WHOOP Podcast - Tips to Maximize Recovery and Minimize the Negative Effects of Alcohol with Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

After wrapping up Sober October, we’ve brought back a fan favorite to dive deep into the effects of alcohol on the body, sleep, and recovery. VP of Performance Science Kristen Holmes and SVP of Data Science and Research Emily Capodilupo break down all things alcohol by discussing what we know about alcohol’s impact on the body (2:45), how alcohol leads to poor sleep (4:05), how alcohol deters muscle development and hinders the results of a workout (6:40), what you can expect to see in your WHOOP metrics after drinking (8:22), the story of a collegiate athletics team that won a championship after going sober for a season (9:50), collegiate athletes and recovering from drinking (11:45), healthy behaviors to offset hangovers and alcohol consumption (15:35), tricks to improve recovery if you know you will be drinking (16:50), a case study with military soldiers and the impact of alcohol (18:40), the potential benefits of consuming small amounts of alcohol (21:36), experimenting with your own WHOOP data (25:55). Then tune in to a couple of soundbites from experts including Andy Blow on hydrating while drinking and the power of non-alcoholic beer (27:20), and Dr. Kelly Starrett on using alcohol to self-soothe (29:44).Resources:Andy Blow on the WHOOP PodcastDr. Kelly Starrett on the WHOOP PodcastSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top performers of all walks of life, athletes, researchers, scientists, and more. I'm wondering what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. All right, October has officially come to. a close. And for many of our members that may have meant, they were giving sober October a try.

That's why we're bringing back an all-time favorite episode, all about alcohol. We also got a ton of questions from all of you. A reminder, you can send us questions if you email us podcast at whoop.com or call us at 508-443-4952. Our own VP of Performance Science, Kristen Holmes and our SVP of data science and research, Emily Capitalupo, are here to pull back the curtain on alcohol's impact on human performance. They discuss what we know about alcohol's impact on sleep and recovery, how it can hinder the benefits of a workout, what to expect in your Woop metrics after drinking, a story behind a national championship winning team that decided to go sober for a season, healthy benefits to offset the effects of alcohol,

The potential benefits of consuming small amounts of alcohol, so there's hope. How to experiment with your own WOOP metrics around alcohol. And from there, we also have a couple sound bites on alcohol usage from hydration expert Andy Blow and trainer Dr. Kelly Starrette. Reminder, if you're new to WOOP, you can use the code Will WI-L-L when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on W-W-A-Ccessaries. You can use that credit for new bands, battery packs, whoop body apparel, and more. That is at join.wup.com to get started. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Emily Capital Lupo. Hello, everyone. I'm Kristen Holmes, and I'm here again with Emily Capitalupo.

Hey, everyone. Today, we're going to talk to you about how alcohol affects your body, the sad truth and what it does to your Woop metrics, in particular, the impact it has on your sleep, recovery, and performance. So alcohol, unfortunately, has more of an impact than we actually realize. One of the common observations we get from new whoop users is that they never previously realized how much alcohol actually impacts both their sleep and recovery. And we're going to dig into kind of the nitty gritty today around both sleep and recovery.

Okay, so just generally speaking, Emily, maybe we can just kind of go back and forth on what we know about alcohol just generally. and then we can kind of back into the Woot metrics and kind of actually what people are seeing in their data and how that might be related to the alcohol consumption. Sure. So I think, you know, one of the reasons why it's such a common kind of new user aha moment for us

is because alcohol is a little bit sneaky. You know, we sort of perceive like, you know, oh, I went to bed drunk and then I just passed out and like didn't move for 12 hours, right? And we think about that as sort of, oh, that meant that I slept really well. But of course, if you think about it, right, when you wake up after drinking a lot, you don't feel rested. Like, yeah, you got, you know, maybe 10, 12 hours of sleep, which is huge, but you're not rested. So where does that kind of come from? And that's because alcohol is a sedative.

