WHOOP Podcast - Understanding HRV to the Link Between Anxiety & Recovery: Kristen Holmes Answers Listener Questions

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

You asked, we answered. This week, Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance, joins the podcast to answer listener questions. From understanding the connection between mental health and Recovery, to discussing  HRV, to understanding calorie calculations, Kristen covers HRV (1:44), the science behind menstrual cycle coaching (5:54), mental health and HRV (9:27), understanding recovery scores (22:30), and fasted cardio (26:43).Additional research:The research behind Menstrual Cycle Coaching Dr. Huberman's tools for circadian alignmentZone 2 exercisePolarized trainingCalorie tracking and calculation Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do, of course, unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. We are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week, we're diving into our inbox. That's right. to answer listener questions on everything from HRV to intermittent fasting to mental health.

Here to help us break this down is none other than VP of performance. Kristen Holmes. Kristen will describe how HRV is individualized and what it means to a high or low HRV, what a low recovery score means, how mental health can affect your physical health and how to conquer anxiety, how to understand menstrual cycle coaching, and understanding intermittent fasting and exercise. A reminder, if you want to have your question answered, email us, podcast at whoop.com, or call us at 508-443-4952, and it may get answered on a future episode like this. And finally, if you're new to Whoop, use the code Will, W-I-L-L, when you're checking out to get started with a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. You can use your credit on battery packs, new bands,

whoop body apparel, and more. That is join.Woop.com to get started. Hi, my name's Ivy Campbell, a proud user of Woop for two and a half years. Don't want to live a day without it. It's completely changed my life. I have listened to most of the podcast, love them. I do have a question about the menstrual data. I read all of my data daily as detailed as possible, and I've tried looking for more clarification on whether the female-specific data is actually customized to my personal information or generally to the female population

and if that changes based on my behaviors and my feedback through the journal or through the algorithm or whether that's just generalized information. So I'd love more on how to pick that apart, how to use it. Thank you so much for all you do. Well, first of all, Ivy, thank you so much for being a loyal member. That is a great question. So yes, the menstrual coaching feature, which I'll refer to as MCC, does coach and map to the individual user.

So in setting up MCC, you're basically asked to fill out a series of questions, including whether or not you are currently taking hormonal birth control, the start date of your last period, the average length of your cycle, and a few other questions. If you don't know the answer to these questions, MCC has a calibration period of 28 days, which is essentially one full cycle, after which your coaching will actually be fully personalized, giving you more accurate, strain and sleep recommendations, and mapping the phases of your individual cycle in a way that will allow you to understand the impact that each phase has on your personal physiology. You'll also automatically have the menstruation toggle activated in your WOOP journal.

So even if you have in a regular cycle, tracking menstruation in the journal will enable WOOP to provide you more accurate cycle mapping and sleep strain recommendations. Because there's differences in happening across the different phases of your cycle, you know, I think this insight really allows you to personalize your training. For example, in the high hormone phase, which is known as your ludial phase, you're probably going to have kind of on average lower recovery. You're going to have to spend a bit more time in bed. This is a really kind of effortful phase of your cycle.

And Whoop knows this and is going to give you recommendations that reflect the effort that's going on in your system. In the follicular phase, you know, which is mencies and ovulation, this is a lower hormone phase. And typically your body is going to be really primed to take on load. And whoop is going to coach you to that end as well. So, yes, it's absolutely personalized to your own physiology. Have a listen to the recommendations that are coming through, the coaching that's coming through. I also should mention that this feature was really a result of super rigorous research that we did

and conducted in collaboration with Dr. Stacey Sims. And Dr. Sims is an industry-leading exercise physiologists and nutrition scientists. So you can have full confidence that the recommendations are fit for you personally. It's important to note that not everyone has, you know, a 28-day cycle. I mean, you could have a longer cycle, a shorter cycle. As such, you know, your recommendations are going to come at different times. A big piece of this magic is that WOOP is able to take all of that into consideration and give you feedback and insight that, again, is personalized to your unique cycle.

