WHOOP Podcast - Work Hard, Rest Hard: Kristen Holmes chats with Nuun Hydration’s CEO Kevin Rutherford & Director of Product Development Vishal Patel about the intersection of endurance sport, sleep and recovery.

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

Endurance sport, sleep & recovery: WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes sits down with Nuun Hydration CEO Kevin Rutherford and Director of Product Development Vishal Patel. They discuss how we can all benefit from performance monitoring (5:15), what endurance exercise does to your body (7:44), sleep as a skill (10:07) and the 4 stages of sleep (11:21), working out too hard to fall asleep (12:47), how WHOOP determines recovery (19:31), results of exercising when you're tired (21:33), nutrition for recovery (23:42), why 8 hours sleep is an arbitrary number (29:56), how to wake up energized (33:43), avoiding negative stress with mindful breathing (34:02), sleep fasting (39:22), hydration and its effect on HRV (42:04), and what happens when you miss your natural window to go to sleep (47:06).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. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for 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? We're launching a podcast to dig deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. 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.

One thing that we have seen with endurance type athletes is that they don't rest enough. And what ends up happening is folks get injured, you know, they just can't sustain that level, right? Something ends up breaking down. Looking at the data, understanding, kind of how you're tracking, what's normal for you, having a robust baseline.

All that's really central if you want to optimize performance. What's up, folks? On this week's podcast, our VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, visits the noon hydration headcount, quarters in Seattle, Washington. If you're not familiar with Noon, they make drink tablets to replenish your electrolytes without the sugar and carbs of a typical sports drink. So here, Kristen sits down with Noon's CEO, Kevin Rutherford, and director of product development, Vishal Patel, to discuss the intersection of endurance sport, rest, and recovery. I think Noon and

Woop share a lot of overlap in that regard, a focus on recovery. So Kristen and these guys go deep on that. Their conversation includes how working out affects your sleep, hydration and nutrition to improve sleep efficiency, and steps you can take to wake up feeling energized and recovered the next day. For our regular listeners, Kristen also reveals a few new sleep and recovery tips that you haven't heard in previous episodes. I think you're going to like this one. Without further ado, here are Kevin, Vishal, and Kristen. Hey, everyone. Welcome to what I think could be a pretty exciting conversation for me anyway because I happen to be a triathly, an endurance, you know, geek, if you will, love to get the heartbeat going for an extended period of time. And I'm constantly

looking for ways to improve performance. And I'm here with two sports scientists that can help me improve my game, which will hopefully improve your game. So I just want to introduce you to Kristen Holmes from Woup, Vishal Patel from noon hydration. And then again, I'm Kevin. and I'm the self-proclaimed chief eternal optimist over at noon hydration. And like I said, a triathlete and endurance geek. So if I could, maybe Kristen, why don't you just tell us, what are you doing over at WOOP? Yeah, so I'm the vice president of performance. So I work primarily with elite athletes, tactical athletes, to help them optimize use of the platform.

So a lot of that involves interpreting and actioning the WOOP data to help drive performance. and a lot of education around, you know, what kind of behaviors are going to lead to optimal performance. All right. A lot of that information comes from the data that we receive. And we get this data and we're like, okay, if we modify these behaviors, whether it's a training adaptation or, you know, maybe it's sleep behavior, maybe it's recovery behavior, you know, we're able to kind of pinpoint it in the data and then drive that information

toward the user. Do you find, and I know we're going to get in detail on this one, so you work with a broad spectrum of athletes, right, from we call it sometimes the front of the pack to the back of the pack and everyone in between. Yeah, for the most part, you know, a lot of the folks that I work with are really at the front of the pack, to be honest. You know, we're talking about, you know, we have almost 82 operators in the platform, special operation forces, Navy Steel, you know, we're really at the sphere. We've got, you know, Florida State Soccer just won a national championship. Florida State softball. I've got Texas Tech. You know, we've got a lot of some of the

very best student athletes at the NCAA level on the play. platform as well as in the end so it's really and then folks like yourself you know we've we've got you know tour to france uh cyclists you know we've got triathletes and you know yeah so we're really um we've been able to capture i think uh the interest of a lot of a lot of uh really high-end athletes who are interested in optimizing their potential within their sport and so for those that are listening that may not be at the front of the pack yeah is it relevant the learning that we're talking about I mean, I think to me, principally, or just at a foundational level, like, I think anyone, you know, whether you're, you know, trying to be the best mom you can be and just look into, like, you know, crush your bar class, or, you know, the lead athlete, you know, you still need to understand your body, right? Like, I think that's just important, right?

We want to live as long as we can. We want to be healthy. We want to be happy. And, you know, we have to understand what is going to help me achieve that, right? You know, and it's proper hydration, it's proper nutrition, it's, you know, getting the requisite sleep. And being able to dig into that, I think, from a quantified sense, I think is ideal. And, of course, that's in my space, so that's what I believe in. But, yeah, I think at both ends of the spectrum, I think understanding your body is absolutely central.

