The Go-To Self-Quantification Wristband Now Used By The Navy SEALs, Pro Sports, Top College Teams,

I have a Master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it's actually been a little while since I have mentioned or talked much about a new new self quantification device that came to market a couple of years ago called the Whoop. And when the Whoop first showed up in the self quant scene, it kind of took the world by storm because it could do skin conductivity, it had accelerometer data, could do continuous HRV monitoring, kind of continuous monitoring of the cardiac autonomic nervous system related to recovery and training status and training readiness, and then all was able to delve into things like pulse oximetry or your oxygenation, body temperature, respiration, and kind of a unique, what's called a three axis accelerometer that allowed it to get really accurate data along with some really accurate temperature sensors and touch sensors. Now, since I first interviewed the scientists over at WHOOP about their device, they've actually been kind of working behind the scenes on some really interesting research studies, including some sleep studies, some performance studies, some recovery studies. So I thought it'd be high time to get their founder and CEO back on the call to talk a little bit about self quantification in general and what's some of the emerging technology in the field that goes way above and beyond the whole Fitbit jawbone, how many steps did I take today thing, and is ultimately something more along the lines of what pro athletes and a lot of professional sports teams are using. Will Ahmed is the actual founder and the CEO of whoop, like I mentioned. And he's the guy I interviewed when I first did that original podcast. And I'll link to that podcast and everything else that Will and I talk about if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Whoop3 and Whoop is spelled w h o o p. So w h o o p the number three. And Will has actually done a lot of a bunch of cardiologists, technologists, marketers, designers, engineers. He was named to the Forbes 30 under 30. He was named in the Boston Business Journal 40 under 40. He's a real go getter. He captained the Harvard men's varsity squash team. So he's got that whole like preppy sports thing going on. I don't know, you probably have your hair slicked back and you're wearing like a sweater around your neck right now, Will. That's the way I'm making you sound.

Yeah, I'm not sure about that, but I appreciate, I appreciate everything else you've said.

Full on Ivy League, baby. So how you doing, man?

I'm great. I'm great, Ben. Thank you for having me.

Good, good. And I know you've got a pretty unique device and some unique things going on over there, and dude, I just want to jump right in. So before we kind of get to some of the new things and also some of the questions I've gotten about the whoop, like, I've received some concerns about like the lighting on it or the EMF or, you know, whether or not it produces dirty electricity, all those things that my, my electronically orthoresic fans like to like to ask me about. I'm curious.

Yeah, we'll get in the weeds on that.

Yeah, let's get into the weeds on it for sure. But can you give me, for the people who didn't hear the original podcast and just need a little bit of background going into this one, just the basic overview of the whoop in general and why it's different when it comes to a self quantification device. And before you do, I should, I should mention to folks it's a, it's a wrist device. I know folks have heard me talk about like a ring before. I know there's, there's other things like embedd chips. This is not that advanced, but it's a wristband device. So that being said, will go ahead and kind of spell this thing out for us in terms of what it actually does.

You got it. I mean, our mission at WOOP is really to unlock human performance. We believe that every individual's got an inner potential that you can tap into if you can better understand their physiology. And so we set out to build technology really across hardware, software and analytics that's designed to understand the human body. And I got into this space personally because I was ozoned to sports and exercise. I was playing squash at Harvard, as you mentioned, and I generally felt like I didn't know what I was doing to my body while I was training. And so I got very interested in physiology. How could you understand the human body? How could you prevent over training, under training? What does it take to really optimize or peak on a given day? Those were some of the questions that I set out to answer to. This probably was six or seven years ago as a student at Harvard. And I ultimately ended up reading something like 500 medical papers. And I wrote a thesis around how I thought you could continuously understand the human body. And a lot of that research, coupled with my co founder, John Capilupo, who was one of the best mathematicians in the country at the time, and also his father turns out to be a professor of exercise physiology. And you know, we had a real overlap around physiology. He had the technical chops to do some things from a sensing standpoint that hadn't been done before. And I had a vision for how we could build a product for coaches and athletes and beyond. And so today, you know, we're fortunate to work with hundreds of the best sports properties in the world. We do work at the highest level with Navy Seals and Special Operations, Special Forces. We work with Fortune 500 CEOs who are with fitness enthusiasts. We work with even Just executives who generally want to better understand their body. And we're doing all sorts of different research initiatives.

Yeah, but so does like Fitbit and Jawbone, some of these other companies.

