WHOOP Podcast - WHOOP 2025 Year in Review: New Features, Research, & Trends with Dr. Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

On this week’s episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance Principal Scientist, Dr. Kristen Holmes and WHOOP SVP of Research, Algorithms and Data, Emily Capodilupo sit down to give you an exclusive look into the WHOOP 2025 Year in Review. Emily and Dr. Holmes share the numerous features released by WHOOP this year, including WHOOP Age and Healthspan, advances in AI and WHOOP Coach capabilities, WHOOP Advanced Labs, and more – all in the effort to add 1 billion healthy years to WHOOP member’s lives. Emily and Dr. Holmes give an inside look into the development of each new feature, the science that powers them, and the ways members can continue to use WHOOP to improve their health and wellbeing. Emily shares her own experience and goals of lowering her WHOOP Age, while Dr. Holmes shares how Healthspan significantly motivated her and her family to make behavior changes toward a better future. Together, Emily and Dr. Holmes unpack global trends of 2025, including the healthiest country by WHOOP Age Delta, Recovery, and the rise of specific activities and sports across the entire WHOOP Community. Emily matches outstanding WHOOP Data from some of our partners and previous podcast guests and teases some exciting WHOOP developments coming in 2026.Check out your 2025 Year In Review, available now in the WHOOP app. (00:10) WHOOP 2025 YIR(00:48) Impact of WHOOP Age and Healthspan(06:41) Behind The Algorithm: What It Took To Create WHOOP Age(09:50) Inside WHOOP Coach with Memory(14:14) WHOOP Advanced Labs(23:54) Women’s Health and Cycle Tracking On WHOOP(28:22) 2025 Superlatives(29:35) How Strength Training Has Impacted Longevity & Healthspan(30:00) Impact of Sleep Consistency on Overall Health(33:05) Training To Live Better: What Do We Need?(37:02) True or False: Sleep Edition(38:48) Crowning The Healthiest Country by WHOOP Age Delta(46:52) Most Logged Strain Activities for 2025(47:37) Looking Ahead to 2026WHOOP Year In Review 2025Support the showFollow WHOOP: Sign up for WHOOP Advanced Labs Trial WHOOP for Free www.whoop.com Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Emily, hello. I am so pumped to get to do the 20-25 year in review with you this year. Same year. Yay. One of my favorite episodes of the year. It has been an incredible year. Like when we think about the launch of 5.0 and just how it spanned apparel, accessories, software, hardware. I mean, battery life, I mean, that to me has been just an

absolute game changer. We've got a medical rate technology, aphib detection, blood pressure insights, just the list goes on and on. When you zoom out and think about the innovations and features, which one is most exciting to you? I know. It's so hard. It's such a an unfair question. And in part, it's because I think that it's the way that everything comes together that's so powerful. And I actually, I truly believe that that is Woop's secret sauce, is the weaving of things. You know, I think one of my absolute favorite projects that I've worked on in my almost 13 years at Woop has been health span. And in large part, because it was the first time that we've ever really tried to say to people, here's a goal that, or here's how we should think

about objectively good and objectively needing work and not just focused on helping you make incremental improvements to be, you know, slightly better version of yourself. And I think that that framing, at least for me, and I think, you know, so much of the feedback that we've gotten is so incredibly powerful and motivating. And, you know, I'll share with you that. it's my birthday in seven weeks. And I had this goal that on my birthday, I want my biological age or my whoop age to be 10 years younger than my chronological age. And I am on track for this, which I'm very excited about. But just like creating that. The fact that you can know that, though, that you can know that. And then what I love about it, because I've done other blood tests and different things that have given me a biological age in the past. And I've always found them very sort of, silly and unmotivating, in large part because a lot of these other age clocks will use the average American as sort of neutral. And so your biological age equals your chronological age if you're the same as the average person. But if you know even a little bit about what's

going on in this country, the average person is like so far from an aspirational level of healthy that it's like you'd get your age back and you'd be 17 years younger or something and just like roll your eyes at like how unhelpful of information that is. That was my experience. Yeah, because I was like, okay, I'm not 32. Right. And when it tells you you're, you know, half as old as you actually are, not only you're not motivated to do anything, but it just doesn't necessarily even align with how you're feeling. Like I remember doing, you know, one of these like blood tests, get a biological age thing because there were like things I was wondering about. And then it would like tell

you like some things need work, but yet somehow you're like 50% younger. And it just like didn't quite add up. And I didn't know like, does that mean I should address these things or am I like just so amazingly amazing that I should kick back and relax. I actually found it like anti-motivating and giving, you know, too much license for inaction. And one of the things that I think that we did that was differentiating and special and motivating is we actually targeted our what we call referent age. And so that point where biological age equals chronological age at meeting healthy recommendations. And so it's a little bit aspirational even to just break even. But then beyond that, we made sure that it was incredibly transparent how the math works.

and really easy to understand what you need to do to move this. And so you can see for every input exactly what it's going to do to your age. And so when I first got my whoop age, which was way earlier than our members, because my team developed it. So I got to see some of the early ones. I could tell like, okay, if I can get my VOTU max up by, you know, five, like I'm going to take another year off. And so that was something that was like, I think I can do this. I know how to go and tackle this. I'm going to make that one of the goals.