It's not actually, you know, a sleeping aid. And so it does make you sort of not awake, but sleep is an incredibly active process. Our bodies are working really, really hard when we sleep. And if you have alcohol in your system, then none of those sort of very active process. processes can happen. So while it is true that you were not awake, you know, you didn't actually get the benefit of sleep, the reason why we are sleeping. And so you wake up sort of almost as if you hadn't slept at all. Totally unrestored. Yes, completely unrestored. Yeah. And that's because the sequence and duration of your sleep cycle is totally impacted, right? Yeah. So if you think about like you're sort of your typical sleep cycle, so, you know, you fall asleep within a couple

minutes, you typically see your first slow wave sleep episode. That's the physically restorative part of sleep. When you're sedated, that just doesn't happen at all. So for all of the athletes out there, slow-wave sleep is when you're producing the vast majority of the human growth hormones. That's when you're sort of building up your muscles or covering from a workout. It just doesn't happen if there's alcohol in your system. Then within about 90 minutes, you typically have your first REM sleep episode. Alcohol actually disproportionately like sort of crushes REM sleep. Rem sleep is the mentally restorative part of sleep. So you'll see that like you're not going to dream when you're really drunk. After a few hours, the alcohol does get out of your system. Its half-life is about

an hour or so. You typically what we'll see is like towards the later half of the sleep, you see some of these restorative stages start to appear in small amounts. But, you know, you miss your first big REM episode. You miss a lot of the slow wave sleep because that tends to be front-loaded in the night. And then you just get a lot of light sleep. And so we sort of confused, like, oh, I had, you know, very few disturbances because I was passed out cold. And I got a lot of sleep with like sort of not realizing if you're not used to tracking your sleep stages that I actually got like very little slow-wave sleep, very little REM sleep. And so I didn't achieve what like the point of sleep is actually.

I think there's some recent research that came out that actually said that if you're drinking six hours before bed, it actually reduces your brain's ability to process and store information. So even drinking like six hours before you intend to sleep is you have to recognize that it's going to impact your sleep in some way and negatively. So I think that was an interesting study that I didn't realize it was quite that long. before you actually go to bed that it could impact or influence your sleep. Usually we kind of say, okay, you know, give yourself three hours before, but it's actually up to six hours.

And, of course, that depends on how much you're consuming and your tolerance and the type of alcohol. All those factors are going to influence what's going on. But I think long story short, it's going to impact your sleep. A lot of it is the alcohol itself. And then a lot of it is also just the behaviors that tend to go along with drinking. So if you are drinking all evening, the likelihood that you're properly hydrated and eating well and like maintaining your sleep consistency and having like a healthy bedtime routine

like typically all of those things yeah like go out the window for sure sort of a double whammy because it tends to mean that you're not doing all these other positive things in addition to having this sort of direct nutrition like yeah your choices pretty much go down down the drain I don't know how too many people who like get really drunk and then eat kale so yeah it's a good point you mentioned a little bit just in terms of actually what happens during sleep, and you mentioned slowly of sleep, you're not going to get into these deeper stages of sleep. So obviously muscle development is totally compromised if we're not getting into these deeper stages. So you're essentially, whatever you did that day for a workout, you're not going to be

able to get a return on that investment. Yeah, it's such an important point that like, you know, when we work out, I mean, I think we talk about this a lot, that during exercise, your muscles, they break down and you create all these tiny little injuries and sort of the getting stronger and getting fitter happens when you sleep following that workout. And so there's this sort of really problematic pattern we see a lot where people have a super tough workout the day before a day off. And, you know, because tomorrow is a rest day and they don't have to wake up at 6 a.m. to work out. They sort of use that as an opportunity to go out with their buddies or they've a really tough game and then go out and celebrate. What that does is instead of letting your body get that slow wave sleep produce that human growth hormone and rebuild those muscles stronger, you sort of suppress all of those signals when you drink.

