WHOOP Podcast - Understanding Strain: Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo break down how the WHOOP strain metric works, and how it can improve your training.

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

How to optimize your training by understanding strain: WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo break down everything there is to know about the WHOOP strain metric, including where it came from (3:27), what it measures exactly (4:39), how it's individualized (5:05), why WHOOP doesn't count steps (6:32), what causes strain besides exercise (7:49), day strain vs workout strain (9:03), minimizing unnecessary strain (12:15), how it's logarithmic and not linear (13:25), balancing strain and recovery (16:25), and two new features available with the WHOOP Strap 3.0, the Strain Coach (21:59) and WHOOP Snap+ (26:12).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. Having recorded about 25 episodes on the WOOP podcast, I can truly say it's a great lens into understanding how high performers, top performers, do what they do. At WOOP, 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 WOOP 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 Woop 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 WOOP 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. All the little things in life add up in ways that you might not realize. So if you walk your dog, if you're playing with little kids, if you're even grocery shopping and so you're lifting a gallon jug of milk up. Like it's, you know, all these things are sort of individually negligible, but if you think about how many of them we might do over the course of 16 hours that we're awake, 18 hours that we're awake, it can add up to a lot. What's up, folks? Today's episode is all about strain. Vice President of Performance, Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics, Emily Capitaluppo, break down everything you want to know about the whoop strain metric. Where it came from, how

works, what it measures exactly, what other things in your life may cause strain besides exercise, and how to balance strain with recovery within whoop to ultimately optimize your training. And by the way, Kristen and Emily have been on some of our previous podcasts talking about sleep, talking about how to optimize the best athletes in the world, how to optimize you. They're really two of the best resources you can find. And without further ado, here are Kristen and Emily. Hey, everybody. I'm Kristen Holmes, Vice President of Performance here at Woop, and I'm sitting here today with Emily Capitilupo, our director of analytics. Hey. Today we're going to talk to you all about the Woop Strain metric. We'll break it down, how it works and where

it came from, how you can use it to improve your training, or just simply function better and optimize your performance in daily life. We'll also examine a few cool new strain-related features available with the Woop Strap 3.0. So to start, Emily, tell us about where whoop strain came from. So we were originally inspired by something called the Borg scale, which is this subjective scale from 0 to 20 that a lot of athletes were using in order to report to their coaches how difficult they thought a workout was. And because we realized that a lot of our clients and potential clients were familiar with this scale, when we went out to create our own strain scale, we used that same range from 0 to 20. We actually added 21 just to kind of, you know,

put our own little spin on it. Yeah. Nice, nice. That was Will's idea. Yeah. And so it feels intuitive to athletes and coaches. Yeah. So the idea is that, you know, strain was this whole new concept and wearables weren't that hot yet. And, you know, there's a lot of newness that we were asking our athletes to get on board with. So we figured, like, let's at least start with something that they're used to, something that they have some point of reference for. They sort of generally had an idea of what a 13 meant. You were an athlete. And so kind of not starting, you know, it's completely arbitrary, right? We could have multiplied it by 10 and had it be from, you know, zero to 200, we could have, you know, divided by two and it had to be zero to 10. Like, it doesn't

actually really matter the scale that it's on. We just kind of thought, like, since it could be anything, why not choose something that most of our athletes had sort of seen before and that coaches were comfortable with sort of thinking about programming? Yeah, it makes total sense. And so what does it actually measure? So it specifically measures cardiovascular load. So that's how hard your heart and lungs and nervous system are working in order to take you through this workout. And which does not measure musculoskeletal load. So we're specifically looking at, you know, things that obviously we can measure from the wrist. So you might do a lot of squats and work your glutes really hard, but, you know, we're not

going to see that in the same way at the wrist. Cool. So how is it individualized? So the idea is that the scale is set for each individual, such that sort of zero is, like, didn't move, didn't get out of bed. And 21 is the highest strain you could possibly take on in a given day. so that if you and I both got, say, 15, we both worked sort of relatively equally hard within our capacity. But if we're at different fitness levels, different capabilities, we could have objectively done very different things.

