WHOOP Podcast - Year on WHOOP: What can you learn from a year of data? Mike Lombardi and Emily Capodilupo discuss what days people are best recovered, when they get the most sleep, behavior trends, training patterns and more.

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

What do you learn from a year of WHOOP data? Mike Lombardi and Emily Capodilupo talk about the Annual Performance Assessment sent to all WHOOP members (2:32), how you stack up against your peers (4:07), what day of the week people take on the most strain and are best recovered (5:54), the time of year they work out the most (8:15), why we sleep more in winter time (9:24), knowledge gained from daily sleep surveys (11:05), behaviors that most affect sleep (12:18), training patterns throughout the year (16:27) and the body's physiological response (17:45), functional overreaching vs non-functional (18:10), and the average daily recovery, strain and sleep stats for everyone on WHOOP (20:35). 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, our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs, and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone?

On this podcast, we dig deeper, we interview experts, we interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop Podcast. Hello, folks. Happy New Year.

On today's podcast, we explore what you can learn about your body from a year on Whoop. Mike Lombardi and Emily Capitaluppo are back to break down the data from your first ever annual performance assessment. We just sent this out to all our members. You can find it in your email or in the app. And it's a summary of your year on whoop. Mike and Emily talk about things like what day of the week are people the most recovered and what days do they usually take on the most strain? How much does the average whoop member actually sleep per night and what behaviors affect their sleep the most? What you can discover by examining your training patterns and your body's response over the course of an entire year. For WIP members, this podcast will give you some

amazing insight into the data you've just received. And even if you're not on WOOP, there's a lot you can learn here about human behavior and how the body responds to the choices we make. That's a big theme at WOOP. Without further ado, here are Mike and Emily. Happy near everybody. I'm Mike Lombardi, and I'm here with everyone's favorite Woop guest, our director of data science and research, Emily Capitulupo. Hey, Mike. Today, Emily and I are going to talk to you about what you can learn from your last year on Whoop. Emily, why don't you talk a little bit about how we got to this point?

Sure. So we had this kind of fun idea that we would give all of our users a holiday gift and sort of this opportunity to look back on 2019, which, you know, for Woop as a company, was, you know, a really incredible and important year. But, you know, for a lot of individual athletes on this platform, it was really, you know, a lot of you guys met various goals and you improved your sleep and recovery and all these different things. And so we wanted to give you a chance to kind of look at the whole year in this big kind of zoomed out macro view and see all that you've accomplished. So let's dive in and start

going through because some of these metrics have only existed on sort of this elite team sports side that we've had since the beginning of whoop and now it's it's becoming more available. So for the first time, we're actually showing how you compare across days, weeks, people. Why don't you kind of talk about some cool stuff here? Yeah, so for a long time, we've been giving our users a weekly performance assessment. So all of you who have been on WOOP for at least 28 days have been getting this report every Monday, and it kind of summarizes your last week. The annual performance assessment kind of adds to some of the stuff that we show you weekly,

but then sort of gives you, again, like this kind of larger scale view. So if you are a WOOP member and have collected at least one day of data in 2019, you can go to app.woop.com slash 2019 to see your report if you didn't catch it yesterday when we sent the push notification. And so it's got, basically it's four pages. And each page kind of gets like deeper and deeper. So the first page is kind of high level. It shows you all of your data, sort of average out, that's the very first row. So your average strain score for the year, recovery score for the year and sleep score for the year. And then we also compare you to a couple of different groups that you might find interesting. If you're on, if you've joined any communities, which is one of our exciting new membership perks,

you should be able to compare yourself to your communities. For our elite members who are on teams, we're comparing you to your teams. And then if you haven't had a chance to do that, we highly recommend you join a community, but we compare you to your sort of age and gender demographics and to sort of the leaders on who. Then we sort of break it down by day of the week. I actually personally found this section really interesting. I didn't realize that sort of Tuesdays were my best day. Who knew?

In terms of recovery or strain or sleep? Yeah, I get my highest recovery scores on Tuesday, which is really interesting because I actually tend to work out pretty hard on Mondays, but then I get good sleep. And sort of like a lot of people, I have my worst recovery day on Friday because sort of burning down all throughout the week. That's a trend that we're seeing sort of across the Woot population. and then sort of recover over the weekend.

But what we see actually for the average whoop user is that they peak in recovery on Monday, but I peak on Tuesday, so who knew? What other sort of interesting trends and just sort of this overall breakdown did you see personally and then within the community? So for me personally, my highest day strains were Saturday and Monday.