And then it was if I add another 30 minutes of strength training, here's what I could do. And I wasn't doing enough zone four or five training. I was doing a lot of lower intensity stuff. And so just really seeing like what are the components that are making it that would be easier for me to move or harder for me to move. And then there were things like sleep consistency, which I – That's a tough one. Well, I take that very seriously.

So I had already maxed out the whoop age benefits there. So I was just like, okay, I just need to maintain this. And so kind of going through all of those things and then setting very specific component level goals made it really easy to just systematically tackle my whoop age and I've got it down by about seven years over the last six months or so. And I'm on track to get to that 10 year gap that I want by my birthday, which will be very exciting. So I've just found that that feature has been one of the more motivating things whoop has ever released. And I love using it. This is an older feature, but that has a totally new life for me is whoop age in combination with weekly plan. So I would set my weekly plan to the things that I know I need to do in order to buy next Sunday because whoop age updates every Sunday have the gap that I need.

And so then throughout the week I would see, okay, you know, if I'm going to get my, you know, whoop age where I need it to be, I know I need to get at least, you know, 10,000 steps or something. And whoop will tell you you're five out of seven to your plan. Yeah, and it's telling you what you're doing. And so I used the weekly plan during the week to make sure that I was on tracks. And then I felt like on Sunday when Woop Age updated, it wasn't like a big reveal surprise moment. It was I know exactly what I need to do during the week. And so and pro tip for people who haven't been using this, you can use Woop AI to help set the weekly plan. And so you can talk to it about what are the most impactful levers in order to change your Woop age. and then you can build your weekly plan with the AI.

So you don't even need to do all of this math and all this thinking. It'll do it for you, which is amazing. Right. And so I love that all of a sudden, weekly plan, which was not a feature I super loved before Wu Bage came out. Now together it's just this like, I check it like five times a day that like come on track. New life is a great way of describing it. And to piggyback, I mean, health span.

I think people don't appreciate how much work went into that. Obviously, a huge shout out to Tori Lee. who really did, you know, a bulk of the work, you know, frankly, but all of the meetings to just figure out what the reference ranges are, like pouring over the literature. I mean, we've looked at thousands and thousands and thousands of papers. I mean, just that span of three years where we were trying to figure out. And in parallel, we were developing V-O-2 Mac. So there's just a lot of like work that was going in to really, I think, develop a feature, obviously working with Buck Institute as well in kind of parallel. And it is an elegant

sophisticated feature that tells you exactly how to apply your effort, you know, if obviously longevity is a goal. Yeah. And sorry, I know we don't want to spend the whole podcast on who page, but I think there's three things that are really important that are related to. One is that people don't realize, like, how many features that we released even ahead of launch that were specifically prioritized because of it. So we did steps.

That was a 2024 release, but it was because we knew that was important for Woopage. We wanted to have that metric in order to go into. to health span. And then same thing with VO2 Max, which we released in February. And so that was specifically because the literature overwhelmingly supported the idea that VO2 Max was important for a functional age. And so we just couldn't imagine a version being as good without it. So we built that entire feature, which is an amazing feature as a standalone, but also really enhanced whoop age. And so there was a lot of work kind of behind the scenes to bring these different components into line with the literature so that we could then have them feed in. And then the other

thing that people don't necessarily realize is that when we realized how much of a sort of centering North Star this age metric was, we actually set a goal as a company to add a billion healthy years to the planet. And this is a little bit of inside kind of sauce or, you know, how the sausage is made, whatever, about how whoop works. But One of the things that we now talk about weekly as an executive team is how many healthy years we've added to our member base. And so we've really reoriented from success being how many of our members are using the product to how many of our members are getting younger because of the product. And when that's your top level goal, it changes what you're optimizing for. It totally

transformed the conversation about what is good product. And I actually think that everything we've built since then with this lens of is this going to make people younger is just so much more powerful and honestly like the thing I get really proud of as a scientist is are we making people healthier not just are we giving people a whole bunch of data so that they can like feel overwhelmed with data soup totally it's not younger for the sake of younger it is it's it's younger with the idea that you are improving the quality of your life yeah right you're able to live your values with more joy and be around for the people that you love, you know, whatever you're pursuing in your life, you know, you want to be able to get after that

with quality. Yeah. And Chris, I know you have a pretty powerful whoop age story. I don't know if you want to. Yeah. So one of the like features that has really enabled a lot of the personalization that you're talking about is the Woop Coach and in the memory capabilities. And I think for folks who haven't used Woop Coach in a while, obviously it was in beta, you know, still in data, I think, technically, but it's come so far. And really, it's because we have added the memory capabilities. You know, if you were to say, hey, WOOP, based on my health span, how do I knew to apply my effort to decrease my pace of aging? It is going to tell you exactly what you need to do. And that is, to me, there's nothing more empowering than that. Just incredible.