And that's actually sort of the magic of the strain score. So like if Desiree Linden and I go for a run together, you know, she's obviously an Olympic marathoner. She's a lot more fit. And we might be step for step together this whole run. Presumably, she would get a much lower strain score than me because I would have had to work harder to do that run. So just telling somebody that like, oh, you ran 10 miles, like a coach can just see that. You don't really need a wearable to do that. But to sort of know, like, what that meant for your body as far as within your potential, how hard did you work is something that

the only whoop can provide. And that's, I think, the big difference maker for us in terms of steps versus strain. We're just giving you so much insight into actually what's happening cardiovascular with your body, which is super relevant if you're trying to think about workouts relative to recovery, which we'll get into a little bit later on. Hating on steps is like a favorite woof past. Yeah, we definitely like hate on steps. I get that question literally every day. So, but yeah.

That's funny. People have stopped asking me. I know. But I guess while we're on the topic, I mean, there's two big reasons why we kind of hate on steps. So like one of them is, is that, you know, 10,000 steps for me means something very different than 10,000 steps for you. But then also that like steps aren't actually the sort of universal measure of anything, right? If I'm a swimmer, you're going to tell me I didn't, you know, take. take any steps, but I could have, you know, swam a mile. And so you're sort of, it's like a very

limited metric. And one of the things that we kind of love about strain is that it's completely sport agnostic. So it is limited to cardiovascular, but it's going to give you the same credit for the cardiovascular load of a swim as it would for like a cardiovascular load for, you know, a run or a squash game or, you know, whatever it is. And so it's much more sort of unitless and useful and therefore it has a lot of applications for cross-training and just sort of applications beyond, you know, things that are more or less, you know, walking, hiking, running. Right. And I think it is, steps seem to be more widely acknowledged as like arbitrary, you know, and I think if you look at the root of where steps came from, you know, it's, it was just a random,

like, you know, put the finger in the air, see if the wind's blown. Okay, 10,000. Yeah. I mean, I think for people who are just trying to be more active, like they're not completely useless. they just think, like, for the loop demographic, it's not really something that people are all that interested in trying to track. Totally. So what are the things caused strain? So we talked a little bit about just running, for example, you know, that's an obvious way to create strain. What are some other ways that you can develop strain? Yeah. So what we say, it's sort of all cause cardiovascular load. And so the obvious sort of source of cardiovascular load and one of the main dominant sources for people who work out is obviously exercise. But it's also things that are stressful. So like if you've ever sort of been about to, you know, walk into a big presentation, you feel your heart racing, right? You're probably accumulating strain then. And it's also all the little things in life add up in ways that you might not realize. So if you walk your dog, if you're playing with little kids, if you're even grocery shopping, and so you're lifting a gallon jug of milk up. Like it's, you know, all these things

are sort of individually negligible. But if you think about how many of them we might do over the course of, you know, 16 hours that we're awake, 18 hours that we're awake, it can add up to a lot. And I think that one of the things that's really cool about whoop is that, you know, we're able to sort of capture not just the workout, but everything you're doing in between that and get that understanding about how if I do a bunch of yard work before I go for a run, I'm not actually starting from haven't worked out yet today. You know, it's not the same as a two a day workout, but it's also not the same as being completely fresh. And that's where we see, you know, with athletes who are on our platform and just individuals in general, you know, if you have a big event later on in the day, it might be why. to take action to kind of mitigate your day strain. So it's just this concept of day strain versus non-workout strain is just super unique to whoop. And I think one of the coolest aspects of the platform, you know, because you can see it build in real time. And if you've got a game, for example,

at seven o'clock, you know, you might want to think about keeping your strain below a certain threshold relative to kind of what you've done previously, right? Yeah, that was one of the big kind of motivators around getting this feature out pretty early on was that a lot of professional athletes because of, you know, people want to go to games after work that, you know, you're not going to get a good turnout at a professional game at 10 a.m. And so baseball players are playing at 7 o'clock at night. So they have to keep their strain down for potentially 12 hours before the game so that they have absolutely everything in the tank for the game. And, you know, you can help mitigate day strain if it happens to start creeping up there by doing things like napping and getting a massage and there's a lot of recovery stuff. But you have to be measuring it to know that you need to do those things. Exactly. How this applies just to folks who aren't professional athletes, you know, if I'm going throughout my workday, for example, and I know that, you know, I have a jammed morning, well, you know, lunchtime might be a time where I build in some mindfulness. I, you know, I take a walk. It just allows you to be way more intentional and conscientious of basically not allowing negative stress to accumulate throughout

