WHOOP Podcast - The Science of Winning: Kristen Holmes and Mike Lombardi discuss how to build and sustain long-term success in sports, with the idea that performance is a choice.

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

The Science of Winning: Kristen Holmes, a national champion field hockey coach, and Mike Lombardi, a former US rowing coach, share what it takes to sustain success in athletics. They talk about the idea that performance is a choice (4:30), defining success (6:57), using data to individualize training (10:23), coach-athlete trust and accountability (14:35), building a perennial contender (20:06), playing as if the score is always 0-0 (25:43), opportunities not opponents (26:19), measuring capacity with WHOOP (37:06), what a coach embodies (42:05), the vital role of sleep (46:28), data trends (52:28), and their favorite recovery modalities (56:38). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

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

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

Whoop Podcast. These other 22 hours of the day are extraordinarily important as it relates to performance. And if we don't understand the choices we're making and the impact those choices have on our readiness, if we don't understand how those choices impact us, we're just literally we have the blindfold on and we're trying to hit a bull's eye. Hello, folks. Today's episode features our VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and elite performance manager Mike Lombardi. Kristen and Mike are going to talk to you about the science of winning. As a national champion field hockey coach at Princeton University, Kristen developed several methods and philosophies for sustaining success at the elite level,

which enabled her teams to win an amazing 12 Ivy League championships in 13 seasons. and made Kristen one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history. Mike is a Princeton grad himself and a former Olympic rowing coach who's led a number of athletes to unbelievable success as well. So these are two winners talking about winning. They get into the idea that winning is a choice and how to instill that mindset in athletes. Concepts like always playing as if the score is zero-zero-zero

and ignoring the names of each upcoming opponent. and the psychological factors that influence performance and the role that WOOP data plays in all of this. If you've heard Kristen on any of her previous appearances on the WOOP podcast or Mike on our recent CrossFit games episode, you know they both have tons of valuable insight to offer. Without further ado, here is Kristen and Mike. I'm Michael Lombardi, lead performance manager here at Woop. I'm here with everyone's favorite WOOP podcast guest, Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance. Today we're going to be talking about the science of winning.

So Kristen is one of the most accomplished coaches, probably in the history of field hockey, not just NCAA. Kristen won 12 Ivy League titles in 13 seasons. First national championship ever at Princeton University has produced, I believe, four Olympians. Is that right? Yeah. In your tenure. That's accurate, yes. My background for those that have not heard from me before, I was a Princeton athlete.

I rode there. I was on the under 19 national team prior to Princeton University. Then I also coached rowing at Princeton University and worked with the national team and Olympic rowing team from 2011 through 2016. That's really kind of where my performance comes in. I've done a lot of both remote and in-person coaching. And again, the focus of what we're looking at today is how to not just create success, but then sustain success. Because a lot of people can have one-off years and people start to think, hey, I've stumbled on this magic formula up, but maybe they just had talent. and some years that's true, but that can't be the case just with Kristen, right, with winning

so many titles year after year. So I'm going to let Kristen give her favorite line here, which is Performance is a choice. Yes, performance is a choice, which is probably one of the most profound yet simple things that anyone can think about when they're trying to set up long-term success. So, Kristen. Yeah. So before I kind of back into this concept of performance being a choice, I think it's important to you, you mentioned talent. I think it's really important to kind of frame that. You know, as a look at it, there's really three factors you've here in performance. You've got, you know, the talent. And this is definitely how I position it when I meet with, you know, some of the best professional athletes in the world who are already really great.

It's like, okay, how do we actually get to the next level and how do we understand what that bar is? I think framing it under this umbrella of these three factors for performance is really helpful. You've got the talent, very much the genetic piece, right? You've won the genetic lotto. Congratulations. Like, you've got this amazing genetic potential. And then you have the skills and expertise that these athletes come to the table with, right? They've been playing, you know, enter sport forever, right? So they've got this really robust skill, expertise, and knowledge in their sport. And generally speaking, that skill and expertise is nurtured through really high-end information coming from coaches and performance staff that are kind of surrounding this individual.

Because at the top, everyone has the genetic capacity. Everyone comes to the table with the skills and expertise and have this robust team around them. The difference maker is the third factor of human performance. which is the performance lifestyle. The choices that you make every single day will either add up to help you or they'll add up to hurt you. And that's where I come at this kind of thesis

around performance being a choice is that if you understand the physiological and the psychological principles that actually move the needle with reference to performance, you can then begin to control for them. In a team setting, it's about really building that infrastructure initially, right?

So you have this robust platform around, okay, if the athletes understand these physiological principles, which I'm sure we'll outline at some point today, and they understand these psychological principles, then they can effectively be the driver of their performance outcomes. And it gives you a platform to sustain outcomes where it doesn't just become a one-off, right? But you've got this foundation of how do I actually need to behave on a day-to-day basis so I can control my motivation, my effective effort, my arousal levels, my response, my mental, physical, emotional response. You can't do that if you don't understand the factors that actually influencing that.

You and I have talked a lot about, and I've asked you this, Kristen, what defines success for you or when you were coaching was the goal to win the national championship was the goal to win the Ivy title. And I think we both would agree that the idea is to optimize the athlete, make sure that each person is really reaching their potential and the results of bi-price. So you've talked about kind of creating this framework where performance is a choice. So you talk a little bit about how you, one, create it so that the athletes feel like they are part of the process. And it's not just, here's what we're going to do because X is the goal where, hey, we want

to win a big 10 title. The goal is X. And I, you know, I'd like to hear how you frame it. Well, I think maybe first, like just defining performance is important. And I, you know, kind of knitted this together over the course of the last, like, probably a couple decades, you know, first as an athlete, you know, in the Big Ten, you know, playing field hockey basketball and then playing on the U.S. national team for seven years and, you know, trying to figure out, okay, what actually is performance. And then moving into the coaching, you know, how do I define this for my athletes? Because I'm saying this word a lot, what does it actually mean? And I think kind of what we've come away with is this definition that I think is a good one. It's a little bit of a mouthful, but it's basically the capacity of an individual to intentionally behave at a level equal to his or her physical, mental, and emotional potential. And to me, that is the most important thing that we need to be thinking about is, okay, how do we help the athlete intentionally be able to perform, right?

