WHOOP Podcast - The 9 Metrics That Makeup Your Healthspan with Emily Capodilupo

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

This week on the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed sits down with WHOOP SVP of Research, Algorithms, and Data Emily Capodilupo to break down an exciting new feature: Healthspan with WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging. Developed in collaboration with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, WHOOP has created the ultimate longevity metric to understand your physiological age, measuring varying components of sleep, strain, and fitness. Will and Emily introduce the 9 metrics that make up your WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging: sleep consistency, hours of sleep, time in heart rate zones 1-3 and 4-5, strength training, steps, VO₂ Max, resting heart rate, and lean body mass. Healthspan with WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging is now available with WHOOP Peak and WHOOP Life memberships. Healthspan is not available for users under the age of 18.(00:00) What is Healthspan?(8:27) WHOOP Partnership with the Buck Institute(9:30) Why Healthspan? What does WHOOP measure to create this metric? (13:57) WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging (19:16): The 9 Metrics of Healthspan (19:46) Sleep Consistency (23:22) Hours of Sleep(27:28) Time in HR Zones 1-3 and HR Zones 4-5(31:39) Strength Training(35:31) Steps(38:28) VO₂ Max(41:15) Resting Heart Rate(44:14) Lean Body Mass(45:37) The Healthspan Algorithm(48:28) Heathspan Page & The Health Tab(49:12) Coaching people toward a healthier and longer life 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

okay emily welcome back so excited to be here for this one will health span this is uh this is a big one you know it's funny i think you and i have both seen the designs or ideation of a feature long before the feature is actually built and i remember saying to the data science teams and the product teams like when we had kind of finalized what we thought this should look like in a finalized what we thought this should look like in a final form that I thought this was going to be as successful a feature for WOOP as the recovery score, which was a pretty big statement. And I mean, we're only now shortly into having launched it, but I think we're already hearing some amazing feedback. Let's start with what is health span? So health span is generally this concept of like we're all familiar with lifespan,

right? That's how long you live. But the place where science and America, medical advancements have made the most gain is improving lifespan without necessarily improving health span. So you can think of health span as this thing that's like up to, but not necessarily as long as your lifespan, which is where you're living with health. And we know now that there's about a decade gap between health span and lifespan. And there are so many of these like biological clocks or age markers that are out there that are focused on lifespan. And we really wanted to zero in are on what are the things that predict health span and how can we measure your health span, not just like some kind of clock of, you know, how long are you going to live or something like that?

And when you say a decade difference in lifespan versus health span, you're saying that people will live 10 years longer than they're actually healthy for? Yeah, I mean, you know, think about how many people spend that marginal decade of life, you know, in an assisted living where they're not able to walk, they're not necessarily enjoying life, their activity, their mobility, their cognition are, you know, incredibly diminished. And then it's just this kind of like slow decay into death that like in a lot of ways started, you know, 10 years earlier. And so we're really interested in how do we maximize health span?

Traditional medicine is maximizing lifespan, I think, in a way that sometimes disregards or doesn't prioritize enough the health span pieces, which are what people truly care about. Quality of life. Quality of life, yeah, the ability to live independently, the ability to, you know, get on the floor and chase your great grandkids around versus like have them visit you, but not necessarily really know that they're there or anything like that. And I think, you know, as people are living longer and longer, they should care about making sure that that life is quality, that they're actively a part of it, that they're enjoying it because there are so many incredible things that happen as we get older, but we need to be in a state of health. in order to enjoy them. Yeah, we want MOOP members to perform better for longer. Yeah, and perform, you're like what that means to you changes throughout life. We're not just talking about like continue to compete in marathons into your 90s, although if that's your thing, I want to help

you do it. But it's, you know, performance starts to look like, can I live independently, you know, do I have to leave my home if it has a flight of stairs in it? Can I go get groceries? Can I, am I safe to drive? You know, all those different things that tend to disappear as we age long before actual, you know, lifespan ends with death. So when we first, or when I came to you and I said, hey, I want to see if we can design a score to tell you how old you really are, where did the research go from there? Yeah, so the first step was teasing apart what that meant. And we pretty quickly moved away from this like, I'm going to predict when you're

going to die kind of approach because it's both very noisy and also. not necessarily what people are super motivated to maximize. And instead to get to this idea of how can I tell you that you're healthy and how can I tell you that you're on track to maintain that health, you know, kind of into that marginal decade of life. And, you know, there's this really beautiful concept that Peter Tia has been evangelizing around this centenary and decathlon. And it really inspired a lot of how we thought about this at the beginning.