And so you don't get any fitness response or gains from that workout. And so you put your bodies through this challenging thing. You exposed yourself to a risk of injury, added all this load, and then got nothing out of it. So it's like a very not productive way to train. I think the bottom line, too, is like, you know, alcohol, like, it just can't be used as energy, right? And I think folks don't really realize that. You know, there's seven calories per gram, but none of it can be converted to like glycogen. So I think that's important to note that none of the normal processes that would be taking place are able to when you're putting a lot of.

of alcohol in your body. Not that we're judging folks, we're just giving any facts. And alcohol increases fat storage too, and obviously it's going to inhibit your nutrient absorption. So lots of negative effects that kind of bleed into what you'll see from your Woot metrics. So, and I think that's when folks wake up after a really heavy night, they will notice probably a decrease in their hearty variability relative to their baseline. They'll see an increase in resting heart rate. They will see most likely an increase in disturbances. They'll see less time spent in the restorative stages of sleep. So Emily mentioned slow sleep. REM, rapid eye movement. You'll see probably a decrease off your baseline. So really no metric

within the whoop. And you'll build strain faster that day because you're under recovered. So you'll be able to see alcohols kind of hangover next day all over the Woot metrics. Yeah. So we ask our users about alcohol in the daily sleep survey. And we looked at everybody's sort of change in resting heart in HRV after reporting drinking. We found that like on average, their resting heart rates go up by 8B per minute and their HRV goes down by 22 milliseconds, which is like a huge, huge change. Yeah, super significant. Yeah, very much so.

Yeah. Yeah. So huge changes. And I think that alone, we see these incredible behavior modifications from folks on the platform. And a lot of it is, I think, just because you have insight into how your body is reacting to the stuff you're doing to it. And alcohol being probably the biggest influencer in terms of its impact on your body,

it has an incredible impact, short term, but also long term. Like we talk about the hangover, what we've seen in the data, been interesting, right? Like, it's not just that day after a huge night out where you're going to see the hangover. And if you want to talk about the study that we did, that showed a decrease off the baseline for up to many days after. This was a pretty cool study. So one of our very first teams to get on to Whoop, this was back in, like, 2014. The early, early adopters. So early, yeah. They're a manly entering their sleep. They're doing all sorts of things that you don't have to do anymore. Yeah, it was hilarious looking back at where the product was.

You know, so these sort of courageous first users. And so they were using WOOP, and we were working really, really closely with them because they were sort of kind of clients, but really mostly sort of development partners. They were the very first ones, like the recovery score was built for these guys. And so they're using their recovery data, and they noticed that after they drank, their recovery scores would stay suppressed for a few days. The captain of the team said, like, you know, we only ever drank on Saturdays, and it takes me until Wednesday to get green again.

And we were looking into this, try and understand, like, is it the way that the recovery score is written? Is this real sort of what's going on? And then they were sort of in this habit of, like, on Saturday nights of going out as a team and drinking. And it kept happening where, like, you know, it would take until Wednesday for them to be green again. The captain ended up basically just declaring, after it happened a few times, like, guys, we're going to be sober for the entire season because this is clearly affecting our performance. They went on to win the NCAA championships that year. And, you know, obviously, like, you know, being able to help this team win, that that's our mission here. So that was amazing.

But really one of the best things about that story was that it was by empowering these athletes with data, they were able to sort of make that decision for themselves because the coach had been asking them not to drink for decades, right? Like this whole idea of like stop drinking was not new, but sort of by putting the data like this in their hands instead of like the sort of grouchy adult telling you not to have fun. They actually did it. Once they came back and sort of told us this story, we got really excited by it. And we had the time 10 teams on the system. We were like, well, let's see if this is just, you guys is a relatively small team, obviously just men.

Does this apply across the board? So we took all 10 teams. We looked at when they reported drinking and sort of what happened. And we found a couple interesting things. So over the first like four months on whoop, these athletes reduced their drinking 76.8%. So they were sort of self-electing to stop doing it when they were sort of given this feedback. Just, you know, we never told them one stop drinking. We just sort of said like, you know,

know, here's your recovery score every day. And they drew that conclusion themselves and it significantly drove improvements in behavior. But what we saw that was like really interesting was two days after drinking, 30% of them still had suppressed recoveries below their baseline. And three days after drinking, 20% of them were still suppressed. And seven percent of them were still suppressed five days after drinking alcohol. And those are the ones that went out really hard. Yeah. So of course, like, you know, there's so many variables, like how much you drank, you know, how well were you high Biduating, before, during, after drinking, you know, and obviously in the like four days that follow. Exercise intensity, duration.