Amazing. By the way, our mission is really simple at noon. It's we want to inspire people to move more. I love it. For sure. What is your role at noon? So my role at Noon is I am the director of product development. So I, my job entails leading our R&D and compliance team.

So personally, I feel like I have the best job at Noon, even though I know a lot of people here that work for Noon will say that. Because, you know, I get to take my passion and my background for science and innovation. and put that into practice in helping develop products. Like Kevin mentioned, our mission at noon is to get people to move more. And we truly believe we're doing that through our products and just using the latest and greatest in science and innovation and taking my passion for running. And it's kind of all married together between what I think is the best job here at noon.

All right. Well, why don't we start from the beginning? Let's jump in. I have a few questions for you guys that kind of start off with. So as an endurance athlete, maybe I'll direct this one first to Vishal and then over to Kristen. So eight to ten hours of movement a week, could be more depending on, depending on if I'm going on peak time or really going after a personal record, if you will, that I'm training for. And I'm curious about the importance when it comes to performance, like what's the role that you think sleep has. Yeah, so I personally, I feel like sleep is probably the most important aspect of performance.

And I say that because for an endurance athlete like yourself, Kevin, that you're working out for multiple hours a week, even multiple hours per day. And what a lot of times endurance athletes and just athletes in general don't understand is that while you're working out, you're actually putting a lot of stress on your body and your muscles. And during that time, your muscles aren't necessarily getting stronger. You're stressing them more. And then endurance exercise in particular,

you get a lot of little micro tears in your muscle, which helps what that's why you get tired. So that develops into fatigue. So your body actually does and will recover efficiently and the right way when you're sleeping. when you're totally down at a restful state, you know, where you're calm, so then, you know, different hormones aren't being released that can kind of interfere with that recovery aspect.

So personally, I feel like when you're sleeping, it's the only time where your mind's truly, truly shut off and then your body can actually focus in on repairing itself because that's the goal of recovery to us to just rebuild and repair your muscles that, you know, you're stressing during exercise. Now, I'm not saying exercise is bad for your muscles. It's going to help, you know, with delay the fatigue and make you get stronger over time. But that recovery aspect is really important to make sure that you're getting all of those gains that you would get from the workout. Yeah, that's helpful.

And any of the belts on that? I mean, it's the greatest legal performance enhancer in sports. Oh, my gosh. I love that quote. Well, I'll have to remember this one. Dr. Matthew Walker. Yeah. He's, you know, on this West Coast.

Yeah. He's a psychiatrist, I believe, or doctor of psychology from Cal I think. But yeah, he's, he's one of the preeminent sleep scientists in the world, and he's done just loads of research. So I stole that from him, but I think it's, I think it's, it's sleep is 100% undervalued in the sports world, and that's a large part what I do is I help, I'm a sleep evangelist, you know, I help people understand that, you know, if they can get, because there's, you know, there's, sleep is a skill, right, that you have to develop. And you need to understand what your sleep architecture looks like at night.

In order to understand what type of behaviors you need to assume during the day in order to optimize your sleep at night. To your point, you know, it's really, it's the only time we release human growth hormone is during sleep. I think up to 25 percent, you know, we're releasing during slowly of sleep. So that's a tremendous amount. So if you think of sleep as a way to, you know, basically you're, you can't capitalize on the day's workout without the proper amount of sleep. And your body will drive toward a, you know, will tell you what you need to do. do. But what happens is most folks just literally don't spend enough time in bed in order to really capture enough restorative sleep to capitalize on the day's work. Right? Because you're

not with what happens tomorrow. If I don't get the requisite sleep, basically what I did today is for not. Right. So as a result, we don't make the games that we should be making. And then, you know, we get injured, we get burned out, you know, things like that. So sleep is is absolutely central from the physical aspect as well as obviously the mental restoration piece. So let me, let's build on that. So what, like, what are the steps kind of walk me through over that eight hours? Yeah. Maybe for me it's 12 hours.

Right. But eight hours of sleep, what's that look like overnight? What's happening? Yeah. So you have different stages of sleep that you're kind of going in and out of throughout the night. And I will say, you know, in order to kind of spend time in deeper stages of sleep, what happens before bed, is really important I think we'll probably talk about that at some point sure but just in terms of sleep stages sleep is continuous it's not discrete but we kind of bucket into these kind of

four categories so you have time that you're spending awake which is completely normal it's not like oh hey I'm awake you know it's you can't really perceive it but you're effectively physiologically not technically asleep so there's periods of wake time there's periods of light sleep yeah there's period REM sleep rabbit eye movement and slowly of sleep and this is kind of moving on a 90 minute or roughly, continuum. Yep. And, you know, you really want to try to spend roughly 40% of your total sleep time in these

deeper stages of sleep. 40%. 40%. Okay. Okay. So that's, that will give you enough of the physical mental restoration to kind of wake up the next day, fully regenerate. Because during that time frame, there's all sorts of things happening.