And the centenary and decathlon is in your market. decade of life, what are the activities that you want to make sure you can do? And some of it's really simple things like, can I get myself up off the floor if I'm seated on the floor? Can I walk up a flight of stairs? Can I, you know, carry groceries from the car? And then it might get into even bigger things like, you know, I want to be able to carry my grandchildren around. I want to be able to, you know, all the different kinds of things that'll translate to, I can continue to live independently, I can continue to engage in my hobbies, whatever those might be. And how do we know that we're setting you up for those? And as we started to dig into the research, there are markers of being on

that trajectory 70 years before you get to that marginal decade of life. And I can tell you, like, you and I were both in our 30s, right? So like, we're not running up against like, oh, is it safe for me to drive at night? Is it safe? You know, am I strong enough to carry into my groceries? Like, capacity is so much above that. But there are differences between all the different people in their 30s who are so far away from being worried about, like, can I carry a load of laundry or something, that sort of start to indicate, like, am I on this trajectory that if I don't seriously change the way I think about strength training or if I don't seriously change the way I'm, you know, investing in my cardiovascular efficiency, am I on track that like through the normal decaying of these systems? in my 70s, 80s, and 90s, will I still be able to do these things? And so if you plan to be alive and, you know, as longevity science is making it more likely that we will be alive for those years, it's up to us to start to invest in the health elements of if I'm alive, I want to be enjoying them, not just kind of tucked away in a corner

like waiting out a longer clock. And so we started really thinking about how can I help people understand their risk factors for the decay of their health span and put that in terms that are really easy to understand, really easy to action. A principle that we landed on super quickly was we didn't want to go and ask you to get all this blood work done and build our health span score off of DNA methylation. There's a ton of blood work-based age scores out there that are just sort of saying like, oh, are these chemical processes happening? And while they're interesting, a huge challenge with them is like the so what you know if you go get your DNA methylation measured and it says

it's a little bit higher or lower than might be expected for someone your age that doesn't tell you okay here are the four things I need to change and so I think the beauty in the way we build health span is it's nine things that ample ample research has tied to all cause mortality and there's a known way in which it changes your risk profile and are extremely behavior modifiable and that whoop can coach to. And so we're able to show you, I think it's the most actionable, most clean age metric I've ever seen because it's here are the nine things that matter. And here is how you line up.

And if you want to make this not make you older, you need to be here. And if you want to make your whoop age even younger, you know, keep pushing. and you can very clearly within, you know, five, ten seconds of looking at the feature have a laundry list of these are the places I need to go and invest. Then you can go make that investment and you can see your age come down. And so again, unlike some of these more blood testing based ones where maybe you're going to do it once, you know, the sort of power users are going to do maybe once or twice a year and not get a lot of feedback in between, you're able to see every single week when your

health span updates. am I moving in the right direction? Am I increasing my likelihood of a longer health span? And we're going to get into those nine metrics here in a second and how to improve them. But first, I wanted to just touch on our partnership with the Buck Institute and Dr. Eric Verdon. Yeah, so we're super grateful to have been partnered with the Buck Institute for this research. The Buck Institute is the world's only research institute that's singularly focused on the biology of aging. And so, you know, it's full of people who have spent their entire careers wrestling with these same problems, but they don't have the wearable data that we have. And so we were able to tap into a lot of the expertise that they bring, get their eyes on the data that WOOP has, how we were thinking about it.

They challenged our thinking. They helped us evolve it over the last year. And, you know, getting that expertise really, you know, evolved the feature in a really exciting way. And we're just really, really grateful for their partnership. It's been really productive, and they've worked with us on a fast timeline. And from where I said, it's just been amazing to see how many different metrics and studies you all have explored. For people who want to understand, like, how we actually created this score, can you give an example of, like, one of the metrics and then how we did a bunch of research on it to determine, you know, essentially what you see in the app is there's the green range, there's the gray range, and there's the orange range. If you're in the green range, you know, that's going to be reducing your age.

And if you're in gray, it's neutral. And if you're in orange, it's increasing your age. So what would be a metric and an example of how you did the research on it? Yes. So it's kind of the same story for each of the metrics. But let's just use sleep consistency as an example. So one of the inclusion criteria for the metrics in our algorithm was it has to be something that is well understood to be associated with all questions. mortality. And we looked only for situations where there were incredibly large scale longitudinal

data sets that we believed were not only large enough in like an absolute sense, but also broad enough demographically that it would represent the WOOP member and their physiology. And then we looked at, okay, what is known about the relationship between sleep consistency and all cause mortality. Then we had to anchor it somewhere. So behind all of these metrics, there's this concept of like that zero point, the break-even, which happened at what we called like a referent value. And so we pegged all of those at sort of somebody who's doing what experts would generally recommend. And the selection of the referent value was actually something you and I debated quite a lot. And I think one of the things that we've done a lot better than other age type metrics, the sort of dominant pattern in pegging these ages is that people look at like what's average.

