WHOOP Podcast - The Best of 2021: Looking back at the year that was on the WHOOP Podcast

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

It’s hard to believe, 2021 is almost over. It’s been a huge year – for WHOOP and for the WHOOP community.  It goes without saying that so many of our guests have inspired us, have made us think, and have challenged us to be the best version of ourselves. This episode looks back at some of the standout moments from the podcast in 2021, including from Alex Honnold (2:04), Rich Roll (8:04), Steve-O (12:29), Dr. Jim Loehr on the performance mindset (15:13), Dr. Meeta Singh on the science of sleep (19:35), Patrick Mahomes (23:18), Eli Manning and Larry Fitzgerald (26:41), Tom Daley (28:32), Gabby Thomas (30:23), Emily Capodilupo on COVID vaccine research (32:08), and Dr. Stacy Sims on women's physiology and performance (34:26). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with the best, top athletes, scientists, experts, and more. Learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. Hopefully help you figure out what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. As a reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership using the code Will. That's W-I-L. All right, where did 2021 go?

We're a few weeks out. New Year's is right around the corner. It's been an exciting year for WOOP and the WOOP community. Company's grown a lot. We launched new technology, WOOP 4.0. Exciting news for the WOOP podcast. We just surpass 5 million downloads. So thank you all for listening.

Pretty wild. We're on episode 153. I remember when we recorded the first five episodes, and I said, we'll do about 10 of these and see how it goes. So we're still going. And it just goes without saying that so many of our guests have inspired us. They've inspired me. I think they make us think about how we can be better versions of ourselves. That's the fun thing about these conversations with high performing people is hopefully listening to these folks rubs off on you and you feel like you can get a little better as a result.

And that's the theme for today's episode. So we're going to take a look back at some of the standout moments from the podcast in 2021, and this will also help guide, I think, what episodes you might want to spend a little more time on. A reminder, you can find every episode of the Whoop podcast at whoop.com slash locker, or wherever you listen to podcasts. When we talk about remarkable guests, it's hard not to think about Alex Honnold. Alex's death-defying experience, climbing Yosemite's El Capitan without any ropes or safety equipment, was documented in the 2018 film Free Solo. His appearance on the Whoop podcast gave listeners an inside view of how the mind works for someone who has truly mastered, both the mental and physical

aspects of his craft. You know, just achieving your goal, like doing the thing that you're trying to do, you're always left with the feeling afterward of, of like, what's the next bigger thing? Like, what's the other thing that you're working on? You know, there's always some other difficult challenge to do. So, like, just doing the thing in a lot of ways isn't really enough. It's like how you feel doing the thing and how you feel building up to the thing. You know, it's like basically the way you lead your life on the way to doing the thing. You know, it's like basically the way you lead your life on the way to doing the thing that kind of matters. The preparation level from a visualization standpoint, I mean, talk about that. I was surprised just the degree to which you

imagine also the negative. You know, a lot of people, when they think about a visualization exercise, they're just visualizing the success. They're visualizing it going perfectly. And you actually really, it seems like, take on all the negative, all the, all the possibilities of how it can go wrong. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, the whole point of visualization. I mean, to me, the point of visualization is to prepare you for any eventualities, like any possibility that could happen while climbing. I mean, basically the point is to not be caught by surprise by anything. And so, you know, you don't want to get into a position climbing and suddenly have the thought for the first time, like, what if I fall? You know what I

mean? Like obviously you want to have thought that through in its entirety. You want to already know that you know if your foot slips here you're going to cartwheel down the wall you're going to bounce down the wall you're going to basically explode on impact on the ground i mean it's all terrible things to think about and it's scary to think about but it's important to think about those things ahead of time so that you don't suddenly come up with them for the first time while you're in that position you know and i mean i think that if you focus only on positive visualization that's actually kind of dangerous because in a way that's like luring you into something that that could be beyond you like if anything especially with that's an interesting way of putting it