Next up, we have Jack. Jack says, I'm a 20-year-old student athlete in golf and recently joined the Whoop team a few weeks ago. I'm extremely active, lifting about five times a week, golfing about five times a week, and doing manual labor three to four times a week. That certainly is active. I've noticed I have low HRV and recovery scores and certainly do feel the affects during the day. I've struggled with anxiety and depression for the majority of my life, which I believe is affecting my scores and energy levels. I'm on a very strict and clean diet with one

sheet meal a week. I began meditating once a day a few weeks ago as well. With all that being said, I am seeking advice to control my mental hurdles with anxiety to achieve peak performance. What habits would be worth adapting to conquer anxiety and get my energy back. What a great question, Jack. Thank you for sharing. Jack, so happy to have you on Woop. And congrats on playing college golf. That is no small feat. It's amazing. So there's kind of a lot to unpack here. I'm going to take it in three parts. And I'll just kind of go through each piece in turn. So in addressing the mental health, anxiety, and depression, you know, these are really issues that require, you know, very individualized response. And I would definitely recommend if you're struggling, you know,

the best first step is to seek advice from a qualified health professional so you can get the proper diagnosis and treatment. With that caveat in mind, I'll do my best to offer some suggestions that you can consider. So I think the first step is, it's really important to understand that, you know, at the foundation of mental and physical health resilience is a concept called circadian health optimization. So I started using the term circadian health as a way to describe the behaviors that influence the circadian system. And this is a network of circadian clocks within every organism. And if the timing of these circadian behaviors are not dialed in, our sleep and our recovery will be compromised. And as a result, we'll have lower levels of focus

and concentration. And our ability to adapt in a functional way to stress, mental, physical, and emotional will be suboptimal. In the show notes, we're going to link to Dr. Andrew Huberman's protocols for circadian alignment, but at a high level, minding your circadian health means you're getting sunlight in the morning upon waking up and as much light as possible during the daytime and restricting blue light, which I know is really hard for student athletes, two hours, ideally three hours before you intend to sleep. Another behavior we want to align to the active phase of our circadian cycle is your meal timing. So keeping your feet feeding window inside a 10-hour block, ideally stopping, again, within two to three hours before

you intend to sleep, is really important. So basically, you want to kind of eat when the sun is up. All right, and this is a really important component for recovery and also helping you get into these deeper stages of sleep. Other behaviors that are really important that impact our circadian rhythm, that then impact our mental and physical health resilience, is caffeine intake. If you're taking caffeine within 8 to 10 hours of bedtime that can really interfere with not only your ability to fall asleep, but it can make you feel anxious before sleep and also end up fragmenting your sleep. So you might fall asleep because you're that tired, but it actually ends up creeping into sleep and fragmenting your sleep experience. The other possible issue is if you

are napping during the day, you're called student athletes, you're probably not getting a whole lot of time to nap, but naps can actually be a super effective strategy when you're taking on the kind of load that you are. But just make sure to limit your nap to 90 minutes, which is one miltradian cycle, so no more than 90 minutes, and ensure you don't go past 2 p.m. And I would say finally, in terms of kind of managing mental health, it never hurts to incorporate a breathing technique throughout the day. Oftentimes, especially a student athlete, or really anyone who's got a busy schedule, is that we end up accumulating stress throughout the day. And if we're not proactively managing it, it can accumulate in a negative way.

and create a lot of anxiety by the time we get to the end of the day, which sometimes can make it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep. Definitely incorporating a breathing protocol. Our favorite one at WOOP is called the physiological sigh. It involves a double inhale and an extended exhale. And you just do that, you know, five, six times a day just for, you know, 15, 30 seconds. If you can do one session of five minutes, that's awesome. But what that does is it activates the parasympathetic branch of the,

the nervous system, which tells your heart rate to decrease and puts you in a nice, relaxed state. Because oftentimes throughout the day, we're in a sympathetic state, which, you know, you're kind of in that fight or flight. Your autonomic nervous system is activated. It's ready to perform. And that's awesome. But you also are releasing cortisol. And if we have sustained levels of cortisol in our system, again, that is what can contribute to kind of the anxiety. So you want to try to, you know, have these short pulses of parasynthetic activation that decrease in heart rate to help mitigate some of that stress accumulation. When we think about all these behaviors that I just outlined, these behaviors are really going to be what enable your system