And we decided pretty quickly that average didn't really make sense for our population, mostly because on average people aren't all that healthy, which is unfortunate but true. and we wanted it to be a bit more relatable to people who are generally healthy but not necessarily like optimizing for longevity and health span. And so we pegged that zero break-even point like following the kind of bare minimum recommendation or like the common recommendation. I think this is a really important point because if you look at like a whoop age relative to other age markers, you might find that our ages are a little bit older, and that's because we've pegged it at this baseline of health as opposed to the average American, which is not a healthy person, unfortunately. Then once we have that referent value, we had to figure out, okay, so if you're doing more than

that in terms of sleep consistency where more is better, then that would reduce your whoop age, so that's the green. And if you're doing less than that, that will increase your whoop age, essentially like making you older. And the rate at which that that happened, like how one incremental unit change in sleep consistency translates to years of whoop age, was based off of these massive bodies of research. In many cases, we were ensembleing information from dozens and dozens of different longitudinal studies in order to say, what is the understood relationship between a 10% improvement in sleep consistency and all cause mortality? And then we would map that to these risk scores where essentially what we're saying is if my sleep

consistency should be to break even 85, but instead it's 60, my risk profile might look like somebody who's two years older than me in terms of my risk of all cause mortality. And so that would map to a plus two on my woup age. And then if instead of being 25 points lower, it was 10 points higher, my sleep consistency is 95 when the referent value is 85. That might make me look like somebody in terms of a risk profile who's a year and a half or three years younger than me. And so we would map that to a minus, like a negative change in your whoop age. And then across all these nine components, you're essentially adding up the increase or decrease in your whoop age in order to get this aggregate score. I think what we got right with the health span feature, if I may, is

these two numbers. You've got your whoop age and you've got your pace of aging. Let's just talk about those two numbers for a second and how they work. Yeah. So your whoop age looks at those nine metrics and each metric is going to have either a positive impact or a negative impact on your whoop age, where the positive impact making you older, sort of less desirable, negative impact, making you younger, more desirable. And we're just adding them up. across those nine measures. And so super transparent, really easy to understand where the strong spots and the weak spots are. It's also all nicely color-coded. So anything that's in the orange, you want to try and get into the gray and then into the green. And if everything's in the

green, you're very impressive, good on you. And you can try and keep pushing towards greener and greener values. That darkest green is where you're going to maximize the benefit of that metric. Health span in general is looking at this six-month view. And the problem with a six-month view is that, you know, one day, two days, three days of an improved or worsened behavior isn't going to have much of a impact when you're looking at a six-month aggregate. So we also created this metric called pace of aging that looks at just the last 30 days. And so what that's basically saying is if the last 30 days are sustained, like my data looks like it did in the last 30 days, for the next five months so that I have six months.

that look like this, what will that mean for my health span? So it's this little preview of am I going up, am I going down, am I making, you know, changes that are going to improve or worsen my whoop age. And so it lets it, it gives you this holistic picture in whoop age in terms of physiologically, where am I right now, while also giving you this little hint in terms of where you're headed. Yeah, I think they're two powerful metrics. I mean, I'm looking at mine right now, and they're actually saying opposite things. So I'm 5.6 years younger in my whoop age, which is obviously quite good. But my pace of aging is 1.6x, which reflects that my last 30 days have actually been quite bad.

Now, in my defense, I was traveling around the world and I've got a 30-day-year-old kid at home. So I've got a newborn on top of it. So your pace of aging is actually measured from negative 1 to 3. And if you are essentially at 1X, it would mean that all of your behaviors and decisions and metrics, essentially, equate to you performing or being at your chronological age. Right. So it's like keeping pace with chronological age, that every chronological year you expect to age one whoop age year. So you really want to be below one. And where it starts to feel really good and really badass is when you get to negative. Right. So you can think of like the benchmark moments as at one, you're keeping pace with chronological age. At zero, you've essentially halted aging. So you're going to maintain your whoop age even as your chronological age goes up. And at negative, you're reverse aging. So you're improving your health so much that you're actually getting younger. So it's like between zero and one, your gap to your chronological age might grow, but you're still aging. And the negative moment is. very badass because it means you're getting younger over time. Well, you'll appreciate this graph.

Literally, it's a roller coaster where feature comes out. I start using it. I get hooked. I start crushing my whoop age in terms of going way down. I go full negative on my pace of aging. Then I have travel. Then I have a new baby at home. And it just goes straight up. And so it's, you know, look, it's a very telling sort of reflection on where you are in your life at any period of time. And I will say that this balance between the six months and the 30 days is pretty useful because everyone's going to have bad weeks, everyone's going to have good weeks and your whoop age is going to reflect really where you are overall. And your pace is going to give you a sense for, well, how am I doing of late? Yeah. And I think like, you know, most people's

pace of aging is a little bit of a roller coaster. Yours is somewhat extreme with the new baby, although probably not unreasonable for a new baby. And I think there's something really motivating about how, you know, you can have a couple bad weeks and it doesn't destroy your whoop age as long as you kind of like get back on the horse and clean up those behaviors. And similarly, you know, you can have a month where you're like really, really dialed. But if you don't sustain that behavior, it's not really going to change much. And so like the key is consistency. And, you know, people say a lot like your body keeps score and like what really matters is over, you know,

