WHOOP Podcast - The Best Ways to Improve Recovery, WFH, Skin Temp and More: Emily Capodilupo Answers Listener Questions

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

We’re back in the inbox answering questions from our listeners this week. Emily Capodilupo, SVP of Data Science & Research, joins the podcast to tackle everything from the best ways to improve recovery what it means to miss your period. Emily breaks down menstrual cycles and what they mean for your training (1:51), what missing your period is actually signaling (4:02), training on biweekly cycles (10:44), how working from how can affect your sleep (12:57), the difference between skin temperature and basal body temperature (17:30) and the top 5 ways to improve recovery based on member data (21:29).Resources:Training and Sleeping Based on Your Menstrual CycleSupport 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 Whoop Podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best, top performers in this never-ending journey to understand human performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week, we're diving back into the inbox to answer questions from our listeners, thanks to everyone who has submitted questions so far. From skin temperature to the behavior is most likely to boost your recovery, to what the data shows about working from home. We're tackling it all with none other than SVP of data science and research, Emily Capitilupo. So Emily joins us to discuss training according to your cycle, if you miss your period,

the difference between skin temperature and basal temperature, the impact of work from home on your sleep and recovery, the behaviors you can start doing that are most likely to improve your recovery. Remind you, if there's something you're curious about, You can email us, podcast at whoop.com, or call us 508-443-4952, and we will answer your question on a future episode. Reminder, if you're new to whooped, you can use the code whale, W-I-L, check out at whoop.com, $60 credit, battery packs, bands, even whoop body apparel. So that is at join.wop.com. Here is Emily Capital Lupo answering all the tough questions.

Getting us started today is Megan. Megan asks, if a woman is missing their period due to training loads, birth control, or other external stressors, do their body still benefit from training in biweekly cycles? Do they still go into those luteal and follicular faces? Thanks, Will. Great to be back. Awesome and super important question. Before we jump into it, I think it's probably helpful to do like the 30 second overview on the menstrual cycle, what goes into it, and then how whoops. thinks about the menstrual cycle as it relates to how we coach. So the menstrual cycle has two phases, the follicular and the luteal, which Megan calls out in the question. So the follicular phase you can think about is it starts when you get your period, when you start bleeding, and then it goes for about 14 days until you ovulate. And then from ovulation until you start bleeding in, so the follicular phase starts over is called the luteal phase. You kind of keep going unless you get pregnant or like this listener's question, you'll lose your

period due to training or menopause or anything like that. You keep going through that cycle for 30, 40 years. And when you're in your follicular phase, hormonally, your body's in a better position to respond to training. You can take on higher loads, your better position to put on lean muscle mass. So it's a really good time, typically, to do things like strength training. Versus in your ludial phase, you're less well positioned to respond to those high training loads. And so it's a good time, relatively speaking, to do, like, you know, the sort of like endurance-based building, you know, even like skill building and stuff like that, but the less really, really high-intensity stuff. And so we reflect this in our menstrual cycle coaching feature, which we've done several podcasts on a link to in the show notes, that, you know, we recommend higher training loads, still accounting for recovery score, but higher training loads during the follicular than the lidial phase. And so where this question comes in, that's so great, is it saying, well, what if I don't menstruate or, you know, we could even look at that a little bit more broadly, like what if my period's super irregular? How does this apply to me? And the way the feature works, to a certain extent, is because it's learning your normal cycle, it can adjust to, you know, periods that are roughly happening every month, but are longer or shorter than what we think of as like the average 28-day cycle. But what the features really,

not designed for is when you start to hit that point of amenorrhea, so when you've lost your period. So amenorrhea, which is the medical term for not having a period, just because you're not menstruating, doesn't necessarily mean that you're not cycling. You could be having just like a really, really light period that you're not really noticing or it could be kind of coming and going. And so you might still be going into a ludial and a follicular phase, even if it's not obvious that you're cycling. The only way to know for sure would be going to go to your doctor and get your hormone levels tested. It's actually important for a number of reasons. One is if you have trained so hard that you've lost your period or you think that you've lost