Like, yeah, you probably should, especially in what you're doing, you should not just have a positive visualization, because that might encourage you to do something that is beyond your means and leads to a disaster, which is what you did with L-Cap and you visualized every scenario. I mean, it seems like you even visualized your shoe tearing or it raining or all that stuff. Totally. I mean, just because that way, if any of it happens, you're never caught by surprise. You're like, oh, yeah, I've done this already, even though you haven't technically done it, but you've played it through in your mind. nothing is a surprise. You're like, I'm ready for everything. It's amazing. The movie is amazing. Free Solo. Congratulations on that accomplishment and of course the movie as well. And I love listening to you talk about it because it's, you know, my general sense is that the outside world looks at

you as someone who's almost got a little bit of a genetic disposition to being able to overcome fear. Like I was reading about, you know, this sort of analysis of your amygdala, right? which is the area of your brain that, you know, obviously is fight or flight and this idea that maybe yours is just sort of naturally a little bit suppressed. But in listening to you, I feel like you're so disciplined and so intentional that you've just trained, you've trained yourself to control it under a certain circumstance, right? Which is a life or death scenario of climbing. But it's, let me ask you this way. Are there other things in your life that might surprise, people that make you fearful like that you realize that you're you have some level of fear towards

yeah i mean as a young person i was horrified of public speaking like the idea of speaking in front of class and school was completely out of the question and actually giving a ted talk remains one of the scariest things i probably ever done in my life like i was horrid like i was i was so gripped on stage that i that i completely skipped one of my closing paragraphs like if you watch my ted talk online it's fully missing a paragraph that i intended to deliver but totally lost because my brain turn to mush. Okay, well, this is a perfect transition, because I watched your TED Talk last night to prepare for this. And I was like, I think he's nervous. Like, I actually think he's nervous. And it's a beautiful thing, though, man, because it shows that with like an insane level of

commitment and discipline and visualization and practice, like you've been able to overcome this insane thing and overcome like the mindset towards it. And it's not just that you're like, you know some genetic unique thing like you do you do feel fears in other aspects of your life but you've been so intentional which i think is so beautiful yeah no that's totally it it's like with with climbing i've been doing it full time and trying my hardest and pushing and you know broadening my comfort zone like working on every aspect of my climbing for 25 years and then you know and i've learned a lot of things about you know managing my fear and you know controlling emotion and whatever But then when I try to apply that to something like a TED talk, you know, giving a TED talk, like, I'm not good at memorizing lines. I'm not that great at public speaking. You know, I've had a little bit of practice now, but not that much. You know, a few years worth, let's say. And you're sort of like, yeah, I have some experience, but not that much. And like, this is hard for me. You know, I'm sort of like, oh, I don't have 25 years of experience and practice in this. And so when I go up on stage and try to deliver this memorized talk in front of, you know, thousands of the most respected people, you know, like people.

I don't know, everyone there's so classy. I'm like, oh, geez, you know, like, I don't want to embarrass myself in front of all these people. And I was like, oh, this is pretty intense. It's pretty hardcore for me. It's just fascinating listening to that. You can listen to the whole episode with Alex, episode 116. Very inspiring. Okay, speaking of inspiring, we recently had Rich Roll on the podcast. If you're unfamiliar with Rich, his story is pretty remarkable about alcoholism and health challenges in his 20s and 30s before transforming his life after turning 40 years old. He's become an elite endurance athlete, leading name in veganism, and a best-selling author. In our discussion, Rich talked about why being teachable is one of the keys to a successful life.

Here's a little taste of the wisdom Rich shared with us. There was plenty of mantras that I still to this day use, not the least of which is one that goes by that goes like this mood follows action so when i feel discontented or i feel emotionally raw or i don't want to do something it's a it's a a reminder that the actions that you take dictate the emotional state that you are seeking so rather than waiting until you feel like doing something it's all about developing this this um inclination towards action first and understanding that mood follows that. And I find that to be so applicable

in almost every aspect of my life. You're not allowing anything new to come into your life if you're holding on too tightly to the thing that's not working. So on some level, you have to be ready to take a leap of faith into the unknown because you're not going to know how it's going to play out.

And if you're waiting until that roadmap is completely laid out, in front of you, you're never going to take the leap. So at some point, you have to understand that that leap is necessary. At the same time, that has to be buffered by that sense of responsibility. And what that looks like is going to be different for every single person based on your circumstances. And the other thing I would add to that is that I think it's really important that you've done a lot of internal work to resolve your inner demons or really gain clarity over what makes you tick and what it is that you want out of your life before you start making, you know, rash or

