demands you place on your body. Will and Jaime will discuss what is Strength Trainer (3:25), the technology behind the feature (4:55), acquiring and incorporating the PUSH technology (7:35), testing the product and feature throughout development (11:00), how WHOOP is able to track various movements and muscles (14:00), the WHOOP Workouts available to users (15:25), how WHOOP is the first wearable to track this type of weight training data (21:25), how your strain, recovery, and sleep scores will be impacted (24:35), and the future of Strength Trainer (26:55).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. We are on a mission to unlock human performance. And I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. On this week's episode, I'm joined once again by our chief technology officer, Jamie Wado. And we are introducing the all-new Woop Strength Trainer. That's right. new feature on whoop strength trainer that tracks exercises reps and weight to calculate the load

you put on your musculoskeletal system with strength trainer that muscular load is now going to be factored into your overall strain giving you a more comprehensive view of the demands you place on your body so if you're listening to this and you used to do weightlifting workouts and you felt like you weren't getting enough credit you're going to love this feature i've been using it for six months now. I use it a few times a week. It's amazing. It tracks all of my exercises. It gives me a much bigger strain score for the work I'm putting on my body. And in this podcast, we really get into it. Just as a quick background on Jamie Waito, our CTO, she's a product and technology executive with over 20 years of experience leading companies like

Alphabet, Apple, Translucent Medical, Hanson Medical, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Latter. laboratory. Jamie and I discuss what is the new strength trainer feature on WOOP. WOOP is literally the first wearable in the market with this technology. We go deep on what the technology actually is. How does it work? How did we manage to update everyone's existing hardware to now measure strength training? We get into the rigorous testing process to develop the feature. Tens of thousands of reps for over 500 different exercises. in Woop Labs. The library of workouts that are now at your fingertips, so you can train like a Woop athlete. We've got workouts now by Rory McElroy, Patrick Mahomes, Michael Phelps, and more.

You can also create your own, which is what I've been doing. If you work out with a trainer, you work out with friends, you can now create your own workouts in the Woop app. And then really the main hook, tracking muscular load, as well as cardiovascular load. So when you look at a strength training workout, you're going to be able to be able to do. We'll see what percentage it was muscular load versus what percentage it was cardiovascular load. And, of course, you're likely you can get a higher strain. If you're listening to this and you're new to Whoop, use the code Will WI-L when you check out to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. That is joined.wop.com.

If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us at 508-443-4952. And without further ado, here is Jamie Waydow. as we talk about the new strength trainer on WOOP. Jamie, welcome back. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be back. Well, you are back because we are shipping new technology.

This is an exciting cadence for all of our listeners and all of our members. We are launching now the new Strength Trainer. Jamie, I know you're excited about this. I'm excited about this. Describe the all-new WOOP Strength Trainer. Yeah, super excited. This one's been a bit in the making, as we'll talk about. But strength trainer is the first of its kind. It's the Woop Wearable, first in market that is combining the cardiovascular load that we've been doing for a while with now your musculoskeletal load. And so what Strength Trainer really allows you to do is track your weightlifting workouts on Woop and get credit for the load that has happened. to your muscles, your joints, your skeleton, and really think about how that ties into the overall picture of your strain, and then what that does to your sleep and your recovery. And so it's

giving you the richest picture of any wearable on the market. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's an amazing moment that now Woop is sleep, recovery, cardiovascular strain, but also muscular strain. And that's just never happened before. It hasn't existed. And so we're proud to be out front. That's right. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge moment for us. We're now launching fully into being able to measure weight lifting workouts, strength