the day because it's not only going to impact kind of your task to task effectiveness or productivity throughout the day, but it also creep into potentially your sleep onset and then, you know, getting into those deeper sleep stages of sleep at night. I think this idea or this concept of day strain is just brilliant. And Emily has been at the forefront of basically kind of developing this whole concept and feature and all the analytics and the math that goes into being able to give us a real accurate depiction of how much load we're taking on through the day. But it's just a great way to understand how to uniquely balance your day in a way that's going to allow you to sustain high levels of productivity. Yeah, Kristen, I don't know if you want to share any stories of, you know, our clients sort of, you know, using this information now that they've sort of become aware of it through WOOP in order to improve their performance in game. Yeah, I mean, I think definitely, you know, understanding or knowing, hey, I've got a game at 4 p.m., what should my strain actually look like? And I think there's a couple things that we kind of patched together that help our users understand what type of things to do throughout the day that will enable them to perform at their highest level whenever their event is. You know, if they wake up, for example, with a lower recovery, they're going to build in some recovery mode. For example, you mentioned it earlier, you know, maybe you take a nap. If you have sleep debt from the previous night, maybe I didn't get as restful sleep as I wanted to and I have 34 minutes of sleep that accumulated. All right, I map that with a 30 minute nap. I know that, maybe I'm a little bit less recovered than I want to be. I'm going to do everything I can to keep my strain down. So, you know, athletes will choose to take the bus as opposed to walk to class or very simple things like that. To your point earlier, you're not going to know what actions to take if you don't understand what your starting point is. And that's really.

what I think this day strain metric gives you is you understand your starting point and then basically what actions you need to take in order to peak for whatever event it is you have later on that day. Yeah, it's that, you know, we talk about this all the time and you can't manage what you're not measuring. Peter Drucker.

Yeah. I think one of like my favorite stories of yours was just with FSU women's soccer. They've been on the system for a couple of years and so two seasons ago where they went to go and taper and obviously the coach just sort of laying off the strain in the workouts and the girls started using all of their free time to go socialize and do all this stuff.

And so their actual overall strain didn't really go down because they were just being a lot more active sort of with all this freed up energy. And so their taper period wasn't as effective as it could be. And then a year later, you know, taper comes around again prior to NC2A championships. And they'd learned from that. And then we saw actually that, you know, in addition to lowering the workout strain, they were taking a lot of steps to really minimize their day strain and to keep that as low as possible and to not try and use the like freed up time to.

to do other active things to go to the mall and redecorate their dorm room all that fun stuff that you know you can't blame them it's a completely logical thing to do but you know they didn't do it and they had their best season ever and it's such a cool example of you know once you become aware of something you can action that information and it makes a difference it definitely does absolutely so we get this question a lot strain it builds logarithmically right it's not linear so can you just explain why the workouts don't add up in, you know, so if I get a 12 and then I go work out and it's a 14, like it's not a 26, right? Right. So this is like a little bit of a design decision as much as anything else. So basically we have this bounded score between zero and

21. And we needed to fit onto this score everything from didn't get out of bed all the way up to like the Spector series that we did last year where for those of you who don't know, we had of group of Navy SEALs and former Navy SEALs who skydived into the ocean, swam three miles, ran 100 miles in order to raise money for his amazing charity, the SEAL Future Fund. And so something like that needs to fit on the same 21 point scale. So if you think about that being sort of the maximum or close to the maximum, then everything normal people do gets like so clustered and smush down at like one that you don't get any differentiation between workouts.

And so in order to like mathematically build in differentiation between sort of normal ranges of activities, you know, the difference between a two-mile run and a four-mile run. We had to stretch out that part of the scale by using a logarithmic instead of a linear scale. So all strain actually gets calculated linearly, and then we use this sort of proprietary function that we more or less made up in order to scale it in the 21-point scale that you guys see. And so when we add your multiple workouts and, you know, multiple activities up throughout the day, we're adding them in linear space and then presenting them in scaled space. And so they are linear and they do add up.