semi-rash decisions about your career path. Because if you have a lot of unresolved inner emotional turmoil or past traumas or whatever it is, we all have our complicated psychological makeups. If you have reckoned with that, then you're probably not in the best position to trust your instinctual impulses. And so I had to do, you know, at least 12 years of work on that before I felt confident trusting those impulses and those instincts and believing that they would not lead me down the wrong path. So that's a really important piece that I feel like doesn't get enough attention. for me, resides in the striving to be okay with where I'm at with who I am. And it's a spiritual practice that requires, again, back to patience, like being patient with yourself, like trying to

find the simple joy in things, rather than being outcome or performance oriented, whether it's in athletics or in career, to just be more in the allowing and the surrendering of yourself to the thing for the joy of it. And these are, you know, principles that I learned in sobriety that I struggle with today, like the idea of surrender. Like when I was first introduced to the idea of, is like, give up. Like, I'm trying to get, you know, from A to Z over here. Like, I'm, I'm not surrendering. But what I've learned over time is that there are so few things that we actually have control over and letting go of those many, many things to which, we have no agency over, provides you with a sense of calm and a sense of peace that actually

makes you more capable at executing on the very few things that you do have control over. I took a lot from that episode with Rich. That's episode 146. I think more than anything, this idea of being teachable, this idea of never being complacent and really always continuing to push yourself, push your body, push your mind. I really enjoyed that episode. Now, someone else who found sobriety, Stevo. Yes, Stevo from MTV's Jackass. Believe it or not,

Steveo's an Abbot whoop member and takes his health very seriously. Like Rich, he found sobriety after years of abusing his body and he opened up on our episode about his trials and tribulations with drugs and alcohol, and he shared how a breakup in college

led him down the path to superstardom. That was my story. When she dumped me and I started videotaping the repelling, the jumping off roofs, the dangling off balconies. I was like, I'm going to be a fucking stunt man, you know? And that was when I dropped out. I mean, I was kicked out of the dorms.

I just stopped going to class. And I was just, people are like, well, what are you going to do now? And I was like, I'm going to videotape fucking stunts, man. I'm going to become a crazy famous stuntman. And everybody I told that, too, just like sincerely fucking felt sorry for me. It was like, okay, you're going to leave the University of Miami. me and you're going to become a famous stuntman with a home video camera. Like, what a fucking shame.

What a tragic loser. And rightfully so, because there was no precedent for that. There was no reality TV. What was the moment for you where you realized that this whole thing was going to just go through the moon? I mean, dude, it was overnight. You know, I mean, that was here 2000. I mean, fuck, that's over 20 years ago now.

At that time, being a hit on MTV, like, I, I, and it was an instant hit, my life was a hundred percent different. Like, I was, recognized everywhere I went, you know, like, it was, it was insane. And I was. It's like a flip switching in the simulation kind of. Right. Plus, at that time when Jackass came out, I had been living with my sister. She kicked me out. I was homeless, I was completely broke.

I had made less than $1,500, all told, for the first season of Jackass. And that had long since been spent. You know, I had lost my job in the circus. I was unemployed, homeless, broke, and a star on the, like, number of people, not just the number one show on MTV, but the number one show in the history of MTV. It was that big of a deal. People were like, you know, dude, can I get a picture? Yeah, I'll take a picture of me.

Can't sleep on your sofa? You know, like it was a little bit of that. You were kind of couch surfing for a little bit. I did. I was fucking homeless. Yeah. Crazy. Wild, wild life, Steveos lived.

That was episode 106. And that's also just a great reminder on mindfulness, meditation. I mean, here's a guy who's lived in an insane life. And yet he thinks one of the most important things. that he does today is meditate. Pretty amazing. I think the mental side of performance, that's a big theme here. Kristen Holmes interviewed world-class sports psychologist Jim Laird

in one of our most inspiring episodes of the year. We're all trying to navigate in life. We're trying to navigate in sport. We're trying to navigate in our relationships with our, if you have children or families or in a sense, metaphorically, we're trying to get home. And home is trying to end up at the end of, your life where you want to get where you want to end up and uh there are lots of detours or a lot of

false trails that end up not taking you where but they really look fantastic in the moment so when you get in your car and you want to go somewhere the first thing you have to know or you're not likely to get there you have to know what the destination is what you have to be able to put it in with some fairly precise coordinates and that is purpose um so there's the big purpose um what's the purpose of your life and where do you want to end up at the end? And I'll call that getting home. Where do you want to be when it's all said and done? And we have all kinds of things that we did at the Institute and I still do,

even with young athletes, to help them really get a sense of what their life needs to be trending towards. What's the trajectory that we asked them on your tombstone, even a young nine or 10 or 15 year old. What do you want in your tombstone when it's all over? Is it trophies? Is it accolades? What is it?