training workouts, crossfit workouts, you name it. If you're putting muscular load on your body in the form of weights or your own body weight, whoop is now going to be able to quantify that for you. Talk a little bit about the technology under the hood that's making this possible. Yeah, it's a really cool technology in my opinion. It's looking at both how much volume did you lift. So what's the weight? And it's not just the weight of the weights that you were lifting. It's also your body weight if you're in a body weight exercise. So it's smart about understanding what exercise are you doing and how much effective load are you taking on that includes your body weight when that's appropriate. So that's how much volume you're lifting. And then it's how hard are you working. in that exercise. And so how fast did you move it? We're detecting all of that. How big of emotion did you go through? We're detecting a lot of that. And so we weave those two things together and start to give you credit for how much did your muscles and your skeleton and your joints

and all of that work during that workout. We're also tracking, of course, your heart rate and all of that. We weave all of that together into a combined stress score now. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, so how exactly do I use strength trainer. You're now able to go into the WOOP app. You're able to go into a preloaded workout from Woop or create your own workout. You'll be able to put in some 500 different exercises that you might do. You'll input the number of reps, the amount of weight. You'll do the workout in real time. It'll guide you through the workout as you're doing it. And then at the end of that workout, you now get credit for the muscular load you put on your body alongside

your cardiovascular load. So whereas before you might have done a weight lifting workout and you wouldn't have been able to capture what all of the weights were that you lifted or how many times you lifted them, now that will be stored on whoop. And in addition, you're going to get a strain score that's likely meaningfully higher because it's also encompassing what whoop now can understand has happened to your muscles. That's exactly right. And one of the things I love is that strain score now combined.

all of the exercise that you did. And so, you know, you've had those weightlifting workouts where you really feel like you're just falling on the floor fatigued. And now all of that load that's gone on to your muscles and your joints is now being accounted for. In addition, you can go into the app and you can see the details of what happened in that workout. And so you can start to understand a history of what you've done over time and are you making

progress and there's some neat capabilities that because your data is all stored on WOOP that I really, really love. Well, this has been a long development, as you know, Jamie. I mean, we knew that this was a category we wanted to be great at. And it really took us years to think about how we're going to execute on that. And we identified a company about two years ago called Push Technologies. They had done a lot of work with professional athletes, people in the weightlifting space. And they had built technology that we thought was pretty innovative as it relates to measuring velocity, measuring intensity, and measuring weightlifting, and how that affects your muscles, musculoskeletal load.

And we got to know the founders of the company. We spent a while kind of agreeing with their philosophy. And it was one of the first technology acquisitions Wupa's ever made. And so we acquired this business in August of 2001. and now here we are releasing the technology that's going to make this strength trainer possible. And a lot of it was taking their hardware and the algorithms that sat on top of their hardware and finding ways to integrate that directly into your existing WOOP 4.0 sensor. So I think one thing that makes WOOP unique is that we really want to release the best technology we can to you today. You know, it ties back to what being a membership, who being a subscription, we want to deliver to our members today versus sell them something new in the future. And in the case of push, what was so exciting is we realized we would be able to update everyone's sensor over the air with software and with algorithms. And so we're able to leverage existing accelerometers, gyroscopes, inside the technology, and then put these algorithms at top so that now you're able to get.

at muscular load, you're able to have a higher strain score when you do weight lifting. It's right. And it's really special. I can't highlight this enough that it works with the existing hardware. And I think in my career now going on 20 plus years, I've acquired a few companies. And it's really, really hard to take an outside company and bring them in and integrate them into the existing software and hardware ecosystem. That's a really special thing. I think WOOP's done a phenomenal job of that. The push team is very much integrated in and distributed across the engineering team at Woop. And so you can start to feel that their capabilities and their algorithms and what they brought to the company are now just WOOP.