So it's not just this guess every day, right, of whether or not you're hitting it or not, but bring some intention around it. And then just being able to think about it in terms of potential, you know, am I moving toward my individual potential? and then is that in turn impacting the team potential. And that's how I evaluate a successful season and always have. And success in my own life is, am I marching toward my potential? And a lot of that comes from being able to measure certain things.

We always say it's really difficult to manage something that you can't measure. So I think in terms of your second part of that question, just athlete buy-in, giving them control, I think it's bringing science to the table. You know, we both, as a Princeton student-athlet, you can appreciate this. And the student athletes I coached are extraordinarily bright. You know, they're not just going to arbitrarily run through a wall because I told them to. They want to have a bit of data. They want to understand why we're doing what we're doing.

And I would say that's true for most athletes of this kind of generation. They want to understand the why. And I think most intelligent human beings want to understand the why. And I think that we need to deliver the why. And that's foundational in of itself, right? Why am I doing what am I doing? Why am I being, you know, if my coach is asking me to do something, why am I doing that? So I think that is one piece of being able to control for response, right, is you have to understand how this fits into my value system.

Is this bringing me purpose? How do I actually perceive this task? So all of those things are kind of a part of the model and really important, but I would say without a doubt, foundationally, delivering the why to the student athlete or to the athlete in general is just really, really critical. Right. So you're basically using the data to build a foundation of trust along with. the rest of the framework of here's why we go about things. Here's how we go about things because I promise you this is the kind of the road for you. And you talked about individual success and then leading to the group success, the ability to use data to influence day-to-day training decisions around individuals as opposed to just the group plan. And that's where it's going, Mike. I mean, we see it every day because we're working with all these teams. Like you can't, if you're not customizing for the individual, you're

missing a huge opportunity. But you can't even do that without effectively. You can't do it without data. And there's people, I can see, I can look. There certainly is an art to coaching, but you're still leaving a ton on the table if you're not looking at how the same sprinting test or rowing test is affecting individuals that is the exact same measurement completely differently. Exactly. So it's really, you know, that's obviously what we do. People look at external, all external load and external output, yet it's how that affects the individual is completely different. And you obviously use that differently to change.

Yeah. And I would just say, as a side note, we've been able to prove this in the data that we've seen is that external load actually is not predictive of next day WOOP recovery. So again, it goes back to if that external load measurement was for two hours, I was at practice, that player load, that volume, right? And that volume and what I did does not predict next day with recovery. So making the case for it's these other 22 hours of the day are extraordinarily important as it relates to performance.

And if we don't understand the choices we're making and the impact those choices have on our readiness, right, when we're rocking up to do whatever it is that we want to do, if we don't understand how those choices impact us, we're just literally we have the blindfold on and we're trying to hit a bull's eye. You're not going to be able to sustain levels of success as an individual or as a team if you don't wrestle to the ground those factors that are influencing me those other 22 hours. And then it's up. So if I can control for those factors, those 20 hours, then I show up with capacity, whatever my capacity, you know, my optimal capacity. And then at that point, I can adapt to stimulus in a really functional way. That's kind of how

I've always thought about it. Right. You jumped right into mindset. there and having the mindset around, let's say, the ultimate goal and how that actually will then shape the decision making around those 22 hours, can you talk a little bit about how you have done that, let's say, at the Princeton level, and then obviously now you work with everyone all the way up to pros and beyond, how you've kind of shifted that over the years and how you think it'll probably continue to evolve with just kind of new generations of athletes and how they think about things. So mindset is really interesting me, interesting to me because I, you know, and the research would support this that, you know, you can only talk

yourself into a better future before your biology, physiology is going to take over, right? So there is this concept, gosh, I can talk myself into anything, right? And there are extraordinary examples of folks talking themselves out of situations and being able to endure incredible amounts of hardship and just through the mind, but eventually physiology will take over. And when you're talking about elite athlete performance, controlling for those physiological factors are really, really important to set you up for the optimal mindset as it relates to being able to approach whatever task it is that you're approaching and that you want to be successful at.

So on the physiological side, obviously, you know, sleep behavior is right at the top, right? You have to figure out how to optimize your sleep behavior. I'm sure we'll dig into that a little bit. training behavior really, really critical, you know, am I, what is my intent? What are the physiological triggers I'm applying? Do they make sense relative to the individual athlete? Does make sense to what we're trying to achieve as a team? What phase of training are we in? You know, all of those questions need to be buttoned up and answered and accounted for. And then recovery behavior, you know, and within that is your fueling strategies, your hydration strategies, and your stress

recycling, right? So I think on the physiological side, that's really important when we're talking about applying the optimal mindset, being able to access a resilient. and see that physiological piece will kind of determine at what the threshold is in terms of mindset. So what level of transparency do you think needs to be there to both foster this culture of trust and accountability while still maintaining this sort of coach perspective? I'm driving the ship here for short term and long term success because you see you see both, right? Yeah, definitely.

People that are not approachable. You show up and here's the plan and then versus here's exactly why we're doing it. here's the intended stimulus, and then you make the choice of that. Is there a combination of the two that you think is valuable? Yeah, well, I think it's interesting. I mean, just looking at the collegiate vertical versus the tactical versus the professional, they're all kind of a little bit different because they arrive at their destination through different pathways. Tactical, there's already this really robust, like, indoctrination, you know, you're kind of all there.

You're protecting, serving your country. Like, it's just a really clear, there's a value alignment. I think that enables trust. So I think if you're to approach this, again, foundationally, attacking it from a value standpoint is really important. And I think that's how you really establish a trust. So almost before you get to the physiological stuff, you approach it from a psychological perspective and you're thinking, okay, what are the most important psychological needs that we have as human beings? Okay, is it number one is purpose. I want to be able to live my values.

That's really important. Well, what are my values? And do the align with the organization's values. Right. Yeah. I think that's like foundational, right? That's a great thing to go back to is, you know, am I acting on those, on those core values that? Right, right.