your menstrual cycle, you actually still could be ovulating. You're probably not. Your chances are a lot lower. But if you're sexually active, you're going to still want to be thinking about things like birth control. So just because you haven't noticed that you're getting a period doesn't 100% guarantee that you're not ovulating. So you do want to be careful. The other reason to go get these hormone levels tested and to find out if you are is because, well, we often think about it or hopefully we know better, but people sometimes think about being really, really high trained, like a natural consequence or even like a badge of honor that you're high trained is losing your period. But it's actually not a good thing, even if we associate it with really, really

serious, you know, elite female athletes. I should caveat that I'm not a doctor, so take this for what it's worth. But, you know, if you do lose your period, especially, you know, as you're ramping up your training load or something like that, it's a good indication that, like, something is probably off and it's worth going, talking to your doctor, either your PCP or like a sports medicine specialist. But, you know, you're probably going to want to go get those hormones levels checked because you don't want to lose your period most of the time, you know, can be a sign of pregnancy, so it's worth going to the doctor and rolling that out. You know, it could also be a sign of something called a female athlete triad.

And so we talked about this a little bit in the episode a couple months ago with Stacey Sims when she was on the podcast. But the female athlete triad is basically these like the set of three. symptoms. And if you have one, you're at very, very high risk of either already having the other two or developing them. So the first one, like we said, is amenorrhea or losing your period. The second one is osteoporosis, which is like bone density loss. And then the third is low energy availability. And it's relatively common. It's totally preventable. And it is reversible. So, you know, if this is you, there's a lot you can do. But all of those things

don't take away from the fact that it's really dangerous, too. So if you start to see those signs, especially, you know, all those three things together, you want to make sure you're talking to your doctor. What's basically going on and how these things are all related is exercised, induced amenorrhea. So when you lose your period because you're training too hard, is caused by not having enough calories. And sometimes it's because we're not eating enough. We might appear to still be eating a quote-unquote normal amount, but because we're training so hard,

we need to be replacing those calories at a higher rate. And so if you're not getting enough calories in to meet the demands of your training, what you're going to start to see is that your body goes into like a low energy mode. And one of the things that gets pruned when we're in this, you know, low energy, you can almost think of like power saving mode on your computer or phone or something is that a bunch of luxury processes get set aside. And so it makes a lot of sense that one of those things would be reproduction. And so we don't want to start a pregnancy and menstruate and have a baby if we don't have the energy even to support ourselves. And so losing your

period is just a symptom of kind of being in this low power mode. But other things that are also going to start to suffer are things like you know, you're going to see like your hair and nails will get really brittle because those are also luxury processes. We can't support our immune systems as well. So you're going to see that you get sick easier. And then you're also just going to feel like sluggish and kind of gross and run down. Building muscle also takes a lot of energy. And so, you know, you're going to see somebody training really, really hard and stop making gains. They might actually start to lose muscle mass because your body is going to start to look to that muscle as a source of calories and break it down

to support other functions. And so you're going to see somebody training. really hard and like getting the opposite of you know more fit right they're going to see them really run down they're going to lose muscle and unfortunately for a lot of athletes and this is like the most common in sports like you know ballet where there's a lot of focus on body image or like long distance running or particularly high prevalence of this first they lose weight and they start to like you know lean up which can be positive for their performance but then it kind of goes too far than all of a sudden something that was helping them, like kind of running a little bit lean, starts to get in the way and start to hurt them. And so it's a sort of easy trap to fall

into. That's why it's relatively common. My biggest thing that I want people to take away is that relatively common does not mean relatively harmless. It's definitely something that you want to be on top of. And then the third piece that we didn't really talk about so much yet is osteoporosis. And so one of the hormones that fluctuates throughout your menstrual cycle is estrogen. And when you're in this low energy, not having a menstrual cycle mode, you're not going to produce as much estrogen. Estrogen is actually vital for supporting bone density. And so you end up with osteoporosis, which puts you at risk of, like, fractures. And so you see a lot, especially in like long distance runners, they'll get those like stress fractures,

different things like that. And so not only are you losing muscle mass, which makes you prone to injury, but you're also losing bone density, which is going to make those bones, which are now less protected, there's less muscle, more prone to fracturing. And so really common kind of consequence of this female athlete triad is that you end up with, you know, different kinds of fractures and things like that and getting injured. And so, you know, while it might start as something that feels performance promoting, it's definitely not in the long term and very, very worth addressing as early as possible.

