WHOOP Podcast - Unlocking Human Performance: What is WHOOP, and what can it do for you? CEO Will Ahmed sits down with ATP Science Co-Founders Jeff Doidge and Matt Legge.

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

ATP Science Co-Founders Jeff Doidge and Matt Legge chat with WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed about unlocking human performance, including the company's mission (3:35), preventing overtraining (4:50), the metrics WHOOP tracks (5:36), measuring recovery (7:16), quantifying strain (8:45), getting WHOOP on the world's best athletes (9:45), improving sleep efficiency and consistency (15:49), the effects of mental fatigue (23:16), why heart rate variability is so important (27:03), what many people don't realize about the impact of alcohol (29:41), other learnings from the data (34:53), and ongoing studies and research using WHOOP (40:55). 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 WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among 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 Woopstrap 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 whoop and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper. We interview experts. We interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the

Whoop Podcast. Your body has physiological indicators that you can't feel. And in general, when it comes to performance, feelings are largely overrated. We as human beings like relying on feelings, but our feelings are often wrong. Whereas our body, it's almost like these secrets that your body is trying to tell you. They can predict things about your performance. I mean, heart rate variability is probably the most important thing. Hello, folks. You may have noticed that last week we put out our 50th episode of the WOOP podcast. So it's now been exactly one year since this podcast debuted. And frankly, it's been quite a ride for me. I've really enjoyed getting to interview all these different guests. And because all of you listen, I'm going to keep doing it. So thank you for everyone who's listened to the WOOP podcast over the last year. You know, you start these things. You don't necessarily know where they're going to take you. But we are excited.

to be continuing on this journey together. Now, Whoop has grown tremendously in the past 12 months, and with so many new members on board and new listeners, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on how we got started and the origins of Whoop, and really, what can Whoop do for you today? I recorded this episode at the Spartan World Championships earlier this year, and I was interviewed by the co-founders of ATP Science, Jeff Doidge and Matt Legg. They turned the tables on me for this one, and they interviewed me all about Whoop.

We talk about the company's mission and how it began, how Whoop works and what it measures, what inspired me to found the company, why 24-7 biometric monitoring is so valuable, different behavior changes you can make to improve your data, and really all the different insights we've gained from Whoop data so far. I think you're going to enjoy this, and without further ado, I'm going to kick it over to Jeff and Matt. Welcome to the ATP Projects. You're with your host, Matt and Jeff.

And today we have Will Ahmed in from the founder and the CEO of Woop, which is really cool because we have a saying that we use all the time at ATP is that you can only manage what you measure. And this is right. Oh, man. I say that all the time. Yeah. This is right in your ballpark.

So, Will, do you want to explain a little bit about your company, what you're doing? And yeah, we'll have a chat. We'll ask you some questions. Yeah, so really our mission at WOOP is to unlock human performance. So we believe that every individual has an inner potential that you can tap into if you can better understand their body and their behaviors. And we've developed technology across hardware, software, and analytics, really designed to continuously understand the human body.

I'm wearing the sensor here. It's a very small sensor. Stallish, too. Yeah, there's a lot of different designs to it. I don't know if this camera can see it. Yeah. I'll pass it over to you. So it's really designed to be lightweight. It's designed to be passive. There's no screen on it. And it's monitoring your body 24-7. So we're measuring data across five different metrics, 100 times a second. We collect about 100 megabytes of data on a person

per day. But really what that all comes up to is we summarize your sleep and your recovery and your strain. And we look at everything through that lens. And I got into this space personally because I was always into sports and exercise. I think like you guys, I was playing squash while I was at Harvard, and I was fortunate to be captain of the team there, and I was training at a really high level, but I found that I was someone who used to overtrain almost every season. And so I got very interested in this concept of how can you prevent overtraining.

Turns out about 70% of athletes over-train. And I got fascinated by physiology. I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school, got interested in sleep and recovery and heart rate variability. And I ultimately wrote a paper myself on how to continuously understand the body. And that became the business plan for founding whoop. No, that's crazy. Excellent. What's the parameters you're measuring? This is I'm dying to know. What sort of data we're collecting? So the sensor itself is measuring heart rate, heart rate variability, skin connectivity, ambient temperature, and accelerometry. And at any given moment, we're using

all of those sensors or a few of them to give you outputs around sleep and recovery and strain. A simple way of thinking about what the sensor can do is it's replacing a chest wrap, so a heart rate monitor, which a lot of people use during exercise. It's replacing that. It's replacing an electrocardiogram for the purpose of measuring heart rate variability. And it's replacing a PSG machine, which is the sleep lab quality data. Yeah, wow. So you've got a chest strap, an ECG, and a sleep lab all rolled up into a small sensor. And do people add in their own data as well? Like, do people then put in training foods? Do they then relate that data back to how they're eating or how their heart rate might change in response to a food allergen or do how people respond to different styles of training?