I'm just not like in the way that you guys see. And one of the things that we found that's been really interesting is that actually like perceived exertion and the scaled strain score that we get show you tend to be really close, which means that it's very intuitive the way we do things. Users seem to be able to pick up on it really quickly. And we think that that's because it actually is easier to go from like a 10 mile run to an 11 mile run than it is to go from like a one mile run to a two mile run. So each like linear anchor.

in sort of external load, doesn't actually have like a linear increment in terms of like what that means for your day. And we've actually seen like a somewhat linear relationship between strain and like next day, HRV. So while we originally sort of did this for more or less presentation reasons, what we've actually found is that physiologically it works. Yeah. Totally. Which is what makes it just even more brilliant. So basically, I mean, I feel like we've all kind of felt this, right, like that if you're I'm a runner it's why I keep talking about running I'm sorry but if you know every if you're running a marathon right like it's so much easier to like the difference between like a half marathon and a full marathon and like a 5k and a 10k and you know so every time you get like a little bit

longer it doesn't get like the same amount harder and we see this in the strain score that like the longer you go the harder you go the harder becomes to build strain cool that's a really good explanation so we're going to pivot and talk a little bit more about um how we're we use strain to kind of help train, which is really one of my favorite things to think about and talk about. So if we kind of just start this just like conceptually, you know, you've got kind of three different buckets per se. You've got a maintenance kind of bucket. You've got a functional overreaching bucket and you've got kind of a taper bucket. So that's kind of how we physiologically can kind of think about the intent is for your workout. It's kind of going to fall into one of these three buckets. If you're aiming to functionally overreach, you're probably going to be pushing yourself in that if your strain or if your recovery is If you really push yourself hard, you would expect to have a lower recovery. You know, your HRV would be a little suppressed. Your resting heart would be a little bit higher. And that's a good thing, right?

That means that your body's responding and adapting to the stimulus that you're putting on it. Now, if you do that for too long and you don't actually bounce back up, i. You keep your strain really high. You can get to a point where you're not in a functional state anymore. You become kind of non, you're overreaching in a nonfunctional way. So I think just this concept of using. the recovery metric and the strain metric kind of in tandem to understand, okay, this is my capacity today. What's my physiological intent? And that kind of dictates what type of strain you

want to put on your body. Yeah. And that's really like why we created that weekly performance assessment. Totally. And I think like we get a question a lot, which is like, oh, what's a good strain? And I think that like what you're getting at is there is no such thing as a good strain and a bad strain. It's not like, you know, sleep where you want to get all the sleep every night. Right. It depends on your intent. Yeah. It's all about your intent. It's about understanding, like, what it is that you're doing to your body and about balancing it, right? So, like, a good strain today might be an 18, given, you know, my race schedule and, you know, where I am and the training cycle and how recovered I am and all these things. And tomorrow, an 18 might be completely inappropriate.

Yeah. Good. So I guess maybe we can talk a little bit about maybe the restoring state, you know, or the maintenance state. So if we wake up in the morning and we've got a trend of maybe three days where we're kind of on the lower. end of recovery. So we're not quite red, but we're in that yellow. What are some things, how do we need to think about our workout, maybe on that third or fourth day where we're just not rebounding? And let's say we're getting all the sleep that we need, because I think that's the first place. You know, when I work with, you know, our athletes, it's kind of immediately, okay, is it lifestyle that's getting in the way of my recovery, which is hindering my ability to take on a lot of strain? Or is it training adaptation? So, and I think for our users who aren't

sports scientists don't have access to coaches. You know, this is, I think, for me, the easiest way to kind of troubleshoot what might be going on if your sleep isn't great and maybe you're, you know, you had a hard night out and that, you know, you're maybe drinking alcohol or maybe you've got a lot of psychological stress, but you haven't been training that hard. It's more of these other external factors. It's not training adaptation. That's the problem. So maybe just talk through some the physiology behind that. Yeah. I mean, I hear thrown around a lot like, you know, red means rest and it's kind of cute and alliterative, but it's an oversimplification for sure. I mean, there's a lot of room for things like active recovery and also just sometimes

you need to mix it up and, like, create a different stimulus. So, like, you might have been running too much and your legs, you know, need that day off, but that doesn't mean, you know, some like low impact like swimming or something like that or yoga. You know, could actually get you like a decent strain score. You know, you could get into that like 10, 11, 12 kind of range and, you know, sweat and all that good stuff. But you're still giving your legs a break.

So we want to kind of make sure that we're not telling people, like, oh, you're red, like, you know, stay in bed. Because a lot of times that just creates, like, you know, you get stiff and, like, that kind of stagnation. And it doesn't actually promote recovery. I mean, a big thing, obviously, to be looking at if you're sort of stuck in, in a low recovery rut is diet. Right. Obviously, assuming here that sleep is.