There's cellular turnover. There's, you know, genes are turning on. They're turning off. Like there's all sorts of things happening that don't happen during the day. The only time it can happen is during biological sleep. Got it. When you go to Tibet, do you ever feel like this when I think about going into the stages? Do you ever feel like you worked out so hard that it's actually hard to really fall asleep?

You would think you'd be completely exhausted. I felt this. So I'm asking for a friend, me and me. I'm going, you're not alone. I can't. I actually, like, I'm so tired and so sore. Like, it's hard to sleep well. Yeah.

I totally get we've I've experienced that as well where you would think that yeah as soon as you get into bed it's like lights out and your body will just immediately shut down and and unfortunately that's not the case a lot of times and and you know Kristen could probably go into more detail and why what's happening to your body to prevent you from that but a lot of the time the one point that Kristen mentioned that I think is important for when you are working out um at like, you know, a higher intensity is that trying to get that 40% or at least within that deep zone because that's the period where your body will actually be able to repair itself and then you can start building those muscle fibers back from when you are working out for a really long time. Personally, I feel like when I have like a really hard workout and I go into bed it's almost that I'm I psyched myself up for that event um of like kind of finally recovering and finally trying to allow my body to calm down where then I can't fall asleep but there's there's things you can do to help your body naturally get into that state you do because

you're so methodical on like how you think about things like you're very intentional sure sure what do you do so like well an interesting part about sleep um in terms of kind of of hormone, natural hormone releases is melatonin. Like, you know, there's a lot of sleep supplements and things like out there that take, you know, that add melatonin in there. Now, melatonin is a sleep-inducing hormone. Your body will actually naturally produce and release this hormone when you're at a very calm, restful state. So a lot of people, when they, when they're trying to get to a more, you know, after a hard workout, you want to try to. to accelerate that, or try to accelerate that period where you are kind of shutting down,

you know, your mind and your body in preparation for that melatonin release that comes, like when you're in bed. And, you know, personally, I take a product called Nune Rest, which is a concentration of a high amount and highly absorbable magnesium. And the magnesium is really a very, very important. mineral in terms of recovery that also helps you that also help you get ready for bed it kind of promotes that this the sleep inducedness and it does that by you know magnesium is responsible for so many biological reactions in your body to help you with energy recovery you know muscle

recovery bone recovery just making sure hormones are being utilized properly and And a lot of your brain is functioning properly as well. When you take in higher amounts of magnesium, it allows your body to reduce its cortisol levels. And cortisol is a stress hormone that just gets built up throughout the day, whether it's exercise-based or if it's life-based. That's why it's, you know, trying to combat your cortisol by, you know, by, you know, hydration, one. And taking in, you know, magnesium, which is a lot of studies that, you know, shown to kind of reduce that so the magnesium will kind of help you reduce stress and then while before you go into bed so your body can you don't naturally produce more melatonin to help your

body kind of you know calm down and fall asleep and then there's there's tart cherry as well which the great thing about tart cherry is that it has natural melatonin in there and it allows your body to naturally produce it yeah yeah right sorry yeah uh and uh so it allows your body to naturally kind of produce uh this release the hormone to allow your body to sleep more so so there it's kind of like a synergistic effect you know you want your body to get down to a restful state first so then you can naturally uh you know you can kind of flip that natural switch where your body your brain will be like, okay, now I can start focusing in on sleep. Obviously, it's, it's harder, you know, it's harder to do in practice.

But one thing that Kristen mentioned early on is that you have to practice sleep. And it's about consistency and then kind of tracking where that, where that consistency goes. That's a great lead in because I was thinking about, as I'm using my whoop here and learning, I'm new to it. And it talks about, like when you're talking about steps and then you talk about, about the best performance-hanting non-drug, I guess, if you will. Like, it says performance sleep. Sleep performance. I'm going, wait, what?

It's supposed to be restful. So, like, how is this a performance? Right. Well, it's just a way we talk about the score. So it's basically what you've got versus what you need. Yeah. So whoop is going to tell you how much time you need to spend in bed based on how much cardiovascular load you put on your body during the day.

Any naps that you might have taken during the day, they'll cut down your sleep need. Does it know if I'm not if I'm not big? Oh, interesting. Yeah, it does. If you've been in, if you've gotten to enough of a restful state where it physiologically, it qualifies as sleep, you can enter it in as a nap manually if it didn't, if it didn't pick it up.