Is there other data added in? Yeah, absolutely. So WOOP will auto detect a lot of the different activities that you do you do you can also input them so you know we measure i think 65 or 75 different types of activities workouts um you can think of all the main types of activities that people do so one simple thing is you can figure out well what's my average strain if i uh go for a five mile run versus a 10 mile run versus cycling versus basketball versus tennis da da right and you start to figure out okay this is the stress that my body accumulates during any particular activity right another important lens here is recovery that's probably the single most important thing that we've brought to market that everyone from the best professional athletes in the world to high-end fitness

enthusiasts executives people understand their body are getting value out of and it's really a score from zero to 100 percent red yellow green that's summarizing how ready your body is to perform so if you go back for a second to overtraining which is how I got into this whole thing Overtraining is really putting more stress on your body than your body is ready for, then your body is recovered. So if your body is run down and you put a lot of stress on it, you're overtraining it or overreaching in a short term. If you are really recovered and you don't put much stress on your body, you're under training. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so the key is high recovery, high strain, low recovery, low strain, mid recovery, mid-strain. And it will measure that because this is the- Yeah, 24-7. The challenge that I always have in my mind are people over-training or under-recovering. So you can- Well, there's that balance too. Yeah, but we show all that. Yeah. So every day you wake up on Woop, and it shows you a recovery from 0 to 100% that's based

on things like your heart rate variability, slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, your resting heart rate. And then we'll give you this score, 0-100% red-yellow green, and it'll tell you how much strain to put on your body. Yeah, yeah. So if you're peaking, take on a lot of strain. run down, do less. And then over the course of the day, whoop will measure your strain.

Yeah, cool. That could be in the form of, you know, what we're doing, which is putting more stress on our bodies. Yeah, yeah. That could be in the form of daily activity. That could be in the form of exercise. And at any point during the day,

you'll kind of check in and you'll say to yourself, oh, maybe I've put too much strain on my body and need to stop. Yeah. Or maybe I need to keep going. And you mentioned electrical conductants. So, you know, reactants versus resistance and that sort of thing. So is that a measure? That would allow us to,

identify our intracellular hydration or our electrolyte status? Would that play into that? To be fair, I think that that technology hasn't advanced. You know, maybe you have people come on here who they tell you they can measure hydration. But we've done a lot of research in the space and we work with all the top performers and that technology is not there yet. Yeah, cool. So look, I think you build credibility by measuring a few things really accurately versus telling people you can measure everything. So that's our point of view at Woop as we do a few things. and we do them really well. Yeah, excellent.

That's great. So when did the company launch? When did you start selling? So founded Woop in 2012. Yeah. My co-founder, John Capulupo, was studying the hardest math classes in the country at Harvard. Wow. He was 19 or 20 years old when we met.

I was 21 or 22. And he, and his father, it turns out, is a professor of exercise physiology. So the two of us had a real overlap around physiology. I had done all that research. He had grown up around the dinner conversations. John had the technical chops to do some things from a sensing standpoint and an algorithm standpoint that really hadn't been done before. And I had a vision for how to build a product for coaches and athletes and beyond. And so that's where it started in summer of 2012. And, you know, over the next 12 months, we had built some initial really goofy looking prototypes, you know, things,

the size of my head with wires coming up. off of them and, you know, finally a big clunky wristband that you could put on. But the data that would come off that prototype was really first of its kind. So we were the first company to measure heart rate variability accurately from the wrist. We were able to do things like heart rate monitoring compared to a chest strap long before any other product. In fact, if you look at the lawsuits between Fitbit and Jawbone, all of the Woop patents were listed as prior art. Yeah, okay. So that's pretty cool, right? We got there first. Yeah, yeah. And so we started, we started then working with really the best athletes in the world.

And I mean that quite literally. Like two of our first 100 users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps. So we started at the tip of the pyramid, right? How did you get those athletes? How did you, was that through a network of people that you know? Well, the secret to getting to anyone high profile, just in life, is who's the person that that person listens to that a bunch of people don't already know. Right.