Yeah, is where it needs to be. Yeah. Because it's just pretty much nothing you can do. Right. If you're not getting enough sleep. But, you know, diet. And I think, like, things like cross training, I think a lot of, you know, sports that tend to just, you kind of beat up one muscle group that if you're not cross-training, you're just not going to make

the progress that you're going to want to make because you're going to fatigue those muscles and then have to rest and, you know, if you're not willing to cross-trained. I definitely see that with CrossFit athletes, you know, who are doing, who don't do a lot of cardiovascular work. Once they build in, you know, one or two cardiovascular workouts a week, we see their HRV increase substantially, resting heart rate decreases substantially for obvious reasons. But I think to Emily's point, to your point, I'm just like mixing it up is really important. You want to create different physiological triggers, right, across the week. It's really important, you know, for us metabolically and, you know, and just everything that needs to be

happening physiologically to really promote these adaptations that we want. Yeah. And I think like that's another place to kind of use strain intelligently, you know, you might hop on a bike, say you're a crossfitter, right? And you hop on a bike to a cross train. And because you haven't cycled in a while, you know, you're able to kind of really push yourself, but you don't want to overdue cycling and then not be ready to crossfit. Like the point is that this is a sort of recovery workout or cross-training ones. So you want to keep that, you know, your heart rate kind of in that like nice moderate zone, you know, where you can hold a conversation and kind of really focus on training that like endurance zone and not, you know, oh, like I'm in a bike. I'm going to go do, you know, 50 miles or something silly.

So that, you know, it helps promote recovery but doesn't create it like a recovery visit itself. Totally. So I think a lot of this data just enables you to ask better. questions about your lifestyle and how that might be contributing or not contributing to, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, you know, from a goal standpoint. Okay, cool. So let's maybe let's pivot a little bit to the Woop Live features. It's really exciting.

So exciting. It's so exciting. Emily's she's been working on Strength Coach for a long time now and excited to Emily to kind of hear your take on what it actually does and how can help people train more intelligently and reach their goals in a more efficient, productive way. Yeah, so Strain Coach is sort of the live, real-time follow-on. Feedback loop, right? Yeah, it sort of takes all the information you're getting in the weekly performance assessment,

and it turns it into a live, real-time feature that will help you train in the moment, not just understand trends. So we're trying to kind of transition from feedback to coaching. So it's got two parts. So instead of it being just retrospective, like you can actually, like, in the moment, see exactly how you're building strain. Yeah, which was always the plan. And, you know, why I think it's so great that for the. the past year, you know, we've been introducing our athletes to this concept of having recovery, you know, sort of dictate your training level. And we've always had that ability where on like

the overview screen on the web, you can see your strain and your recovery lined up. But we really want to take this and like put it in the moment while you're training and not just as feedback. And so, you know, I've been playing with these features in beta for a couple weeks now. They're really exciting and I'm so excited for everybody else to get their hands on it. So strain coach is two parts. The first part is when you sort of are ready to work out in the morning, you'll see whoops recommended strain range that will keep you in the maintenance zone. And this is really important that what we're showing you is what will constitute maintenance, which sort of roughly means you'll have the same HRV tomorrow that you had today. If it is, in fact, your goal to be

in a restorative or an overreaching state, then obviously you want to do more or less than what we're identifying as maintenance. But we're going to show you where that is, and it's based on your personalized recovery from that morning. And then while you work out, it'll sort of show you how much strain you have left in order to get into that zone. So if you already have like say an eight day strain because you've been pretty active and now you're going to work out and your goal for the day is to get to a 14. We'll show you that that means that you have, you know, an 11 left. And as you're working out, you can see, well, now you have this much left, you know, and so and so until you get into that zone and then we'll show you, oh, you're about to exit that zone and go into overreaching.