the long term, what are these behaviors looking like? And I think it is important that they're not super sensitive to like a week where you had COVID and your metrics were really bad or kind of like you shouldn't eat like one salad and expect to lose weight, right? You have to keep these behaviors. So there's nine metrics nested under the umbrella of sleep, strain, and fitness, sleep consistency, total hours of sleep, daily steps, time spent in heart rate zones one through three, time spent in heart rate zones four and five. Time spent strength training. So big exercise themes there. V-O-2 max, resting heart rate, and lean body mass. Let's go through these. We're obviously just talking about sleep consistency. Why is sleep consistency important? Sleep consistency sets your

biological clock. So when you go to bed and you wake up at the same time every day, you're allowing your body to effectively anticipate what's going to happen. And when our body can anticipate, this is when a meal is going to happen. This is when I need to be active. This is when I have more downtime. It can prepare hormonally and enzymatically for those different things to happen. And so you see that everything operates more efficiently. There's fascinating studies that have shown that like when your circadian health is greater, when you're on a more consistent rhythm, the same food will have like a lower spike in your blood sugar because if your body is expecting food, you've preemptively created insulin. And so your body's like kind of, you know, you're standing

there ready to catch versus if, you know, things happen at times when your body's not anticipating them to happen, you can only react to them. And so there's like a lag in terms of that. And so it's harder on your body. And so the more you can be consistent in your schedule, the more you allow your body to anticipate what's going to happen, and then the sort of machine runs more smoothly. Yeah, I mean, this is actually my most challenged metric, in part because I travel, and I just had this travel bender where I was in a bunch of different cities and time zones. I think it did eight cities and 12 days, and that just nukes your sleep consistency. Yeah, and, you know, we went back and forth on this because it does kind of punish you for

traveling, but physiologically, that's very true. You know, it punishes you for things like shift work, too. But if you look at there's so much data, like shift work and transmitting travel, are class one carcinogens. Like, they're strongly associated with all-cause mortality, with increased risk of cancer, increased metabolic dysfunction. And it's one of the most important behaviors to dial. And you'll actually see this in health span, like little improvements or like little regressions in your sleep consistency. can have a relatively large impact on your whoop age because the research really is that powerful.

We published data back, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, showing that people who had better sleep consistency going into the pandemic mentally in terms of like their mental health, like kind of weathered all of that stress much better. And then people with worse sleep consistency pre-pandemic, they had much higher rates of like anxiety, depression, suicidal, lineation, like all of those things during the pandemic. And so it's super protective mentally, physically. And the good thing is it's mostly free. So it's something that's really, really worth working on.

Okay. Well, it's a fairly straightforward message, which is you need to go to bed and wake up at a more similar time. Yeah. And that's how you improve sleep consistency. And I think one of the things that I love most about health span is in putting this importance on sleep consistency. I've seen like around the office. Oh, totally. Everybody's talking about it.

Everybody's trying to work on it. And all of a sudden, they're like, okay, this matters, and they're motivated by it. And I'm just super proud of the way that we are helping our members understand that this truly is important because I think there's been so much, like, did you get your eight hours of sleep, kind of rhetoric around getting enough sleep? And enough sleep is really important. But the data actually shows for health span, it is more important that your sleep is consistent than that you're getting enough. And so I think we've been focused on the wrong hero metric of sleep. And consistency is really important.

Let's talk about hours of sleep, which is the second metric here on improving health span. Yeah. So you have to get enough sleep. You know, we kind of have this mental model of like sleep is when my brain turns off, but it's really the opposite. Sleep is when our whole bodies turn on in really powerful ways. We produce 95% of our human growth hormone during sleep. It's when our body's repair. It's when our memories consolidate.

When your body is in go mode, when it's awake, you kind of build up, you know, kind of this debt that we need to clear out. And sleep is when the cleanup crews come, you know, repair our bodies, repair our minds. And if we don't get enough sleep, nothing works. So you have to get enough sleep. And I think one of the things, and this is an interesting thing about health span, one of the things that people will notice is that in order to break even. So get like a plus zero. on your health span for sleep, you have to hit seven hours, which is lower than the amount of sleep that whoop is recommending for most people on most nights.

And I think this is the difference between sort of health span where we're saying this is what you need to do to not add risk of reduced health in, you know, that marginal decade of life over time versus what we're coaching you to in like the sleep view on a day-to-day basis is what do you need to hit in order to maximally feel good tomorrow? And so one of the things that I think, you know, health span's not just a new aggregation of the same data that we've been showing you in the app for a long time. It's optimizing for this other thing for this long-term picture of health. And so the bar in order to not reduce your health span is lower than sort of the amount

at which you will maximize how good you feel tomorrow. So you don't necessarily need to be hitting 100% of your sleep every single. single night in order to not reduce your husband. One other observation with hours of sleep I noticed in the reference groups is that getting more sleep would make you younger up into a certain point. So it was like eight hours or nine hours. If you're getting that every night, that's going to make you younger. But it actually got to a point where more than that might signal the opposite. Yeah, this is an interesting place where the literature is pretty mixed and part of why we needed to look at so many different studies

to get this one right. You know, a challenge with these massive longitudinal studies is that they can often have confounding variables. And so most people do not need 10, 11, 12 hours of sleep per night. Most people who are getting 10 plus hours of sleep per night, it's because there's some underlying chronic health condition. And so it tends to be associated with there's something, could be depression, which is known to make people sleep long, or it could just be, you know, you're fighting a disease or something like that, you know, chronic health issues that make you a lot more exhausted or your sleep quality very depressed. Like sleep apnea, the sort of minute per minute of sleep is much less restorative.