Okay. Because it, for example, in the. case of LeBron, right? Everyone knows who his coach is, his agent is, his wife is, right? Like, okay, that's hard to get to those people. What it turned out is he actually spends most of his day with his personal trainer. And this was 2014, 2015 time frame. A lot of people at the time didn't know Mike, Mike Manzias. And so anyway, I reached out to Mike and sent him the technology. He wore the whoop. He liked it. And then he eventually put it on, put it on LeBron. And we had a similar process with Phelps and you know so that that's how we ultimately got to some of these high

improved people and then once you have people like that wearing it there's a brilliant cascading effect you know even just this week uh people are sending me photos of Steph Curry wearing it on the golf course Tiger Woods was wearing it last week and like look we don't we don't sponsor athletes no that's great I was going to ask you that yeah so these people are opting in because of the value that they're getting out of the watch you're not having to to give the money it's the ultimate validation right yeah sure sure these are people buying it themselves and getting value out of it now often sure we'll send one to someone of that nature yeah but you're not paying the money for it i mean like to look we couldn't afford to pay the people of course wearing this thing

and they wouldn't use it if it didn't work yeah so you only wear it if it works and i said that from the beginning no matter how much money we paid these guys if the products suck they're not going to wear it 24-7 yeah and the flip is true too if you can actually improve a high performer by one percent or even five percent oh my god right you just changed the equation you just changed the for that person. So that's how WOOP has been fortunate to play a role in these athletes' lives. So it measures all the information and how is that displayed to? Is that downloaded?

All the data sent from the Woopstra app directly to your phone, phone to the cloud. You know, you can check in at various points throughout the day to look at your data on your phone. And even the sensor can live in other areas of the body. So right now you can wear it on your forearm. You can wear it in an arm sleeve above. So if you're competing in a, you know, a basketball game or you're on a. tennis corridor you know there's different places where you may prefer to wear it yeah uh that's going to be a continued area of investment for me not a professional athlete at all looking at me i know

that's hard to believe but when i was playing over men's 40 soccer one of the things i used to love to do was was where uh my garment right which would tell me how far i'd run and and i'd download that on the phone and it was great for training as well too because i could see the distance the heart rate you know it would be measuring my VO2 max and all that sort of stuff well apparently right now you're making me question some stuff But what it came down to, though, is that on the games, I couldn't use that because you weren't allowed to wear, you know, these big chunky watches. Of course, you got for a head or something, you smack someone with a watch. You know, going to get a lawsuit.

So then you had these really uncomfortable things. You had to put them to these socks on your back. Very familiar, yeah, with you're describing. You're annoying. Yeah, so one thing that's nice about this is because it's really small, you can kind of take it out and you can sort of hide it under a wristband or up here. Yeah, we actually have a lot of athletes wearing this during games and no one even knows. Yeah. And, you know, that's what I did.

I actually got a wristband. A watch is more, it's a little more invasive. Yeah, and it's big, and it's still like clunky. I hit someone with that, whereas that looks quite soft. So is it quite durable? Like, can it take a knock? Oh, look, man, we work with the Navy SEALs. We work with people who are really banging this thing up.

Wow. Cool. And it keeps going. So everywhere we go, I mean, I recently went to the International Society of Sports Nutrition. I reckon close to 50% of the content people were talking about was sleep and the importance of sleep for performance and the sleep for recovery. And so really, this is quite timely and everything. And it gives you a lot of good data about sleep,

not just subjectively, how do you feel, you know? Oh, look, I mean, I think sleep is the missing equation for most high-performing people. Because once you dial in your sleep, everything else starts to feel so much easier in your life. It really does. And were you going to say something? Well, I really am curious as to, on the other side of the metrics, I mean, you know, we talk about sleep, we talk about the detoxification of the brain, we know that it's important. But for a long time, science wasn't really 100% sure exactly why we needed

sleep per se. You know, we know, what have you discovered or what have you learned as far as maybe new information when you've looked at athletes and you've seen peak performance in terms of their sleep patterns? Like what has it, what have you been able to discover? Okay, so here we go. So the first thing is people talk about sleep very high level. They'll say, oh, you know, it's important to get seven or eight hours of sleep right okay first of all if you spend eight hours in bed that doesn't mean you get eight hours of sleep in fact you know a lot of people don't have that high of a sleep efficiency so maybe they spend eight hours in bed and they're getting seven hours of sleep or six hours of sleep we've worked with professional athlete that spend eight hours in bed and get four to

five hours of sleep right you're talking about people who are playing professional sports half drunk yeah right i mean that's how much of a disadvantage that person's at that person's at that person does not need to spend more time in the dugout. Does not need to spend more time, you know, at the range or practicing. That person needs to figure out sleep because they're a phenom if they can figure out sleep. Yeah, right? It's pretty amazing. So that's the first thing to understand is what is your sleep efficiency?