And no one ever says I want to be remembered because I was a gold medalist four times. You know, there's something, that's this scorecard that is so incredible that if this is who you want to be at the end of your life, you're going to have to start investing energy to get there in some way. So we start out with trying to understand. what is the purpose of sport if you're going to be involved in sport? What is the reason and how does that connect to getting home ultimately in your life? How can you leverage that to make sure that when you pass from this earth,

you've accounted yourself well so that in fact the things that are most important to you and when people, the legacy you're leaving behind is something that in fact you intended. So you need the destination. And the second thing for you to be able to get there is you need to know where you are now. But if you don't know where you are at this moment, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and so forth, if you're not sure where you are right now, you have no idea of how to close the gap between where you want to go and where you are now. So I call that face the truth. So the first coordinate is purpose.

The second is truth. And this is where the WIPP technology is so brilliant. because it's a face-the-truth technology. We know that sleep plays a very important, critical role in being able to manage all these complex systems of the body. The more you understand that, the more you're going to realize that this might be a contributing factor to you, having enough energy and having the emotional strength

to do what you need to do, face the truth. This is tough on people. We have so many filters that we use to conceal the brutal reality from what is really the truth. I mean, from getting through to our sensitive cells. And that's the story of life. So we always begin all the training with purpose and try to help people understand. We are purpose-driven species. the door that opens this treasure trove of energy is purpose.

If you get the purpose right, you know, the doors of that energy will open up and you'll be able to be a big investor. It's a very powerful conversation with Dr. Laird, check that out in episode 137. Now, Dr. Lair mentioned the importance of sleep, and that's obviously a huge theme for us here at Woop. Another doctor, Dr. Mita Singh, renowned sleep specialist, joined us to discuss the science of sleep. Episode 145, she covered so much excellent stuff related to sleep, especially how good sleep is deeply linked to your mental and emotional well-being. Sleep and mental health is a bidirectional relationship. I mean, you know, if poor sleep worsens mental health. Mental health issues are typically associated with poor sleep.

And if you don't improve the sleep, mental health doesn't get better. In fact, just recently, I want to say in this last one month, there's this great meta-analysis that came out that showed that improving sleep improved every aspect of mental health. They looked at depression, anxiety, etc. You know, substance use, everything got better if you improved the quality of your sleep. Yeah. So that's number one. That's really important.

The second thing I want to... So think about what happens at night. So, you know, sleep is like a reset button, and it helps you prepare to face the stresses of the next day. And if you don't sleep very well, you're ill-prepared. And if you don't face the stresses really well, you know, that tends to make you more anxious and that's going to make you sleep poorly. It's like a vicious cycle.

And the best way to intervene is to try and improve your sleep. So that's the second point. But third, let's come to, you know, your question. And what happens is that because we live very big. busy lives. People are on the go all the time. So sometimes when they get into bed, it's the first time they give themselves an opportunity to kind of think about it. And it's not even consciously they're thinking about it. It's all these like thoughts come crowding in and they're like all stressed out and then they're or or, you know, or I was, I think I was telling you,

I just recently was speaking to a head athletic trainer of an NFL team. And he's like, well, you know, he gets home, it does thing, and then he gets into bed, and he's, like, working on his laptop, turns it off and he's like, well, I have to sleep now. Well, that's not how sleep happens. It's not going to happen. Even an aeroplane when it's about to land, it doesn't just, like, flop from the ground. It's not like going full speed and it's like, you know, that's not. There's a transition. Yes, there is a transition. You know, it decides, it's like circles around, like lowers its altitude, slowly comes down. And you want like a nice, really, really you know soft landing and so think about about that building in that landing time for your sleep

in preparation of sleep so it's like building a winding down and the winding down has to be both physical as well as mental in which you wind down so that sleep can happen allow sleep to happen rather than command it to happen everything improves if you improve sleep there is not a single thing that doesn't improve with better sleep. It really, really doesn't. Your relationships, the way that you function, your interaction with your children, with other people, the way that you're exercising, the way that you're metabolizing whatever you're taking in. There is nothing that does not improve with better sleep. It's easy for me to agree with a lot of Dr. Meda Singh's work here. Nothing in your life gets better without great sleep. Must listen.