Not surprising about Saturday, but, I mean, Monday, am I really that stressed? I don't know. It's interesting. I certainly didn't perceive that over the last year. One thing that's interesting is actually globally across whoop Saturday is the highest strain day. And then Monday's not that far behind.

So the average whoop user gets a 12.8 day strain on Saturday. And then Sunday is actually the lowest strain day, which I was actually surprised about because I thought people would be going hard on the weekend. But on average, whoop users are getting. an 11.9 day strain, so almost a whole point different. What's not that surprising, I guess, is that the recovery score follows this interesting pattern where people, on average, their highest recovery scores on Monday. So the average whoop user has 60% recovered on Mondays. And then it gets like progressively worse throughout the week. So it's 59 on Tuesday, 58 on Wednesday, down to 57 by

Friday, Saturday, 56, and Sunday. And then it kind of seems to bounce back for Monday. So it's just is like progressive linear decline throughout the week. Not that's surprising, but it was cool to kind of see it come out in the data. And it's good. So it all sounds negative as we're talking about it. But as we're looking at sort of this data here, what we're also seeing is that on Saturday and Sunday, people are tending to get more sleep, which is then manifesting in this much better recovery for Monday.

So despite the fact that recoveries are down, you know, with community, great job. You're using your weekends to actually get more sleep. So that's great. On the second page of the annual performance assessment, we look at your strain recovery and sleep as a heat map. So for strain and sleep, the lighter colors represent less strain and the darker or less strain and less sleep and the darker colors are more strain and more sleep. And then recovery is that familiar red, yellow, green breakdown.

And so it's really interesting to kind of see both sort of by month and by day of week how these different values changed. Like, I actually had, like, really low strain in April, and, you know, I maybe didn't know that until I looked at this report. And it's kind of cool if you not just look at them sort of one at a time, but if you look at them sort of stacked on top of each other. So I had a really high strain month in July, but didn't have a single red recovery score. So I was, like, clearly in a good spot and, like, taking on a lot of strain, but could handle it. And so by looking at those two graphs together, you can kind of get, like, an additional insight, which I really really. like about this report. Did we, did you see any sort of seasonality where people were taking on

more strain as a population? Yeah. So we actually looked at the average of strain recovery and sleep across olive loop broken down by month. And we saw that surprisingly, people take on the most strain in July and August, or maybe not that surprisingly if everybody's sort of doing summer things, so with an average of 12.6. And I was a little bit surprised to see that December is the lowest strain month of the year within an average of an 11.6. Because I would think that a lot of my friends, they're going skiing and it's finally, you know, winter sport season. And so I think sort of the people that I talk to are having high strain months, but. Yeah, it's probably very, that's where it's cool to be able to go back and look at the communities that you're in, because like Emily

said it just because the whole woo population, you know, may not be as strenuous in December. That certainly doesn't mean the circles you run in aren't. So that's such a cool thing of what we do with our communities in that new feature. One thing I thought was really surprising looking at the sort of month-by-month breakdown is that in January through March, people were sleeping an average of a half hour more per night than in May, June, July, and picking back up maybe a tiny bit towards the end of the year, but, you know, as a population, we're losing sleep, which I was really surprised to see. What's your take on that?

The take is how much sunlight's in the day. When it's dark, starts getting dark at 3.30, 4 p.m., it makes it very easy to go to bed. You know, when we're walking home back over to Cambridge, it's like, it feels like the middle of the night, even though it's, you know, early evening, mid-evening. But then once you have these extra hours, people tend to use them. And that same time home is not dreaded. It's like, I can't wait to get home so I can go do XYZ and trying to fit more time. Amazing what a little vitamin D does to your energy levels.

But yeah, that would be my suggestion that or hypothesis that because people have better weather, they want to be outside, want to be doing more things, in which case they're willing to compromise a little bit of that sleep and get that higher strain. Well, I can certainly understand that. And then just one last thing, not that surprisingly, the lowest sleep months were also the lowest recovery months. So sort of June and July, the Woot population averaged a recovery score of 56 and a sleep duration of six hours and 42 minutes, which is surprisingly low. Yeah, that's just when it's turning. It's just when it's turning.

