WHOOP Podcast - Unlocking Steps: Introducing the Newest Metric that Matters

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

We are announcing an all-new feature on this week’s episode! WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by WHOOP SVP Research Algorithms, and Data Emily Capodilupo to discuss the newest metric on the WHOOP platform, steps! Will and Emily were on the move for this episode and monitoring their steps throughout the recording. They will discuss the all-new feature (1:19), listen back to an old clip of Will denouncing steps (2:28), the importance of accuracy when counting steps (5:26), the difference between steps and Strain (7:06), the research leading to our changing viewpoints on steps (15:26), the impact of being sedentary (18:12), and how members will see Steps inside the WHOOP app (20:37).Follow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport 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. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Woop. And appropriately, I am walking right now on a treadmill because this is the Steps podcast. That's right. Ignore everything I've said before about Steps. We are coming out with Steps. It's now in the WOOP app. And I'm going to be joined by Emily Capulupa, our senior vice president of research algorithms and data. We're going to get into why we, released steps. Why are we doing this? Why now? We play some of the maybe critiques I've had in the past of steps and my criticisms of it as a metric. And then we also talk about why we're excited to be rolling it out, how you can use it in the WOOP app. And a lot of the research that, by the way, justifies having Steps be a metric that's on Woop. In closing, my biggest summary is that Steps is now on WOOP, and this is The Steps Podcast. Okay, Emily, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me.

So we are right now walking on a little modular treadmills, which, by the way, I've never done this before. It actually feels pretty good. I'm kind of loving it. Yeah, and it's kind of funny. I'm trying not to smile as we do this. We've just announced steps. Whoop now measures steps.

It's in the app. I think if anyone's paid any attention to things I've said about steps on a podcast, they might find that surprising. But I imagine you're excited about this. I'm extremely excited about this. This is one of our most asked for features, really across all the different demographics and user personas on WOOP. And so we're really proud to bring people what they've been asking for. How many steps does WOOP say you have right now? Let's check. So Woop is showing that so far today, I have walked 4,059 steps. Okay, I'm at 5,094, and we're going to see what we are at the end of this podcast. Sounds good. This is like an advertisement right now for these little walking machines.

Yes. For those of you who aren't watching this, we have these like very small, flat treadmills effectively that really could fit under a desk and are allowing us to walk while we record a podcast indoors. Okay, let's go to a clip of me talking about steps just to kind of clear the air. In general, I think steps are a grossly overrated metric. One reason for this is that a step isn't actually a step. You know, if I'm sitting here and thinking a lot about this podcast and waving my arm around elaborately, all of a sudden maybe I've gone a thousand steps over the course of an hour,

just because I'm moving my wrist. I mean, that's not actually a step. That's just an inaccurate metric. So, you know, an Apple Watch or a Fitbit that tells you they're measuring steps is really just measuring the amount that your arm is moving. So that's my first issue with steps is that a step is not a step. The second thing is a step doesn't necessarily reflect cardiovascular strain, which, again, if you go back to understanding your physiology,

is a much more important phenomenon. For example, if you were to do a weightlifting workout, that would accumulate a lot of strain on your body. It wouldn't accumulate a lot of steps. If you were to go for a long walk, that might accumulate a lot of steps, but not a lot of strain. And some of this goes back to what do you ultimately want.

Sure, if you're trying to lose weight, walking can be a great mechanism for losing weight. But that's going to show up in calories. So let's talk about calories, right? The goal is to lose weight. Let's talk about calories. Who measures calories? We measure it really accurately.

So I think that just unfortunately, because Steps was a very easy thing to sell to consumers, 10,000 steps a day, 10,000 steps a day, it had mass market appeal. And the good news is that I think the whole movement around steps is pretty much dying. And I think in some ways, sleep has become the new steps. And look, we feel good about that. We're happy to see sleep become more of the mass market conversation around health. Okay. So I have to take a little bit of a cell phone and saying

that steps is dying and then obviously launching steps. But I make some points there that I think we have to address, you know, by my calculation, I mean, the point of whether a step is actually a step as measured by a wearable, this difference between steps and strain, and then also just how in general consumers should use steps, if at all. So why don't we take those as we go here? Yeah, I think the really kind of fun or funny thing about everything you said when hating about steps is absolutely true. And yet, I'm so excited to have release steps. I'm loving step counting, which is something I never thought I would say.

And I think our members are going to love it too. So that sounds really contradictory. Let me break it down. The big thing, so you talked about steps being inaccurate. And, you know, step counters have been around for a really long time. There's very good data that shows they are, in fact, largely quite inaccurate. They've gotten better over the last decade since who first came out and first decided we weren't going to be a step counter. They're a lot more accurate, especially as you start to think about layering in information beyond just trying to look at accelerometer signals, which can easily get tricked by like, oh, you're needing bread, right?