That just means your heart rate wasn't, you know, low enough. You move too much and your heart rate variability, you know, is, you know, too high or whatever. So, yeah, so we're looking at, you know, certain parameters to understand if, you know, you know, if you actually trigger physiological sleep. So speaking of heart rate, how has that an indicator of recovery performance? How is heart rate an indication of recovery performance?

Is that phrased rate? Yeah, so, I mean, heart rate is really interesting because it's a better like longitudinal marker as opposed to kind of something you want to hyper-optimized, like day and day out, right? It's like a, so I think a better marker of understanding, kind of how your capacity for a single day is part of variability is probably a better indicator of what you can do that day on the day.

So you're looking at, you know, sense, standard deviation movement off of your baseline to kind of understand what yesterday did to me today. Okay, so it's a really core metric as it relates to recovery. Yeah. They can combine that with resting heart rate and you combine it with sleep performance now, and that's kind of what we do at Woop, that. makes up our recovery score. You combine those three markers and now we really can understand your capacity for the day. So I think we just get done an 18-month study with Corey Serner Institute

and were published and what the paper basically said was that, or found was that no single metric rest of heart rate variability sleep performance is independently more valuable than they are together. So our algorithm that puts those three pieces together was basically validated. So it's a number that basically when you wake up in the morning, you understand, okay, how much strain can I actually put in my body safely? And in a way that I can make gains. Right. If you wake up and you're in a bucketed, you know, green, yellow, red. And if you wake up kind of in this red zone, you know, you're really, you're basically, your heart is responsive to both inputs of the obanomic nervous system.

You have the synthetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. They're both competing to set signals to the heart. When your heart variability is suppressed, your heart isn't going to be responsive to both inputs. So you're just not going to be able to adapt your environment. The same way as if you had a really high heart rate of variability. High heart

variability, good, low, means you need to prior threshold recovery. You're leading me to so many, like both you are like to so many more questions that I didn't have written down. So here's one for for you to think about on what you just said is yeah so if i'm tired i've got like a lot of training workload built in it's that peak time frame chronic load yeah exactly i'm beat up i'm tired i'm tired

right yeah but yet i'm told that work out through that just keep going through it because that just trains your body to work through pain and blah blah blah and so i'm like okay keep going but meanwhile I'm just like, and that performance goes down on my workouts. I cannot hold it. There's a sweet spot. There's no question about it, right? Like you, you know, and I think that's where having data, you know, and I work thousands of athletes, that's all the day long is what I do.

So I think there's functional adaptation and there's non-functional, right? If you are so far off of your baseline, you're in a non-functional moment. Like you're, you know, more is not better, right? More is just more, right? You don't want to be in a situation where you shouldn't be pushing through pain. that shouldn't be the norm, right? There's going to be periods of time during your training block where you are looking to,

you know, you're going to have a suppressed HRB, you're going to have an increase in resting heart rate. That's good, right? Your system is accepting the stress that you're putting on it, but it gets to a point where it can be non-functional. And that's where kind of this superficial bucketing of the red, green, yellow is really helpful. When you have a huge deviation on her baseline,

it's just your body is not going to be able to capitalize on the effort that you're putting on that. day. It's just rest. So I think one thing that we have seen with endurance type athletes is that they don't rest enough. There's too, there's way too much going on in terms of workload, chronic workload. And what ends up happening is folks get injured, you know, they just can't sustain that level, right? Something ends up breaking down. Yeah. So I think there is, you know, in my viewpoint, and I think what the research kind of supports this is that, you know, you know, looking at the data, understanding kind of how you're tracking, what's normal for you,

having a robust baseline. All that's really central if you want to optimize performance. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense for sure. Michelle, is there anything like you would recommend to do? I was thinking from a nutrition perspective to help get to a quicker recovery. Absolutely. And the one thing about recovery nutrition is that, you know, it's all about the long term. You know, it's, It's not about, hey, you know, I just finished a run and my calf is sore, so I'm going to drink this, so I'm not sore anymore. It's about taking that slower approach where, you know, yes, protein and specificity like branch chain amino acids are really, really important for that muscle recovery aspect of it. But as Kristen has mentioned throughout the talk today, it's that you do need that rest.

You really, really do need that rest side of it because that's when the load is going to be off your body completely. Like as you're preparing for bed and things like that, you know, it's taking in, it's not consuming caffeine or stuff like that. You know, obviously close to bed. It's not, you know, exercising for an extremely high intensity, you know, 30, 40 minutes before bed. But it's really to try to take more calm, inducing. nutrients and things like that, like magnesium, like a camomile tea or something like that. And then the tart cherry as well that is a component of rest will help as well. And it's not necessarily just because of the aspect that it's going to help your body produce melatonin.