And so we do still call it push core. Like that's what we call the algorithm, which is really cool. But it's woven in an integral part of how we build software and how we build algorithms and data science across. the company. And I don't, you may not know this, but it's really hard to get that right. Integrating a company is really hard. And I think the team at Woop has just done a phenomenal job, making sure that that happened in a really seamless way. So there are members just feel like WOOP got more powerful and not like there's this extra thing that got bolted on. Well, thank you for saying that. It has been a very successful acquisition. I think we're very excited now to have this

out the door and have members using it. Talk a little bit about all the testing that we did because it was a pretty rigorous testing process along with it being an acquisition and an integration. It absolutely was. As you mentioned, there's over 500 exercises on the app. Every single one of those has to be built, has to be tested, has to be validated, that the algorithms are working correctly for that exercise. And so this started, you know, probably over a year ago down at whoop labs with some of our team members and then some outside people coming in. And so we would get a diversity of people who do the same exercise, but do it in different ways. And some of them are novices to weightlifting. Some of them are experts. Some of them are young. Some of them are

old. And you have them do the same exercise and repeat it over and over and over so that you can get a diverse set of data and then you can verify and validate your algorithms against that, make sure it's working. So all of that work went on and on and on for months now. One of my favorite stories is the PM, the product manager who works on this feature. He's been on WOOP since 2018, way before he worked at the company. And he bought WOOF because he wanted to make the U.S. National Rowing Team. And Woop really helped him in his training and helped him get ready for that team and he tried out six times. And then finally when he joined Woop, he made a the team. And then he got put on the strength trainer of feature, and he started using it immediately

as part of his workouts. And so he's one of the earliest testers. He said his favorite moment at Woop and on this feature was they had this huge workout in the Czech Republic right before they went for their competition. And it was the first time he got to use the feature. And he saw all of the load he was putting on his body and really realized how powerful he was and how much his workouts were adding to his fitness and capability. And then they went off to go and compete. So I think there are going to be so many more stories like that. But all of that's been happening at Woop behind the scenes for over a year now. And we're just so excited that the world gets to start experiencing it and using. Yeah, I think it's worth underscoring just how important research and

data collection are to whoop. I mean, we spent years developing all the, the algorithms for strain as it relates to cardiovascular load. And this is our first foray into muscular load. And so it was really important to us that we follow all the same procedures. We do rigorous data collections. We get a ton of user feedback. This is something that we've been using in the background for, I think, six months now, at least I've been using it for six months. Maybe others have been using it longer. So there's just been a very rigorous testing process. Yeah, I mean, it's tens of thousands of reps that have gone into every single exercise to really make sure that it's accurate. Right. And so you think about that across 500 plus

exercises, you can start to do the math on just how intensive that is. And for folks wondering, like, okay, so how exactly is some of this math working? Think about it this way, right? And you Help me explain this, Jamie. If you're doing, say, a bicep curl, whoop is able to track the motion of that bicep curl. And by knowing how much weight is in your hand while you're doing it and how fast you're moving that weight, whoop is now built algorithms around the musculoskeletal strain

that that's putting on your body. That's right. And it knows the difference between how many muscles are activated in that bicep curl versus. doing a full body squat and all the muscles involved in that. And so you get different strain because you're exercising and putting load on more muscles in the case of the squat. Yeah, there's a lot of fun aspects to what you just said. So for example, if you're listening to this and you like to skip leg day, I got bad news for you. You're going to be getting lower

strains than the people who are doing full body workouts are doing their leg exercises because It's really fascinating to see how much more strain you'll get from doing things like squats and bicepcrow. Planks are fabulous if you want to put a lot of load on your musculoskeletal system. So I'm just excited for people to get to interact with. All right, let's dive into just all the details of this feature. I think the first thing to hit on is the entry point into Strength Trainer. So when you first go into Strength Trainer, you're met by Whoop Workouts. or the ability to create your own.

Let's start with the whoop workouts. What's been our mindset there? Yeah, you know, I really love a couple of pieces of this. First of all, at the top of the page, you're going to see workouts from some of your favorite athletes. We've got Michael Phelps. We've got Patrick Mahomes. We've got Sloan Stevens and a few more.