Yeah, a body type. You know, all these different things. There's genetic factors. We did not survey for, you know, what they were drinking or how much. The only information we had was did they have at least two drinks less than two hours before bedtime. You know, I think if we sort of were interested in doing this again, we'd collect more specific data. That wasn't the point at the time. So we can only report on the data we collected.

but what was so interesting is that, like, for the sort of not insignificant number of people, it's statistically significantly showing up in their data almost a week later. And so if you think about these kind of common behavioral patterns of like, oh, I have tomorrow off so I can drink tonight, that's clearly not supported by the data. Like, yeah, your hangover is going to, you know, be gone within a day. But there's something that lingers that we see in the data in the resting heart rate and HRV data for many days longer than that. it actually has a measurable effect on performance. So I think for collegiate athletes, or anyone who has like an athletic or performance-related

type of goal, and we're not making a judgment here, we're just kind of outlining the facts, you know, and it's been very, very clear over the last five years, really, that we've been inside this data that alcohol is going to have a negative impact on your performance levels and can stick around for up to five days after the drinking event and make it just substantially more difficult to kind of get yourself back up to your baseline. And your body is already having to work so hard when you're putting it through the demands of season or an off training where you're trying to off season when you're trying to get fitter by layering in alcohol and these other variables and asking your body to be under that type of stress, it's going to have an impact. And I think just recognizing that and being able to build maybe moments into your schedule. You know, Evelyn and I were talking earlier about we have a couple teams, a few teams on the platform, one professional team and then the other teams are collegiate teams.

And I think just acknowledging that, yeah, folks are probably going to go out, they're going to have drinks. You know, when are those social moments on campus where a team in season is going to want to, out of season is going to want to celebrate or do something a little bit out of the norm outside of their training and, you know, kind of schedule those moments. So if there's a big football game and they're going to want to stay out later, okay, what are those times during the season that they're going to want to do that and maybe just adding an extra rest day in or really getting the athletes themselves, like position themselves, their body to be able to kind of take a later night out, for example. And not that they're drinking even, but even, you know, just staying out, getting outside their normal routine, perhaps. And, you know, how do you kind of account for that and build that into the kind of the fabric of the schedule? And so kind of bringing captains, coaches in can be an effective way of talking through those moments where you do want to be social and pre and post in a way that allows the athlete to kind of recover

from, you know, what would be a more social kind of evening out. Yeah, and I think that that's such an important point because I would hate it if, like, the takeaway from this podcast is sort of whoop is anti-drinking. And, you know, your goal isn't to be perfectly recovered every single second of every day. The sort of the goal is that, like, in moments that matter, you sort of can make these behavioral decisions as much as days and weeks ahead of time so that, like, you're informed and can sort of do everything that it takes so that, like, when you do drink, you sort of understand, and can account for it, you know, what's going to come out of that.

So not to think that, like, oh, I have, you know, a race on Saturday and it's Thursday night so I can drink because tomorrow's whatever. Just to understand in your own data and, you know, to learn from the data of our other whoop users that, like, you know, there's a good chance that this is going to have some effect on your autonomic nervous system that's going to last potentially, you know, three days, four days. And so I need to be doing sort of if I am going to drink anyway because, you know, I'm some of N or whatever. just want to, that you're doing things like, you know, adding extra sleep. So it's like you're going to have this hit on your autonomic nervous system. What kind of healthy behaviors can I do to try and offset that as much as possible so that like when I get to wanting to be able to perform again on Saturday, I have the best chance of doing that. Let's talk through a couple of tips to

kind of help people think about that. All right, we've got a big night out Saturday night. Sure. And it's Monday. Okay. One thing that I do if I know I have a big night out, I'm going to front load and backload my sleep by 30 minutes on either end. So I I kind of already am spending a decent amount of time in bed. I know how much time I need to spend in bed and when I need to go to bed and wake up in order to kind of optimize my sleep, already thinking about that. So what I do is I just add 30 minutes on either end. So I extend my sleep leading up to this night where I know I'm not going to be getting

as much rest as I normally do. Hydration, Emily mentioned, is huge, right? Just, you know, making sure you're getting plenty of water. Eating well will also help, you know, just lots of no processed foods and just kind of sticking to a nice regimen. What else can folks do if they know they've got to be? big night out and they're going to be drinking. I think just sort of planning your workouts accordingly too because, you know, your body, we know that alcohol impacts endurance and so