I've heard stories or somebody needs bread. everybody was making sourdough during the pandemic and they get like 17 miles worth of steps you know over the course of doing that motion or you know i think that when you think about so you know it's sort of easily tricked you talk about that we've done some very clever things in filtering our own data in order to avoid that and so we didn't really didn't want to do steps at all for a long time and then when we first talked about doing it you said we're not going to do it unless we can do it incredibly accurately and proud to say that all the data we've collected suggests that we're doing it incredibly accurately.

So I think we've solved a lot of those is a step-a-step concerns that you had originally raised and that were fair to raise in reference to those other products as they existed a couple years ago. Okay. So let's now say we're measuring steps accurately. Why should I care about steps versus, say, our beautiful strain metric? So I think that was the other big learning for us was that when you talk about steps versus strain, strain is an infinitely more useful metric.

I 100% still stand by that. But steps and strain are actually not a good and a bad version of the same thing. They're actually very orthogonal, meaning they're measuring different things. And there is at this point enough existing writ literature that shows that the different things that they're measuring. are both very important. So as you kind of talk about in that clip, the sort of a major limitation of steps, especially if you're trying to use steps as your strain metric, is that it just sort of says everything is equal. If I'm running, I can get 2,000 steps to the mile. And if I walk that same mile, I get the same 2,000 steps. And we know physiologically that those aren't equal.

Now add in all the other things that you could do. You could have a heavy backpack on. You could be walking upstairs versus flat, all those different things. And steps sort of compresses those all into a step as a step, which isn't true. Strain captures that like some steps I work harder to do than others. And so I get credit in strain for the harder steps. more than for the easier steps. Yeah, and I'm glad you talked about that because I think in my defense of being extremely critical of steps historically, one of the big themes was I was defending why we measure strain versus steps. And look, you know, the big reason I changed my mind on this and we as a company

have changed our point of view on it is just to say, well, maybe it's not either or. Yeah, I really don't think it is. And I think, you know, an important thing about this release is that we didn't replace strain or change strain in response to releasing steps. It's just another dimension that's helpful to understand your day. The other sort of big shortcoming with steps that strain does a great job capturing is that not all activity involves steps. So steps works great for, you know, walking and running and even things like soccer and potentially CrossFit or whatnot.

But, you know, if I swim, I can swim a mile, which is a tough workout, zero steps. Right. And all those other things, you know, zero steps for weightlifting, zero steps for, you know, all kinds of things that we know are really important in the activity lives of our members. And so strain was designed to be sport and activity and modality agnostic. It does a beautiful job at that. When we were creating our hero metric around, you know, am I doing enough activity, strain was a way better version of that. With steps, though, where it wins and why it was so important for us to include it, is that because strain is based off of your heart rate, if your heart rate stays low, you're not going to accumulate a lot of strain.

But you can, especially if you're more fit, do a lot of movement. And that movement tends to get captured in steps. And doing a lot of stepping versus a similarly low strain where you just like stayed on the couch or did nothing all day are physiologically very different too. And so we wanted to make sure that we were capturing that range of low intensity activity. a lot of which involves walking or taking steps so that we could capture when are you moving around, walking around a lot, and physiologically, how does that manifest in terms of how your sleep changes in terms of recovery versus days where you didn't accumulate a lot of strain because you truly didn't do very much? Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean,

I think the other piece just now from having started measuring steps and been using it on whoop for the past couple of months, it is like a motivating metric. I mean, of course, we've always said you can only really manage what you measure. But having a number that just you assign to how much you move every day, I find, I found personally more useful than I was expecting. And I was always someone who used to exercise on most days. So I kind of figured like, okay, well, the strain of that is really all I know. need to know. But to your point, you can have these days where you have a high strain or a low

strain even and it's sort of independent from how much you moved. And as someone who'll do like a big weightlifting workout, say with my trainer in the morning and then otherwise be super sedentary all day, this has kind of gotten me off my ass to like, you know, take some walking meetings or, you know, do something as ridiculous as record a podcast on a treadmill. And like, you know, it's rewarding to see that number climb. Yeah, and I think that was a big aha moment for us. Like, we sort of thought, like, strain was for people like you, right? People who are working out and care about sort of the high-end stuff.