And so in order to get enough to where you feel fully rested, you just need a ton more. And so if you're in that state where there's this other health condition causing you to sleep a lot more, you start to see that like as you go from zero to eight hours, increasing sleep is associated with increased health and decreased all-cause mortality. And then as you start to crest over that nine-hour mark, you see increasing sleep is associated with increased all-cause mortality. So decreased health span. Our belief, although the literature is a little bit noisy here, is that it's because it's like a canary for these other underlying health conditions and not actually that like something bad is happening. But there's also, you know, there's a zero-sum game

thing here with time. And so if I spend like, a marginal three hours in bed rolling around. I'm not moving. I'm probably not exercising. I'm not doing all those things. And so part of it could be more of a direct effect that it's squeezing out time for other health promoting behaviors during the day and not necessarily that like sleep becomes bad for you. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty fascinating finding. And it also just reflects, I think, how much research you all did. Okay, let's go to strain. So time in heart rate zones is a big theme. We've got time and heart rate zones one to three. And this is per week and time and heart rate zones four to five. I've seen at least looking at my data,

it looks like I have to get about two hours per week in time and heart rate zones one to three to have my age be decreasing based on exercise. Yeah, you know, your heart's a muscle and with all muscles, there's a use it or lose it element. And if you're not intentionally exercising and getting into that upper limit of pushing your heart, it's going to get weaker and weaker over time. And what starts to happen is we kind of talked about this at the beginning, right? Like in our 30s, just doing normal things like, you know, walking up the stairs to come record this podcast and taking care of my house, taking care of my life. Like I might only be getting to like that bottom like one third of my heart's capacity. And if that's like where I live

my whole life, you might not realize that that upper limit is slowly creeping down. And then all of a sudden, you're 75 years old and you're trying to carry a 10 pound bag of groceries up the flight of stairs. And you realize that like you're losing your breath, you have to pause. And it's because all of a sudden your like maximum capacity has like run up against the like kind of cruising altitude capacity of daily life. And so you start to slow down, right? And what starts to happen is, okay, you start to feel like I can't carry the groceries. I'm going to ask somebody to do it for me. And you stop pushing that limit. And so then it continues to drop even more. And then all of a sudden you're out a place where like, you know, you're in a wheelchair, all these things. And, you know,

it creeps up on you. And I think that's what people miss a lot, right? It's like everything's fine until you can't do this thing. If you want that upper limit of your capacity to not be like free falling for decades because, you know, it takes decades to happen. So it's not like you can reverse it overnight or even over like just a couple of months. You want to make sure that you're pushing those limits. And so we very intentionally separated the zones one through three, which is the kind of moderate physical exercise. And then the zones four and five, which is where you're really pushing that upper limit. And that's what's going to increase your VO2 max. That's what's going to increase your endurance capacity. It's a really important zone to spend time in.

And it's an area that like unless you are intentionally endurance training, you're probably just not going to get to. Yeah. This has definitely helped me lock in on exercise personally. I think it's going to do that for a lot of people. It's also just an interesting way to look at your data because it's adding up every week the total time that you spend in these zones. And I think it's a very transparent look at actually how much are you at. exercising. So I've found it valuable. And am I right in thinking that the bars, you know, orange, gray, green that signify if you're doing well or not are also based on your age and your gender? That's right. Yeah. So everything's based off of your age and your gender. In some

cases, when we looked at things across age and gender, the answer was it's the same. So like the points at which the sleep consistency metric changes over are the same for everybody. But And in other places like steps, the research suggested that sort of doing, you know, 8,000 steps a day when you're younger is sort of what you need to stay at that break-even point. But as you get older, it goes down towards like 5,000 steps per day as being that break-even point. And so that's included in our model. I found it very helpful. And it makes sense that, you know, a younger person would be expected to exercise more than an older person relative to the same age impact. Yeah.

And then also you start to get these interesting. confounders, like an older person who is able to exercise that much, has a lot of good things going for them. Because, you know, at 80, that means that, like, you're not in a wheelchair, just the fact that you can take these steps. Right. And so it starts to be correlated with all these other positive things as well. Strength activity time also measured on a total per week. Why is strength training important? It's so important. After age 30, if you're not intentionally strength training, you will just naturally lose about 1% of your muscle mass per year. Wow.