You know, they can make the same claims. And I'm just curious like why it is that WHOOP would be different than devices like that.

Well, to be clear, I mean, they can't make the same claims in that they're working with some of the clientele I just mentioned. And the reason that we're able to work with, with the folks that I just mentioned is really our focus on understanding three core parameters about the body. So WHOOP is really designed to understand strain, recovery and sleep. And within each of those parameters we're collecting a lot of data. I think you can understand strain through the lens of how much exercise or body in a given day, and you can understand recovery through the lens of how prepared or how ready is your body to take strain on. And the reason that we've been able to measure, measure these data points so accurately I think has been our focus on collecting data. So we sample across five different sensors 100 times a second. We collect about 100 megabytes of data on a person per day. If you compare that to say an Apple Watch or a Fitbit, you know, they're collecting data at 1 Hz or 10 Hz. So you know, on a given day we're collecting 100 times more data than, than one of those products or some of the other wearables that you mentioned. And by collecting that much data, we're able to have a really accurate and granular understanding of the body as a result. And that in turn actually gives you a lot of the actionable insights. One thing that you and I both share a passion for is understanding heart rate variability. So WHOOP was really the first wrist worn heart rate monitor to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously. And we have a lot of intellectual property around that phenomenon.

You mean like 24 7?

Yeah, 24 7.

Well, what I was going to ask you, and maybe you were getting into this, but I want to get into the weeds as far as how it's able to do that. Like what's different in terms of the sensing devices and also what actual metrics are being measured to give me like a strain score or what were the other ones you said you got?

Strain, strain recovery and sleep, Strain recovery and sleep, main pillars of the system.

What's feeding into those and why are the sensors any different?

Yeah, so for example, with sleep, we're measuring heart rate heart rate variability 3x accelerometry Skin connectivity that you mentioned before, and optical sensing, which feeds a lot of the heart rate information. I think the magic in our algorithms is that it's not taking any one specific data point, but rather a triangulation of data points. So I'll give you a example. So the difference between lying on a couch with a low resting heart rate and no movement and actually sleeping on a bed with a low resting heart rate and no movement is that when you fall asleep, your core temperature drops and in the process you emit heat and you emit instantaneously. And so by measuring galvanic skin response, we're actually able to pick that up immediately. And so that's one of the things that feeds into our algorithm, for example, around sleep latency. Now, if we had just measured motion and resting heart rate, we wouldn't have been able to do that. But by adding a third data point, we're able to fine tune and analyze that quite accurately. So that's just one example of how these different things feed off each other. The thing that we filed a lot of IP around is actually our measurement of heart rate variability. So WHOOP measures heart rate variability 24, 7. We're the only product to do that. And there's a lot of reasons, by the way, not to do that. Right? It's a ton of data that you're collecting. You have to transmit that data from a sensor to your phone phone to the cloud. In the process, it's requiring a lot of battery usage. So if a product like an Apple Watch wanted to collect that much heart rate variability, it would have like a 10 minute battery life along with all the other things that they're doing. Right. They're taking, you know, Uber rides and it's got a really high resolution screen on it. WHOOP is entirely focused on data collection. We don't have a screen on our product. It's really lightweight, it's a small sensor and you can wear it on your wrist or your upper arm. And we're working on other areas of the body now. Recovery, I would say, is the single most important thing that we measure. Probably the single most important thing that people get out of the system. And a lot of that ties back again to being able to measure heart rate variability really accurately. One of the things that we patented is the ability to measure heart rate variability during the last five minutes of your slow wave sleep. And we do that every single night. And then we compare the exact data point to your own personal data points. You Know the challenge with some of the other technology that's been on the market, for example, a chest strap is that. And you've probably done this before, right, where you put a chest strap on to measure heart rate variability. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, I'll use like the, like I have the Nature Beat app that'll pair to a Polar H6 or it'll pair to like a Viva heart rate monitor. And that's something that I'll roll over in bed sometimes to do so that I can look at the difference between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system rather than just a general HRV score.

Yeah. So the challenge with measuring with a chest strap the way you just described or other methods of measuring heart rate variability is that it's not taken in a control. Right. If you wake up in the morning, you put a chest strap on and you're standing versus lying down, or you've had a cup of coffee, or it's right before practice and you're think about practice, all of those things are actually going to change the validity of that measurement from the standpoint of how prepared or how ready your body actually is to perform. Because WHOOP effectively takes this measurement, heart rate variability, while you're sleeping during your slow wave sleep. And we do that every single night. We're capturing it in a control and that gives us the ability to really analyze its status on your body and the true status of your autonomic nervous system system. So we look at a 3 day and 30 day moving average compared to your statistic last night. And that in turn actually gives us a really good understanding of how ready your body is.