Because like I said, it really is reversible by, you know, increasing your calorie intake and just being mindful of how you're training. I want to loop back to the original question, which is whether or not you'd still continue to benefit from training in biweekly cycles. And what hopefully you've heard through all of this is if you've exercised so hard that you've gotten yourself into exercise-induced amenorrhea,

like the question shouldn't be anymore, like, you know, is the best way to train in biweekly cycles or tri-weekly or something else, right? I think like once you hit that point, you're really in quite serious danger of hurting yourself and doing long-lasting damage to your body. And so the best thing that you can do at that point is, you know, go talk to your doctor, maybe just a good time to rest until you can get that doctor's appointment, increase what you're eating and try and get that healthy cycle back because this is one of the most important vital signs for young female athletes that indicates that you're giving your body the fuel that it needs, that you can support all these. functions, losing your period is not a sign that you're training hard enough. And I think unfortunately it's something that people almost get excited about because they view their mental cycle as this inconvenience. This is sort of like another thing you have to deal with that makes

it harder, like it makes you sometimes feel like you don't want to train, right? And I get that. I felt that before. And I'm sort of sympathetic to that. But I think it's important to pay attention that this isn't like a convenient. I don't have to deal with my cycle. This is a very meaningful sign that I'm headed down a bad path. So I'm not going to comment at all on if you should be training on biweekly or any other kind of cycle. I think that that's a moment that you should go and talk to your doctor, make sure everything's going on. That's okay. There's just a couple of pretty straightforward rules to live by or things to train by that can help you avoid accidentally getting to the state of female athlete triad or losing your cycle and eat within 30 to 60

minutes after you exercise, you know, the more intense the exercise, the more important it is that you're doing that, making sure that that food is carb-heavy, you know, a little bit of protein as well. You know, when workouts last more than 90 minutes, it's a really good idea to consider fueling within the workout. And then just making sure that you're always eating three males a day and making a point of getting enough calories in and being mindful of that. Okay, incoming question from Anthony. He asks, I noticed my whoop flag that I had better REM sleep when I worked from home. Has there been any greater published data on this since the start of COVID or even better since people have started to return back to work? Give up all the great work. Thank you. Thank you, Anthony.

I think before I jump in, it's helpful to do the super speedy overview on sleep. So we at Woop think about sleep as having four stages, which is pretty standard across all wearables and the sleep industry itself. So there's wake, which is the absence of sleep, but we count it as a sleep stage anyway. and then you have light sleep, which is sort of the transition stage. We spend about half of our night in light sleep. And then the rest of your sleep is slow wave, which you can think of as the physically restorative part of sleep. And then REM sleep, which Anthony's asking about, which is the cognitive or mentally restorative part of sleep. It's when we dream the most intensely, and it's when we consolidate our memories.

It's a little bit tricky and interesting to kind of dive into what Anthony's getting at as far as, how the pandemic and the associated shift towards working from home might have affected REM sleep. You know, it's interesting to see that in his case, REM sleep increased. And there's a couple of reasons why, you know, that could happen, right? Like, if he's spending more time asleep, he should get more REM sleep proportionally. But it's a little bit tricky to kind of tease out exactly why this is happening and be like, oh, yeah, if you're REM sleep, you know, increased, it means X, Y, Z, because we didn't start working from home in isolation, right? There's a lot of things that were going on. Like I said, like most people got sent home because of the pandemic.

The pandemic was a super stressful event for a lot of people. And depending on where you were, how personally impacted you were, how, you know, it affected things like your feeling of job security. A lot of people lost their jobs during the pandemic or your feelings of your safety for yourself and for other people like this could have landed very differently. And so, you know, on the one hand, working from home generally is associated with decreased stress, right? We don't have to commute. That's great. But it can also be associated with increased stress. Things like, you know, you're not getting any social interactions can be like disruptive to your mental health or dogs and kids and who knows what else running around, creating a lot of distractions and

things like that. So understanding like what working from home meant for him in this particular context is sort of important to understanding if we would have expected REM sleep to increase or decrease. There's a lot of research out there that mild stress actually increases REM sleep. And this is an adaptive response, you know, healthy response in normally functioning people because REM sleep is cognitively restorative. It's when we process our days and try and make sense of things. And so if we are a little bit more stressed out. It makes sense that we're investing a little bit more in like making sense of our days and stuff like that. And so we typically do see as a response to mild stressors associated with working from home and being in the middle of a pandemic could

certainly explain that increase. What's interesting is that if we look at population level changes to sleep during the pandemic, which are pretty well documented at this point, We know that a lot of people, 40% of people reported sleep-related issues. We're seeing a lot of increase in anxiety and depression. And anxiety is associated with difficulty falling asleep. But we're also seeing things that, like, lots of people are saving 90-plus minutes a day by not commuting. And a lot of that's going back into sleep. And so we're seeing an increase in sleep, which will be associated with an increase in REM sleep.