And so they've personally built workouts that you can use and train like the pro athletes that you love. The second thing is there's another catalog of, pre-built workouts as well. And they're all labeled. So you know before you get into it, if they're novice, if they're intermediate, or if they're expert workouts. So you can kind of choose what adventure you want that day. And then when you click in from there, you see that it tells you and summarizes what equipment do you need. And one of the things I love about this is I travel a lot for work. And so I can click in there and I can very quickly get a pre-built workout

that's going to have all the videos, all of the exercises for me. And I can pick ones that require no equipment. So I can just work out in my apartment when I'm traveling here to Boston and really know what I'm getting into before I'm in the middle of it and trying to figure out like, hey, I'm missing a dumbbell or a kettlebell. So that's all great. And, you know, that library will continue to evolve and change as we continue to build out the feature.

Yeah, I think it's a great kind of, quick way for someone to dive into this feature if they're trying to figure it out or if you don't know what you want to do and you're just trying to get a quick idea on what kind of a workout can I do for 30 minutes. It's the first time whoops ever had preloaded workouts like that. So it's, again, an interesting entry point for us in that. And we're excited to get feedback on it. I think it's a library that over time probably will get quite comprehensive. You know, right now we're starting with, you know, a certain set of workouts, but you can imagine over time this will be a very deep and rich experience.

So for everyone listening, I encourage you to check that out. Okay, the second piece of this is the notion that you can now create a workout. And Strength Trainer allows you to choose from 500 different exercises. You can go in, you can search. It's got a fairly comprehensive search. we've tried to have a really comprehensive list of exercises, and you'll be able to go in and build out your workout. And you can superset, you can do individual workouts in a row. It's a very, I would say, rich experience. It's like a more enhanced version of building a playlist and a

music app, and you can move things around. You can change the reps and the weight, both before the workout and during the workout. So you'll build your workout and then you'll start it. Once you're now in the actual strength trainer, WOOP will be guiding you through each set that you do. And you'll notice a timer that'll be showing you the time that you're resting or the time that you're active. It'll be showing you what your next workout is as you go through it or your next exercises as you go through it. I've found personally it kind of keeps me on the ball, if you will. It's like moving you breadcrumbs step to step to step. It's moving you along.

And from a whoop's standpoint, this is our ability also to zero in on when you're using different muscles, to nail the intensity. It's whoops way of understanding your musculoskeletal strain as you're doing it. And you're going to be getting more and more insights on your workout from being able to start and stop all of this. We have a number of things that you'll observe in the activity details after the fact that we'll talk about in a sense. second. So you can go through your whole workout. At the end, there's a cool down period. You can double check all of the weights that you've put in, the reps you've put in. Boom, you save it. And, you know, within a few seconds, it'll spit out your new strain score. Yeah. And I think this is an exciting moment, certainly for anyone who's been on whoop for a little while, because now when you

go into your workout review, it's not just showing you a heart rate graph, but all of a sudden, it's a very comprehensive view into strength training and into weightlifting. And now at your fingertips is every weight and every rep that you did. That's right. And you'll see one of my favorite interactions with this feature is you see the heart rate graph. And then you can click on the different exercises that you did. And you can see what your heart was doing during those different exercises. So you can see which exercises actually let your heart relax.

and then which ones amplify your heart rate? Yeah, it's really, I think, quite fascinating to be able to swipe through and actually see the different sets or supersets and which was triggering more of your heart rate. How fast your heart rate was recovering during each set, which is a sign of fitness. I did some sled pushes this morning that kind of crushed me. So it's really rich and hopefully everyone loves it.

You'll also be able to just tap into a full archive of your weight list. for that workout. So, you know, I'm sort of worked out with a trainer actually for years. And a lot of my understanding of what I lifted was sort of in my mind or the deep, you know, like sort of loss. May or may not be right. Yeah. Like, oh, I think I used to lift that much. Yeah. Or my trainer had it in some Excel that I rarely looked at. And it's really valuable to be able to go back now and look and say, oh, when I did that bench press, it was at this number of pounds and for this many reps. And it creates a level of accountability that I think is really valuable. I also think it's the first wearable that's really integrated this kind of tracking and this

kind of understanding of what it is you're doing in a weightlifting activity, what that means to your overall strain, yes, but also that history of workouts. I don't think there's anything on the market that's like it. And so I think it's a really rich set of data that you're now going to have when you live on WOOP. Yeah, there's no question we're first to market with this. It's a very unique, I think, offering for anyone who has strength training or weightlifting is a big part of their lives. And you get credit now for lifting weight, which is, I think, really important on Woop. Another few characteristics here that you'll notice. So obviously there's the activity strain, which will now be higher.