I think for anyone who wants to know more about their sleep because it really covers a lot of ground information on the stages of sleep and exactly what rest does for our body. Again, that's episode 145. Sleep, of course, goes hand in hand with recovery and you need to be recovered to handle strain. Few people understand that better than Patrick Mahomes. Not only is Patrick the face of the NFL. He also uses whoop. He's an investor in the company. And one of the fun moments of my sit-down with Patrick was going over his strain data from the 2020 season. Not surprisingly, Patrick takes on a ton of strain. Here's Patrick.

So this is an interesting graph. So this is your strain as it builds over the course of the season. So you can see like September and October, it's lower. And then all of a sudden, you're like over the course of the season. I mean, those are big peaks. And these are your two bye weeks. So the two bi weeks have these huge drops in strain. That is hilarious with the by weeks.

I mean, it does make so much sense. I mean, obviously, every game's important, but September and October, you're trying to fill in it out, you're filling out what you are as a team. And then as you get to November and December and obviously January and February, your intensity picks up because you're trying to win these football games.

The other one that I found pretty interesting is you had a 91% recovery when you torch the poor jets, 35 to 9, 91% recovery. You went 31 for 42, 416 yards, five TDs, which is the season high, 144 pass rating. Now, when you wake up in the morning, will you look at the recovery the day of the game

and think about it a little bit? I do, and then Bobby texts me every single day before and tells me how my recovery score. But I do, it's like the first thing I wake up, try to wait for it to kind of get the info in, process the info in, and I try to get the look at it because I want to know how I'm feeling, how my body's feeling, where I'm at.

And usually if I'm feeling pretty relaxed, it's usually a pretty good score. Now, if you see, like, so there you had a 91% recovery. You also, you had at one point this season a 16% recover, 18% recovery against the Bills in the AFC championship game. That means I wasn't sleeping well at night. I was definitely thinking about everything and too much visualizing before the before and too much adrenaline pumping.

So when you see that in the morning, what do you do so that doesn't bother you? How do you think about it in the context of winning? Yeah, well, the good thing about that one is it was a later game, so I could kind of, I went and got breakfast, and then I went back and just kind of laid there for a little bit and just kind of let my body relax. Usually when they're earlier games, you want to have a good recovery score for sure. But if you have a later game, you can kind of get back down, lay down, kind of let your body relax, let your mind relax and kind of get it off the football game just a little bit and kind of focus in on just kind of getting your body in the best possible place. I love that. I mean, I've heard some folks say, like, oh, I'm not sure if I want to look at it because it might affect my psyche, but I think the more advanced way to think about it is I'll know the information, and it's not going to change my mindset for winning, but I'm going to use that information to treat my body appropriately leading up to the game. Yeah, you have to. I mean, your body, I mean, you can do so much with your mind, obviously, but your body, at the end of the day, if it's in prime shape, you can go out there and be the best you can possibly be at. whatever you're doing.

So I always check mine and just try to make sure I know where I'm at physically and then mentally where I need to prepare myself if I need to do stuff a little bit extra on the mental side or I'm able to let my body kind of do what it needs to do physically. We actually covered Patrick's Super Bowl data, his strain data, really his data for the whole season on the locker. So you can check that out, whoop.com slash locker. Just look for Patrick Mahomes. Patrick wasn't the only football legend we had on the podcast.

year. We had the pleasure of talking with Eli Manning and Larry Fitzgerald. They both talked about the mindset needed to be great. That's part of being an athlete. There's going to be times when you're not at your best and you're not feeling your best and you know it. You've got injuries or you got sick or you got stuff going on and you got your mind wandering, but you got to find a way for those that three hours to be at my best and to peak and to make plays when I need to and to forget about everything and say, I'm not that I, you know, after this game, game, there are there being no excuses. I'm not looking for a way out or an excuse of why I play poorly. Instead, I want to, I'm going to, you know, show how tough I am to myself and prove

that no matter what's thrown at me, I can overcome it. If you look around throughout the course of history and the really high level of cheerers, they usually have that type of mindset. No matter what I accomplished, what I did, I could have, you know, 200 yards in the game and three touchdowns and when all I would do on the next day. and Monday, I would go into film, and all I would see is bad things that I did. The time I didn't get my depth or the catch that I didn't make, it wouldn't matter how good I did it. And, you know, you listen to, like, Michael Jordan on his documentary Last Dance, and, you know, you look at Tom Brady. I mean, the guy has accomplished everything that anybody could ever accomplish.