And do I have, does this infrastructure have an outlet for the things that I really, really care about? And, you know, and I think that if you're in the collegiate vertical, that's your recruiting platform, right? Like, this is what we value at our core. And that should select your athletes on its own. Because if they don't buy in to the core values of your program, they probably are going to fit in better somewhere else. And if you can make that really, really clear, and if you can prompt the athlete with some questions on to start to think about what they actually value, because some athletes haven't asked themselves that question, right? So if you can ask that during the recruiting process

and have them start to noodle on that, then they can see, okay, wow, I actually, I really do want to be able to be super social and go out like three times a week. Like, darn it, maybe I should be playing club or something, you know? Like just making it really, really clear what the demands are. And I would say this all the way to the tippy top is, I think unhappiness invariably ensues when expectation does not meet reality. So stop glamorizing what it actually is going to be. It's fucking hard to be good, right? And it takes sacrifice, right? It takes hard choices.

You know, that's just the reality of it. And if you're not up for that, this is kind of how I frame my recruiting pitch. It's like if you're, that's not what you want. If you don't want hard, go somewhere else. Because, you know, to be a student athlete, win national championships at a place that it hasn't been done before within field hockey, you know, obviously. Then you go somewhere else. Invariably, we ended up attracting great talent, but not always the great talent, but we attracted the fit because I was really clear about what this journey was going to be like. So very rarely did expectation of reality, you know, not match.

So I think that's a big piece of it, is that purpose piece, right? And that's going to influence mindset and, you know, to kind of go back to that. It's really two both sides there. Then it's, you know, a team and a culture doesn't, or let's say. the coach of a team does everyone a disservice the current athletes and the future athletes if they're painting a bullshit picture of what the experience is going to be like and if you know whether it's either a job interview or you're the recruit or you're meeting with any person and you're just trying to mold yourself into what you think they want because and they say

hey we love you but then you go home and you're like what am i doing right that was a mistake you're really just limiting your your own ability to be successful because like you said you're not going to have the right outlets and maybe some of your values will align with what you're doing and where the company's going or where the team's going. But there's probably a lot that isn't an alignment and your growth and your ultimate, you're never going to reach that optimal state both individually and then you're going to hurt, honestly, you're going to hurt the team because you are never really the right fit. Yeah. And I think just going back, like having your values in front of you all the time is really important. And they're going to change. You know,

I think just looking at the course of my 13 years, you know, a decision to leave. Princeton wasn't easy. You know, I loved, I loved my student athletes, right? Like, they're just, like, they're just the best, right? And, you know, I had great staff and the whole culture and dynamic, you know, was, was awesome. It was a great setup. But I could feel myself wanting something different. And if, if I wasn't aware of my values and being honest, like intellectually honest about, you know, what it was that I wanted to be thinking about and things that I wanted to be pursuing, I would never have probably had the courage to kind of leave and do something else that was really risky at the time. You know, we had like six months left of money, I think, when I joined a few years ago.

You know, it was like a really kind of risky move. But at the core, I really did understand what I valued. And I knew I wasn't doing the team. I wasn't being honest with them, right? You weren't 100% in and you were, yeah, kind of elsewhere. I was starting. I could feel myself on the edge. And I wanted to make sure that, yeah, they had the best.

and I knew I could not offer that, and that was part of a big decision. So it's funny to look at that end. Let's go back to the beginning when you first got the job. How long did it take you to put in the culture and the framework to just get the people you wanted or kind of plug and play, right? If we look at all of the, let's say, most successful perennial contenders in multiple sports, so let's say Princeton Field Hockey, the New England Patriots and the San Antonio Spurs, right? Well, putting me in the same sentence for those things, like,

But it's for good comparison, right? It makes me uncomfortable, but yeah. That's all right. I'm going to do it. So the point is that the coach is the same. The culture there is understood. And you're either a fit. And if you're not a fit, they'll make sure to show you the door.

It doesn't exactly work the same at the collegiate level, but you're probably not going to play. But what's there is a culture that's built and expectations are very clear and mindset. But it didn't start that way. None of these places started that way. So how long did it take you to come? in, build this up, because once it's going, it's kind of easy to keep going, as opposed to this is a mess. We're not even making the playoffs. We're not winning the Ivy League to, all right, I'm turning people away because I don't have that many spots. Well, when I started, I was the

youngest head coach in Division I Fialaki. So I wasn't too far off from the actual age of the student athletes. So that was kind of an interesting dynamic in itself. And I mean, I was like really, really raw. Technically, tactically, very confident in what I was bringing to the table there and redlined myself to make sure that I knew every single little thing about the opposition and, you know, was just on top of everything technically, like went to all the coaching courses, like domestically internationally, like was just like pushing myself to the end just to make sure that I was the authority, you know, in that area and in our country. And so I was really all over that piece, but I realized, and I knew this because of my experience as a player at an elite

level, I knew that it was more than just the technical and tactical piece, but it took me a couple of years to actually really implement other pieces in an intentional way that were beyond just the tactical and tactical piece. And it took, and it was like pretty, we were winning, but it was a little painful. And, you know, my student athletes were amazing in that. They would give me really hard feedback, you know, tough feedback. And I would just, you know, internalize it and try to take a deep breath and I'd go home and cry and then I would come back the next day and try to make improvements. But I think fundamentally I was really open to feedback and as hard as it is to digest and take in the moment. I listened. I listened to my boss. You know, Gary Walters was really an awesome mentor for me and would give me a lot of really good feedback and just subtle ways. But he was really helpful in kind of helping me steer to create this more holistic kind of viewpoint on how to approach putting together a team that was going to be able, that was sustainable, an infrastructure that was sustainable. So that's kind of what got me down the path of really exploring the physiology,

exploring the psychology, and then, okay, how do we actually knit this all together in a framework? You know, that's really going to make sense to these student athletes that we can, you know, that we can, you know, that kind of helps us recruit. It helps us stay focused on what's important and gives us some way to kind of measure whether or not we're tracking in the right direction. So how long do you feel like that took? A few years. A few years. Yeah, I would say by my fourth year, we were actually starting to roll. We had a pretty good performance education in place, apart from the technical and the tactical pieces of just the sport. I think we had this really nice educational platform that you'd come in as a freshman, and it would take you through