Yeah. Right. Is everybody different? Have you noticed a big difference between different people in terms of what's ultimate? Oh, absolutely. And different people on different nights, too, right? Because there's all these other things that affect how well you sleep. But we'll get to that in a second.

Okay. Then within the hours of sleep that you get, there's different stages. There's light, there's REM, there's slow wave, and then there's periods in which you're awake, right? Now, REM and slow wave are way more important than just periods of light sleep. As you guys know, REM, that's the dream state. That's when your mind is repairing itself, right? So if you want to be focused in your daily life, if you have to make important cognitive decisions, which by all humans do, you need REM sleep every night. Slow wave sleep, especially for athletes, is even more important because that's the way.

that's when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. So people think you get stronger in the gym. No, you're breaking down your muscles in the gym. It's actually during slow-wave sleep that you're repairing your body and getting stronger. So just based on that alone, right, if you get three to four hours of REM and slow-wave sleep, you have a profoundly different experience the next day if you're getting one or two. And I guarantee you, most people listening to this, have no idea how much REM and slow-s sleep they get because they're not measuring it. Yeah.

Right. So that's the other fundamental thing is understand how much REM and slow wave sleep you get. On the flip side, we work with individuals that only spend five or six hours in bed, but they've figured out a way to get three hours or four hours even of really deep sleep, rem and slow wave. So that person is getting the equivalent amount of sleep of the eight hour in bed person who's not as efficient. Yeah. Right? Now, what's the next layer? The layer is, okay, you figure out how much time you spend in bed.

You figure out how efficiently you sleep. You figure out how much slow-even REM you get, and then you figure out how you can improve it, right? That's the beautiful thing about measuring this stuff is you can manage it, right? Yeah, right, of course. So here are a lot of things that people generally find help them sleep.

One is the environment. So generally speaking, the darker, the better. If you have trouble sleeping in a dark room or you're traveling a lot, you're in a hotel room, wear an eye mask. Makes you huge difference, right? Because it's blocking out light. Cold.

The colder, the better. I mean, there's all kinds of studies on this. For those of you who are in Fahrenheit here, you know, I like to be at 65 degrees. Most people in their hotel room, it's way too hot. So, again, if you travel a lot, first thing you should do when you get to a hotel room, blast the AC. Every single time. Yeah. You guys seem pretty dialed on this.

Yeah. Well, that AC won't let us go below 68. Yeah. I had a terrible night sleep last night because it was too hot. The room I was staying in last night, the AC thing was broken. And I actually requested them to switch my room out, which they did. And so I ended up in a cold room. So that's how much I'm into it.

Supplements, you know, not everything's right for everyone. I've found personally taking magnesium before bed and melatonin probably four to five nights a week improves my sleep. I get a little more around, a little more slow wave sleep. Managing your phone, right? Are you looking at that thing up until the second you fall asleep? Yeah. Right? Because you're hitting those retina, which obviously.

it's affecting your eyes it's affecting your brain now there's ways to offset that too blue light blocking glasses um you know you can get glasses that have a red tint do you do you recommend that through the day as well too like people in front of computer screens or is generally speaking you should you if you're really um in an environment that has a lot of fake artificial light so if you're at a convention you know um and you see a lot of that bright fluorescent light that's probably when you might want to consider that during the day yeah I mostly just wear them, you know, two to three hours before bed, sometimes only 30 minutes before bed. But it helps your mind start to shut down.

And you'll even start to feel sleepy when you start wearing them. Wow. So that's all quite impactful from an environment standpoint, preparation standpoint. So another amazing sleep hack is around what's called sleep consistency. Sleep consistency is going to bed and waking up at the same time. Yeah. Right? they did a study actually on

hundreds of Harvard students this is the National Institute of Health and they put out this paper and they found that the consistency with which students went to bed and woken up was actually a more important predictor of GPA than how long people spent in bed

so it wasn't about duration it was about consistency and the power to whoop is that we were able to take that learning from a research institution and instead of it being on a couple hundred people we applied it to 10 million sleep data sets. So we looked at 10 million sleep data sets

and we found, okay, if you go to bed and wake up at the same time as you have in previous nights, it makes your resting heart rate lower and your heart rate variability higher. So now, as part of the whoop coach in the app, we're actually coaching you not just on the duration of sleep that you should get, but when you should go to bed and wake up to be consistent.