Okay, got it. And then regarding the sleep, what is going on there? Like, is there anything unique that you're using that enables you to simulate what one might get if they were to go to a sleep lab, for example? And have you done any accuracy testing on the sleep measurements?

Yeah, we have done accuracy testings within a sleep laboratory. We've done, I think, over 250 sleep studies to date where you have an individual in a sleep lab wearing the PSG equipment, which is considered the gold standard for measuring sleep. And what's interesting is that a PSG puts out information and then two human beings score that data and human beings, even scoring the gold standard, agree with each other 78% of the time. And if you look at WHOOP data alongside that, we're at 76%. So it's almost indistinguishable from a PSG sleep laboratory. Experience. That's how accurate our sleep monitoring is. And if you actually go pretty deep on the data, you'll get a really, really nice lens into understanding how you sleep. So we measure everything from the hours of sleep that you got. We look at the quality. So the amount of time that you spent in REM versus slow wave versus light awake, as you know and as your audience knows, like getting a lot of REM sleep is a lot more valuable than getting a lot of light sleep. So just the distinguishing factor there being that we can actually measure the different stages of your sleep. We look at sleep latency, so that's the amount of time that it takes to fall asleep. Sleep, we look at disturbances over the course of the night. How many times did you toss and turn, did you wake up? Folks who have sleep apnea have really, really high sleep disturbance markers. So that'll be something that triggers on our product. Now, mind you, we don't directly measure for sleep apnea, but my point is that if you have a sleeping condition, it will undoubtedly show up in our data to the point where you'll be like, okay, I need to go get, get checked out. And that level of accuracy just hasn't been, hasn't been seen before in the market. And I think it's why, you know, I think it's why we're the official recovery wearable of the NFL Players Association. We beat out 300 other companies to be the official recovery wearable. We're being distributed to every player in the NFL right now. And I think that's, you know, one demonstration, the fact that we work with the Navy seals and some of these other high end performers. Again, we had to compete with a large number of products to get these contracts. We had to go through a lot of third party validation testing. So, you know, it's been an exciting journey.

Okay, so that's actually something I wanted to ask you about, and I think this is a perfect segue from the sleep portion is when we did our last podcast, I know some people reached out to me and they pointed out the fact that when you're asleep and when this thing is measuring you, it emits this light. It's like a greenish light on the backside of the device. You can't see it, but it's obviously up against your skin. And since you have photoreceptors on your skin, one of my concerns and the concerns of some of these folks who reached out to me was that this could disrupt sleep cycles. Because we know that there are studies that in areas of high Blood flow. Like one of the more popular studies or well known studies was the one in which they shone a small light on the back of the knee in the popliteal area where there's a high amount of blood flow and also photoreceptors. And this disrupted people's circadian rhythm. And so I'm curious what you found in terms of the whoop, whether that light can be disabled or what your feelings are as far as that light that it produces while you're asleep.

Yeah, it's a good question. And just generally speaking, there's a lot of information out there about the negative, you know, the negatives associated with light while you're sleeping. You know, blue light is really the specific frequency that stimulates your iprgc, which is intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. And as you know, those are the ones that tell your circadian rhythm.

That it's daytime. And these cells have the sole purpose of really telling your body to wake up. Now, the thing to understand is that the IPRGC are in your eyes. So this is why it's recommended not to stare at a cell phone or like a television before you go to bed. You want to filter out blue light. There's a whole big movement around that. Now, there's two pieces of good news from the whoop perspective. Like, fortunately, whoop emits green light, which has a different frequency and is less capable of stimulating these cells and interfere with your sleep. The other thing is, like, from the point of view of actually seeing light, if you're wearing your whoop strap correctly, then you literally can't see any light. Whoop sits suddenly on your wrist and there's no light emission to the eye. Now, there's also a concept of whether, just generally speaking, having light on your skin.

Can affect your ability to sleep. And there's no studies to suggest that light on the skin is problematic at the green light frequency that we use. What is problematic is if you're looking at, if you've got light on the body that's at the UV spectrum, which I think is much closer to the study that you mentioned. So we haven't seen it as an issue either from the standpoint of seeing light or from the standpoint of having it shine on your body.