It's a lot. It's a wake-up call. Yeah, and like at menopause for women, it accelerates even faster than that. And this matters for so many reasons. Muscle is metabolically protective. Muscle is able to absorb a lot of sugar. And so if you have lower muscle mass, your ability to respond to a big influx of sugar starts to go down.

And so you start to get insulin resistance if your muscle mass gets too low. You also start to see things like, you know, muscle takes more calories, day to maintain than like equivalent mass of fat does. And so your BMR goes down and so you start to gain weight, BMR being basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories you would burn per day without exercising. And then muscle is also really effective cushioning. So like if you fall, because you trip on a brick and you have a lot of muscle, and let's say you don't catch yourself, you actually fall. You're less likely to break a hip or to break an ankle or something like that if you have muscle as padding versus if you have like an equal volume of fat, which

is kind of softer and distorts more easily. And so muscle not only prevents those falls, but it also makes the falls less dangerous. It's metabolically protective. And then, you know, we keep coming back to this concept of, you know, independent living in that marginal decade of life. You know, we think in our 30s about muscle being like, how many pounds can you deadlift? In our 80s, it's can you carry your groceries inside? Can you pick up your granddaughter? Can you, like, do all these different things? And so it starts to become the difference between, you know, It's a kind of funny way to think about it, but like getting on and off the toilet is one rep of a body weight squat. And so like right now when you think about the importance of squatting, you know, there's probably an aesthetic component and there's like bragging rights of like, oh, I can squat this many pounds.

But like if you're going to lose 1% of your muscle mass per year, you know, you're over 30. So if you don't do anything, that's going to happen to you. How many years until you can't do one rep of a body weight squat? that means you can't get on and off the toilet by yourself. So now you're in an assisted living or you're asking your kid to come move in and take care of you, right? And that kind of has all kinds of things associated with it. And so I want to make sure that we're helping our members realize in their 30s, in their 40s or maybe even younger than that, that they need to be on track to do one body weight rep squat, you know, 40, 50 years from now.

And the strength training requirement that we have is framed around that. do we get you on track to be able to live independently in that marginal decade? Well, I love seeing it this way. And the PSA I'll give to our WOOP members is time in heart rate zones and strength activity time are based on your activities. And so if you're saying to yourself, well, my strength activity time seems low relative to how often I weightlift. It might be that you're not adding all of your activities into WOOP or they're not being logged properly. And so here I'll just give you a quick rundown. If you do an activity, so all these activities are included in strength activity time, for example.

Strength trainer, weightlifting, power lifting, bar, Pilates, yoga, functional fitness, Barry's F-45, box fitness, hit, baby wearing, toddler wearing. So essentially, if you do any of those things and you add them as an activity on whoop, you're going to get credit towards strength activity time. And so hopefully this inspires you to add your activities. but it also is good because when you add activities, Woop then gets better at recognizing your activities, which in turn is going to help Woop recognize them going forward.

So make sure to add your activities. All right. Let's go to steps. Why do steps matter? Steps are one of those funny metrics where, you know, people don't realize this, but we added steps to the app back in October, specifically because we wanted to put it into health span.

There's just so much research that's been done over the last decade, tying movement and steps to all-caused. mortality and one of the reasons we thought it was really important to include it is the heart rate zone time is zones one through three and then zones four and five it doesn't include zone zero which for most people when they're not power walking but just kind of the normal everyday walking like walking your dog or you know walking around the house any of that kind of stuff you're going to be in that zone zero and just moving is really important and so steps is this like proxy for movement and you want to be moving more or less constantly throughout the day,

not go too long without moving. And it's just a really well-studied metric. And so we were excited to bring it to the Whoop world last year and excited to help people better understand it and set goals around it because of how it's positioned in health span. Well, I'll say this as someone whose step numbers were always kind of lower than I was expecting. I do think that a good way to improve your steps is build systems in your life that allow you to do steps sort of naturally. So, you know, if you can walk to get to the

grocery store versus drive, I actually got a treadmill underneath my desk, which now allows me to stand from time to time and just hop on a treadmill for like what otherwise would have maybe been a, you know, a somewhat sedentary Zoom call. Essentially just finding these different ways for you to get yourself moving a little bit more. And when you start measuring it, you start managing it. So Steps is one of my more improved metrics, if you will. Same here. And also got the treadmill under my desk. And I think one of the things that people don't realize is they're less than $100. Yeah. These aren't like fancy treadmills you'd want to run on. They're like little guys that are pretty quiet, pretty low profile kind of, you know, hide under there and

become like a really easy way to just sneak in these little snacks. And I think, um, Step snacks. Yeah, I think like step snacking is such a great hack. Like, you're like, oh, you know, 8,000 steps. How am I going to go fit that in? That's like, I have to go walk for an hour. But you don't realize that it's like, you know, can you take the stairs instead of taking the elevator?

You know, that could be 50 steps. Can I, you know, throw this little treadmill under my desk and, you know, walk during this meeting instead of sit, which, by the way, like, I've been very motivated from sort of the competitive part of me really wanting to hit that number and bring down my whoopage. But I also have noticed that I feel better. Like, you know, this isn't just a game that we're playing. It's quite literally rooted in incredibly good research. And so I promise, like, if you reduce your whoop age, you will feel it.