to work efficiently and allow you to fall asleep at a consistent time each day. So we know sleep consistency is really important. But if we're not doing these behaviors around aligning our feeding window, lots of light when we want to be alert and restricting light when we want to be sleepy and mitigating stress, if we're not really taking advantage of those behaviors, then it's going to be harder to fall asleep when we want to fall asleep. I think the other piece that is worth noting is that if we can engage in these behaviors consistently, your exercise capacity will increase because you've got this nice foundation. And then I think most importantly, it'll help your just overall feelings of well-being.

As a reminder, Jack, you know, Woop Journal includes some measures for you to track specifically related to your mental health on a daily basis, including all these circadian health variables that I just outlined. and you can actually view the impact of potentially declining mental health and how that might be impacting sleep and recovery by kind of tracking these variables. And you can view that in your monthly performance assessment, also known as the MPA. And then in the show notes, we'll also provide some examples of other measures that are important just to think about. And you can also track these measures in the Woop Journal, their purpose, autonomy, and self-efficacy. These are kind of our three most important or core psychological needs, which is why we give

you the opportunity to kind of track and reflect on them. But that might be worth reading as well just to kind of help you understand when you are feeling a little bit off. It's a lot of potentially the physiological variables that I spoke about related to kind of circadian health. And then also purpose, autonomy and self-efficacy or autonomy and control. I use those interchangeably. Those will also kind of move your mental health around as well. So that might be a good resource just to look into just for your awareness. And then I would say, you know, just once again prioritizing sleep hygiene and sleep consistency. And again, getting that morning light each day, going for walks, deep breathing, connecting with family and friends on a regular basis.

These are all things that you can actually track in the WOOP journal. If you're really stuck in a rut, some of the self-experimentation can be really, I think, powerful. And really looking at how some of these new behaviors you're bringing in might be improving your quality of life and most importantly, kind of your mental health. All that being said, it's really important, I think for you to check in with yourself frequently and determine what sort of help you may need. You know, mental health struggles are absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. And I love that you wrote in and were really targeted and asking this question because I know you're not alone. There's a lot of folks who are trying to figure out, you know, how they can

position their behaviors to try to create this a really, you know, positive foundation for mental health resilience. So never feel shy about reaching out to mental health professional, family, friends, whenever you need it. All right, Jack, I'm going to tackle partner too, which is you're wondering about the nutrition piece. We're actually going to do a whole segment on nutrition. We've done some past podcasts that have been really exceptional in kind of talking about different nutritional paradigms. But it's super cool to know how active you are and how you're really attempting to kind of eat this really clean diet. I would say, you know, just at a high level, that if you are struggling, you know, with low energy, low recovery,

and persistently low HRV, looking at your fueling is definitely important, especially given, you know, high level of activity are doing. You know, you mentioned that you're eating, you know, very strict, clean diet with one cheat meal per week. This might be a great strategy for some folks, but it can lead to under-fueling potentially and contribute to lower energy levels and the poorer scores that you mentioned. You know, it's not a guarantee, but certain elements of your nutrition might a good place to start and examining what could be causing these low recoveries. So different nutritional paradigms like flexible eating, time-restricted eating, which is what I mentioned in terms of one of the circadian behaviors, definitely

might be worth experimenting. And I would also probably try tracking your macronutrients, so your carbohydrates, fats, and protein, and really ensure that, you know, based on your activity level, based on your body weight, that you're really getting enough good calories to, you know, to fuel your activity requirements. Because it does sound like you're doing a ton. And you can also track all this in the Whoop Journal as well. You mentioned clean eating, so that means, you know, just avoiding processed foods, potentially