And for people who don't know, what we mean by memory is when you have a conversation with the WOOP AI, it's saving pieces of that conversation and then refreshing itself on them and referencing those conversations in future conversations. Context. Yeah. So I was training for a half marathon. I told loop that I was training for a half marathon. And then when I was asking about improving my health span, it was saying, well, I know you have

this half marathon in four weeks, two weeks, whatever it was at the time. So here's how you both optimize around that goal while also this dual goal of improving your health span. And so it would kind of go back and forth between those things. And I didn't have to tell it every time, like given that I'm training for half marathon. So it would know those things about me. And then it also knew that like that event had passed. And so, okay, now that that's over, we can focus just on this other goal.

So that was pretty cool. It's getting just really sophisticated. I traveled to Dubai recently and I live on the East Coast and the U.S. And, you know, I said, how do I, what can I do? You know, I traveled to Dubai in 48 hours. What can I do to mitigate the dilatur's effects on my physiology? And it gave me a laundry list of, as someone who studies circadian physiology, I was like, like, okay, this is actually really good. You know, it told me to think intentionally about my

feeding window. It told me how to think about my plane ride there. It asked me about my meeting schedule. You know, so it really was, it was good. You know, so I think if you haven't gotten it to coach, get in there, you know, experiment, get curious. And I think you'll be surprised in the insights that you get. Yeah, I think one more thing about how far coach has come. Just a couple weeks before you were in Dubai, I was in Doha. So same part of the world. And as you might imagine with the seven-hour time zone change, those were the worst sleep consistency scores that I've had, I think, since you and I went to Australia five years ago. But I told Whoop Coach that, you know, I'm in Doha. Again, kind of similar conversation to what you had, helped me get over jet lag and all that kind of

stuff. And because Coach remembered that I was in Doha, it wasn't reprimanding me for my sleep consistency falling off of a cliff and instead it was very supportive and then it didn't talk about this sort of wild you know kind of deviation in my behavior as something that it needed to continue to focus on because it understood that this was a one-time blip specifically related to this trip and not that I've abandoned good sleep consistency pattern so when I went back to Boston it was okay here's how we're going to get over jet lag not wow like your sleep consistency was so bad try and get back on track because it sort of knows that I'm the kind of of person who my sleep consistencies in the 90s all the time. Like, you don't need to coach me on

this. I need help with jet lag. But I don't need to be motivated to kind of get back on track. And so it was able to kind of find the actually useful angle. Whereas if I had been in Boston and all of a sudden my sleep consistency fell off a cliff like that, I think it would be a very different conversation. Totally. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And I had a similar experience. Like I was really supportive and encouraging. Instead of yelling at me when I got back. So I definitely encourage anybody who hasn't used coach in a while. Just take a couple minutes and tell it what's going on in your life. It will remember.

And then it references that. And then it'll save that. So when you come back in six months and you say, like, you know, tell me about my sleep consistency for the year. It's not going to give you this like really unhelpful thing around like, wow. And, you know, October, you really like lost the plot there. It's like, no way. You were traveling. Yeah.

Went on a pretty big trip. Yeah. If you missed our last sale, don't worry because we have a number. great deal starting in just a couple of days. Be on the lookout for another opportunity to save big on memberships. I mean, we'd be remiss not to talk about advanced labs. You know, this is just, you know, I think Emily, you know, for you and I who have been at the company for so long, we've been dreaming and working towards this for a very, very long time. This is very exciting data set to have in parallel, you know, running in parallel to all

the physiological data that, that, you know, folks are collecting every day. And, you know, my My co-parent, Matt, he basically stopped drinking like seven years ago. And two years in, I was like, hey, let's get some blood work done. So he had been, you know, basically not drinking for two years, really focused on his health, you know, doing everything, you know, as right as he could. And we got his blood work done. And it was actually pretty depressing. You know, he was out of range in most areas. And to your earlier point about just the biological age, it was, you know, just not motivating, you know, to your point. We were, you know, having our example, just keep doing what you're doing. And I think the story there and what I think folks who are getting their lab work done, it takes a while to move your blood work into optimal ranges, right? And, you know, so fast forward five years. So literally just this past week got blood work done, got it interpreted, you know, on Saturday. Everything has improved. One of the markers that really stood out, his testosterone, you know, five years ago was,

300, and it's now in the 700s. So the story there is just understanding that your biological blood biomarkers are going to probably lag, right, and not going to improve in parallel to a lot of the lifestyle behavior changes that you're making. You know, he was making lots of changes to kind of how he's managing stress. And, you know, one of the big changes that we made is really actually using Whoop to get his kind of balance between his strain and his recovery more in line. He was really chasing workouts, you know, because he eventually was like, holy cow, my testosterone has improved so much. And I was like, you have not been chasing workouts as much. You know, like he's really been more intelligent about managing his volume and intensity in relationship

to his actual recovery or capacity. And the result has been, he's as fit as he's ever been, his testosterone is in optimal ranges and, you know, all of this, every single one of his blood baromarchos has improved. So I tell this story just because, you know, for folks out there who are making big lifestyle changes that might right now feel like a little bit of a sacrifice, stay the course. You will see it manifest in your blood data. Eventually, you just kind of have to keep going. Yeah, I think that's such a powerful story and just obviously so happy for Matt that he was able to turn that around and then get that validation a couple years later. It was a beautiful moment.