There's people that are just intrinsically motivated to be wired to go be the very best. And it's so fun to watch it when you see it in the process. Well, both Eli and Larry have become friends and I think are just deeply inspiring people. You can check out Eli in episode 140 and Larry and episode 151. Speaking of world class athletes, it was an Olympic year and we got to sit down with truly inspiring Olympians. Diver Tom Daly joined us in episode 141 to talk about what it was like when he finally captured that elusive gold. metal. And I remember putting that medal on me, seeing the flag kind of raise and the national anthem play. And I was, I thought it was going to be a moment that I was going to be able to sing

the national anthem from the, you know, at the top of my lungs. And, oh, I just couldn't speak. I was crying. I was a complete mess. I thought if I was ever with an Olympic gold medal, somebody could lock me in a dark room for the rest of my life and I'd be happy, like that kind of level of a dream. So it was amazing. It was, yeah, it was pretty special. After that Olympic gold medal, It was the first time I woke up with a sense of peace. I've done it. Like everything that I've ever dreamed of achieving in my sport, I have now achieved. And I almost beforehand kind of almost felt a bit like a fraud.

I'd won worlds and Europeans and Commonwealth and World Cup, but never the Olympic gold medal. It was Robbie, my son, when I called him after him, I'd won the second medal. And he was just, he just said to me, when are you coming home, Papa? And I was like, you know what, that's what matters. You know, like, you know, he doesn't care that I've won an Olympic medal. He just wants me to be home. It's a beautiful clip because it shows the pressure that Olympians put on themselves. I mean, Tom almost calling his life a fraud up until the moment of winning a gold medal,

but then realizing just where he is in life now that he has a son. I think it's a beautiful story and just reflects the insanity that goes into being a competitor at that elite, elite level. congratulations to Tom. Track and field star Gabby Thomas. She took home a bronze in the 200 meter and a silver medal in the team competition. Given how much we talk and think about optimal sleep conditions and recovery conditions, it's pretty ridiculous what Olympians have to go through in terms of sleeping in the Olympic Village. Just take a listen to what Gabby had to say about her experience in the Olympic Village.

Were the beds at the Olympics very uncomfortable? Oh my gosh, yes, like shockingly so. And the problem wasn't even the cardboard. Like the cardboard is okay. Just don't jump on your bed. You'll be fine. Was a mattress made out of cardboard too, the pillows too? It was so shocking.

And what has me a little bit bitter was the fact that, you know, all the throwers got the nice mattresses. What's why? The rest of us just didn't, I guess because their body types are like just naturally like they have to be heavier to do their event. And so I imagine that they just needed more support. I really don't know. But doesn't this piss you off? It kind of pissed me off. I mean, like here you guys are. You're training four years to peak on one, two, three days. And all of a sudden, we're just going to put you on cardboard. Like what? Who is approving that as a strategy? Who's like,

this is the right time for cardboard mattresses? This is the right time for cardboard. Like, yeah, of all places and times in the world. Yeah, this is it. Yeah, no. I was shocked, too. I'm like, really? The Olympics? That's Gabby Thomas on episode 141. She's about as impressive as they come. Olympic medalist, Harvard grad, and working on her master's in epidemiology. That's obviously an extremely important area of expertise right now and transitions us nicely to a lot of our groundbreaking COVID research, which we focused around respiratory rate. Yes, we found that an increase in your respiratory rate can often be an indicator of COVID-19 infection. This year, we dedicated a lot of

time and energy into studying the effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Our own Emily Capilupo joins us in episode 109 to tell our audience what to expect with their COVID shots. For both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, people tend to have stronger reactions to the second one than they did for the first. And we're seeing that both in terms of the subjectively reported reactions, so people people saying that they feel fatigue or having chills or being nauseous, stuff like that. But then also in the objective loop data. So we're seeing larger increases in resting heart rate, larger decreases in HRV and recovery and larger disturbances to the subsequent night's sleep. So broadly speaking, what we're seeing is that the vaccine is having a physiological response,