And you'll also see a weighting of cardiovascular versus muscular load. So if you had just gone for a run on WOOP, the strain score that you'd be getting would be entirely based on your cardiovascular system. So your heart's working hard. Correct. Now, when you do a strength trainer workout, you're actually given you'll see the percentage that Woop is attributing cardiovascular load versus the percentage that it's, you're that's attributing muscular load.

And what you'll find is that the workouts of the heavier lifts that have the lower heart rates, those will have a higher percentage of muscular load. Yeah. And so that's where you're getting really that big incremental benefit or credit, if you will, on whoop. A few other statistics, we now keep track of tonnage, which, of course, is a statistic that the waylifting community cares a lot about.

So you'll see the total tonnage of your overall workout. there's a new statistic we was introducing called intensity, which is measuring effectively the rate at which you're doing a lot of your weight lifting. So that's the active time. That's also the pace or the velocity of the lifts that you're doing. It's right. It's that lift from the bottom of the motion to the top of the motion. And it can tell how hard it is a little bit based on how long did it take you to get that weight up and get it moved. And we do that through the excels and the gyros in the whoop strap. This is using the hardware to calculate the intensity of a weightlifting workout,

which, again, really is the first product in market to do it. And so we're excited to be out ahead. The other piece of intensity that goes into that calculation is how many muscle groups are involved in that exercise. And so it's thinking about, like I said, that bicep curl versus that squat. It's a different intensity on the load that's going on. body. If you wanted to think, you know, just simplify in your mind listening to this, how is muscular load quantified? It's really looking at volume and intensity. That's right. So the more

weight you lift and the harder or the intent, the more intense you do it, the higher your muscular load. That's right. Some other benefits to having a strain score that's more representative of what you've now done to your body. First of all, your sleep need will be a little higher, so you'll notice that in the WOOP app. WOOP might be a little more forgiving on why your recovery is lower the next day because it'll now absorb, of course,

the muscular strain that you've put on your body. Yeah. Your overall day strain will be higher if you've done a strength trainer workout. So these are some of the aspects to the feature. that we think make the overall experience richer. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, a lot of people tell me that have tried this feature, that they'll

never go back. They'll always do weightlifting and strength training on whoop because you get that extra dimension of what load did you just put on your body. What does that mean to how much sleep you need? What does that mean to your recovery the next day? It's definitely, I would say, an addictive feature, at least I've found that personally, because, you know, you now realize how much harder it is on your body, and you want to quantify it, and you want credit for it.

And then you now realize you're going to have an archive of every weight you've ever lifted. Yeah. And one thing I've found valuable is, okay, I work out with my trainer a few times a week, but now I also have saved every single workout that I've done with him for the last six months. And so I can now automatically go into the app, and maybe I'm in a hotel gym, or something, but I can just open one of those workouts, cue it up, and all of a sudden, I'm off for the races, doing the exact workout that I had done. It's like your trainer's with you.

And, yeah, in a sense, it's like my trainer's with me because WOOB is guiding me through every set. So that's something I find valuable about it. I've certainly heard from other people testing the feature that they like the ability to go back to their old workouts and just have that archive of workouts that you've built. So that's one of the subtle really advantages to this new feature. Yeah. I think, you know, members have really been asking for this. And so if you look at what the members are really excited about, I think this is a feature that's going to have a lot of our strength training community pretty excited. Let's talk for a second about where this is going, because like all things that we try to build pillars or platforms and then layer on top of them.