So it depends a lot on what the situation is. But what we're seeing kind of across the board, is that, well, in general, the pandemic was not great for sleep. You know, different groups of people had wildly different experiences, both in terms of what happened to sleep duration, which kind of overall went up, but sleep disorders went up too. So you're seeing more extremes and sleep architecture, which is that breakdown between, like, how much time you're spending

in the different stages of sleep. This is all a long way of saying that the pandemic and sort of associated work from home stuff has been polarizing on sleep. and we don't really have a like across the board like this is what happened and everybody moved this way or everybody moved this other way. Hey, loop team. My name is Ashley and I am a loop 4.0 user. I have loved the additions of the skin temperature and menstrual coaching cycles.

My question is around skin temperature. I really would love a deeper dive into this metric. And I've also been reading literature that link skin temperature monitoring on the wrist to basal body temperatureing as well as linking that to fertility. Can you talk a little bit about how those two could be either linked metrics or nothing to do with each other at all? I just would love a little bit more detail about this. Thank you. Bye. Great question. So there's a lot of research, as Ashley calls out, that has shown that skin temperature and basal body temperature, also known as core body temperature, are highly correlated. But they're not exactly the same thing. And there are

important factors like weather and the clothing that you're wearing potentially over, you know, something like a whoop that's measuring your skin temperature that can alter the degree of correlation. And so how correlated they are actually can fluctuate a little bit throughout the day. They're also not going to be exactly the same thing. And this is one of the things we didn't want to freak people out with when we introduce skin temperature with a Ford Auto device who aren't used to seeing that. So, you know, we're all kind of familiar with core body temperature. You You know, when you use a thermometer, when you're worried that you might be sick, use are the average healthy core body temperature is about 98.6 degrees.

But skin temperature at the wrist can be, you know, 92 degrees, and that's not concerning at all. And, you know, it can go all the way up to 98 degrees sometimes. And we've all intuitively experienced this, right? Like, you've had super cold hands while still, you know, maintaining a normal core body temperature. you can put your hands in really warm water, like in a hot tub. They're absolutely going to warm up to 100, 102, 104 degrees, whatever that hot tub is. That doesn't mean you're running a fever, right?

Your core body temperature is going to stay where it is. And our body is really, really good at protecting our core because important protein reactions need to be at that temperature to take place. That's why we feel so gross when we have a fever because that's like the optimal temperature for all these reactions to be taking place. And so our body protects that by constricting. blood flow and doing different things to protect our vital organs in a way that's just not that necessary to do for our hands and wrists and feet, which is why they tend to respond a lot more

to weather than the trunk of our body does. So in order to understand skin temperature, when what you really care about is core body temperature, you need to have that context of things like weather and environmental temperature. And if you can look at the difference between them, you can get to core body temperature in a fairly reliable way. And so that's what the bulk of the literature out there that's talking about the reliability of skin temperature is really doing is understanding how can we interpret skin temperature in the context of external temperature and understand what might be going on with core temperature. And importantly, as Ashley calls out, when we ovulate, so for those of us with a menstrual cycle,

about once a month you release an egg, our body temperatures go up about one degree Fahrenheit. And then when we start our periods, assuming you didn't get pregnant about two weeks later, beginning of the follicular phase, your body temperature will drop about a degree. And so if you're trying to understand fertility and monitor ovulation for the purposes of either getting pregnant or avoiding getting pregnant, you're going to want to look for these changes in your core body temperature. And as Ashley points out, you can use skin temperature from a wearable device to track that. and there's a lot of research out there that shows that that information can be just as reliable, if not actually, marginally more reliable in some studies than tracking basal body temperature alone. And we're closing today's conversation with a great question from WOOP member, Dylan, that a lot of us could benefit from. Dylan writes in, hey, whoop team, this is Dylan, 32-year-old family doc practicing an MA.