Like, it's not just about, like, you know, making your score look pretty. Okay. Fitness category, V-O-2 max. This one has a massive impact on your whoop age. Yeah, as it should. It's one of the most powerful markers of cardiovascular health. You know, we were talking earlier. about that idea of like that maximal capacity being, you know, way higher than you need for

daily living when you're in your 30s, but like kind of lowering and sneaking up on you throughout life until all of a sudden, you know, you can't walk up the stairs without losing your breath. V-O-2 max is what's going to tell you, can I walk upstairs without losing my breath? And it's going to decline every single year if you're not actively pushing it up there. And so you should know what it is. You should know that it is more or less free-falling unless you're paying attention to it. You know, it was one of the last features that we released prior to the launch of 5.0 and MG.

And the response that we got from our members was just so unbelievably positive because it's something that is so important. And so we were really excited to be able to bring it to the Woot World. And I think now through Hellspan, putting this context around it, it was one of the best predictors of your ability to live independently in that marginal decade of life and something that I think people should be much more aware of. And I think what's something so beautiful about the way we've brought VOTU Max into the app is that it's totally passive.

Whereas like before, if you wanted to know what your VOTU Max was, you've done it, you had to go find a lab that could do the specialized testing. Totally. It's super maximal effort. It's really uncomfortable and difficult. It's quite the commitment. both in terms of being pretty expensive and time committing and kind of painful to push to that limit. And now we can do this totally passively on sub-maximal efforts. And so we've made it really easy.

Pay attention to this metric. Yeah. And I would encourage people once they see their V-O-2 max to go into the analysis and the trends where it shows you your cardiovascular fitness level. And it'll give you very specific ranges relative to your age and your gender. So I'm 35 years old. 15 to 39 is below average, 40 to 44 is average, 45 to 50s above average, 51 to 59, excellent, and then superior is 60 plus. I'm in the mid mid 50s, low mid 50s. And so, you know, I'm getting a lot of credit for that. But it's also something I realize where I'm like, okay, well, now that I see this metric, like this is something I want to keep improving at. And so I think it's awesome that we now have this metric. And it makes a lot of sense that it's such a

big contributor to your overall whoopage. Yeah, I mean, the literature definitely supports that it's one of the more important things. Resting heart rate? Kind of a similar story. They're correlated, but, you know, your resting heart rate is how, quite literally, it's how fast is your heart beating when you're at rest. But sort of why that matters is it's how hard does your body have to work at baseline? And so the more healthy your heart is, the more healthy you are a kind of less distracting processes you have going on physiologically, the less hard you have to work at rest. And so it's just this great marker of the health of your overall system. And this is another one, folks, which is baseline to your age and your gender. Yeah. And I think a really interesting one because,

you know, medical training tells people that, you know, a resting heart rate under a hundred is fine. And they will not like in any way clinically intervene. when your resting heart rate's below 100. But if you go look at the literature, like a resting heart rate in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are correlated with like significantly reduced health span and increased risk of morbidity, all cause mortality.

And so it's one of those places where, you know, you go to your PCP and they're not really going to pay attention to that metric. But like if it's creeping up because your health is creeping down over time, eventually you will cross that threshold. And then it's like, oh, wow, like you're, sick now, but it's like if you pay attention to this and are focused on trying to, you know, reduce how hard your body has to work at baseline, you can start to intervene long before you hit that clinical threshold. So I think like one of the things that's so important about the way

health span can prompt and motivate behavior change is that we're picking up on things that mean you're on a trajectory long, long before even a great primary care physician would say like, oh, wow, this is a problem. And if people are looking to improve their resting heart rate, obviously there's the obvious thing, which is get fitter, right? So cardiovascular fitness, unquestionably is going to lower your string heart rate. I think some other things I've seen amongst Woot members and in my own life, learning how to breathe properly, you know, learning how to meditate,

learning how to do breathing techniques, those are things that will lower your resting heart rate. On the flip side, stimulants, so if you're drinking a lot of cough, coffee, if you're taking nicotine products, if you're taking other things that are sort of uppers, so to speak, those will all increase your resting heart rate. And so less of those can be good. And then resting heart rate is also a metric that tends to get the lowest when you're sleeping, which is also when we're recording it. So having higher quality sleep habits is going to decrease your resting heart rate on whoop. Yeah. And then I will add to that reducing alcohol intake. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty much nothing on here is going to help. Alcohol's not going to help anything, I think, related to your whoopage. Okay, lean body mass. This is our ninth metric. Yeah. And this one's a little bit interesting because it's the only one that's not totally passively being recorded on whoop. So if we don't have lean body mass data for you, it's just treated as neutral and it doesn't affect your health span. Through our integration with whithing, if you have one of their scales that support the BIA and the lean body mass measures, or if you have a different scale and want to manually enter in any lean body mass data, we'll take that into account.