And strength and strength trainer as a feature is now a new platform for us. Yeah. And we're going to continue innovating around it. We're going to continue adding software and functionality for it. Let's give people a little bit of a preview of some of the things that are exciting. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's always going to be more workouts that get added, whether it's the individual workouts or it's the pre-built workouts. I think you're going to just see that get richer and richer over time.

one of the next things that's coming is trends obviously you want to know how this workout compared to one that was similar that you did a month ago so you'll start to see some of that coming into the app when you lifted weights today how was it different than when you lifted weights the other day even if the exercises were different just understanding that and just on that point

yeah I'm particularly excited to be able to track over time even the same exercise yeah like okay squat you know how is that evolve How is the weight I've done for that evolved over time, deadlift or bench or pull-ups, like some of these sort of core things that have been doing my whole life. Yeah. Now I'm going to have an archive and a trend to be able to look at. Yeah.

Are you getting stronger and are your workouts getting longer or shorter? And how much total tonnage are you lifting in any given workout? And so you'll get history of all of those. Another thing that I get really excited about is the ability to start to search the library based on the kinds of equipment you have. And so thinking about like when you're traveling, you're on the road, you walk into the gym and you're like, okay, they've got free weights, they've got kettlebells, they've got, you know, a pull-up bar.

I'm going to type those things in. And then the search shows you all of the different exercises that you can do in that gym in that moment. Yeah, I think access to workouts and exercises is going to be a core piece of functionality going forwards, the idea that WOOP can create a workout for you based on where you are or what you have. But even the idea that you can tap into the WOOP community for workouts, right? So you can imagine your friend did a workout and he or she can now send it to. Or your coach can send you your workouts and you can start doing your work. He can send it to you in the app. You can do the

workout and then you can send them the results back. Like closing that loop, I think, is going to be There's going to be an amazing sort of trainer-client relationship, coach-player relationship. We're definitely building for those use cases. Also, it's worth noting you're going to get more information over time about the very specific lifts that you're doing. So we're measuring a whole lot of information on velocity, on intensity. We're going to surf us more of that in the exercise details after you've recorded the workout. We're also going to find more ways. We're also going to find more ways for you to be able to input that this information has happened. So right now, it's a very live experience. You're going into the app, you're starting and stopping different

repetitions that you're doing. We will get to a place where you can actually just add the activity after the fact. And you can say, here's the overall workout that I did, or I did the same exact workout I did from last Monday, and it was from this time to this time. And Woop will be able to actually understand everything that happened in there and still give you the credit for it. So these are some of the things that I think are really exciting and just kind of right around the corn. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those features that we really wanted to get the value out to the members as quickly as we could. And that's kind of this V1. But if you see the way that WOOP is shipping, we really think a lot about like what's the next thing, what's the next thing. And the

roadmap on Strength Trainer is one of the richest and most fun that I think we have in the company. So to everyone listening to this, you can download the latest WOOP app, find it on the App Store, find it on the Play Store. You'll see Strength Trainer right there in the app. You'll see an introduction to how to use it, go check it out. And Jamie, a big thank you to you and your team for really pushing this out the door and for creating, I think, new, exciting, innovative technology that our members are going to love. Thank you very much for having me and excited for all of our members to get to enjoy this new feature capability. Thank you for listening. That was Jamie Waito and me discussing the latest and greatest feature Strength

Trainer on Whoop. A reminder, download the latest app. That's how you're going to get access to this feature. And the latest software will be at your fingertips. Your hardware will be updated. If you enjoyed this episode of the Whoop podcast, please leave us a rating or review. Please subscribe to the Whoop podcast. Check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed.

If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us. at whoop.com, call us 508 443-4-9-5-2. New members can use the code Will W-I-L-L at checkout. That's joined.woop.com. And that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening.

Try the Strength Trainer on the Woop app. And as always, stay healthy and stay in the green.