So again, if you know these people who say they only need six hours of sleep, the answer is they probably need more but they probably have a consistent bedtime and wake time because that makes their sleep again back to the original point more efficient more REM more slow it but not necessarily ideal but you can get the data and help us to create an ideal scenario for the individual is that what look again back to you can only manage what you measure you got to figure out where you are today yeah and then it's building layers on top of each other you know it's taking me years to get to the stuff I'm describing to yeah yeah yeah

It's just funny in the four-hour body, Tim Ferriss talks a lot about exactly these kind of things. He was also talking about hacking the body in terms of having a regular sleep through the day. Have you read his book? I have. I think I'm there on like 50% of it, right? I think even Tim Ferriss would say as well too. He's probably there on most of it, not all of it. Some of it's sort of experimental, if you like, or interesting.

So, yeah, it's the sleep thing is really massive. And I think the watch, I mean, that's awesome in terms of. of that but there's so much more to it than obviously outside the sleep correct yeah i mean look sleep plays a big role than in recovery yeah and recovery i think encompasses a lot of different things so we talk primarily about overtraining right being something that negatively impacts your recovery yeah i mean i'll give you an example there's because there's other things like mental fatigue that'll affect your recovery yeah right uh it's all playing off the same sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system. So I ran the Boston Marathon. Okay. I didn't train for it that well. I got a really

high strain on WOOP. And for the next three days, I had red recoveries. So my body was run down from this big event. Okay. Now, the first time Woop launched a product to the public, there was like an intense week leading up to it. There was the big press announcement. I had to do a bunch of press and it actually turned out that my body was more run down after that buildup of launching a product than it was running the boss marathon and so but here's the thing right like i think i think there's a lot of people listening to this out there in the world who are putting stress on their body that they almost don't give themselves credit for right like rah rah i ran the marathon yeah but actually in terms of my body needing to recover it was the

intensity of work that I really needed the biggest recovery from yeah so in a lot of ways that goes back to 24-7 monitoring and it goes back to I think how whoop can help you frame all these different things in your life yeah that's amazing well I mean it's even with the guys but the vault as well too the amount of sorry about the whooping in the background that's the guy I think they're cheering they're here yeah that's on the other side of the belkin you go woo woo woo but uh the the the impact that executives have on their life as well too in terms of obviously the stress and the cortisol and you know the decisions and I mean obviously there are ways and mechanisms to be able to deal with stress that you can do incorporate meditation being centered you know turmeric all that sort of stuff

as magnesium but yeah obviously monitoring stress but giving yourself to credit a lot of these executives probably would not say well it's not like I've just run a marathon or I haven't worked out today. So they're not probably taking the precautions or putting the emphasis on sleep and recovery as maybe they should. And look, I mean, let's not forget about relationships too. You know, if you're in a happy, loving relationship versus getting divorced or you lost a family member or, you know, life happens, right? And all of that affects your body too. And I think people may underestimate that, right? They really may underestimate that. And we've seen some profound data from who are going through something like what I just described.

And the reality, again, is you need to manage your body differently when you're going through that stuff. You can't just be on the same track all the time. You need to be adapting. You have to acknowledge the effect that it has on the body. And if your home's not a sanctuary, I mean, how can you have a good slate? Tell you what, it does fix that blue light issue and not playing with the phone right up until bedtime.

You get a good five minutes of something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, five minutes in heaven is better than, you know, two minutes in heaven. But in terms of who is the average consumer that's using your watch? I mean, it sounds like there's a broad demographic, not just athletes, but... Yeah, I mean, what's been awesome for us is we went from really the best athletes in the world to now having, you know, executives, people want to better stand their bodies, people who live stressful lives, people who are fitness enthusiasts, runners, cyclists, swimmers,

triathletes, marathoners, probably a bunch of people competing in the Spartan race where we are today. But, you know, also people with active jobs, right? You get doctors and surgeons and cops and firemen, shift workers. Shipworkers would be horrendous. Do they ever get not a red light? Well, they learn to manage it, right? I mean, that's the key is you have to figure out how to manage these things.