It's the anthocyan in there, that red pigment that you see in tart cherry that's going to really help with muscle soreness. And there's a lot of, yeah, and the antioxidants as well. Like there's, there's a lot of good things in, in tart cherry that will help you kind of prepare for bed and to help you kind of recover. In that, it's just helping fighting all of the high stress, like free radical production and things like that. Oxidative stress is like really tough for the potty and we'll divert resources, you know, toward recovery. So, you know, one way to think about it. just principally, like at a high level, is you want to reduce glycemic variability, right? Like, you don't want to have these huge spikes in your blood sugar, right?

Because that is going to disrupt, you know, you're going away from when you're in a position where, oh, gosh, all these resources need to go to deal with all the crap I just put in my system. So now that's not enabling me to have, you know, all the things that need be happening to kind of help you recover don't happen, right? So another way to think about it is, you know, having foods that are not going to create these spikes and blood sugar, nutrient-rich at any point in the day, or you're talking about before I go to bed?

Well, certainly before you go to bed, because if you've exercised really, really hard, like to your point earlier, you know, you're going to mute melatonin. Yep. Okay, that's what's been studied, right? We know that, so you have to think actually hard about what you're actually putting in your body.

Yep. So you can, you know, you can prepare to get yourself to a point where you can actually sleep. I think we'd be remiss not to say the blue light as well. You know. As in this. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

It will, you know, it will prevent you from staying asleep, getting into the deeper stages, your sleep quality sleep efficiency, your sleep onsets. The blue light, you should block it three hours before bed. Three hours. Oh gosh. Three hours. I know. It's crazy. I go to bed at 7 p.m.

So, yeah, I know. But when you talk about this, your game rhythm, you know, it's light as a measure, right? You know, light, food timing are both. really sleep wake timing, you know, three most important factors, you know, when it, when it comes to a lining your shircanyan rhythm. So, I'm curious to get your definition of what is poor quality versus high quality sleep, maybe if we could define that. And then from there, I have a question for both of you, because it was, it was, they're kind of correlated here. We talked about when not to have the blue light. He said three hours before.

I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I've got to change my habits pretty quickly here. Those glasses are really helpful. What about it then as well? So poor quality, high quality, that's one of the other things that leads into it. So I've heard about, obviously, breakfast is break the fast. And so I hear you shouldn't have anything food-wise to consume for 12 hours.

I've even heard some data, statistical data would suggest it's even closer to 14 is optimal. Again, this is interesting, but again, it's about this high-quality, poor-quality sleep, and then you guys have a perspective on the 12-hour break the faster more. Yeah, so in terms of, do I... No, no, go ahead, go ahead. So the sleep quality is, you know, as I mentioned, it's 40% of your total sleep time we want to be in these deeper stages of sleep.

So that's a combination. That would be high quality. Yeah, so it's really, the time that you're spending in bed, you know, are you able to achieve that 40%? So some folks have to spend more time in bed in order to get to that 40. Some people need to spend less time in bed. there are things that you can do that will enable you to spend less time in bed but allow you to have

that more quality more efficient sleep yeah the low-hanging fruit is sleep wake timing if you can be as consistent as humanly possible in terms of when you go to bed and when you wake up right that is huge because your body it likes predictability right when we're talking about releasing hormones and things like that it's it's it wants to like if you if my body knows that I'm going to be going to bed I want to fall asleep at 9.30. I start prepping for bed at 8.30. Like, my body already knows that. And I do that over and over and over again.

Like, everything is just firing on all cylinders, right? My gut, my brain, my hormones. Like, all of that is just on fire, right? Because I'm just this one single hack, sleep weight timing. Therefore, I don't have to spend as much time in bed because I'm giving my body what it wants. And I've got this, like, perfect sleep weight line. So is, I'm sorry, I'm going to be.

That's the best way to get quality sleep is to stabilize your sleep wake time. But eight hours is kind of the... That's arbitrary. So that's arbitrary. It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary. So it's really, it's relative to how much load you're putting on your body during the day. Okay.

If you crush the, you know, if you did a three-hour run and a, you know, and then you swam a mile, like, you know, that you put a lot of load on your body. You're probably going to have to spend more time in bed in order to opt to regenerate. yeah okay also factor in you know it is harder to sleep when you're sore and you know like you're you can't quite get as comfortable like you just might need to spend a bit more time in bed in order to get that optimal sleep okay do you what do you think vishal yeah i um the last point you mentioned on on and i think this kind of hits home on on your earlier question about kind of being comfortable when you like get into bed and then and then because oftentimes i and sorry i'm kind

I'm taking this in an out of direction. But often when I'm like going, this happened to me this weekend after I had a harder run on Saturday. And I did take a nap during the day, which I had to because it was just like I had time. And I could just feel, I felt that if I wasn't going to actually try to start the recovery earlier in the day, it's going to be harder for me to fall asleep because I'm just not going to be able to get comfortable. And I actually, that strategy does work for like longer, you know, longer workouts and stuff. It's before 3 o'clock. Yeah, it was before 3 o'clock.