I've been on WOOP since 2020 after a cardiologist at my local hospital recommended it, and I haven't looked back. Thanks for all you do. I was wondering if you could pool the recovery data of all Woot members and find the top five things in the monthly performance assessment that help recovery and share that with us. That way, those of us looking to boost our HRV and recovery can try to focus on those things in an attempt to enhance recovery. Well, this is a super fun question, and I'll talk about why I think some of those top five earned a spot in top five. But before I answer it, I think there's actually like a really important caveat. which is that the things that are best on average are not necessarily and are actually very unlikely to be the things that are best for you because how you like show up to one of

these behaviors is going to determine to a huge extent how you're going to respond to this behavior right the person who's dehydrated is going to get a ton more benefit from hydrating than the person who's already like pretty well hydrated and the person who's like stiff and sore is going to get a lot more out of foam rolling than the person who's like really limber and feeling great. So because you are not the average person, I would not expect you to have the response of the average person. And therefore, highly recommend that everybody uses the journal feature, that they engage with the monthly performance assessment and see what their own responses to these things are, because the stuff that's really, really going

to move your needle is going to be what your body needs. And the only way to find that out is to try these things and see what happens. With all that said, let's talk about the things that are on average the most impactful and kind of why they sort of earn that really cool spot. So number one was hydrating, important for so, so many different reasons. We've actually covered this in the locker, so we will link to that blog post in our show notes. But being well hydrated is key to optional functioning in every system of our body. When our bodies are poorly hydrated, every single thing we do just becomes harder. less efficient, right? We have to work harder to do absolutely everything. And so because we're working

harder to do basic things like flush out waste or whatever it is, that leaves less left over for peak performance. And so that's going to show up in reduced recovery scores. Thankfully, this is a really easy one to fix, just to hydrate. And we see that. We see that when our Woot members are better recovered. They increase their HRV by about four and a half milliseconds and they decrease their heart rates by about 1.7 beats per minute, which is huge to see something like that, you know, on average. And when we talk about being properly hydrated, what we're talking about is anywhere from about half an ounce to an ounce of water per pound of your weight. So it's a pretty easy formula to figure out and sort of where you actually fall within that range, you know,

closer to the half or closer to the one ounce per pound, is going to depend a lot on things like your activity level. And also, weather. So if it's hotter, you're going to need more water. And then sort of what's going on in your life, right? So if you've been sick, it's generally a good idea to increase your fluid intake to support all the different things going on with your body. We know things like our immune system functions a lot better if we're well hydrated. A couple of quick and easy tips around hydration. One, the weather's changing. We're getting into cold and flu season. I definitely want to think about hydrating a little bit more to help boost your immune system and protect you. And if you're the

kind of person that's like thinking about drinking, whatever it is, 60, 70, 80 ounces of water a day, and that sounds really, really horrible and challenging. The good news is that it doesn't all have to be water. It doesn't all have to like even be liquids, right? Things like watermelon have really high water content. There's a lot of different fruits and vegetables that you can cheat with. But also we're thinking about things like, you know, throwing a water bottle in your bag so that you can just hydrate on the go, you know, before you get out of bed or before you really start your day or leave the house, whatever kind of works for you, make sure you have a full glass of water. When you sit down for a meal, you'll have a glass of water before you eat to just kind of make

a habit out of that. Lots and lots of ways to get those ounces in, but it's really important. And we do see that Woot members who are hitting their hydration goals are on average about 3% more hydrated, which is sort of small on average, but we're seeing at the individual level really, really big differences, you know, in some cases. And some of that's coming from, like, is the difference between a good day and a bad day, five, six, seven ounces, or is the difference between a good day and a bad day, like 30 ounces versus 80 ounces? And so the people who have more extreme missed days are going to see the bigger benefits when they do hit those hydration