I think the thing that I'm just completely obsessed with about advanced labs is that while none of the blood work that we're doing is in any way original, right? It's all in partnership with Quest and stuff that you can get. What we've added to it that's uniquely whoop is a new interpretation around what the optimal versus functional versus sort of not great ranges are and helping people understand this data in a different way than like a traditional primary care physician might be interpreting the same data. So like there are a lot of things. I think like the one thing that people don't realize and that I feel like I can't say enough times because it's so important to understand is that like the traditional health care system is designed for like once you cross some threshold of disease. And,

they're really well equipped to medicate you out of those diseases and to manage those diseases once you meet this definition of disease. But there's this huge spectrum before you are sick, you know, before insurance reimburses things and these labels follow you around, between optimal and merely not yet diseased. And a lot of people spend a lot of time nowhere near optimal, but still subclinical. So like before this definition of disease and they don't feel awesome, but because everyone around them is in this like kind of crummy but I can get through my day state, we normalize it to such a degree that we just say, welcome to your 40s.

You know, I have a busy job. Welcome to parenthood. Like we excuse, excuse, excuse. And we even laugh about it, right? Like the thing that like drives me crazy is how much we normalize hangar. That idea that like you're not yourself when you're hungry is like that's a literally metabolic dysfunction. And then we laugh about it and we're like, you just need a candy bar. And it's like, no, you need so much more than a candy bar. First of all, but like,

you need to be able to burn fat for fuel. If you are in a state where you're not yourself when you're hungry, like that means that like you're not able to access fat storage. Like your sort of metabolic health is out of whack. And that is not inevitable. And that doesn't mean just wait for it to turn into type 2 diabetes, which by the way is the path that you're on if that's what you're feeling. And, you know, maybe something else kills you before you ever get there. But, like, that is the spectrum that we're talking about. And, like, you need to gain muscle. You need to do certain things. But those are all, like, very doable things. What we've done with our interpretation of biomarkers that, again, are not proprietary at all, but the interpretation is, hey, here are some

things that you might be feeling because this is functionally not optimal. Here are some things you can do. And here's what to look for in whoop to know that you're making progress there. You know, right after we launched advanced labs, I was sitting down in a one-on-one with one of my colleagues and here at VOOP, and he was telling me how his metabolic markers were just totally at a range. I mean, he's pre-diabetic. So his home I are, his HBA1C, fasting glucose, you know, we're all, you know, pointing toward prediabetes. And I asked him, I was like, hey, like, how often do you lift? He's like, I've never lifted before. And so, and I point out the metabolic because he's not alone. You know, that was actually, actually, you know, I know we can't talk about specific numbers yet, but we've seen some preliminary advanced labs data and a good proportion of the folks who have engaged in advanced labs whose data we have have an alarming level of metabolic dysfunction. Well, there's national data that says that 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. So population's not much better than that.

One of the things that we'll be able to do is we'll be able to basically pair those data with how much time they're spending strength training, for example, how many minutes, how many steps? You know, we're going to be able to really understand where you're going maybe wrong and what behaviors you can lean into to improve these markers, to your point, relatively quickly. What I really just want everybody to hear with advanced labs is if you feel less good than you did, quote unquote, in your prime or in your 20s or anything like that, you might have a biomarker that's functionally out of range, that most likely is fairly simply behavior modifiably fixable in a relatively short period of time. And I think that's the thing that I also want people to

because I feel like some people don't do this stuff because they're like not really ready to completely overhaul their life, right? They don't want to give up carbs. They don't want to start working out four hours a week. So they don't want to do the blood test because it's just going to tell them something they're not ready to hear. But, and I've shared the story on the podcast before, after I finished breastfeeding my daughter, my vitamin D level was like 19, which is like a third of what it should be. And it was a $5, like, couple week problem to fix of supplementing vitamin D, which is so easy. And my energy levels were like through the roof. And one of our other colleagues was telling me that he did similar blood work before advanced labs came out.

His vitamin B12 was really low, started supplementing again, $5 problem, like take a multivitamin or B12 supplement. and his energies through the roof. And so it's like so many of the things that we're going to find are really easy. Now there's also some scary or harder things that we're going to find, but knowledge is power and not knowing about it doesn't make it go away. But I think for the majority of people that I've spoken to, it's kind of simple stuff that's really easy to fix. And so this isn't, you know, this isn't a don't do it until you're ready to overhaul your

life and make these massive changes, although I'm totally here for you if you want to do that it's more like there's really little things and what's I think so crazy was I had told my prior PCP like multiple times like oh you know I kind of like don't really feel like a bounce back post baby and like all that kind of stuff most people yeah that math you know yeah and we just accept it as normal yeah and what's annoying is if you pay full price like no insurance or anything of vitamin D blood tests like nine dollars yeah with insurance it's usually like free So this isn't even like a wildly inaccessible thing. And I told my PCP like, oh, I was feeling this way.