the four years. And that was kind of very intentionally put together, which I'm happy to share in the show notes. I think people probably enjoy kind of that framework. That really served as the foundation that we would kind of move through with the student athletes year after year. You've got the system in place. And part of that was from being very open, being adaptable. And then, like you said, you're going to every coaching, basically conference, you're looking internationally. I know we've talked about how much you felt you learned from the international level because the way the game has played a little bit differently. I felt the same way when I was coaching rowing that in the United States, basically people focus on rowing in eights, which is the least technical

of all boats and it's all about power output. You go anywhere else. It's about moving. It's about movement quality, as opposed to just getting in junk miles, right? So these people that they've a way smaller population, they come and produce amazing results, you know, with not less work, just higher quality work and focus on different things. So learning from other people because they might know more than you and then being okay with that. Yeah, that's the default, really. But a lot of people think they know. Yeah, that's true. Hey, this is the way. This is the way. I, It's been done before me and that inability to change. So those same coaches, I'll keep saying, Popovich, Belichick, Holmes.

Okay. They got this culture in place, but then what's the next step, right? So basically, if we look at the NBA, Pop basically revolutionized ball movement off the, you know, there were periods against the heat, and I guess the heat old's last kind of year where it was like the most beautiful basketball ever played in the history of basketball, and now the game has changed. where you kind of did this similar thing in the Ivy League where people are already playing for second place. So at what point after the culture is in place, you have kind of the people coming, did you start looking at there's more to unlocking performance here and dialing that into,

I know the level you did, but I'm sure most people don't know that level. Yeah, I mean, I think we had just like a couple things in place that, again, we would always be able to turn to that definitely influenced our playing style and the mindset with which we approach that playing style. You know, one simple thing we always had in place and had this in place for over a decade was, you know, the score is always zero to zero. Like it's, that kept task orientation super clear, right? Because if it's zero to zero, you're always trying to fucking score, right? So it doesn't matter what position on the field you are, you're trying to score. And that made every single, and that's, that is how we evaluated.

success or failure is, were you trying to score? Were your decisions, were your decisions on the, on the field putting us in a position to score? Like, that was the question. And you just keep it really, really simple. The other piece that we did is, you know, I think in terms of sustaining results, like, I hate the whole thing around trap games. I think I can count on one hand the time that we lost to an opponent who wasn't as good, who wasn't as, you know, who was lesser than us, right? And I think underperformance, there's a lot of reasons for it, a lot of psychological reasons around appraisal and perception. And if coaches don't know what those two things are and they're not manipulating those on a day-to-day basis with their athletes, again, totally missing the mark. But that's something that I would manipulate on a daily basis to make sure that my athletes were getting the very most out of the training session.

And we're going into a game against an opponent who we knew we could beat because we're just flat out way more talented. but if we weren't performing to our potential, that was a failure. So, you know, the other piece of that is, like, we never named our opposition. It wasn't anywhere on any of anything that we had within our team. It was just opposition number one, opposition number two. It took off this whole thing of this whole concept of rivalries, which I know people love rivalries, and that's awesome. People can talk about them.

It's not a rivalry if the same team always wins. That is a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. And there's that piece too, right? So for me, it wasn't, it didn't matter who we were playing. We stepped on the field. We were going to impose our will in opposition.

And we were going to play our brand of hockey. And that was it. And that's how we evaluated. And if you, it was really, if you were underperforming, that was a choice, right? And we would do little things to kind of manipulate that. If we had a player who, you know, for example, you know, is our center midfielder. and she's going to be able to just dribble through the entire team just because she simply can. She's more talented.

You know, we would put a constraint in place and say, you know what, you can't dribble. You have to, it's just too touch. As soon as you receive it, you have to pass it. So now of a sudden, instead of going into that game with a low appraisal or low perception of the task, like going to go into the game, she perceived that as easy, right? So she's playing a lesser team. We know, you know, she knows that we're going to beat them. She knows she's going to be able to dribble through every.

So we take that off the table for her. And now she's got to play two touch hockey. So her heart rate is where it needs to be. Her mindset going in the game. She's prepped for it. She knows she's got this constraint that she's going to have to deal with on top of managing the field. So again, we've made it challenging as opposed to easy. So again, actively manipulating those situations. If you want to try to maintain levels and not underperform and lose to shitty teams, that's how you do it. So that's what we did it. Yeah, that's, yeah, I love that stuff. So I love the idea of not naming an opponent and just looking at this is the next thing on the calendar, whether that's any sport, whether that's something that is, you know, on your calendar at work. You know, all these principles, you know, applied to literally every facet. Like, there's performance really everywhere. So, you know, would you still do that even when we're getting into postseason? You know, hey.

Yeah, it's, it's, it didn't mean, you know, we scouted the shit out of the opponent, right? Like, I knew when they're going to like, you know. But, you know, it's, you know, it's not that, you know, we were preparing for the opponent. But yeah, it was, we saw it as an opportunity, not an opponent. It was an opportunity to define our playing structure to, again, show how we're able to impose our will in the opposition. It took, you know, for the most part, you know, I would never run up scores. But, you know what? Like, if we went 10 nothing, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we're doing our job.

right? So it, you know, for us, it was, it was, again, zero, zero, and it was an opportunity to, to, you know, impose our will in the opposition. And I think, too, just psychologically, you know, this concept of kind of controlling the energy and motivation is really one of the most important things to sustaining a mindset, then Abel's consistent levels of performance. So if your system is constantly reinforcing the correct mindset, then, again, these traps games aren't really, they just don't exist. And again, that's kind of how you can evaluate the task orientation of the team, the level of effort, was it effective, the motivation, energy production, and again, not necessarily the result versus a specific opponent. Right. Just gives you a whole other way of evaluating success. Yeah, so that's how you're evaluating success. And you talked about the two-touch versus dribbling three. through the entire team, and you said, I'm going to see if this person's able to perform,

and we're going to make choices around that so that they appraised the task appropriately. So we've got the whole week. We've got a game on Friday. How do we start looking at appraising the task and looking to perform from a data perspective? So where do you start kind of working that in? Because you had like your own little whoop system prior to whoop existing. You know, I just love to hear. Well, the whoop data around this.

is fascinating and 100% validates this whole concept around, you know, how you perceive a task and how you appraise it is so critical because we will see invariably if we know, so I'll ask the coaches to basically rank the opposition in their view, you know, what should be a win, what should be a loss. And there is no question when they know that they should win, the data is not as good for the athletes leading up to that game. So this is just strictly coming from the coach. This is, so the coach just sent it to me just in private, say, hey, this is what I think I'm going to win, we'll win what I think we're going to lose based on talent, projections, like all of the scouting, all the things that goes into it, right? But assuming from that point that they are omitting that sort of feeling to their athletes as well, that.