goals than the people who are kind of generally okay and then sometimes awesome. Individual results definitely vary, but there's all kinds of reasons outside of your recovery score to be prioritizing being well hydrated. The second thing on our list is turmeric, which is again, I think, going to be very much an individual result will vary type of a thing. Tumaric is that's that little orangey, yellow spice, it's delicious. It contains this active ingredient called curcumin. That's the bioactive compound. And it's a super powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant. So, you know, when we just sort of sprinkle a little bit of it in our food, we're getting relatively little, but it's become kind of common to take it in like a supplement form where you're getting, you know, a hundred or a

thousand times what you would ever get just like through a nice curry or something like that. We do consume curcumin or turmeric, however you're getting at that active ingredient. We know that it's boosting something called like brain-derived neurotropic factor, which is involved in memory and learning. It's also been shown to be deficient in Alzheimer's and depression. And so it's boosting our mood, which is, of course, going to help us with things like falling asleep and, you know, sort of the better you sleep, sort of the better you're going to be recovered. So it wasn't so surprising to see that it's associated with improved recovery scores. And then there's also research that's shown that, you know, because it's anti-inflammatory, it's been associated with things. And like reduced arthritis symptoms, but also sort of in more mild, less clinical things, like less pain, right? So all of those things, you know, if you're in pain, you're going to have trouble sleeping. And so you see that it's like the anti-inflammatory is going to help you sleep, therefore going to help you be recovered. If you're sort of thinking, oh my goodness, I need to go run out and buy this stuff, you know, the more you suffer from the types of things that anti-inflammatories solve,

the better results you're going to get. So if you're already leading a relatively low inflammation, lifestyle, you know, you've a clean diet, you're doing all these kinds of things. You might see relatively little benefit or even no benefit at all because you don't need a powerful anti-inflammatory. But if you're suffering from any of those things, arthritis or even just like joint pain or anything like that, you might see a different impact. So definitely one of those things where I think to understand how this is going to affect you individually, you know, think about whether or not inflammation is an issue for you personally. And you can use the monthly performance assessment in the journal feature to understand if you're personally going to benefit

from this. The third thing on our list was following a dairy-free diet. And I was a little bit surprised to see this one up there. And I think it's a little bit complicated because I think it might be tied to some other things as well. Importantly, the people that we looked at in this category were not like vegans who are always dairy-free. We're looking at people who sometimes ate dairy and sometimes didn't, and comparing these people to themselves, as opposed to, like, comparing people who never eat dairy to people who always eat dairy. And the reason why that difference matters is because there might be other things going on on days when you're dairy-free versus eating dairy that are contributing to this, like, what appears to be a boost in recovery associated with being dairy-free. And it matters a ton what that dairy is, right? So is it that you're going out for ice cream late at night?

You know, that's going to affect your recovery score differently in different ways. Is it that you're eating dairy when you're eating out? You know, you go out for pizza after, you know, the game where you're eating like junk food or different things like that versus when you're dairy-free. It's like you're home and you're eating clean food because all that kind of like take out and like junky things that might be super loaded up with cheese tend to have a lot of salt, a lot of grease. both of which are dairy-free, but obviously going to have a negative effect on your recovery score. And so, you know, it's kind of fun to go through these things, like a top five list or whatever. But I think it is important sometimes to think about, like, is dairy really what's going on here is, like, the biggest thing, you know, is this attributed just to dairy? Is this, you know, what kind of dairy are they getting?

Is this, you know, kind of the, like, junky commercial dairy that's loaded up with hormones, you know, or is this, like, or is this like, or. organic dairy. Is this, you're just having a little bit of skin milk with your coffee? Are you getting like cheesy fries or ice cream late at night? And all those kinds of things are going to affect how your body is going to respond to just dairy. And so because we're not looking at dairy in isolation, it's always packaged in with something, it's really, really hard to know just from the data, like how much of this is dairy, how much of it isn't. The other huge factor is that about half of all Americans are believed to be lactose intolerant, many of whom are too mildly lactose intolerant to ever be diagnosed or even to like really know that

about themselves. And so if you are lactose intolerant, your response to dairy is going to be very, very different than someone who isn't. And so the benefit that you're going to see from cutting out dairy is going to depend a lot on like, what is it that you're cutting out? You know, is it something that you're like actively don't have the enzymes to break down in the case of like lactose intolerance is that you're cutting out late night ice cream or pizza or whatever or are you cutting out like that splash of skim milk in your coffee from time

to time and it's like I don't really know if you're going to see anything in that case so I think a bit of a complicated one to get at and I think if anybody is suspicious that dairy might be their issue or something that you know they might benefit from cutting out it's worth doing so really carefully and mindfully and making sure that you're not accidentally blame naming dairy when what you're really cutting out is like some other more destructive behavior. The next thing on our list, number four, is spending time outdoors. And this is another one. I feel like my theme for all of these is that it depends.