Yeah. And so I'm still a little bit confused a little bit about how it can gather data and tell you when you're recovered. well look your body has physiological indicators that you can't feel and in general when it comes to performance feelings are largely overrated we as human beings like relying on feelings but our feelings are often wrong whereas our body it's almost like these secrets that your body is trying to tell you they can predict things about your performance i mean heart rate variability is probably the most important thing um heart rate variability to geek out for a second is a lens into your autonomic nervous system. So your autonomic nervous system, as you guys know, consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, right? Sympathetic is activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up,

respiration up. That's what's happening when you're stressed or you're exercising, you're thinking about something. It's what happens when you inhale, right? That's sympathetic. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down.

So it happens when you exhale. So it helps you fall asleep. And you want, actually, for every single, sympathetic to have a parasympathetic response. That's a sign that your body is really in tune. It's really rested. It's really repaired. It's really focused.

And when you see that balance, sympathetic parasympathetic, sympathy, you know, when you see that balance, it actually increases your heart rate variability. Yep. So higher heart rate variability, as you know, is better. And we measure this phenomenon during slow wave sleep. So slow wave sleep is when your body. is producing human growth hormone and it's recovering and what it's repairing. So every night we measure slow wave sleep during this important period of time

and we measure heart rate variability during that. And then we're able to compare your baseline over three day, seven day and 30 day moving averages to tell you where you at today. Yeah, it's fascinating. Another thing for the other listeners to our podcast, we often talk about acids and metabolic wastes and those sort of things. they settle when you settle so often when you're moving around we can pant and breathe but when we relax we start getting some acid shifting out of our muscles and irritating sympathetic nerves

and that sort of stuff as well which can um probably influence that variability in that slow wave sleep phase yeah look and and nutrition plays a big role too right like and have you noticed anything in terms of the things i mean you mentioned before about the melatonin with the sleep but is there there any other you know key insights that you can share with with us? The most profound, and this probably won't come as much of a surprise, but the most profound is alcohol, right? Yeah. How bad? Alcohol dramatically affects your sleep and dramatically affects your heart rate variability the next day. Right. And it's probably okay, one drink, one to two drinks, it becomes a question mark. Anything north of that, you're going to see a response, a negative

response. It's 100% of the time. And in fact, we've worked with, you know, thousands of college athletes at this point. In college athletes, it's not one or two drinks, right? It's often binge drinking. And what we've seen is the college athletes who report drinking on a night versus their teammates who report not drinking have a suppressed recovery of up to five days. Five days. Wow. So everyone intuitively is like, all, all, I'm hung over the next day and then it's gone. Not at all. In the data, it has this lasting effect. Man, the Brisbane Broncos need these things. which is profound. Our team basically made it into the playoffs

and they went out drinking the night before this knockout semi-final and they got knocked out. Why would they drink before? Because they're idiots. And I think some of the teams got sacked and all the rest of it. And they lost the worst game,

I think, that they've had in it. I mean, that's literally the least surprising thing. I know, right? But I mean, it's interesting is that that sort of data backed up with real science is absolutely phenomenal. What about caffeine in terms of, you know, Dr. Session Panda and a few of the other people talk about sleep and...

So this is one that varies more by individual than other things. Everyone metabolizes caffeine a little bit differently. Right. The more of a tolerance you build up to caffeine, the less obviously an effect it'll have on your body. Generally speaking, if you want like an ultimatum, drinking caffeine after 2 or 3 p.m. in the day will start to impact your sleep. Now, you can offset against it, but if you want to be optimal, try not to do that. do it. Yeah.

With the drinking, before we move on, with that, there's some people out there that'll have the, and the medical journals will say one or two drinks or, you know, a serve of alcohol daily or something like that could be good for you. Have you noticed that not true? I'm not a drinkable. I mean, I don't want you to. Look, yeah. And the different types of alcohol, I'm curious too.

Yeah. Generally speaking, clearer alcohols are better. So vodka and gin versus beer. Yeah. Right. You know, there's been some studies that suggest that red wine has been benefits. Is that something you've noticed with your data? I think mostly what we see is alcohol is bad Right Like that's kind of your simple ultimatum

Now we don't know often how many drinks someone's having But anecdotally that's it And we'll ask people if they've had more than two drinks So that seems to be the tipping point Where it starts to negatively If someone has one drink Is it nil or is it slightly negative or slightly positive? Again it depends on the alcohol

Depends on the person Right So you know A woman who weighs 110 pounds having a shot of, you know, liquor right before she goes to bed, it's going to have a very different effect on, you know, a 250-pound man drinking a glass of red wine four hours before bed. Yeah, yeah.