No, no. You don't think they are. Oh, no, no, no. They aren't at all. They don't think they are. They don't think they are. They don't think they are. And that's, I think, the opportunity is that there'll be hints in the data that maybe support that.

maybe support that those games aren't as important. Strain levels might be a little bit higher, which isn't maybe a bad thing because they're trying to push the athletes because they know that game is not going to be from a volume and intensity standpoint is not going to be as physiologically demanding. But that said, what happens is they push the athletes during the week. The athletes aren't necessarily as in tune with managing their sleep dead, thinking about consistency, maybe the hydration piece. Maybe they go out a little bit later. You know, they're not spent as much time in bed. their day strain, there's workout strain and there's day strain, right? So their day strain is higher than it typically would be if they're playing a team that they perceive as being really good.

So there's just these little hints throughout the week that invariably set them up for a lower level of performance. They might still win because they're just more talented, but that's when we see teams tying when they should be winning, you know, if we're thinking about soccer or, you know, it's a game goes into overtime that had no business going into overtime. I can almost predict what's going to happen just based on that week. So that's, I mean, that's amazing, right? That you can just look at physiological data and know how people are perceiving a task and opponent and we're not going to say predict, but we have a good feeling of where

that performance is going to go at, like you said, it's going to be tighter than probably it should be. Yeah. And it impacts. It's not just impacting, you know, the, if you're talking about soccer, you've got 11 people. You're maybe playing 14, 15. It's not just impacting those 15 people, but it's impacting. thing all the way down the roster to the degree that it's then affecting the quality of the

practice, the focus of the practice. Again, it doesn't matter who you're going to play on Saturday. Shouldn't, right? And if it doesn't, if it really doesn't matter, then my Tuesday practice is going to be the same level of quality and intensity and focus and, you know, deliberateness as it is the following Tuesday, right? It's not going to change throughout the season. And that comes from the coach as well. And that comes from the leadership putting it out there that this is the expectation. And if someone's, you know, dragging ass and isn't doing what they should be, or you can see that, what are you doing with your sleep? Like, why aren't you sleeping enough? This is serious this week.

It's not any different. You know, kind of how much do you intervene? I know that as a coach, you probably did to some degree. Or, I guess it's kind of, it's a combination of how do you, what's the best way to approach when you see the team getting in this position for a letdown, despite, you know, kind of best efforts in culture? Is that a fall-through in culture? Or do you think kids will be kids and pro-athletes are going to be pro-athletes and they rely on the genetic?

I'm so good. It's going to be okay. Well, I don't believe in that at all. So, no. You don't believe in genetics are so good. Oh, no, no, no. Well, this whole, yeah, I'm so good. I can do whatever I want.

Like, that eventually will bite you in the ass. So, and I think for professional athlete, you know, it's, you know, Maybe I could have played until I was 29, but you know what? My career got cut short at 27 because I was like fucking off for the previous like six years. You know, like eventually it is going those choices and those habits are going to add up and either extend your career or shorten your career. Like it's just there might be the outlier. But the evidence and the science is just too strong to that, you know, to not support that statement. So yeah, I mean, I think owning your your choices and your.

in your body and be able to measure that to a degree, the stuff that's really important is critical if you want to sustain individual levels of performance and obviously contribute to a team at the highest level. So, yeah, I mean, it's really a combination of having this structure in place, bringing people into your organization or your program that understand, hey, this is how we roll. This is the level of accountability. We're trying to do stuff that's never been done before. And in order to do stuff that's never been done before, you've got to be accountable to your choices, right? And, hey, by the way, these are the things that are going to actually impact your performance levels. You know, purpose, competency control, we'll build that into the infrastructure.

We'll make sure that you're able to think about that within the context of this team. We're going to think about the sleep. We're going to think about the recovery. We're going to think about the training behavior. We're going to make sure this is all knitted together in a way that's going to enable you to optimize your long-term potential. But it really does come down to those other 21 hours where the, you're going to be able to the They're not with me, and they're employing these strategies and routines, you know, across that time frame.

We talk a little bit about longevity of an individual career and sustaining a level of success as an organization. And probably one of the most hot button or, you know, buzzwords in sports is load management. Yeah. And everyone's using something different for load management, whether that's like a minutes restriction or, you know, they're kind of arbitrary, right? Totally. Let's use Joelle Ambide.

Like he's coming back from these injuries. And they're just like, you can't play more than 20 minutes a game. And it's like, okay, why? Like, what's the basis of this load management as opposed to actually looking at how a person's performing? So I guess your take on how to actually put in a system for managing load for peak performance,

sustaining performance over the course of a season, whether that's collegiate, pro, whatever, or just, you know, working, you know, working at a high level, and then, you know, longevity of career. Yeah. I think coming to training with capacity is really important and understanding what influences capacity. So I think at an organizational level, you know, there should be rules for a lack of a better word. And I know I'm going to sound like, you know, the dictator, but there's a lot of science behind alcohol. in how that impacts capacity, right? So, again, bringing the right people into your organization

are going to make the right kind of choices. So they rock up to training and to games, matches, whatever, with as much capacity as possible. Because putting load, putting volume and intensity on an athlete who doesn't have capacity, I mean, that's obviously the recipe for injury. But I think where most organizations fall down is that they don't have a system in place to actually measure one's capacity. Like, if you don't have that, you're just missing.

the entire piece of the puzzle because that is first, right? Establish that first. You need a baseline to measure off of or we're just, you know, or you're just, you're just guessing, you're guessing. I mean, I always say this, the Holy Grail is combining the external load and the internal load, right? When you have those two data sets, you have so much visibility into how the athlete is actually managing what you're doing to them, right? If you don't have those two data sets, you don't know, right?