It's complicated. But I think it's important to be realistic about like what we're really seeing in the data. You know, make sure that we're drawing like fair conclusions because I don't want people to just, you know, double down on things or throw things out. but spending time outdoors is also associated in our data with being more active. And it's also going to be associated with things like getting light exposure, you know, if that time outdoors is during the day, which is really, really good for your circadian rhythm, your like sleep wake cycle.

When we see light during daytime, you know, because our body's this like strong signal like, okay, this is day and it helps align our circadian rhythm. So then later at night, we start to produce the hormone like melatonin, which tells our body that it's sleep time. And so when we get light exposure during the day, we're going to sleep better at night. And so a couple different things could be going on here. We know that nature exposure is associated with improved mental health. We just feel really good, even if you just show people pictures of trees, their mood improves.

So actually being out in nature counts for a lot. And so when we spend out time outdoors, we boost our mental health. We align our circadian rhythm. And just by virtue of what root people are doing, we tend to see about two points higher strain. so we tend to be a little bit more active, all of which is going to promote better sleep at night. And so it wasn't surprising at all that's something that, you know, for three separate reasons, super good for your sleep is going to be improving your recovery. And so I think that's probably something that, you know, across the board, I can say if you do this,

you're probably going to see positive benefits, but exactly why you're seeing those benefits are going to depend a little bit, you know, which of those three things is relevant to you. And the last one to make the list, and I thought this one was fun, was sharing a bed. And I have a couple of thoughts as to why this one made the top five. One reason why sharing a bed might be good for your recovery score is there's actually a series of really adorable studies that were done like 20 years ago in couples where they looked at couples who had been together for a long time, like many decades. And they found that when you're with your partner in bed, you feel a lot safer. And those feelings of safety allow you to get into deeper stages of sleep. So you get a lot more slow-wave and REM sleep when you're sleeping next to someone you trust.

And so even if you lose a little bit of sleep because, you know, you fool around and you chat and who knows what before falling asleep, that sort of feeling of safety is very real and it translates to higher quality sleep. And so we see a lot less time spent awake and more time spent in those deeper stages when you're sharing the bed with somebody you care about. The other thing, a little less adorable, is just kind of practical, right? Like, you know, I'm married. I mostly sleep with my husband. If I'm not, it's like because I'm traveling for work. You know, you're sort of compounding that with, I'm not sharing my bed. I'm also in a foreign place that I don't really know.

Probably, you know, it's not my pillows, not my whatever. So I'm not going to sleep as well because of that. And so that confounds the data a little bit because sleeping in an odd environment, you know, where the temperature might be different. The air quality is different. It smells a little different. You know, everything's a little off, you know, makes us. like less at ease and less likely to get into those deep stages of sleep that are so restorative.

So we do tend to see that there's a boost associated with sharing a bed probably because of these feelings of safeties. But again, like everything else, you know, individual results vary a little bit because, of course, if your partner snores, then, you know, having the bed to yourself every now and then might be the greatest thing ever because the snoring keeps you up and all of a and you can get a good night's sleep or you guys have so much fun together that you stay up late, fooling around in bed or whatever it is that you want to do, that could be associated with worse sleep. So, you know, very much depends on the person, depends on the situation. But for the most part, we do see that when we feel safe and when we're in our own environment and all those

kinds of things, it's really, really good for sleep. And so sharing a bed makes the top five list. And that is everything. Thank you so much to everybody who submitted questions. It was so much fun to go through them. If anybody else has a question that you're hoping we tackle on a future episode, please, please send them in, either voicemail, email, message us. We love to hear from you and looking forward to doing another episode soon. Thanks to everyone who wrote and called in. Keep the questions coming. Podcast at whooop.com or 508-443-4952. If you enjoy this episode of The podcast, please leave us a rating or review.

Please subscribe. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. And don't forget, new members can use the code Will to get a $60 discount on WOOP accessories. That's it, folks. We'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.