but it's for a very short period of time. Yeah. So we're looking at the loop data at night. And what we're seeing is like that night after you get vaccinated, so, you know, 12 hours later, there's definitely elevated resting heart rate, suppressed HRV, suppressed recovery scores, disrupted sleep. And then the night after, it looks exactly like the three-week baselines that we were comparing it to. So no indication of anything abnormal going on after that. We're seeing a much stronger reaction in younger people than we are in older groups. For every symptom that we looked at, as well as the objective loop data, we're seeing that

younger cohorts are experiencing all of the symptoms more frequently across all the different vaccines. What would be the explanation for that? Stronger immune systems. So it's actually a good thing in a weird way to have this reaction because the stronger your immune system is, the more we're going to like divert resources, attack this invading protein and then try and convert that to an sort of stored immune response. Very proud of the research Emily and her team did.

You can read more about WOOP, COVID-19, vaccines, how your body responds. That's all at Woop.com slash locker. Just search for vaccines. And that wasn't the only groundbreaking research our team at Woop did. We just released a brand new menstrual cycle coaching feature that's based on research done with leading women's physiologist, Dr. Stacey Sims. She made two appearances on the podcast this year, episodes 132 and 150. Here's Stacey Sims. So if we're looking at training methodologies and what we should be doing to maximize training and adaptation, we need to take an account,

are you naturally cycling, are you on a combined oral contraceptive pill, are you on a progestin-only type birth control? Because that will be able to tailor in when you can push hard when you should back down. So it's not saying you can't do certain things across your cycle, and we should never say that because women can perform at any point in their cycle. But if we really want to maximize someone's ability to withstand stress and adapt and really improve on their fitness, then we can work with the way these hormones perturbate over the course of a month. If a lot of women aren't tracking or they don't know what their patterning is, and they have a really awful day from a fitness standpoint, they always self-doubt, oh, I'm not fit enough, I'm not strong

enough, I didn't recover well, I didn't sleep well, when actually it's just that day within their cycle where their hormones are making them feel a little bit off. So the more you know about yourself, the better you can tailor your own training into it. So I'm always about track and understand yourself and then dial in your training to your own patterning. Fascinating episode. really diving deep on menstrual cycles and when it may be more optimal to train and treat your body differently. I love episodes and research like this because they also demonstrate the commitment we're making to women focused features. And that's going to be a continued area of investment for us is understanding women's performance and women's physiology. I think 2021 had a bunch of

amazing guests. I want to thank all of them for coming on the Woodpot. And I especially want to thank each and every one of you for listening in. This is, believe it or not, not my main day job being your podcast host. I try to help guide the company as the CEO. And just given the response that we've seen to this podcast and how many people listen to it and enjoy it, it helps justify me spending all this time on it. So I thank you for listening to it. We'll continue to bring on world-class guests. And they seem to keep getting better and better every year.

If you have specific recommendations for the podcast, for me, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're on social at Will Ahmed at Whoop. You can check us out at The Locker, Whoop.com slash Locker. And I think 2022 is going to be an important year, both for the podcast, but especially for Whoop. You'll see us continue to be pushing the envelopes on research and health monitoring. 4.0 is going to be coming to the world next year. There's a big play with Whoop Body, which is. is going to allow you to wear your technology throughout your body.

I'm excited to see where that goes. We're making big pushes into women's health and women's physiology, having more and more women on WOOP, which we're excited about. And we're growing internationally. We're going to be marketing in more countries than ever before. We're going to have app translation in a number of different countries. And I'm excited to see how many of you around the world will be using Woop. So with that, again, I'm deeply appreciative of everyone who listens to the Wooop podcast.

It's really an honor to get to do this and get to interview such smart, high-performing people. If you want to check out the episodes that we cut to today, let me just go through these quickly. We've got COVID vaccines. That's episode 109 and 121. Alex Honnold, Amazing Climer, episode 117. Patrick Mahomes, Super Bowl MVP, episode 124. Dr. Stacey Sims, episode 132 and 150. Dr. Jim Lair on performance mindsets, episode 137, Eli Manning,

Super Bowl quarterback, episode 140, Gabby Thomas, Olympian, episode 141. Tom Daly, Olympian, episode 142. Science of Sleep with Dr. Mita Singh. That one's pretty self-explanatory, episode 145. Rich Roll, episode 146, and the Great Laira Fitzgerald, episode 151. That covers it. I wish you all a very happy, happy holiday season and we will be back better than ever in 2022. So stay healthy folks, stay in the green, and have a phenomenal holiday season.