The reason why we incorporated this metric is because the more muscle mass you have and the less fat mass that's been shown over many, many different studies, done in many different populations, that that's very protective and reduces all-cause mortality. We really intentionally didn't want to use BMI here. BMI is a really flawed metric, and I've been excited to see that the medical and longevity research community has been moving away from it.

And so if you have one of those smart scales that supports lean body mass measurements, or if you've ever done like a dexas scan or something like that and have those measures, you can enter them in and health span will account for that. Yeah, it's interesting. it's one of those metrics which can only make you older. Otherwise, it's sort of checking in the box. But look, the thing I'll say, and I think it's a credit to the fact that we got the design, right,

is each one of these metrics you can go through and look at and see what your six-month average has been and what your 30-day average has been. And you can also see, therefore, are you trending younger or are you trending older? And I think it's worth everyone listening to this to spend a minute on the health span page and looking at each of their metrics because it gives you just in real transparency, what are you doing well and what are you not doing well? And I think for Whoop, it's really the, at least since I can remember, it's the most that we've ever said, this is good and this is bad. Yeah, I also love that it's one of the most transparent algorithms we've ever built. We're like, we do not want this to be this, like, big, crazy algorithm where we do some crazy neural net and predict something. And then we're just like, I don't know, it's a black box, AI, whatever. Like, there's so, so much research that went into it, creating the most simple interface you could possibly imagine.

And it's like, you know, make this go down by this amount and, like, you know, your whoop age will improve by this amount. And what I have seen that's so incredibly encouraging about this is that people look at it and they go, okay, I know what to do. And then we're seeing people do it. Like, I can't tell you how many people have told me, like, I reduced my woof age by a year in six, eight weeks because I knew what mattered. And I just said, I'm going to go do these things. And it's like the behavior change that we're seeing with this feature is just, Like probably one of the things that I'm the most proud of in the 12 years I've been at whoop because, you know, we've, I don't even know how many times on this podcast told people

sleep consistency matters. But we've now put it in like such a beautiful design in this like incredibly simple feature where it's like, reduce this by 10, increase your age by, you know, reduce your Woop age by a year. And people are like, okay, got it. I'm going to do that. And then they're trying really, really hard to do it, and then they're seeing that move. And I think, you know, one of the things that we did really well, you mentioned the difference between like the six-month view and the 30-day view. The six-month view is essentially what your health span is built on. But the 30-day view is like this little sneak peek of if I keep doing what I've been doing for the last 30 days, we call this pace of aging. How can I expect my whoop age to change?

And so we give you that sneak peek that helps you keep you motivated to like stay on a good path or motivate a behavior change if you're on a bad path. And we've seen people just feel really, really empowered because of how clear it is. And so I'm really, really excited by how powerful that's been. And for the designers at home, I think they'll appreciate a few elements on this page. One is that there's this glowing amoeba essentially at the top of the health span page. And if you're meaningfully younger than your age, that'll be green. And if you're meaningfully older than your age, it'll be orange, and there's, you know, some tones in between that sort of reflect the health of your amoeba. And then there's also an impact to pace of aging. So if your pace of aging is high,

you'll see your amoeba get more jagged. And if your pace of aging's low or slow, I should say, you'll see your amoeba be very round. So it's something you'll start to pick up on as you go. If you've seen enough Whoop ages, which we all have, you can kind of spot from a distance what someone's colors mean. Well, this is super exciting. I mean, this is, I would say, the biggest leap that we've taken towards helping people focus on health as much as performance. And look, we updated our mission at Whoop. Like we said, our mission is now to unlock human performance and health span because we feel so strongly about this feature. and about our commitment to help people live longer and healthier lives with really high quality.

Yeah, and I think, you know, what I so loved about the challenge of health span was how do we think about coaching people towards really long-term goals? So much of what Woop has done historically has been about understanding tomorrow, understanding, optimizing for the game on Saturday, understanding, like, hitting these shorter-term goals. And so this ability to say, like, how do I know that I'm optimizing for my whole life and that like whoop is now this partner that, you know, I don't necessarily have to have a very specific goal, but I think a lot of people universally can relate to this idea of, you know, not wanting to be in that gap where health spans run out, but lifespan hasn't. And so creating just like a super clean, super actionable roadmap to not having a big gap between health span and lifespan, I think is such a beautiful new concept. and totally different from, you know, what anybody else has ever done in this, like, kind of biological clock or, like, age space. And so I'm just really excited. And super encouraged by the incredible feedback we've gotten, even in just the first couple days that people have had their hands on this. Well, this is HealthSpan with Whoop Age, which also has pace of aging,

and it's now in the Whoop app. Emily, this has always been fun. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And if you're listening, I hope you love this feature as much as we do. If you enjoyed this episode of the Whoop podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Whoop.com. Call us 508-4434349.2. If you think about joining Whoop, you can visit Whoop. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members to use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next. week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.