people get it's the first day it's about 45 people throw shorts on you may or may not realize that underneath your sleep and your strain when you toggle back and forth to see your metrics occasionally you'll get a little prompt that'll say hey when you do x activity you get x% increase or decrease in sleep or duration um so this is the the culmination effectively page three right the culmination of the year yeah so all of this data is 100% like personalized to the users, if they haven't been answering those surveys, it's going to be kind of sad and blank looking, answer your surveys. But basically what we did was we took every time you said yes to each of these questions that we ask in the morning, and every time you said no, and we

compared those answers within all of the sort of key sleep and recovery statistics, so sleep performance, sleep efficiency, resting heart rate, HRV, recovery, respiratory rate, and sleep consistency and so that you could see sort of for you personally what sort of doing or not doing these various things what effect that has on your physiology and um so what you can't see in the report is sort of what the global effects are so I wanted to kind of touch on those a little bit because they're actually really interesting so we looked for the average whoop user uh after you report consuming alcohol your resting heart rate goes up by six beats per minute which is huge HRV goes down by 15 milliseconds. Recovery goes down 16% and sleep efficiency goes down by one and a half percent. And so that's like a really big hit. One thing that's kind of important to point out with like the way that we collect all this survey data is that all of these correlations that we're talking about sort of aren't necessarily causative relationships. So there might be other things associated with drinking alcohol, like for example, staying up late and eating poorly.

that also contributes to these. So these are more sort of fun facts than hard science, but they definitely sort of point to, you know, these kind of interesting global trends. So like we're seeing things with caffeine, that it increases resting heart rate by two beats per minute, lowers HRV by 6 milliseconds if you take it close to bedtime.

So within four hours of going to bed, it decreases recovery by 7.5% and it decreases sleep efficiency by almost 1%. So, yeah, If you're, caffeine, I think, is a really good one because people say, ah, caffeine doesn't affect me. If you actually are answering this and you know and you say, oh, wait, actually, maybe it does. It's a good time to re-maybe, maybe rethink about how you actually metabolize caffeine. Yeah, and I think that sort of there's this cool opportunity, not just to look at all of these stats as like getting shamed for things, but sort of so that you can make an informed decision.

Like my husband's Italian, like his whole family, all they do is like they drink coffee with dinner and like have been doing this forever and he claims it doesn't affect him. He doesn't notice it. And like, you know, if you look at his whoop data, he's actually relatively insensitive to caffeine sort of compared to the average person. Like if I had coffee after dinner, I would just be totally wired. So I'm like very sensitive. And so for him to be able to look at the data and say like, okay, it's going to increase my resting heart rate by like a little bit and, you know, decrease my HRV. I don't necessarily need to perform tomorrow, and I sort of like this family, you know, tradition or ritual and it tastes good and feels good and whatever. And so I'm going to do it

anyway. Like, it's okay to sometimes make that decision, but I think it's really important that you can be informed so that you can kind of not be like, oh, it's fine. It doesn't affect me. Like, it probably affects you a little bit. And you can decide, like, maybe before a game or, you know, an important meeting at work or something. I'm going to sort of do absolutely everything I can in my power the night before to optimize recovery. And so skip the coffee. But if it's vacation or if it's just, you know, a random Sunday and you don't really care, like, you can sort of more informed to make that decision to do these things. Because, I mean, like, one of the things we've seen is that, like, you know, reading before bed, some people that it's associated with a positive increase, some people that's associated with a negative increase, like screen time sort of there's a big variety. There's nobody that I've seen yet on whoop for whom, like, alcohol is a positive.

So that one's kind of straightforward, like probably don't want to drink too much before bed if you're interested in recovery. But like sharing a bed, it's like 50, 50, whether or not that's going to help you. So it's helpful, you know, if you can take the like three seconds every morning to answer the survey so that you can kind of learn something about your body. Yeah, I think you're going out of it. It's definitely, it's in no way a shaming tool. It's completely a learning and self-experimentation because as the data keeps rolling in and if you're keeping track, a little bit mentally of, hey, I'm going to try this one thing and see how it affects either recovery or my ability to get quality sleep. That's important to just kind of play around

with and learn yourself so that you can keep kind of fine-tuning. And you know that when you do have tough times, let's just say like the holidays that we're still in, when there's a million parties and there's travel and you can't control really anything or you have limited control of everything around you, you know what can still work for you. And I think Emily and Kristen really touched on this on the holiday hacks if you hadn't listened to that one. Definitely check that out. Always applies. So the final page, probably the coolest.

Yeah, this is my favorite. Basically, what this page does is it looks at sort of how you trained throughout the year and how your body physically responded to that. And so the top graph shows what are you calling like training behavior. It's adapted from the first page of the weekly performance assessment. But instead of showing it, as a scatterplot, we've turned it into time series data. And so if you're below the gray bar,

that means that you're net restorative. So basically the difference between your recovery that morning and your strain that day. So basically from recovery, we get your recommended strain, and then we have your actual strain. And if you kind of subtract the two, if you sort of did more than what was recommended, that's going to be in the overreaching direction.