And then the naps like 30 or 90 minutes. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. And I just set a time room. I've flown for 45 minutes and I shut everything off. And even we're, I'm not even sure if I'm actually sleeping or napping in that time. But I feel like you're resting. Yeah, absolutely.

And I feel like when. When I start doing things like that or I try to not think about, like, you know, being sore going into bed, it really is, like, the power of the brain works, you know, controls everything and it actually does work in that scenario for me. Okay. So do you wake up in the morning energized as it's one of the choices when I'm looking at my loop data and it's like, are you energized, are you slightly sore? do you actually wait up going boom let's do this day honestly in the mornings my dog jumps onto bed it starts going crazy so i am like ready to go um but but no i yeah honestly there there are some warnings where i'm just i feel tired um where you know i feel even more sore than i did the night before and i think um i think that that's natural and normal to have your body kind of feel a little bit differently in certain stages of sleep and during your workouts and things like that but but i feel like the times where you know i do it like i'm trying to be more consistent about my bed in a wait time and i and it really i i feel like it really has been um now i've been really you know an hour before like

i try to get into bed at 10 30 and around 9 30 i'll start preparing you know and start shutting everything down i read before i go to bed it if it's helps me um just it just helps take my mind off of the day yeah and then exactly it's about like reading is okay because your mind is working like you're isn't yeah I mean depends on what you're reading you know if you're reading something like some crime novel and it's like it's probably not right right right right but um but yeah as long as it's like relaxing and pluggable you know not stressful it's great um do you yeah yeah I really do yeah I do I mean not every I'm just really jealous.

Yeah. I want to wake up energized. You can. It's possible. I'm tired. There's just a few things that you need to stabilize in your life and try to be consistent with. It's not a million things. It's a few things.

Okay. What do I need to do? Okay. Well, I think, okay, so one of the things that influences your time spent in deeper stages is how you manage stress throughout the day. Okay. So most individuals have accumulate negative stress throughout the day. Yeah. And that is going to, it might not affect your sleep onset because most people have a lot of

asleep debt so they fall asleep really quickly but then they have crappy sleep during the night and a lot of this is due to this negative stress accumulation so this phenomenon is real and the way to mitigate that is to take these like micro like rest cycles throughout the day oh so so literally you can just breathe for a minute every 90 minutes and you know if you breathe over 45 seconds or seconds, 45 seconds to a minute you release the Cetacoline, which tells your heart rate to slow down. You know, it's got this really powerful effect. And you don't, again, it doesn't have to be a long time. But if you do that, you know, I try to do it before and after a meal.

And then I do it after every 90 minute block of work. So for the most part, like during the day, I feel pretty much like I can stay present and focus on the task at hand. And that's really what breathing does. Is that equivalent of meditating in this case in the time of around? Yeah. It's passive mindfulness, which, you know, some meditation. can actually activate the sympathetic branch in the nervous system and actually not be as, you know, restorative as just passive mindfulness.

But the whole idea or the whole principle behind it is that, you know, you want to, when you're thinking about the future, you think about the past and you're not in the present, that's when the anxiety kind of creeps in. Yeah. So, you know, the extent to which you can kind of, okay, you've got this work block where you're focused, you're on task, all right, and now I've got this, like, mindful moment. Yeah. That I breathe for, you know, a minute, two minutes.

And you want your inhale to be greater than your exhale. But, you know, there's lots of resources online that you can kind of figure out what's best for you. Yeah, so breathe in and then, you know, your exhale is a little bit less than your inhale. Got it. You know, hypoxia, even, you know, training sometimes when your mouth closed, sleep with your mouth closed. You know, a lot of, you want a lot of, you know, you're kind of that journey to be through your nose. Okay. There's something to think about.

Why is that different? Like, why through your nose versus your mouth? so it's just in terms of like it's just your diaphragm and kind of how it's responding okay um to the rough essentially okay um the oxygen advantage um if anyone wants to like dig into it is an awesome book and i'll tell you all about movement and oxygen and how important it is interesting yeah but i would say mitigating negative stress accumulation is going to help with your sleep efficiency quality um and and also your onset so your sleep onset your ability and fall asleep at night yeah um a hot shower, you know,

vasodalation, you know, all the blood gets pumped to the out, you know, the extremities. Because you can't actually fall asleep until your core temperature decreases. Right. So that process of a hot shower decreases your core temperature. So you have to bring it down by like two degrees,

I think, in order to release melaton. That feels backwards to me. I'm taking a hot shower, but I'm reducing my core temperature? Yes, you reduce your core temperature with a hot shower because all the blood gets pumped to the outer extremities. Oh, yes. Of course.

Yeah. All right. And that is like an awesome hat for sleep. So the bottom line is just, is finding kind of a routine for you that's going to work. You know, and when you're working out really, really hard, you know, to your point earlier, like, you're that routine is going to probably look a little bit different. If you've got a light workout, that routine is going to be slightly different. But again, your body loves predictability. Yeah.