And that Steps was like, I don't know, I feel like the slur that used to, like, circulate in our office was like, steps is for your aunt trying to lose five pounds. And, like, I think we got that wrong a little bit because this pattern of, you know, committed, motivated athletes, but who like have a nine to five job and maybe are very sedentary at their screens or at their desks for the bulk of the workday, we do find that like whether or not those people move during the day, even if like you control for the fact that like they got a really tough high strain workout either this morning or that they're going to do that after work, there are additional benefits that we see that are measurable in our data

if you also made an effort to move during the day. And so what we've seen as we've been beta testing steps internally in our office for the last couple months is that people are doing silly things like this. They're taking more walking meetings and they're, you know, walking around the office or, you know, taking little breaks to stretch doing. different things to kind of play with their step count, but that they're also reporting, you know, feeling better, sleeping better, being more focused, you know, a lot of cognitive benefits without actually changing their workout behavior, without having to break a sweat. And so we started to look at this data as there is this important dimension. People are inherently

motivated by step counts. And we can help capture this thing that like, if I work out really hard. I get my 16 in the morning. I think too many Woot members are going, okay, I'm like, good for the day. I hit my strain goal. And then they give themselves permission to go and sit for 12 hours straight. And that sitting for 12 hours straight is actually inherently unhealthy for us. And our goal in releasing steps is to demotivate you from like letting yourself off the hook because you worked out this morning. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast, or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop.

That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. yeah i mean i think there were really three things that forced me to change my point of view on this the first

which we've talked about is can we measure it super accurately so that a step is a step okay check second was i think this might be the single most requested feature from our members and and so the idea that we could just seamlessly update everyone's hardware to measure something that everyone wanted That was certainly intriguing. The third piece of this, though, which we haven't touched on quite as much, is that, like, there is now a fair amount of research on Steps. And what that research suggests is that Steps is a useful metric. Yeah.

And I think what had originally turned us off from a lot of it is, like, the way that Steps was introduced to the world was, like, remarkably jokey. Yes, we'll say. There's a reason why it's 10,000. Like, that is just a nice round number that, like, literally some, like, no-nothing product person was like, that's nice and round. Let's make you go 10,000. Yeah, let's make it an even 10-K. But, like, it's not like there was some study done that's, like, what's the optimal

number of steps? And actually, research has shown that it's a little bit lower than that, probably closer to 8,000 steps a day. Interesting, okay. But if you look at data, the average American is getting less than three. thousand steps a day. So, like, it's one of those things where, like, yes, it's very joking. Yes, 10,000 is wrong and not special. But, like, people are so far off from where they probably should be that, like, helping them understand and quantify that and move in the right direction

is really important. So, like, you know, that, like, it's one of those things where it's, like, it kind of doesn't super matter. Like, is it 8,000? Is it 8,500 steps? Like, you'd probably need to move more than you're moving. And being able to quantify that and give you a goal, we've seen that, like, everybody that I've spoken to in this building who's been playing around with steps and trying to break up their workday with more periods of intentional movement is reporting, feeling a lot better. And then we're seeing that manifest in, you know, their sleep and their recovery. And so we just want to help people, you know, set this important goal, quantify their progress so that they can then see those benefits. And it doesn't, we kind of had this

like allergic reaction to how unscientific it was. But at the same time, like, it's also a scientific facts that more movement is better, especially if your baseline level of movement is so far from good. What specifically has research shown that being sedentary leads to? that's part of the motivation for this feature. It's like everything. It's all bad things. It's like, yeah. So it's, you know, being sedentary is bad for like glucose metabolism, right? So if you eat and then you move versus you eat and then you sit, you have a higher glucose spike and it lasts longer. So all of the sort of symptoms of poor insulin regulation and all that worse if you don't move. Moving helps to actually, like, relieve pain by, you know, circulating all your, like, lymphatic

system and your blood and just, like, loosening things up, it reduces tightness. So people who move more do tend to feel a lot better. We know that there's all kinds of, like, mental health and cognitive performance benefits, It's people who move more, have less depression, less anxiety, less stress. It's extremely stress relieving to move on a very healthy channel for stress, obviously, and somewhat related to the metabolic benefits, but it's much easier to maintain your weight if you're moving more. We know, like, there's data that's correlated steps with all-cause mortality. Heart disease, obesity. Yeah, obesity, all kinds, like cancer.

It's just like, because of how easy steps have become to measure, and, you know, thanks to wearables, there are these massive longitudinal data sets of steps, it's been correlated with like every bad outcome. And it's very hard to overdose on steps. Right. You know, certainly you can get into something unhealthy. You probably shouldn't walk 22 hours a day. But, you know, for almost everybody on the planet, you can't overdose, more is better for

most people in. So we would probably all benefit from moving more, from moving more frequently. So not just thinking like before work, I'm going to try and walk 10 miles, but also how can I break up my work day with like micro periods of movement. Okay. Well, so to summarize, we realized we could do steps really well. Our members really wanted it. And the research supported it. So here we are. We're now rolling out steps. So we should now talk about what we're actually releasing, or have released, which is, of course, Steps is now part of the Whoop Fabric and inside the Whoop app. First step is everyone's firmware should have been updated.