looking at, you know, some really high quality supplementation. I know, you know, a lot of collegiate programs, you know, kind of offer, you know, discounts for athletes or offer, you know, supplements for athletes as well. You know, just always check to make sure that they're, you know, allowed. Some supplements are actually banned for NC2A athletes, so just make sure you check on that. But just making sure you're eating enough is really important. again, kind of staying inside that feeding window, I think also will really help your body work more efficiently. And then I would say, you know, making sure that you're hydrating adequately and effectively, golf is kind of one of those sneaky, sneaky sports. I know when we think about the

data on whoop in terms of strain, I think golf is, I think it, I think maybe comes in at six in terms of like highest strain. So golf is effortful, both physically and cognitively. I know, especially if you're in the south, I don't know where you're located, but if you're in the south, you're probably sweating a whole lot. So making sure that you're hydrating and getting electrolytes is really important. And if you haven't checked out our podcast with Andy Blow, you should. He's an expert in all things hydration and fueling. And he could be a really great source. He's got an incredible blog that answers a lot of these types of questions as well. So he might be a good source for you to check in on. Part three of your question, Jack, alludes to kind of that high

strain, low recovery dynamic. So definitely, you know, looking at your training regimen in and status is also, you know, an important piece to potentially diagnose. So we talked about circadian health. We talked about kind of nutrition. And now we're going to kind of talk about, you know, just really how you're training and balancing that with recovery. So with frequent weight lifting and manual labor, you're probably putting your body through a lot of high-intensity workouts, which is awesome in terms of, you know, getting stronger and faster. But it needs to be kind of in the context of adequate recovery. So if you're putting on a lot of that volume and intensity and your body is not adequately recovered, basically that training is not going to really get you

very far because your body just is simply not capable of adapting to that stimulus. It's really important that you're focused on getting your recovery up, so your body is prepared to take on that volume and intensity and to kind of transfer it into gains. If you're constantly in this kind of scenario where your strain is exceeding your recovery, it's going to be tough to make the kind of gains, I think, that you want. So, you know, mixing up this kind of high intensity, high volume training with actually some lower intensity exercise can be an amazing strategy. So think like Zone 2. And I'll link in the show notes to just kind of what this means and how to think about it in terms of your broader training. And this actually, Zone 2 has been

shown in the literature. And I'll link to an article that Zone, to in combination with high-intensity work actually improves recovery and fitness in individuals. So this would be, you know, just incorporating a couple easy training sessions, 45 to 55% of your max heart rate could actually improve your recovery. And this is kind of called, this concept is called polarized training. I'll make sure we link to that in the show notes, so you have an idea of what that actually means. But this is a technique that's deployed by a lot of elite athletes across the world to maximize health and performance. So hopefully some of those recommendations are helpful.

Here we've got a question about a topic many of our listeners are interested in, HRV. Madeline wrote in to ask, I understand the concept of HRV. However, I don't understand why some have such a high HRV and others don't. For example, Lionel Sanders and Colleen Quigley usually have values around 100,

but they are professional athletes and really fit. I am a competitive triathlete myself and have a range of 150 to 180 most of the time. Wow, that's pretty high. If I get below 100, then I'm in the red zone. How does that happen? Hi, Madeline. Thank you so much. Amazing question. And you're not alone with this one. We get this a lot out in the field. The most important thing to know with HRV is that it is an incredibly personalized metric. So it very much differs from one individual to the next, to one athlete to the next. When you're trying to kind of figure out, you know, what is good hearty variability for you, there are really a number of factors to take into consideration, such as, you know, age, gender,

fitness, your fitness level, your lifestyle, environment, genetics, all those things need to be taken into account. You know, just note that, like, younger individuals generally tend to have a higher hearty variability than older people. As you age, hearty variability can decrease, which is why it's such a cool thing to track. because HRV is modifiable. So, you know, not that you can totally escape father time, but I think you can delay it. And one of the ways to kind of keep track of that is ensuring that, you know, your behaviors are really one that isn't decreasing your heart rate variability over time, that you're kind of maybe slowly increasing or at least maintaining your heart variability as you age.