And he kept telling me I was healthy and normal. And like, you know, most women feel this way after having a baby. And just getting access to this blood work was just like, oh, here's a $5 problem to fix. And just, you know, I don't want to minimize the privilege involved in, like, access to all those things. But I'm not exaggerating when I say like life changing to fix that problem. And I was so mad that it took like two years to get access to that. One of the things that I'm really excited about a feature that launched this year that we haven't spoken about enough is the menstrual cycle insights feature. And I think people don't realize how much valuable data is in there.

But even if you're not worried about pregnancy or anything like that, the health and regularity of your menstrual cycle is one of your most important vital signs. And I think we did a really beautiful job in helping you understand what's normal for you and your cycle. cycle with that feature. You know, it does the sort of classic predict ovulation window, which, you know, you can use how you choose to use, you know, predict your period, which actually is like super helpful because I just went on vacation. And the sort of heads up from whoop that my period was going to start on vacation, like totally changed the way packed because it's like, okay, I need to like be prepared, which I wasn't like thinking about it. But that like heads up that, you know, this is going to happen while you're out, bring the right stuff. It was super

helpful. But more importantly than that, your cycle becoming less regular is one of the first signs of overtraining. And it's a gift that women get visibility into this in Mendo. You know, if you're... Both in timing and length. The length in terms of how many days you bleed for, for sure, if it gets shorter. And whether or not the sort of days from, like between periods, if that duration is changing from what's normal for you, that's a big red flag that your hormones are getting disrupted. And if you intervene on overtraining as soon as you see that, you can prevent getting into like a sort of functionally overtrained like red-ass kind of energy deficit state. And so, you know, I really encourage people who are listening to this and they're like, motivation's not my

issue. It's I need to know when to pull back or I'm feeling super motivated because health span or advanced labs like gave me the kick in the pants that I need. Like to be really careful because that hyper-motivated state can go too far. More is not more all the time. And so keep an eye on that. And I think I don't know. More is not better. More is just more. More is more. Yeah. More is not necessarily better. That's a better way of putting it. I think I've seen a lot of people on whoop get really motivated. I saw actually one of our colleagues, such a beautiful story, got really spooked by his whoop age when it first came out internally to employees months before it came out to everyone else. and just, like, woke up one day and is like, I'm going to lose 70 pounds, which he did

and, like, has kept it off now for a couple months. I'm super proud of him and, like, went from... I was very deep on that journey with him. I actually got a strength training. I'm like such a strength training pusher. I know. I worked out with him. I love that.

Yeah, no, I mean, he's a good friend. But, like, lost 70 pounds, went from, you know, working out zero times a week to almost, you know, six or seven. and totally overhauled his diet and all that kind of stuff. And it went really well for him. But generally that, like, that extreme can backfire. And so I don't generally like love seeing that. And I think especially for women, if you were going to do something extreme because you're feeling hypermotivated, whether it's because of advanced labs, whoop age or something totally unrelated, watch your cycle and use the Metro Cycle Insights feature for that. It's fully revamped all new since launch of our new.

Hardware. Yeah, it's really beautiful. It's not like we launched it and left it. Yeah. We've been working on it. It's actually a feature that I look at like daily. I like keep track of it because I know that I feel different and respond different to different things. My body responds very differently to workout, follicular versus my luteal phase. And that knowledge is just empowering, right? Like you feel so much more in control of your body. And I think for women like because of how hormones vary and how influential to start lifestyle. is on those hormonal variations, like you can feel a little out of control sometimes. And I think those insights can kind of help you course correct faster, you know, so you don't kind of get down this path where you're like, oh my God, I'm out of control. Yeah, worth mentioning that what we're talking about in terms of your cycle being a really useful kind of early warning sign really only applies if you're not on hormonal birth control because that can mask all of this. But if you're not

on hormonal birth control, even if you think, oh, I don't need to pay so much attention to this because I'm not thinking about fertility, whether conception or contraception related. It's such a powerful vital sign. It's, you know, we've kind of fully automated tracking it. And so don't sleep on that feature. 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. So we've got just some insane massive metrics, which are really cool.

We've just, you know, sleeping billions of minutes, hundreds of billions of minutes, logging, you know, trillions of steps, hundreds of millions of hours in zone one to three, just incredible. There's some really members who log steps. It's the, it's 5.74 trillion steps this year, and that's equivalent to walking to Neptune, which is kind of cool. I don't know who figures this stuff out. Boot members lifted 1184 trillion kilograms this year. And that is equivalent to 789 million blue whales. Love that. I love that. I, well, we'll talk about 2026, but that is just, I just want every single Woot member lifting weights this year.