You know, is that something you want? And so we're trying to help people make better in the moment decisions like, you know, you're mid run and you're like, should I add in this extra loop and go up that hill or should I cut short and go home and you can sort of see where you're at and make that decision at that time. What I love about this is it's just so much more specific, you know, and, you know, we've been using strain and recovery obviously with our elite athletes in a super proactive way in the sense that, all right, I have a lower recovery instead of playing 35 minutes. You know, I'm an NBA athlete. Instead of playing 35 minutes, I'm going to play 16. You know, this just gives us the potential to be much more

specific with actually how many minutes you should be playing. It might not be 16. It might actually be 20. We're just kind of guessing based on trends and based on recovery and minutes and what's happened previously. So, you know, we're able to give a reasonable number in terms of what we should be aiming toward, but this is way more specific and so much cooler. Yeah. And one of the things I really love about it is it makes whoop really friendly to new users. Like, you know, I know, like, oh, you know, if I'm, I should get a 16 today, like I can tell you how many miles that is because I've been on moot for six years. And I wrote the algorithm, so I'm cheating a little bit. And I think that a lot of our users who have been on for a few months, like they start to figure that out. But, you know,

a new user, like, as we've said already, you know, we made up the strain score. And so, you know, a new user doesn't arrive necessarily with an understanding like, oh, a 13, that's, you know, six miles or whatever. And so it just helps them kind of put things in terms that they understand from day one. Right. I think what's amazing is that, you know, I think this platform has been incredible for elite athletes, right? Because they have access, you know, to coaches and sports scientists who are really helping them manage this whole concept, putting together, or doing the programming and workouts, everything's very specific. In a sense, strain coach kind of gives you access to that level of information, which I think for folks who don't have, you know, their resources to have a personal coach, you know, that that's really what whoop is, it's the gap that whoop is filling, you know, which is brilliant. And I know over time, it's just going to keep getting, you know, more robust and better and more accurate. But I think this is, it's just an incredible. place to start. Yeah, and then the other feature part of this whoop live, Gen 3 update that we're really excited about was whoop snap plus. So you guys have all been playing around with for a couple months of the whoop snap where you can sort of take a selfie and overlay various whoop stats.

And again, this is sort of the evolution of that where we're making it live, we're making it more actionable, and we're making it a coaching tool as opposed to just a social tool. So now you can record your workout or anything you're doing and overlay with whoop snap plus your heart rate in the moment. And I think this is a really exciting training tool because you can start to see like, you know, visually like, oh, wow, I can see, you know, my form breaking down and my heart rates going up and that, like, cardiovascular drift can indicate fatigue. That's such a good point. You know, you can start to look at, you know, obviously there's so many fun, like social aspects to the future, but it's so much more than that because if I'm watching, like, let's say

I'm a tennis player, right, and I'm watching my game and I can see where my heart rate is and I can see how much strain I've accumulated and I start to see that I'm missing shots they should be getting or you know my serves are getting sloppy that's you're literally seeing fatigue happen in real time and you know video analysis has been a part of so many sports for so long like I grew up gymnast my whole life so much film yeah exactly and you kind of look at things but you know it's always just like oh you can see that you know your cheeks are red and that you're breathing heavy so you must be tired but to have this like extra layer of like wow like here in practice this is where you've really started you know once you start to get to say a 16 strain for the practice

or whatever it is start to get sloppy you that's where you can really start to understand you know, where you become at risk of an injury, right, because your form's getting bad or where it's just not productive to have you there. And, you know, for a sport, like, you know, hockey, you should be substituted here. And I think that, like, having that information is so valuable. Yeah. I mean, overlaying physiological data onto game film is, you know, it's always been just kind of a little bit of a pipe dream, honestly, you know. And to make it this a reality is super cool. Just, you know, as a coach for 16 years and just, you know, having my head inside game film for probably 75% of my life. I can definitely appreciate, like, how powerful. this feature could be and I think where it ends up going, I think will be also really interesting. I mean, I can't wait to see, you know, just how the WOOP community responds, you know, to these features and how they use them. I imagine there's going to be all sorts of different ways. Appropriate and inappropriate. People take this feature. I'm just kidding. But no, I think it's going to be, it's going to be really cool. All right. Well, I think that's all we have for you guys today. We just love the Woop community. You guys are the best. We feel really privileged to

be a part of your journey. And we'll talk to you again soon. Yeah. And if we didn't answer any of your questions, feel free to reach out and we're happy to answer them. We will do our best. Thanks to Kristen and Emily for sharing all their insight. I'm really excited to see how our members take advantage of the new strain coach and whoop snap plus features. 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 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, you, and that'll give you 30 euros off when you join.

And for our current members, you can upgrade to the whoop strap 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 Whoop 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. Thank you again to all our listeners, to all our Whoop members. We love you.