If you did less than what was recommended, that's going to be in the restorative direction. And so if you're sort of seeing that blue data below the gray bar. That means like during that period you are net restorative. So that could be either detraining if you just sort of took a ton of time off. That could be tapering for a competition. But whatever it is, it's sort of less than what your body could like maximally take on that day. And sort of similarly, if you're above in the red, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It means that you are overreaching. Overreaching can be functional. It's how you get stronger. It can also be

non-functional. And so that's why we put the resting heart rate and HRV trends below that. because that can help you see, like, during this time where I was sort of training, you know, less than what I was technically capable of doing on those days, you know, was my HIV resting heart rate improving or was it going down? Because if they're getting worse during that time, that that means that you're sort of losing fitness. And if they're getting better, it means you were taking a sort of well-needed break. Same thing with overreaching. So if you're overreaching and you're seeing, yeah, maybe your metrics get sort of worse during the overreaching period, but if right after they improve a lot, then that's what's called functional.

overreaching. But if you sort of overreach for a long time, you just see your metrics get worse and worse and worse. And then when you back up off the training, they stay bad. That means it becomes like non-functional overreaching. So you actually just kind of like burnt yourself out and it was too much. And so the goal here at this page is really to look at the top graph with the bottom two graphs. And so you can see like if you're, so each bar is the average for a month. And whether it's green or red or black is sort of relative to the month before. Did this metric improve? or get worse and if you didn't have enough data for the month we just put it in gray because we sort of couldn't make any claims about sort of what that meant for you but

I think it's really interesting for me to look at like I was saying earlier in July and August I was actually like perfectly in the optimal zone and those like I have two months in a row of like green and green on the HRV and on the resting heart rate so like you know training exactly the way whoop was telling me to and my metrics were improving as a result. That's great. I, on the other hand, was riding the lightning from the middle of May to end of September. And I was seeing, I was actually seeing great HRV increase and resting heart rate going down from that period.

And then eventually I just kind of hit the point where this is too much and actually came back down, which is good. And then got a little bit further. I mean, it's not, it's not really changing that much. A good thing is, I would say it's kind of like a mini, many jumps in fitness, but never really losing. So I think looking at, like Emily said, looking at this, not thinking if I see either blue or red on that top graph that everything I'm doing is wrong or I didn't train hard enough, it's all about the context of what is happening physiologically that ties the whole picture together. And this is amazing. This is, I think, probably something people didn't. realize they want it until they see it now. And this is what we've kind of been doing,

weekly performance at a smaller scale. But it's so cool to see the year in review. And this is the brainchild of Emily. Any other cool things that you thought that came out of this? So a lot of our users, you know, they write into our membership services and they want to know if their data is good or if it's normal. So just kind of to summarize, since a lot of you ask, the average sleep duration on whoop is six hours and 55 minutes and that's actual sleep that's not time in bed which is closer to seven and a half hours the average sleep performance score is 79 percent the average recovery score is 58 percent and the average day strain is 12.4 but those numbers all vary a ton they vary by demographic they vary based on what kind of sports

you're doing and based on your goals and sort of fitness level so don't read too much into these but but since you asked, we figured we'd provide them. So I hope all you guys who got your WOOP annual performance assessment yesterday really enjoyed it. We'd love to hear from you what your favorite parts of it were, what kind of analyses you'd like to see from us in the future. We're really here to serve you. So let us know, hit us up on, you know, Facebook, email, Instagram, and happy holidays. All the channels, yeah, happy holidays. Enjoy and thank you for another your own whoop.

Thanks again to Mike and Emily for sharing their insights and a very, very happy New Year to all our listeners and whoop members out there. We love you. If you're not already a whoop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free whoop strap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you $30 off a membership, just for listening to this podcast. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E-U, and that will give you 30 euros off when you join.

And for our current members, you can upgrade to the Woopstrap 3.0.0.2. and get access to all the new Woop Live features by following the link in your Woop app. If you're out of contract, you'll literally get the 3.0 for free when you commit to another six months. Check out Woop.com slash The Locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from this conversation and others. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Woop podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. find me online at Will Ahmed. I try to respond to everyone who reaches out. And you can also follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can email The Locker at Whoop.com

with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you may have. Thank you again to all our listeners, to all our Whoop members. We love you.