not sort of expecting yourself to be able to like go out at the same intensity the next day. You're giving yourself more time to like warm up and cool down because it sort of affects on things like balance and reaction time. We know that people who drink tend to have more athletic injuries. Our athletes that drink tend to have more athletic injuries, even sort of when they're working out sober, because it does seem to have these like last, again, if it's affecting your autonomic nervous system, it is going to be affecting things like balance, things like reaction time and all these things that you're really important to the athlete. And then just things like focus, you know, if you think about tennis where your goal is just kind of like follow this

little fuzzy ball back and forth, like that ability to kind of stay focused to anticipate like where it's going to go and all that kind of stuff, like that gets impaired. And so accounting for that and sort of upsetting your expectations for the workout. Well, we have a couple other case studies that I think are worth mentioning where we've seen decreases in alcohol and substantial physiological improvements based on that. So this is actually, these are pretty large sample size, I guess, relatively speaking. And this is from our special operation forces. So it's kind of exciting, kind of looking at the tactical athlete and what exposure is doing to those folks on the platform. And just after four months, we saw an 83% decrease in alcohol pre-bed, which is huge.

And again, you know, I think the decrease in alcohol before bed also kind of triggers these other behaviors that are really useful and helpful as it relates to sleep specifically. They were 22% less time on screens prior to bed. And as a result, they spent 16% more time in restorative stages of sleep. Right, which is very, very significant. It is so significant. And a lot of these guys are coming from a pretty bad place to start, honestly. But 16% is massive.

And this is, again, the restorative stages, slowly of sleep and REM. And you can find those in the Woop app if you click on time in bed. That will give you a nice deep dive into how much time you're spending in each stage of sleep. And then we also saw, so because of these behavior changes, we saw an increase in heart rate variability by 10 milliseconds and a decrease in resting heart rate by 5.3 beats per minute. So again, really meaningful physiological changes based on these behavior modifications. And this was 52 operators. Another study we did, this is 24 operators. Again, same thing, four months on the platform.

They did get a little bit of education on the front end, but really this is just exposure to the data on an ongoing basis and just being a super competitive group. They could all see each other's data. So they're all trying to wake up green every day, which again, might not be necessarily exactly what you're after. but I kind of like the fact that they were trying to do that. We saw a 79% decrease in alcohol pre-bed, and we saw 25% less screen time, which is pretty massive, decrease,

and we saw a 9% increase in restorative stages of sleep. Heart rate variability increase in the four months on the platform, 17 milliseconds, which is huge. And then we saw a decrease in resting heart rate by 4.2 beats per minute. So, again, really significant physiological changes based on just, these behaviors. Four months is a good kind of time frame because you've got lots of different types of training happening in there. You've got lots of different types of life events happening in there, you know, nutrition, hydration, all the kind of life factors and stressors for the most

part, you're going to kind of feel those over the course of four months. So I thought this was a pretty good case study and the power of exposing yourself to the right kinds of data. And focusing in definitely on the sleep piece, but just this one kind of big behavior modification and decrease of alcohol is really what enabled some of these shifts in the cardiovascular improvements. you're going to be able to train differently. Like when you are not waking up hungover or if alcohol is not as big of influence, your perception of effort is going to change, like your ability, your capacity to kind of show up and train and do what you need to do

and be present for your family. Like all of those things are going to be impacted, I think, in a positive way. So we were able to see this kind of in the physiology, which was cool. So one of the questions we get from whoop users a lot is one of the things that they notice in the data is, you know, they'll have one or two glasses of wine and they will feel as though just looking at the data, it will appear that they're impacted negatively by these one or two glasses of alcohol. Again, consumption tolerance level type of alcohol, all of those things are going to influence, you know, kind of what happens during sleep and what's going to follow

with a recovery score. Yeah, I think a few different things are going on there. So I think, you know, a lot of our, especially the sort of elite and professional athletes, you know, they're so in touch with their bodies and things are so highly tuned that just a little bit of alcohol, so you're just being like a little bit less kind of, like, kind of buttoned up, they sort of notice because when you push yourself to that extreme, it's a unstable kind of point. And so it's very easily disturbed. It's kind of like, you know, when somebody does a couch to 5K program, right, they can get like a lot faster and a lot more endurance, like, because your body, there's so much like room to kind of move that you can kind of absorb these different things. But, you know,