So more predictability, you can be the better. So I, as I really don't wake up. energized in the morning very often. I don't, I'm not like sluggish. You're probably even recovered. Maybe. Generally. Maybe. But most endurance athletes I come across are

generally underrecovered. Hmm. But if I take a nap, unexpected nap, here I am on a Saturday afternoon and I fall asleep, I feel like a million bucks when I wake up. I'm like, my chest feels like it's expanded. Is that normal? Like, seriously, like I'm like, I feel like there's so much

oxygen going on in here. That's we feel i don't know if that's what's happening yeah um it really important that you do it before three o'clock you don't want to nap after three because that will have a negative yeah no negative effect on your your your prior onset and also your quality of your sleep we've seen this in the data like big time yeah um so it'll impair your sleep up to 15 percent so if you'll spend 50 percent less time with deeper stages of sleep if you take a nap after three this is like mb and melb athletes it's a constant struggle yeah because a lot of this guys especially the latin guys come over and they, you know, they're sleeping at 4 o'clock.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, four, three. Yeah. And generally, you want to do either a 30-minute block or a 90-minute block, but try to avoid anything in between. Oh.

And the caffeine nap is sensational. Expresso, set your timer, wake up 30 minutes. You will really feel like a million dollars. All right. Shal. You're the coffee master, so you got that down. I can drink. We need, like, a noon version of, like, the nap.

the noon nap new nap yeah tablet uh interesting I feel like I just feel like

like I have so many questions I frequently say you talk about the intermittent fasting too that's a whole other that was like the second part

of that question oh yeah talk to me about oh yeah so the 12 hours so do you agree that that's optimal like what do you guys think

uh personally I mean this is just a personal um opinion I don't I don't encourage

like the intermittent fasting aspect of it just because I and I understand that for certain situations like it can work and there's some premise behind it for me just as a general kind of you know a scientist or a nutritionist I just feel like more balanced intake of food and eating the right foods at the right times during the day it's just going to provide more overall health that will end up helping with recovery and sleep etc so i don't really uh prescribe if you would um to kind of some of those strategies although i i do understand the premise behind it um and um yeah but but for me it's more about just uh taking nutrition in terms of eating the right foods eating more

trying to eat more plant based and not a lot of refined sugars to try to control your blood and to have it more consistent throughout the day because that's going to also give you energy and then also allow your body to rest and calm down when it needs to fair makes sense yeah definitely yeah i mean i'm kind of on the fringe on that i i i basically don't eat till noon i'd stop eating at seven so so you do to it then i do i do at least you know three four times a week um i just feel better um i feel like it's uh it controls my weight it takes decision making off the table like a freeze in my train um but that said i do have um you all have like a mccc oil in the morning um so i'm not not eating um so i am having fat but um but i don't have you know i really my first

meal is pretty much lunch for the most how would you consume that then sir is that i put it in a coffee okay gotcha yeah bull proof yeah oh yeah local Seattle baseball brand

that's right yeah so yeah so and I think you know there is there's there's you know

a lot of science that suggests it's a it's a positive thing for your health longevity you know having these periods of time

where you're not asking your body to digest food you know it's I think kind of getting to that anabolic state

versus a catabolic I think is a powerful forcing puncture in the system And something that I think we can actually manipulate, you know, by through fasting. Is there a role that hydration plays into whether or not you're going to get the right recovery, right amount of sleep? Well, you know, the fundamental basis of hydration, which I try to keep reminding people like what hydration does.

And, you know, just from the simple aspect of it, it helps bring oxygen to, you know, help circulate oxygen. right um to your working muscles um especially um that's why it's so important um for athletes that's why when you're you know uh you when you go to the doctor or whatever and they're they're doing your physical and you know you're like oh yeah I'm tired all the time they're like drink more water and it's like it's like yeah I know I know it is it's like they're like okay yeah sure I'll just drink water and it'll do it um water won't hydrate you as effectively as like noon or something with electrolytes will because like yeah consuming fluids is one thing but you want to actually absorb the fluids and the sodium and the electrolytes will kind of help that

so so I again I'm not saying that hydration is a cure for everything but like in the fundamental if you look at it yeah it is really close if you look at it what the functions of it in that it helps bring oxygen to you it gives plant plants like an ability to live and us too obviously so so I do think that if there's so many aspects of hydration that the help with recovery to help with sleep

you can add different nutrients to hydration like you know increase of magnesium levels to kind of which is a key electrolyte and a mineral that will help with just overall hydration but will also help with like kind of that sleep induced

inducing behaviors and things like we see it with one of the metrics that would track hearty variability, if you go to bed under hydrated, your hearty variability will be in the tank. It's one of the biggest influencers on hearty variability. So do you want to have more variants? More variability, yeah. So it's the interval of time, party variability. It's a function of heart, but it manifests in on our nervous nervous system. And it's just literally like the measurement of time in between kind of heart beats. Then you want more variability. That's the healthier