Just for in layman's term, what does that even mean for people? Yeah, so you get a notification, you probably are used to getting these every couple of weeks or so in your app where it'll say new firmware update available. If you happen to have clicked to this over the last couple weeks, you might already have this firmware. If you can see steps in your app, you already have this firmware. If you're wondering, hey, you said this thing was released a few days ago, why can't I see it? It means that you didn't update your firmware, so you want to go.

You're going to go into strap settings. Go into strap settings, which is in the more part of your app. Go to device settings, and then you can go to Advanced and see firmware check. If you click firmware check, you'll see a blue circle fill up, and it'll say either no new update, which means you already have the latest and greatest firmware, or it'll prompt you to update, accept that prompt and update your firmware. This is because our step-counting algorithm lives on the strap itself, and so without the new firmware, you can't have this algorithm.

And just to reiterate, this is, I think, just a principle of whoop, but we like to try to continue to update your hardware in real time. And the fact that we're literally changing what whoop can measure based on a software update over the air, I think is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. So once you have steps enabled, you'll notice that just like strain or just like calories all day long, starting from when you wake up, you'll see your steps accumulating in real time. You can also look at steps for an individual activity.

So if you go for a run and you want to see how many steps you have in that run, you can look at it for just that period of time. And just on that point, I've actually found that kind of fascinating in its own. right? So I play squash, I play tennis, I'll play golf. And these are our activities where seeing steps creates another dimension. You know, the strain of my golf is not something I actually spend that much time looking at, but knowing that, you know, one golf course was, you know, 8,000 steps or something's actually kind of intriguing versus another course that was less. And then similarly for squash matches, it's actually interesting to see how much I've run around the court, independent from what my strain metric was, because there might be days

where I've covered more ground, but the match actually wasn't as hard because maybe I was moving efficiently or my opponent wasn't playing as good of shots. Yeah. And I think we might discover that Steps is useful in interesting ways, right? Like, if you're moving less within a game, that might be, you know, a good sign that you're more in control of the ball or something like that, and the data point that becomes something. And so Steps is now going to live within a lot of activities. And so you can now, if you add an activity and you label it, you'll most likely see steps within it unless it's some activity that I very obviously wouldn't include steps, for example, weightlifting.

Yeah. And you can also customize it. So, you know, you can move it to be one of your top four metrics so it can live right there under your dials alongside strain. You can move it up and down on your key statistics list. And then, of course, any day you can tap on it and look at a trend. You know, today, if you're looking at this, maybe you're not going to have more than a week's worth of data so you can only see a weak trend. But over time, you'll be able to look at it over a month, six months, and see how it's evolving. Yeah.

We've also given you the ability to set a personal goal around how many steps you want to hit each day. And you can see your trend relative to that goal through your weekly plan, how often you're achieving your step goal. So feel free to make that as ambitious or as not ambitious as we'd like. If you want to get a little bit competitive, I'll share that the average Woot member is just over 8,000 steps a day. Well, that's pretty good, actually, if you think about, you know, Woot members versus the world. Yes. So we're about more than double, the average person, which has something amazing about all of you. So congratulations.

And if you're wondering what that means, if you wanted to have like a little bit of a mental model, roughly 2,000 steps makes a mile. So on average, Woot members cover about four miles a day. And, of course, there's a pretty broad distribution. I mean, we've got runners who are doing many times that, but yeah. So, Will, I think one thing that might be fun is to take a look at our phone from now. Yes, see who's done more.

So I've got 6,066,000, which is just about 2,010 steps. from where we started. What about you? Okay, doing some quick math. I am at roughly 1,900 steps. So you've got me a little beat. I feel like that's because you started before me, maybe? No, I think it's, well, you and I were walking at the same speed, but you're quite a bit taller than I am. And so you're going to cover the same distance in fewer steps. You've got longer legs than I do. And so that's where, you know, this mental model of 2,000 steps to a mile is very loose and, you know, your stride length is going to change that quite a bit. So one of the

reasons why strain is better than steps. Well, look, for folks listening to this, enjoy steps. Hopefully you appreciate that we're going to continue adding more functionality to the app. And Emily, thank you and your team for making it happen. Yeah, thanks for having me, and I hope you enjoy the future. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on the WOOP podcast. Big thank you to Emily and her team for delivering steps. She outstepped me on this podcast. I'll get her next time.

A reminder, you can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you've got a question, you want to see answered on the WOOP podcast. You can email us, podcast at Woop.com. And a reminder, if you're not on Woop, you can check us out, Woop.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial, get the whole experience for 30 days for free. That's on woup.com. And that's a wrap, folks. We'll see you next week.

In the meantime, stay healthy and stay in the green.