when somebody's like the super elite marathon runner, like taking like four seconds off of their marathon is exciting news. And, you know, so it's like when you push your body to this extreme, you become very sensitive to small perturbations in the system. And so, you know, when people are saying like, oh, I notice just like a drink or two, they probably do. Yeah. But I would say that like, you know, there's, and this is where like, there's so many factors

that it affected. And once you sort of get hammered, right, nobody's benefiting from being hammered. At very low levels of alcohol, there's actually kind of our mixed results. Right. But we're probably talking like two to four ounces. Like that's, you know, like has a nice in a ox. We're talking about like, you know, half of a glass of red wine at dinner with, you know, with food and with water. We're not talking about any form of like binge drinking or sort of that is definitely going to have a negative effect.

But very, very small amounts of alcohol, especially there's a lot of research around red wine. Yeah. Because of the whole Mediterranean diet. Yeah. Where, you know, just a little bit. It can help you relax. You know, it can help with a lot of people. sort of have trouble turning off at night. So just like that tiny bit can like, you know, help with that

relaxation, that like anxiety turning off kind of process. Obviously like red wine has polyphenols and antioxidants and, you know, there are some health benefits. But it seems like there's this sort of like small bump followed by cliff where like a teeny weeny bit and I really do mean a little bit can have a positive effect where it can be totally healthy to have that sip to half glass or whatever with dinner. And then as you sort of at go, you know, more and more than you sort of, the consequences start to, like, very quickly outweigh the benefits. So that was actually the reason why on our survey, we specifically ask about two drinks or more, because what we do see is that there's sort of very mixed results with a single

drink, again, especially when you're having it with food and with water as part of a meal. Because also when we eat fats, it slows down everything in our digestive system. So the process of, like, the alcohol getting into your blood is slower. So it's almost becomes a little bit more slow release versus like when you're, you know, shooting shots on like an otherwise sort of roughly empty stomach, and it all kind of hits you at once. And so it's a more kind of concentrated dose. But if you know, over the course of 45 minutes, you drink a glass of wine with, you know, some pasta or something, like we do actually often see that it has maybe a tiny benefit to sort of a neutral effect and sort of when you go beyond that, obviously a negative

effect. But there are people who are, you know, in such a sort of unstable, like highly sensitive state that sort of there are negatives outweigh the positives sort of more quickly and so they would see that effect and we do have plenty of anecdotes for folks who you know would say hey you know when I have half a glass a wine with dinner like it it definitely seemed to have a positive effect you know so I think a lot of what you're pointing to too is just your state of mind and just getting into the parasympathetic state right when you're being social and you're with your family and you're kind of winding down after a day there are you know all those like kind of social and physical cues that are telling your body, okay, you know, it's time to shut it down. And that could be a real

positive precursor to a nice night's sleep. So we've definitely seen both where it's this small amounts of impact negatively and small impacts impact positively. And I think a lot of it is what is that context surrounding that drink that I think really does influence what happens next, the behavior is happened next, whether it's sleep behavior or whatever. Yeah. And I think a lot of that is sort of the power of whoop where you do it, you know, at a time where tomorrow is fairly inconsequential. See how your body responds and get a sense of like, you know, are you somebody who is, just happens to be that sensitive. And again, there's a lot of genetic and environmental and all these other factors go into sort of whether or not that's going to be a good thing or a bad

thing for you. Look at your data, see what happens, find out what you can kind of get away with and what you can't. And the idea isn't to sort of be, you know, the bad guys, but we just to kind of empower our users to understand how their body is going to respond so that you don't have this sort of nasty surprise when, you know, it's sort of an important day and you're not ready for it. Yeah, I think the real opportunity with whoop data is just to see how your body responds to stuff, you know, alcohol being one of those variables. And I think it is worth investigating because alcohol does have quite a severe impact on your biological and physiological processes and your capacity to kind of show up for the next day. So it's definitely worth kind of figuring out

what your tolerance level is and what you respond to best and use your data. Use your data to to give you insights that you would otherwise have. Now we've got a couple tips from experts on how to manage alcohol consumption and avoid the low recovery scores and bad sleep that can follow drinking. First up is sports scientist and founder of precision hydration.