Right. And in fact, the time before bed is quite important, too. Yeah. Alcohol right before bed is quite disruptive. Alcohol three hours or plus before bed, then it starts to have less of an effect, right? So it's like all of these different things that, again, manage what you measure. You start measuring these things, you start managing it. Have you had time to gather enough data regarding CBD?

And I know everyone in America so that I've seen is talking CBD. I like the drum roll leading up to the C. Yeah. Yeah. Did you see that? You know, CBD is, again, it's at such an early phase right now. There's not a lot of data out there. Anecdotally, I hear from whoop users.

Hey, started taking CBD and now my REM's higher, my slow waves higher. I know it's working for some people. The other thing, though, to keep in mind is CBD, there's so many products out there. There's not a lot of regulation. Quality. So, you don't, I can't say, hey, CBD's good or savings is bad because a lot of it comes down to a specific product for a specific person. I do think there's evidence that it's working for certain people. And when I say it, I mean, there's certain products that are working for certain people.

And keep in mind, there's all these different ways to administer it. But again, if you're interested in it, I would say, one, start monitoring your body. Do a trial. My bias is towards whoop. And two, you know, then start to see how it affects your body. I was going to ask about recreational weed then because, I mean, there would have been plenty of data, but not many people are going to be reporting that, are they?

Yeah, we've heard it anecdotally from whoop users, some positive, some negative. I know also some people take CBD products that have THC and some take CBD products that don't. I've heard more positive things about CBD products that don't have THC. Again, this is more anecdotal, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another trial. Any other interesting matter? I think food allergies also play a sneaky role in your data.

Most people don't actually know what they're allergic to. Right. And we'll see this with whoop users who say they do everything right, like they're saying, so speak you know hey i don't drink alcohol hey i'm training based on my recovery um i you know have happy relations or whatever these perfect lives but then they'll say like yeah but i keep getting yeah maybe there's a little exaggeration here but then they'll say you know but all of a sudden i'm getting these red recoveries why am i getting them and one one unlock there has been food allergies where we've found that certain people uh you know have food sensitivities they were never aware of

yeah and those show up in your whoop data and they can change quite quickly. Again, we're not going to tell you, hey, you're allergic to gluten. No, no. But people can use the data. So for example, a naturopathic style might be an elimination diet and then you try to rechallenge, but we'd be looking for subjective feedback. You know, how do you feel and that sort of stuff. So in this case, we could do the elimination style. We could rechallenge and then use the whoop data to see heart rate variables and that sort of stuff that might respond to or poor recovery days that might respond to those foods that they've rechallenged. Look, absolutely. I want to play. I think that I think the diet

it is a wildly confusing thing and people, you know, pick up a magazine and read 15 steps to why to go keto, and next thing you know, they're on an incredibly disruptive diet to their body. Oh, that's massive. Let's talk about diets. I mean, I'm really interesting. Have you seen in the population, you know, any benefits to any of these different, like the keto diet or the paleo diet?

I mean, it's a lot like CBD where it's like, look, you have to figure out what's right for you. And all sorts of different diets have different effects on people. So let's preface it with that. I think first thing for anyone to consider when starting a diet is what is your goal? Yeah. Right? You're trying to lose weight. You're trying to get fitter.

You're trying to win an event. You're trying to be cognitively more focused. I mean, those are all fundamentally different paths that are going to take you on a different journey. I think a lot of people will start a diet without knowing what they want. And, you know, it's hard to get what you want if you don't know what it is. So that's really the first step. I think from a weight loss standpoint, like pure weight loss, potentially sacrifice for performance, you know, things like keto, paleo, low carb,

like those can work. I've seen, though, on the other side of that, really negative whoop data, you know, people having really low recoveries for a number of days in a row as their body try to get into ketosis and get comfortable. So there's, you know, you got to keep in mind there could be a short-term, adaptation yeah adaptation negative impact are you okay going a week being really suboptimal and massive changes to microbiome as you change those dogs yeah the other thing to consider is um how long are you hoping to do these things for and how disciplined are you actually i want on a paleo diet for about

five months at one point in my life and it's almost better described as failio because you know it's like once a week, maybe I was having the wrong thing or, you know, and, and this was four or five years ago, but what I found was that the days where I didn't follow the strict diet, my body couldn't hang at all, you know, you eat a turkey sandwich, and I felt like someone had just stabbed me in the stomach, you know, and so I asked myself, okay, I do feel great when I'm following this thing but do I really want to be uh do I want my body to be that you know incapable of adapting to its environment and so that's where for me personally I want to take a step back and you know my diet is fairly inclusive where I'll eat a lot of different things

you know try to stay organic and whole food and things like that's the obvious stuff but you know like I'll eat pasta I'll eat bread like you know I like those things and I find that I perform and a high level on them. Well, in terms of the watch, how much does it sell for? Where do you sell it? Where can people learn more about the watch and really dive in? Have you got YouTube channels, obviously, website? Yeah, so first of all, whoop.com is a great place to learn more about the product.