And I think that's where, you know, we go back to, I think, our unbley, successful success rates, and I'm sorry, I'm really proud of this, but, you know, we've got 237 athletes that were actively managing from August to January of 2018, and we only had seven injuries. So we, so again, there's a lot of amazing things happening within these organizations, right? There's great leadership. There are really outstanding professionals who are super knowledgeable about training load and understand how to customize load. And, um, have a good infrastructure around, okay, how much, what's sleep consistency? You know, how do we manage sleep debt? You know, how do we employ? What is our rule around recovery modalities relative

to capacity? You know, how are we thinking about that? You know, they have this really nice infrastructure in place that supports a technology like ours. You know, a lot of some, many times, our technology falls down in some of these environments because they simply don't have an infrastructure to support it. Exactly. They love the idea. They have no means to really get the buying or effectively step one that we talked about of creating the infrastructure and the culture it doesn't exist though and that's where that's where I see it fall down over and over and over again where you see sports scientists literally beating their head against a wall because the coach all they might know is you know some pseudicycology from you know

back from like 1982 and and they're but they're experts in their sport which is awesome right but they have no understanding of just basic principles around physiology and basic principles around perception and appraisal and driving meaning and purpose into your infrastructure. You know, those pieces aren't there, right? So when it comes time for sports scientists to have a conversation with a coach about, hey, we can do better here with injury management if we think about these principles a little bit more intentionally and we ask more from our athletes. Like, they don't ask chat from their athletes.

It drives me bananas. Like, to think that you can play video games for seven hours a day and that's not going to impact you, like, there's, we've got an ocean of data that will tell you that is not good for performance, right? It's because it's not good for sleep. Right. You'll just simply spend less time and run, right? So there's just, there's things in these, and as you can tell, it drives me bananas because I just am witness to this over and over again. But it has, the coach has to be involved in driving some of this stuff. Like, you can't just get away with being the bat, you know, the football coach, the basketball coach.

Like, you have to figure out how to influence, you have to figure out how to influence on a, on a grander scale. Like, and I think that, to answer your question, where this is going, that's where it's going. And I think it's the coaches who are able to do that are the ones that are going to really have success and be able to sustain success and have, like, an awesome environment where people are happy to be a part of it. So just from that, it seems like you would. say that like just saying you're a coach isn't enough, you know, or maybe that's your title, but what you embody and how you kind of act, you're almost like a leader of men and women in the full 360 perspective because we aren't just looking at training anymore. I feel like, well, the people that are succeeding are way beyond the practice field. They are looking at

the sleep, the hydration, the recovery modalities. And yet still people say they're overtrained. I'm I'm overtrained. I'm overtrained. I'm overtrained. When really it's just kind of they're under recovered. Yeah, definitely. There's just more, more, more, you know. Yeah, and that's the, that's the, I think that's something here too with understanding how to kind of use data to sustain excellence is, hey, is this, is this athlete or individual doing everything they can to put themselves in the best possible position to come back and meet the stimulus as opposed to, hey, man, I got like a 10% recovery. I think the training's too hard.

bullshit, you slept four and a half hours and you're eating Kentucky fried chicken at 3 a.m. Like, get your shit together, go get some sleep, and then we'll talk about the training. Exactly. Coaches that say that, you know, oh, you're going to use the recovery as an excuse. Like, I will say over and I'm going, that is not a woo problem. That is a you problem. Like, that is your leadership, your structure or lack of structure that's not holding these, you know, the athletes accountable. So I think there's, for me, like, that's such a clear distinction. And it's such a good point. like we let ourselves off the hook, I think, way too easily. And I think, to be fair, a lot of the people at the tippy top, like, you know, they aren't

sleeping. They aren't embodying, I think, the behaviors that they want their athletes to embody, therefore they don't have the credibility to enforce or talk about some of that. And I think, you know, that needs to be part of the conversation, too, is, you know, if I tell my athletes that, you know, managing your sleep is really, prioritizing sleep is really important, and then I'm sending them emails at 3 a.m. And not getting the sleep I need. What message is that?

No, that's completely opposite of what you need. You see that over and over again. And I think that's, you know, you should never be too busy and too tired to live your values, right? And it goes, okay, what actually do I value? You know, I want to be a leader of men and women, you know, if I'm a coach. You know, I want to be a leader of men. Like, okay, well, what does that actually mean? You know, what does that mean about my character?

What does that mean about how I treat myself, my self-care? Like, you know, all those things are really, really fundamental. And you have a responsibility as a head coach, I think, to be as good as you can possibly be because every day they're looking at you as an example of how to live and if you're not bring it to the table like the stuff that you want them to do to me you don't have any credibility in my eyes and that's a it has to be like a consistent evolution because people are changing so it's yeah how do you take your core values and relate them to you know the fortnight generation because that's the reality these are the people that you're dealing with and you need to find a way to

still connect, right? That's part of it. The second you just say, I don't get these kids anymore, it's too young. No, you have then just given up on yourself, which means you are you're letting the team down effectively. And some of the cool research we're going to do is hopefully understanding kind of actually what's happening when you're playing video games. So there's a little bit of science. How do we actually play safely, you know, without compromising our biological sleep? If there's a way to do it, and I think that's how you compromise and meet halfway, He's like, hey, you know, I know you love playing. And there's, like, a lot of cool things about Fortnite, for example.

You know, like you're connecting with your buddies. It's incredibly creative. Like the stimulus it gives to your brain. Yeah. Like anything, right? No, no. This is certainly not a slam on video games. This is a slam on people not getting sleep so they can play video games and then say that

they're not prepared to perform or they just are starting to have cognitive impairment when they're trying to do any sort of task. Like, they can't see straight. They can't focus more than two minutes. And that's not. True story. Let's give this kid ADD medication. No, just get the kid some more sleep, and then let's talk about it.