Andy Blow, with a secret you may not know about relating to non-alcoholic beer. So a few things are, you know, an obvious one is you can, if you know you're going to a big celebration, a big party, and you are just accepting the fact you're going to have a few drinks and you want to just take the breaks off and not worry about it. You know, having, treating it almost like a workout in some ways. You're going to, because what you're going to do, alcohol is diuretic.

It's going to make you pee and you're going to lose a lot more body fluid. And having almost like a prehydration like you would before a workout with a strong electrolyte drink and trying to do the same as well, either during the evening at some point or before you go to bed. It's not like a cure-all because if one of those existed, I think people would have found it by now. But it can help, you know, so if I'm having a party or something, and like that, I'll pre-mix up a bottle of electrolyte drink and have that towards the end of the evening or before I go to bed as one strategy. And then probably another one in the morning if I'm going to try and go out and, you know, work out, work the hangover off, as it

were. The other thing to do was we would chat and we've been chatting with an interesting company that's making some things like non-alcoholic beers for athletes and that sort of thing. And they were trying to come up with this funky like a beer equation. So it was like have it, the ideal ratio of maybe having like two alcoholic drinks to then one non-alcoholic beer or something like that because what's changed massively in the last few years I think is the range of like interesting because it used to be if you went out and you were not drinking you got offered a Coke, you know, that was it really. And that was kind of like, well, I don't really want to drink a coat. It's like that or a glass of water. It's pretty boring. Now, you know,

I'm a fan of drinking real beer, but some of the non-alcoholic beers are fantastic. And if you just slip one or two of those into the route in between yeah they're actually pretty good at hydration you know if you are in a social situation it can feel a little bit less awkward because you know it still looks like you're having a drink if that's what matters or and it certainly they taste you know they taste pretty good i've sometimes after a long if i go out for a long run on a weekend and it's hot it's actually like a cold non-alcoholic beer is a really nice thing to drink as in recovery i suppose those kind of things you know rather than trying to be preaching because we're all, you know, many of us are going to do it.

We're going to go out and have a few drinks and enjoy it and then still try and get up and train. So you do what you can to manage you. Thank you to Andy. I'm going to turn things now to physical therapist, trainer, and author, Dr. Kelly Starrett, who shares some insights on how alcohol can be used to self-soothe. What I think people forget is that the human body is the most sophisticated structure in the own universe.

And the brain is on top of that. But these systems of the body are tightly coupled. And we fail to appreciate how the inputs and outputs interact into a stew that makes something tasty, which is how the human can function durability, maximally for a long time. And if you are super stressed and you have some alcohol to self-soothe, because that's the tool that you've reached for and it's worked for you, it's going to mess up your sleep. So I'm not saying alcohol is bad. I'm just saying that's a choice you made to self-sue. And now I know that you're going to have crap sleep.

Our friends at Woop, early on, one of the most important pieces of research that came out was working with some young rowers who drank some alcohol and saw altered cardiac function three days. later. That has stuck with my head. And suddenly when athletes see that, they're like, oh, I'm stressed right now. I'm under a lot of strain load. I'm not going to drink. I'm going to drink after the race when I'm rested and fun. So we're not ever saying don't drink. We're saying, understand that this choice. But if this is the only way you're self-soothing, then your sleep is going to be bad. Then you're going to be sleepy and tired and less likely stoked to move to move. And you're going to eat a lot more carbohydrate to pump up that serotonin. And then at 4 o'clock, you're going to have a coffee to get through the day. And then guess what's going to happen?

When you didn't move all day, you're going to have a hard time falling asleep. So you hit the alcohol again. Now you're caught in a depressant stimulant stimulant cycle and you didn't even see how you got there because you didn't appreciate that you're coping mechanism for stress with alcohol. Big thank you to Kristen and Emily for covering the impact that alcohol has on the body.

Thank you also to Andy Blow and Dr. Kelly Starrett. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, you want to see

answered on the podcast, please. podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com, or call us 508-443-4-9-5-2. New members can use the code will, W-I-L, to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. All right, that's it for this week. We'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green.