You know, one of the things that feels like the biggest win, and we talked earlier about our goal of adding a billion healthy years to the planet, one of the metrics that people have really, we've seen behavior change, is strength training. And I think that it's because when you tell somebody this is making you old, it's motivating. And so the two things that have moved a lot are sleep consistency, which you and I have not shut up about for a decade. And all of a sudden. And nobody was doing anything. I literally published a paper like five years ago that said that it's going to make you like suicidal and depressed to not have good sleep. And everybody was like, okay, I'm going to do nothing with that information. And then we're like, it makes you old. And they're like fixed. And so I think it's hilarious. And a huge lesson for me about the importance of, you know, if the message isn't resonating, you have to change the message. But I'm so excited to see it finally resonating for people because, you know, irregular sleep cycles are known to be a class one carcinogen.

which means that it is not merely correlated, but understood causally to cause cancer in humans. And yet, it's something that we are horrible about. It's one of the most important things you can do actually more important than getting enough sleep every night is to get that sleep at a consistent time. And so that and strength training, which, you know, we used to think that muscle was just about, you know, how powerful am I or, you know, how much can I lift and all that kind of stuff. And that is incredibly important. But we now understand that muscle is a metabolically active tissue and you will not be metabolically healthy if you do not have good muscle mass. It is our store for sugar. It's much more effective than like glycogen in the liver and stuff like that because we can only store so much, 100 grams.

And we think about strength as, you know, in my 20s, I want to have like, you know, bro cred of I can benchpress my body weight or whatever. And it has a role in aesthetics for sure. But it matters for so many other reasons. And I actually saw an Instagram ad that was so cute. And it was like a grandpa practicing lifting a kettlebell. And then it like cuts to what he was training for. And you see him lifting like a toddler up to put the star in the Christmas tree. And the caption was like kind of normalized training.

I forget what it was. It was so cute. But it was like kind of about like normalize these like functional life goals. And I was like, yes, that that's the message that people need. to see, which is that, you know, you might say like, oh, you know, I don't care about being buff. I'm in my 80s. I'm past that or I don't care, you know. It's not about vanity.

It's not about vanity or body positivity or any of that stuff. It's literally about like being able to live the life you want to live. When we look at just our own data around kind of metabolic health, it is very clear that our population is actually undermuscled. Yes, badly. Right. Badly undermuscled, right? So this is a call to action, you know, that people need to improve.

the quality of their muscle tissue for all the reasons that you just outlined. I mean, 80% of your glucose disposal has a potential to be uptake by the muscle. So if you don't have quality muscle tissue, that goes into your bloodstream. And that is what is creating these, you know, results that you're getting high fasting glucose, you know, HB-A-1C, that's out of range, HOMA-R. You know, it's like, that's why. And this is just the fastest way to tackle it, you know, is by lifting. Yeah, and I think one of the things that people don't realize is that, a lot of advances in even things like packaging or just like all this convenience, right? We get everything delivered instead of going shopping.

Like there were all these little micro strength moments we used to have that technology has eliminated. And so there was a study that actually really scared me as the mom of a toddler that little kids, their hand strength, is so much worse than it used to be. And it's like part of it is because toys have gotten better and like all the pieces fit together more easily. But when I watch my daughter sometimes with like those little, like think things like Legos where they have to like snap together and pull apart, like they're all much easier and better than they used to be. Like my mom saved a lot of the toys from when we were little and they're harder to play with. And she gets frustrated and gives up more easily. And I'm like, no, this is like hand strength.

It's so important. And, you know, she's not even three yet. And so like at that age, it's also, you know, hand strength translates to handwriting, translates to all these other things. But like we have to supplement that back in because, you know, we used to work really, really hard to like scrote. scrub floors and now we have the, you know, robot mops. And we just like, like, a lot of things are easier when we think of that as purely good. And I'm not saying, like, make those things hard again. But we do need to be conscious of what we lost in gaining all of that efficiency and productivity because we are very badly undermuscled. And it's not just an aesthetic concern

for sure. And it relates to living independently in like old age. You know, I think like one thing I try to remind people of a lot is, you know, getting on and off the toilet independently. is the ability to do one body weight squat. You know, can you carry a 10-pound thing, you know, pan full of food from the stove to the counter or from the oven to the counter or whatever it is? If you can't do these things all of a sudden, you can't really live alone. And so when you think about wanting to delay the timeline to whatever form of assisted living that, you know, end of life might take on, it's how do I make sure that I have the strength

and the muscle mass? Because if you're not actively training, you're going to lose 1% per year. starting in around age 30, and that's just going to kind of free fall. And so as we are, thanks to modern medicine, expected to live a lot longer if we want those marginal years to be with quality, we need to be investing in strength. And it's not too early at any point to do that. And also importantly, it's not too late. There's an incredible study done in I think 2022 in Australia called the Liftmore study. And they got women in their 70s to squat and deadlift their body weight. So they did like a really cool. Yeah. And they like improved their bone mineral

density. And it took them three years to get this study through IRB because it was originally rejected as unethical and unsafe to have older women lift that kind of weight. And that's part of why I think it had to happen in Australia. Like we couldn't get it approved. And then they finally got it through. And not only was it totally safe, but like all their blood work, it was just absolutely massive in terms of what it did for this cohort of women. The shifts are not clinically significant across the board. But it wasn't even known that you could improve bone mineral density in postmenopausal women and 100% of them did. It was really beautiful and super inspiring. And so I just, it's both never too early to start, but also never too late and incredibly protective. And, you know,

I think, like, the weird sort of place that we're in right now as a CITES, we should expect to live a lot longer, hopefully, than people did 50 years ago. But we should also expect that our last years, if we don't do anything, are going to be so much crumbier than, like, the marginal decade. And that's the reality today. That's the reality today, but it's completely preventable. Yeah, that's the opportunity. Yeah.