Right. Again, not a doctor. That's just some sleep science. Don't hold me to that. The kid may have ADD. We're not doctors. Not doctors. That's just, you know, pure science on what happens to your executive functioning

and your ability to operate when you're chronically underrecovered and not getting the sleep you need. Right. Restore of sleep. So would you say that a lot of this, all this, you know, talking about the extra 22 hours, or the other 22 hours outside of practice. How big of a role are you looking at sleep? Obviously, that's what we do, but that's probably the cornerstone. There's no question. It is, and I say this over and over again, it's my little line, but, you know, it's this most important behavioral experience we have as human beings. And it is the foundation

from which you're able to then build any exercise protocol, any nutritional protocol. You know, there's things that are happening during your biological sleep that can't happen while you're awake or during nap time during the day, it's just very, very important that you figure out how to get a good night's rest. And I view this when I'm talking to, whether it's Duke basketball or whatever, the clippers. Like it's the same conversation. It's, it is a skill. Sleep is a skill. And if you are not good at it right now, it's okay. Let's figure it out. Because it's, it's just like shooting a free throw. Like it is, it takes repetition. It takes discipline it takes you know a certain level of you know just methodology because a lot of it is

about consistency you know when you when you talk about really optimizing sleep is it's a very much routine thing so you can have the best possible synchronization of your circadian rhythm as possible and you get all your clocks firing all cylinders you know so yeah sleep is is 100% the foundation everything and and I just must say that I love that it's kind of starting to become a little trendy. I just remember, you know, a decade ago at Princeton, you know, me talking about sleep and I felt like everyone looked at me like I had literally 30 heads. But it feels like it's starting to like, you know, come into vogue, which is exciting. But yeah, you can't, you cannot have capacity. You can't manage volume and intensity in a functional way without getting the

requisite amount of sleep consistently. It's just, it's not possible. So 100% sleep is just the place to start. Absolutely the place to start. It's the place to start. And the place to end. Is that a new one? What? Free? Is that a new tag? Oh, a new tag long? Sleep is a skill. I mean, I have been saying that for for a while, but, but yeah. I'm just going to start getting, like, stickers made of all the things you say. Yeah, I've got a lot of one-liners. It's because they're so good. The athlete, you know, the attention span is, is pretty right okay so that's actually that's a good point i just want to talk about that too yeah when you have this thanks for throwing me that softball by the way what softball the sleep softball appreciate that oh

i didn't even think it was a softball it's it's an important thing to talk about no it's so this attention span you know i've did a good amount of research on you know millennials and gen z and it's not that those two generations i am a millennial myself it's not that we have short attention spans it's just that we have unlimited options. Yes. Right? So it's, you need to do something that really captures the attention to sustain it. With Woop, I guess, it's so simple in terms of what's the recovery score.

It's so easy to digest and, you know, hey, what's your recovery? What's your age? And the more understanding, it's kind of getting this buy-in. So basically what Woop is allowing for these next generation of athletes to understand is really quick to understand. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I think that. You don't have to overthink it. It's, hey, look at this. I can do better. And that's where the performance staff and the coach really comes into play here, not just looking at the day to day, but looking at the trends. For sure. So not actually freaking out if there's a one red recovery, but looking at the trends over time. Two things that are really important in that. What you just said is, I think, number one, that this is an athlete empowerment tool. And we say that all the time, right?

So it gives the athlete, it gives them an understanding of how their behaviors are influencing their capacity, right? So what did that stressor do to me? And they get immediate feedback. So to kind of just the attention span thing, like that's what makes loop I think amazing is that you're getting, it's like this constant feedback loop. You know, if you just think about this whole day strain concept, I have a game at seven o'clock. I know I want to have as much in the tank as humanly possible for that game at seven o'clock. So I'm going to keep my strain low, right? I'm going to control my strain, right?

So, again, that when we think about psychological needs, like control is really important. Whoop gives the athletes a sense of control, right? Because they can see directly how the behaviors are influencing the core metrics that we track. So I think that's the one piece. In terms of trends, I think from a coaching standpoint, understanding how, you know, what a seven-day period actually did to an athlete is so. super valuable information, right? How are they adapting to the load that's the volume and the intensity and how that is influencing their sleep consistency and their restorative sleep and,

you know, obviously their HRV and their resting heart rate. And to be able to kind of just zoom out and look at that, you know, on a weekly basis, I think is super valuable. And then retrospectively, looking at an entire season also, there's just like a mountain of cool stuff that we can we look at that informs how we how we deal with the next season you know okay what did midterms actually do to the student what did the all-star break do to you know the the NBA athlete or the MLB athlete you know you see a huge spike of injuries invariably after these breaks because the you know there's an acute a couple acute moments of spikes and load that athlete isn't prepared for and invariably they get injured so you know it just I think that the trend view and then the

hyper-optimization piece are just these two really powerful ying and yang kind of, you know, opportunity, I guess, that exists within the platform. So with both, you know, there's off-season training and then there's in-season competition. And a lot of people are going to look at the data, the whoop data specifically, and say, is this bad, is this good? What can people kind of expect for, let's use two different periods here? One, a period of overreaching off-season where we're trying to improve, how long should we be waiting to see kind of any sort of gains? Are we improving HRV?

Are we decreasing that? So a functional overreaching period, like a four-to-four-week block. Right. Yeah. So however you want to look at the training block, you know, what kind of metrics and how often should we be looking at the long-term view versus short-term view. Yeah. And then in-season, what to kind of expect just from a. metric standpoint so that a coach doesn't necessarily freak out that everyone's either losing

fitness or anything like that. I mean, I think really simply, you know, in the offseason, like you can use, you know, the definitely the daily tools that we have to see how an athlete, you know, if they've got a big percent standard deviation from their baseline on a single day, it's probably not that concerning, right? You wouldn't probably change volume and intensity because of that one day. But if we've got another day and then another day, 100%, you're going to want to manage volume and intensity, i.e. dial it back. If you're in a functional, if you're maintaining, then you'd probably be a little bit more conservative. If you're in a functional overreaching

period, then you would expect to have a larger deviation in resting heart rate, variability from the baseline. In fact, you want to, right? You're putting stimulus on. But you're monitoring closely how they're adapting. If it becomes non-functional when you don't see them, let's say, on day four, after three days where they're kind of trending downward, on day four, you don't, you manage volume intensity, you keep it lower. And this is, again, sleep need is where it needs to be, you know, they're getting, they're meeting their sleep need and they're consistent. They're in their deeper stages. So sleep is all good. Other variables aren't influencing things, right?