But there's also gender differences. So males will also have kind of slightly higher HRV than females. And we'll actually link to a graph that shows HRV by age and gender, which is, I think, you know, just interesting to look at. I would also say, you know, elite athletes, endurance athletes like yourself in particular, tend to have higher hearty variability than non-athletes. We see a trend in the literature that exists kind of looking at the demographics across HRV. The most important high little takeaway is that, you know, a healthy HRV does in fact vary for everyone.

It will be helpful to note that our recovery algorithm will use your daily measurement of heart variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, and sleep performance, all of which we kind of calculate and measure during your sleep. And then we take that and map it against your baseline to determine today's recovery. So when you are significantly below your own personal baseline, that means your body is struggling to adapt to stress. And those are the days that you'll likely be kind of in the red. When your measurements are above your baseline, you'll likely be in the green.

So that's kind of what's happening from an algorithm perspective to spit out those numbers that you see in the morning. One important thing to remember is that when you're taking on more mental, physical, and emotional strain or stress, then your body is capable of. That can just lead to generally a lower HRV. So just something, again, to keep in mind. And I think that's where kind of this dynamic of strain and recovery are just so, so powerful. You know, in the days where you want to potentially get fitter, you know, as long as you're not kind of really under-recovered, you know, it's okay for your strain to exceed your capacity a little bit, right? Like that's putting stimulus on your body, and recovery is a reflection of, hey, I heard your body heard that you took on that, you know, that strain or that stimulus, and it's kind of working to adapt to it so it can make you stronger. And that's where prioritizing recovery becomes really important.

And I think understanding the behaviors that you can adopt, that influence recovery are really important. We'll also link to a locker post that gives you kind of a nice laundry list of different recovery modalities you can do that are known to kind of mediate heart rate variability and kind of foster recovery. That might be good to consider, you know, as you're taking on kind of higher strain and really looking to build fitness levels. Maris asked, I've been a whoop user for over a year now. Absolutely love this thing. Thank you, Maris. So I have plenty of 1% recoveries, and so have my whoop friends.

I've even reached the fabled 0% recovery one day. I'd love to know if anyone else has gotten a 0% and the difference between 1% and 0%. Also, how accurate would you say the calorie burn counter is? Ooh, Maris. Okay, good questions. All right. So I'm going to tell you what happened with the 0% recovery because that's not actually possible to get a 0% recovery. The lowest recovery score possible is actually 1%. If you're not

actually seeing a value for recovery, and this might have been what happened in your experience, it likely means that you actually didn't record asleep the previous night, which would have rendered WOOP unable to calculate your score. So that might have been what is going on. As far as calorie burn estimation, WOOP calculates calories burned by estimating your basal metabolic rate, your BMR, and then we use a proprietary formula based on heart rate measurements throughout the day to increase the accuracy of this estimate. I should probably note that to estimate BMR, we use the most accurate formula currently available based on your height, your weight, your age, and biological sex. This is essentially a revised Harris-Bedict equation, which has a 95% confidence

level of roughly, you know, kind of 200 calories left to right for both men and women. It's really important to make sure that all of your demographic information in your profile is up to date in the WOOP app so we can keep this BMR estimate as accurate as possible. Just remember, you know, if you're working out a lot, you know, you might lose weight, you might gain muscle mass, so you might gain weight. It's going to change. Your age is going to change. Depending on what age bracket you're in, you might get taller. So keeping that up to date, I think is really important.

The second part of the equation referred to as your daily active burn is a bit trickier to calculate. So working within the limitations of a risk-worn device, our active burn formula is heart rate-based, which has been shown to far outperform calculations based on acceleration or just motion alone, which is actually a majority of our competitors, I think, are using acceleration to estimate calories. So we're definitely going a step beyond that. So we use the modified form of the best-performing heart rate-based. active calorie burn calculation that is currently available, and we've been able to enhance that through our collection of millions of workouts worth of data at various exercise intensities.