And if you're listening, you know, go to a Y. If you've never lifted before, go to your local YMCA and ask for three training sessions. Yeah. Give you the basics. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it'll cost you about a hundred bucks, you know, but it's totally worth it. Okay. True or false, Emily? All right. Millennials slept the most in 2025. False. Who do you think slept the most? The older, like the boomers. Oh. Is it Gen Z? It's Gen Z. Oh. I know. With, um. Good for Gen Z. Yeah. Yeah. Gen Z. Oh, no, that does make sense because younger people need more sleep.

Okay, true or false. Females slept more than males. True. 434 minutes versus 413. Okay, put the four generations in order of earliest to latest bedtime. The four generations are Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers. Okay, so my guess based on just sort of what we know about circadian preference is that the oldest generations go to bed the earliest and it's just going to go in order. So boomers go to bed the earliest, then Gen X, then Millennials, then Gen Z. Yep. Good girl. So good.

And that's actually, it's actually interesting. So as we get older, our innate preference for sleep shifts earlier. And it's believed that this is a protective mechanism for sort of nomadic societies that this would evolve. Because if people have different innate preferences for sleep, you'd get more coverage in terms of like people keeping watch. So, like, the younger people would stay up late while the older people went to sleep. And then the older people would wake up when the younger people went to sleep. And so you'd never have a situation where, like, the whole tribe is asleep at once because that makes you very vulnerable.

And so it's kind of funny that it's not sort of randomly distributed, but instead shifts as you age. But you could totally see why that would be in a sort of cooperative, evolved society, incredibly productive. Yeah. Yeah, totally. All right. The healthiest country by Woop Age Delta. This absolutely shocked me.

I would never in a million years, I've guessed it. I want to see if you can. So the age delta is at negative 3.53 years, which is pretty cool. It's located in Europe. It doesn't at all surprise me as Europe. It's definitely going to be like a Scandinavian country, right? Finland. They're actually the Kings of Recovery.

Okay. But they're not. So I cheated a little. They're not in the top five, actually. They're not. Interesting. Okay. Eastern Europe.

For the top spot. Slovakia. Yeah. Let's go. The Slovakians. You know, I think that it's been really interesting traveling recently. There are places, I mean, you and I just both got back from separate trips to the GCC. And what blew my mind when I was in Doha is like every block has some sort of group exercise.

studio on it, whether it was like, and they're all American brands was like sculpt, F-45, Orange Theory, everywhere. I was like, am I in Boston or halfway around the world, right? And the boardwalk in Dubai has like, it has a cycling kind of lane. It has a run, a rubberized running lane, and then a boardwalk for people who are walking. Yes, it is like they have built these cities for exercise. There are cultures built around exercise. I mean, it's why I'm so excited that who is coming to Doha in a couple months. We just signed a lease. I'm super excited about the new space. But there are places where you're seeing national efforts to take fitness and with it preventative health and wellness and longevity at a national level. And I'm so inspired by it.

I mean, you and I had this conversation just coming back from the GCC and saying like they are doing so many things right over there. And like I'm pumped for them and the way that they're. Definitely some improvement on the sleep. I mean, their sleep schedule. That's why I did not get. then their sleep is really awful. So there's still room for improvement, but they're getting a lot right. And exercise is protective. You know, when a lot of those other behaviors are off, you know, if you're exercising, you know, you can offset some of the negative impact. Yeah. So I do think kind of, you know, just having traveled a bit with Whoop recently, that sneak peek into the ways where these cultural revolutions around fitness are just

impossible for a place like the U.S. where we have almost the opposite culture to compete with. So I knew it wasn't us. Number two. This one won't be as big as a surprise. And hint, it's kind of a blue zone. Italy? Yes. Yeah. Negative 3.35. Coming in at the third spot, another Eastern European country. Czech Republic. Good for them. And then this one neighbors Slovakia, I think. It sounds similar. Slovenia. Yeah. And then we've got a Scandinavian to coming in at number five.

We know it's not Finland. Sweden? Close. Norway? Close. Denmark? Yeah. Okay.

All right. That's a great job, Emily, as usual. All right, health span promoters, top three. Look at the impact of behaviors on whoop age globally. We see the number one contributor is. VO2 max. So the average impact is negative 0.82. So it's interesting. I'm surprised a little bit. I think some of that is just the way that the math of health span works, that VO2 max is given a lot of weight in the algorithm. Because the research so overwhelmingly supports it drives. Health span, right? Which in what we say when we say health span, what we're modeling is risk of all cause mortality relative to your.

age bracket. And I think one of the reasons why it earns that much weight is because it doesn't hide anything. So a bunch of systems need to be working appropriately. And so it captures in some ways like long term exercise behavior, long term health behavior, long term, even like weight management, because the math of VO2 max is literally like per kilogram. And so it captures a ton of of different things all in that one little number. Yeah, I really like, that was for me one of the areas. I was, I think, 47 when I first got my V-O-2 max. I was kind of like, you know, I just felt like I should have been, it should be better. But I worked so hard over the summer. I made a goal to PR my mile by the end of the summer. Oh, amazing. I did. I got a 615, which I was so

pumped. And that's not my PR. I mean, I was 117 pounds as a freshman in high school. I ran a 537. That was my actual VR. But, but obviously, I was like, effectively a little boy at that point. because I hadn't got married or anything. But yeah, so I was pretty pumped. And then I just had my VOT2 max done yesterday, Bruce Rampt test, and had a 51. That's amazing. I know. So huge improvements.