we're just talking about training adaptation we get into that you know three day block where they're trending downward we get to the fourth day and you limit volume and intensity and then we don't see a little bit of a rebound that next day okay limit volume and intensity again and if you still don't then you've actually probably overloaded them and and you just need to kind of continue resting until they get back to the baseline and again it goes back though to the athlete managing all of the external stuff in order to make sure that it is, in fact, the training adaptation that is that's not working, right? They're not adapting functionally to what you're doing to them from a volume and intensity. That's just a real quick and dirty way to kind of use the data

in a kind of hyper-optimization day-to-day type of way. And then, and then frankly, like, that's kind of how I would use it all the time, right? Just in season, you're just basically looking at different types of what you're, you know, your physiological tent is just different in a season. where you're maintaining, for example, where you don't want to, you know, you really don't want to see them ever red, right? And we've been able to achieve this with some teams. You know, we're obviously going to have some red days. But for the most part, you want to keep them in the yellow. You want to keep them in the green. You're prioritizing recovery modalities. And I think where you see fitness losses is when you actually don't have enough yellow days kind of sprinkled in. That means they're just not getting enough stimulus. So, yeah. So I think there's, there's easy ways to kind of use the data that we put together and the reporting that we put together to be able to really keep them in an optimal physiological state depending on whatever your intent is. You know, taper, same thing. You know, we're prioritizing recovery. We're really trying to limit, you know, any, you know, any, obviously any huge spikes in volume and intensity.

We're trying to keep them, you know, tracking toward, you know, the green. You know, we just want them, you know, twitchy, ready for the postseason. I know you're, you're a big. fan of hopping into different and new modalities, recovering modalities. Professional athletes can do whatever they want. They have everything at their fingertips. But this is more for either college athlete, high school athlete, master's athlete, or just an individual that likes to compete. You could be just a fitness enthusiast. You do Iron Man's on the weekend. How often, and I think this is something that always gets left out, people are, I got to get the work in because I have such a full schedule, but I still just have to just have to do.

the work. And everyone skips the recovery part. Everyone skips the modality, whether it's, you know, a hypervold or an infrared sauna. Yeah. How often, minimally, and this is just throwing it out there, would you say, how often do you do recovery modalities per week? Okay. I mean, I do Romwad, you know, at least three times a week. And thank you, Michael, for getting me. Shouts to Romwad. Yeah, shout out to Romwad. Love it. My whole family does it. We all love it and that was courtesy. Mike actually got me a subscription last January and I've been ever faithful since. So that was really kind of you. So thank you. Not even just a plug for Ron Watt here. That wasn't the setup there. But really effectively what it's combining is, you know, low skill

mobility and basically passive stretching. Passive stretching. And focus on breathing. And how have you seen any sort of change to recovery or sleep? Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I mean, I think starting January, like, I will say, like, it was life-changing for me, honestly, because I would be the person who would not prioritize the recovery as much as I should. You know, I'd prioritize the work. It was funny because we were doing stretching, like, in the office, which would probably the only, like, whoop is like the only place that we were doing. I don't even know what we did. We just work out? Like, well, I don't know what happened, but. You said, Mike, how do I stretch this. And then I ran through a couple stretches. I was like,

oh, you should really think about this. Yeah. It's been for me really life-changing for a lot of reasons. I only breathe through my nose during Romwad. So again, I think low-hanging fruit, you know, water, nasal breathing. The breathing, I think, is something that actually came up a lot recently. So when I was- That in itself is a recovery modality. Let's just be clear. Right. Yeah. At the CrossFit games, I sat down with a bunch of

different people and two or three times, breathing came up at different points in the day. One was pre-workout. So instead of just the normal, hey, I'm going to move around and get warmed up, set yourself aside, and then actually just focus on breathing. And what you're going to see is your heart rate, your racing heart rate is effectively going to plummet. And you're priming your body to then get ready to go. Yeah. Vers and then obviously there's the, either throughout the day, which I know you've tried and at night before bed. I mean, I pretty much only breathe, I try to all day long breathe through my nose when I went on not talking. I'm breathing through my nose. So that in itself is a great way to help you. There's

a number of reasons why it's good, but it definitely will help with sleep. Again, you should try to sleep with your mouth closed the best that you can. But that in itself, I think, is something that can help facilitate recovery. It's effectively a daily reset. So if we're talking about sustainability of performance and the ability to come back day after day, people are looking for some magic thing here that's just going, oh my goodness, I'm just going to be amazed at I do this for 10 minutes and it's, well, actually, it's like breathing and sleep. Yeah. And I think that's the second piece to it is, you know, just fundamentally like this doesn't cost a thing is just waking up and get yourself in the sunshine. You know, you know, you want to try to keep your circadian

rhythm as, you know, synchronized as possible and light meals, the timing of your meals. And when you go to bed and when you wake up you know if you can if you can figure those three things out and optimize that you are well on your way uh and then also just breathe through your nose there you go figure out what to do with figure out what to do with the other 20 hours of the day that we told you how to breathe and and eat and drink water uh in your training we could deep dive into any of these for literal hours we're not going to do that no um i think that's it thanks hey my pleasure Mike for recording this episode and stay tuned for more from them on this subject and more. If you're not already a whoop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin.

We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free whoop strap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you see. sign up for the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you $30 off a membership just for listening to this podcast. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E-U, and that'll give you 30 euros off when you join. And for our current members, you can upgrade to the Woopstrap 3.0 and get access to all the new Woop Live features by following the link in your WOOP app.

If you're out of contract, you'll literally get the 3.0 for free when you commit to another six months. Check out Woop.com slash The Locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from this conversation and others. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the WOOP podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can find me online at Will Ahmed. I try to respond to everyone who reaches out. And you can also follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you may have.

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