I think cool to note, we've also recently updated to more actively consider periods of heart rate elevation at 30 to 40 percent of maximum heart rate. So this is kind of just a little bit below zone one, you know, getting into zone two. A lot of life takes place in this band, and now we're able to kind of include more accurate estimation of kind of what is actually happening from caloric standpoint during this band. All that being said, estimates of caloric expenditure really should be regarded as an estimate. If people want to read a little bit more about it, there was a really good review done by Stanford in 2017. It did not include whoop, but actually found that none of the technologies

that they studied were exceptionally accurate at measuring caloric expenditure. However, this doesn't mean that heart rate-based calorie estimates, like the ones provided by whoop, aren't useful. The framework to think about it is really understanding that whoops' calorie burn estimates scale with true caloric expenditure, meaning that you can look at trends in caloric burn and really trust that it is identifying periods of high and low expenditure. So the reliability of whoops measurements allow you to actually action this data by scaling your intake based on these trends. So all in all, estimating, you know, calorie is obviously tricky, but using

the accurate estimates provided by WOOP to modify your fueling and observe these kind of longitudinal trends in energy expenditure can definitely be super useful in achieving optimal performance. Hi, guys, Jonas here from Romania. I love what you're doing. What's your take on your morning positive cardio? Oh, yeah, this is like kind of a pretty barbed-wired question with a lot of dimensions to it. You know, there are definitely sex implications. So I'm not going to be able to give a comprehensive answer, but I'll just say at a high level, you know, fasted cardio in the morning is typically effective because, you know, as you sleep and fast overnight, your body conserves the carb stores and leans more toward mobilizing, you know, fat for fuel. So

triggering that flexibility, you know, from going from a carb as a fuel source, you know, moving to fat is typically a pretty positive thing for your system. Your body is also breaking down amino acids and glucose overnight. So fasted morning cardio is definitely going to mobilize, you know, more fat and potentially more amino acids for fuel, which probably isn't your ideal if building muscle is your primary goal. This isn't a huge problem as long as you consume a fast digesting protein, like a way or a case in protein, you know, which is more on the slower digesting side, Kaysen is the more slow digesting after your cardio. So before your cardio, fast digesting protein, and then like away, and then after your cardio, taking in some

slower digesting like Kaysen would be a great strategy. So hopefully those are some helpful ways to think about it. It is honestly so fun to get these questions from our members and our customers. And I think from our perspective, we build this device so you can have more control of your physiology so you can lead a happier, healthier life. And it's honestly such an honor to be a part of that journey and to be a partner with you on that journey. And, you know, in addition to these questions, we also got just a lot of really cool, you know, just testimonials and, you know, just comments about how WUPAs changed their life. And we wanted to share one that honestly just gives me chills. And, you know, when I think about being able to impact people's

lives. I mean, that's why all of us come to work each day, you know, is to have this opportunity to help folks grow in their personal health journey and achieve their goals and be the best possible version of themselves and excited to close with this really incredible testimony from one of our members. Hey, you guys. My name is Shelby Collins, and I feel kind of silly calling this in, but I just wanted to share it with you. I purchased the loop after I had my second child. I was super overweight and unhealthy from bad dieting, and I wanted to become a powerlifter. So I hired a powerlifting coach and I bought the whoop. I've worn it every single day since then and with the help of this device I've lost over 60 pounds and I compete competitively in powerlifting. I have used

every single fit tracker on the market and none of them compares to the whoop. I work in sales. I'm constantly in front of people chit chatting about what they're wearing on their wrist and I tell every single one of them that it's garbage and that they need to buy the whoop. We hear from really cool people on this podcast who are masters of their craft, but I wanted you guys be here from just an average chick whose life has totally changed and I credit a lot of it to wearing the whoop. Thank you guys for all you're doing. Faithful listener over here. Well, thank you so much for tuning in and thank you so much to our members and our customers for writing in questions. Please keep them coming. If you enjoy this episode, we'll absolutely do

more of them, but really appreciate tuning in and really excited to keep building a product that you love and helps you along your journey. Okay, that's a wrap for this week. Thank you to Kristen for, as always, advising us through all things, performance and help. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. Check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast like this one. Email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. 508443, 4952, and we will answer on a future episode. And then, of course, new members can use the code will, W-I-L, to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories when you sign up for WOOP.

That is join.wop.com. All right, that's it, folks. Have a great week. We'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.