But that's all because of Halspan, like pushing me to Zone 4 and 5 and just being like, you need to do more of this, you know? And it's been such a positive, I think, reinforcing mechanism to get out there and, like, really push myself. So it's been cool. All right. Number two rank, weekly zone. one to three minutes, which is obviously one of the contributors to health span, is the

average impact is negative 0.45. So that's good. People walk in and, you know, and a low-level activity. Yeah. And we specifically did zone one through three and not sort of the zone zero stuff because a lot of the zone zero gets captured with steps with walking. Most people aren't going to hit zone one with just walking. I mean, if you're power walking or really being intentional, you can or any kind of incline. So that's going to get captured through counting steps. But to get into zone one for most people, you are actually being pretty intentional about working out. Yeah. Yeah, that's great call. And the third contributor is super cool to see. So happy we added those daily steps. Yeah. And we know, obviously, sedentary behavior is, you know, just

obviously a huge detractor of health span and getting those steps in is a thing. Yeah, and I think what's exciting about seeing steps be so impactful for people is it's one of the most accessible things on there. And I think I've shared this in the past, but when we released steps about a year and change ago, Will, our CEO, got me as a present, a walking treadmill for under my desk here at work. And this is like one of, like, I'm like, I'm a, I'm a, So I set again in my weekly plan a step's goal and I want to hit 10,000 steps a day and I check it multiple times. And if I'm not on track in my office, I'll just walk it on that thing. I'll just pop on the trip. But it's like I can get, you know, a thousand here, a thousand there. And then it doesn't have to be this whole big thing of like, oh, when am I going to go? Because to actually just say like, okay, I'm going to go do with 10,000 steps. That's well over an hour. That's a big commitment. But can I get a half, you know, like can I do a half a mile here? Can I do 30 minutes, whatever it is. And just snack it in there. And it's become like, again, it's like, in some ways it feels silly that, you know, we had to gamify it or whatever.

But then I do notice that when I'm hitting it consistently, I feel better. And when I'm like, you know, have all these travel days. Like when I flew to Doha, I think that day I had something like 800 steps. Like, because it was like I just spent the whole day on the plane. So it was just like the little bit of walking in the airport. And I just like, we're just feeling so crazy. And it's like, how can I just like, how can I sneak? these in somehow before I go to bed and just like feeling so grateful that I even though it was

sort of silly gamification it's it's real yeah having those data is powerful yeah you know the top five activities with the biggest growth from 2024 to 2025 weightlifting oh loves the I know me too keep it up guys I know keep going keep going and number two field hockey you must feel so personally validated I feel personally validated I think I have single handedly gut our field hockey community energized about using whoop. It was so cool to see the national championship this weekend and see so many young women here in the U.S., like wearing whoop. It just made me so proud. And the international stage as well, like just blowing up like, you know, the Dutch and the Argentine, like everyone is wearing whoop in the sport of field hockey. Paddle number three,

gymnastics and jumping rope, which so cool. I had no idea. So Emily, as we look to 2026, what gets you super excited. I am not going to spoil too much about a very confidential roadmap, but I am so excited about everything coming out on the AI front. It feels like some of the stuff that I've been playing with that are in internal alphas and soon to come to our members are completely game-changing. I'm just really excited about that. And then on a totally vain, selfish level, I'm like really excited about some of the bands coming out next year. Seriously exciting stuff coming out on the A&A side. being accessories and apparel. I know you're excited about this too, but one of the things that I'm super excited to work

with you and your team on is the Advanced Labs data. And just looking at all the interactions and relationships. I think as scientists, I know that gets me really excited. What's the evolution of information that we can give our members to really help them understand how everything is fitting together? And obviously the AI coach is going to be able to do a lot of that. But I think from a research lens, contributing to the science, I think is really exciting. Yeah, and I think we can probably spoil this because it's been shared, but expect more to come out on the advanced lab side.

So we're going to be offering different types of tests and more specialized panels and things like that. And so really, really excited for people to continue to learn more about their bodies in that way. Yeah. Folks listening, your year in review is available in the app. you can learn about everything that your data has to say about about 2025 and get planning for 2026. Yeah. Cheers to an amazing 2026 everybody. And just wanted to give a shout out to Greg Grisicki and Finfielding for doing a lot of this analysis. And Elena on the marketing team for all the product marketing for making it look so beautiful in the app. And obviously, Emily's team

for creating these incredible algorithms that underpin all of this amazing data and insight. Huge shout out to the entire team at WOOP for everything that's gotten into 2025. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at WOOP.com. Call us 508-4434349.2. If you think about joining Woop, you can visit WOOP.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership.

New members to use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-U-A-accessaries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Woof podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.