Man, that's a good website. W-H-O-O-P.com. Wow, did you get a lot of money for that? You know, it was an adventure acquiring that. Yeah, we'll save that for another pod. So, whoop.com, you can learn everything about it. the product there really think of it as a membership so the hardware comes free with it um it comes with hardware software analytics we have a customer support team that'll answer questions about your

data or help you yeah um and it's just a monthly subscription so you can pay as little as 18 dollars a month wow that's awesome you can sign up for as little as 30 dollars down so we tried to make it really flexible and you know by being a subscription versus a large upfront cost the promise we're making to you is that you're going to see benefit over time. You're going to see the value that we're delivering over time. And by the way, if you don't, you can cancel and stop paying us. Wow. It's that simple. And you support globally? Like you world-wide? Yeah. So today, Whoop is in the U.S., Canada, most of Europe, especially English-speaking Europe. And we just launched in Australia. Oh, brilliant. And the UAE, excuse me, United Arab Emirates.

Oh, brilliant. Our biggest markets. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. And in terms of of um and then sorry we're also you can find us on social at woup yeah yeah and you can find me online at will omit yeah w i l l a hm ed yeah and happy to answer more questions about all this stuff too yeah yeah it's fun man it's really fascinating i mean um we're running out of time man i mean i think we could probably have another 45 minutes with you yeah definitely i'd love to do a follow up later on and find out any new data any new science you're learning And look, we're always publishing white papers, new research studies. We've got some stuff coming out that we can't talk about today.

But, you know, we'll love to stay in-touch. When it's time, let's talk. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're really keen of, and Matt's obviously working with Richard Kreider from ISSN and doing trials is that we actually want to look at doing some in-house trials as well to and actually measuring the response in the body. This could actually be kind of cool for some in-house stuff for us

before we go out to maybe do some larger double-blind perceiving. controlled studies you know what i mean so yeah look we've done a lot of um of work with research institutions and and being a sidekick i would say as well to different studies yeah so just having that that data can create an interesting side data set alongside whatever you're looking at yeah sometimes it can be a core thing i mean we're involved in drug trials looking at efficacy of drugs yeah right we're doing stuff with patients uh who have diabetes we're doing stuff um around diet It's, we're in an Alzheimer's paper. So there will look a lot of different things.

That's cool. Yeah. So whoop.com, if you're in those markets that you mentioned. And by the way, I know, I forgot to mention before, as far as technology support, is it Android and iPhone? Yeah, Android, iOS, yep. Yep. Perfect. Oh, it sounds like you thought of everything, including coming to Australia, which is a great move.

Because I know that that, I mean, like the amount of people that I see that obviously utilize, you know, the, you know, the, The sort of daughter is absolutely huge. Yeah, look, I think Australia deserves a lot of credit for being a leader in exercise physiology. I mean, a lot of those papers I was reading six or seven years ago when I founded Whoop were really around some of the work that have been done in Australia. And look, the thing I'll say about research is that unfortunately, a lot of times it's on subjects, 10 people, 20 people. you know, not 10 million data sets. So that's an advantage hopefully that Whoop can have going forward to really give back to the medical community.

I mean, we want to play a role too in helping people understand their bodies and improving human performance. And that's your why. That's your why. Yeah. Excellent. Look, thanks so much, Will.

Thanks for coming on. We definitely want to stay connected with you again, whoop.com to find out some more information. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Again, Matt and I will be back with some more soon. from Lake Tahoe. Thanks again to Jeff and Matt for recording this episode with me and a big shout out to all of our loyal listeners

who've been with us for the past year. We love you. If you're not already a Woop 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.

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For our listeners in Australia, the code Will Ahmed A.U. We'll get you 35 Australian dollars off your membership. And for our current members, you can upgrade to the Woopstrap 3.0 and get access to all the new Woop Live features by following the link in your Woop app. If you're out of contract, you'll literally get the 3.0 for free when you commit to another six months. Check out whoop.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.

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