your heart more very little. Is there a heart rate that's like a little dangerously too low when you're sleeping? My mindset it was like 37. I know. I mean just you're really fit and you're got I don't know. I mean your cardiovascular health is just really good. It's interesting. Like your your blood pressure must be super low. I think I actually just went to the doctor last week and um and they said normal I can't remember what it was. Yeah, it was just normal. It wasn't well. It was just yeah. Nothing bad. Nothing exciting. No. I mean, I I mean, there probably is, yeah, maybe your heart's no longer beating. That's not a good thing.

I know, I'm just like, I think my wife's been like, are you alive? What did the doctor say? Did you tell him? Did you mean, he must have saw that? He didn't say anything. I don't know. Well, usually the reaction, yeah, usually the reaction I get is, are you, like, that's the question. I know, they say it's too.

Are you a runner? Yeah, I'm like, yeah, I don't know. But I didn't realize my resting heart rate at night was that low. until I used whoop. And I was like, what the heck is going on? I go, am I almost like not alive? No, no. No, we, it's not, it's, we see that in our elite indoors athletes.

Oh, interesting. Okay, cool. So, welcome to the club. Yes, you made it. I don't know if I made it, but I'll pretend. I'll fake it, I'll fake it, for sure. Yeah, anything of their tips, you guys want to make sure we leave everyone with on when it comes to sleep and recovery, rejuvenation, energy. Yeah, I mean, I would, again, not to, you know, say this over and over again,

but why I think recovery is hands down the most important part of exercise performance, and especially sleep, is that that's when your body can actually repair and rebuild itself. Yeah. And it's like you're stressing your body so much during exercise, which is great. But, like, you really do need to give your body the time. time to repair because you know we're not just running on Monday you know we're running Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday so it's like you know tomorrow's workout or tomorrow's run is going to be dictated by everything I do you know today in how I prepare my body so so I I was really

excited for you know for for this talk and obviously for for us to provide more options for people to help them recover and rest more so they can move more, you know, which we're doing with noon rest and in other aspects as well. Awesome. The one thing that I would add is just, you know, to really pay attention when your like natural pressure for sleep is, you know, we're all, we have a different chronotype. You know, some folks are going to naturally feel sleepy around 11, other people, seven. You mentioned that you go to bed at 7.

Maybe true. So I started to feel sleepy around 8.30. I've got to want to be in bed around 9. And then hopefully I'll hopefully fall in sleep by 930 at the latest. That's my natural pressure for sleep. So pay attention to your natural pressure for sleep. When you push past your natural pressure for biological sleep, you end up releasing a whole host of hormones that are going to basically stress the sympathetic branch of your nervous system.

So you're going to release cortisol, epinephrine, you know, adrenaline, you know, all of those. things you need for race time not for bedtime so it's really important to um to understand that piece because people are like oh i have a surge of energy i'm like well of course you do because your body is like stressed thinking that it needs to perform when it really wants to go to sleep it wants to you know so i think that's that's something that's a something for folks to just i think be aware of and then obviously nail the sleep wake timing i'm telling you i in the data it is mind-boggling when people start being consistent with their sleep you know they end up spending I think it's 32 more minutes in REM

and I think 17 more minutes in slowly of sleep which is clinically very, very significant. Yeah. So it's in the operators that I work with, it's even more than that. You know, it's somewhere between 6, 13% across both groups, both stages of sleep. So it's really powerful.

Do you have nap rooms at Woot? We don't and we should. I know. I know. We need nap pods. I know. Yeah, I just saw Arianna. Huffington, Thrive Global, you know, she's all about the bird life, you know, that balance, and they have just purchased a nap pot in their office. Oh, she did? Or they did, I guess. Yeah,

but yeah, we need one. Yeah. Don't give the new team any ideas. They'll just want to nap all day. It might never get up. Um, so yeah, I just want to say thanks a time. This was been so fun. I, I seriously could go on for another half an hour with questions for you, too. So thanks so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I appreciate it. Cheers. It's good to be you. Thanks to Kristen, Kevin, and Vichal for coming on the WOOP podcast. If you're not already a member, you can join the Woop community now for as low as $18 a month. We'll provide you a 24-7 access to your biometric data as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, and more. The membership comes with a free Woop Strap 2.0.

And for listening to this podcast, folks, if you enter the code Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D at checkout, we'll give you $30 off. Thank you for listening, put $30 on my tab, and hopefully you enjoy Whoop. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E-U. Just tag E-U on the end of my name, and that'll get you 30 euros off when you join. Check out whoop.com slash the locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from our conversation. You can subscribe, rate, and review the Whoop podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you've found this podcast.

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