Okay, so the main takeaway message that I think I'm getting the impression you're getting across is the fact that it's a green light versus a blue light.

Green light versus blue light is a huge difference because those are different frequencies. And then the Second piece is just the concept of seeing light versus having it emit on your body. The consequences for seeing light are much more consequential because then it's triggering the iprgc, those cells that I mentioned, which tell your circadian rhythm that it's daytime. But if you can't, if you can't, like, if you're not seeing any light, which of course is the case if you wear wube properly, like literally you can't see any light, then it won't affect the way that you sleep.

Okay, got it. So the other question that I of course get a lot, and this is related issue, would be the actual electricity produced by the WHOOP and that or the Bluetooth signaling, any wi fi signaling, etc. And there's an increasing interest in the ability to be able to, especially in the bedroom, to reduce electricity as much as possible when you sleep, including the ability to be able to put devices into airplane mode, et cetera. Now where do you guys stand as far as that's concerned with the amount of signal produced during a night of sleep or even just during the day?

Well, you know, our whole technology is designed to help you improve performance and also help you improve sleeping as one component of that. So we obviously took a pretty close look at, at this. The first thing to understand is that there's sort of two different things at work, right? One is actually the frequency with which something's being transmitted, and then the other is the power emission. So there's no data that shows that extended exposure to something with very, very low power emission has any health consequences to the body. Now, high power emissions from other devices, like.

No, no, just to interrupt. When you're talking about power, you're talking about Bluetooth or some other form of electricity.

So the power emission is effectively what's coming off of the device from a communication standpoint, right? So a cell phone has a very high power emission. So we could talk about why it's not necessarily good to have your cell phone behind beside your bed if you're trying to optimize for everything in your sleeping environment. Now, fortunately, WHOOP and a number of other products, by the way, that have the proper Bluetooth settings have very, very low power emissions. So it's a completely.

You're comparing apples to oranges if you think about the power emission of something like a whoop strap versus a cell phone. And the other thing to keep in mind is that WHOOP actually isn't always transmitting data. It's transmitting data every six minutes. And if your phone's not in reach, then it's actually not transmitting data at all. So if you put your phone into Bluetooth, excuse me, into airplane mode, it wouldn't be sending data to your phone. So for the people who are, you know, thinking about that, that's an easy thing to do where you just effectively put your phone into airplane mode. The last thing to know is just that if you look at WI fi, for example, that's transmitting at something like roughly around 30 gigahertz. And Bluetooth, meanwhile, is transmitting a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz. So if you're even just in a house with WI FI connection, you're already exposed to something way more extreme than the frequency of your Bluetooth. And that could be Bluetooth from a whoop strap, it could be Bluetooth from headphones, you name it. So overall, we've done a lot of research on this, as you can probably tell, and we haven't seen any issues.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the people who are raising these concerns, they're already doing things like going completely blackout in their rooms, including any light exposed to their skin, and they're already going pretty far when it comes to doing things like turning off WI FI routers, disabling electronic devices. So I know that to make the comparison to WI fi, a lot of these people are kind of past that level, but really interested in just mitigating as much as possible any type of radiation. So is there a way to disable any of that, or. I mean, can it be placed in airplane mode or anything like that?

Yeah, as I said, like, if you put your phone in airplane mode, it's not going to be transmitting data out to the phone.

Okay. So once I put the phone in airplane mode, then the whoop will stop transmitting.

You got it.

Okay. And the Bluetooth signal won't be turning on and off, looking for a signal during the night.

You got it.

Oh, okay. Well, that's good to know. And that light, how often does that light come on while you're asleep?

Well, I mean, part of what differentiates whoop is that we're sampling data at an extremely high frequency. So we're collecting data 100 times a second, and that includes the emission of that green light. But I want to be, I mean, super clear. Like, the frequency with which that light is hitting your skin is remarkably low. Like, from the standpoint of, you know, actually emissions, you know, the, like UV rays, for example, or something like sunlight is at a completely different scale in terms of what that does to your Body. You know this, the, this green light is virtually undetectable.

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Okay, well, that actually allays a lot of my concerns when it comes to the lighting and the Bluetooth component, especially the fact that's not going to transmit if my phone's actually in airplane mode. And then, then you wake up and it'll just do a data dump to your phone. Once you do, turn your phone on and connect it via Bluetooth.

Exactly.

Okay, cool. Got it. Now, you were telling me that you had done some research lately on meditation. Can you fill me in on what you guys have been doing with meditation?

Yeah, we've got a few different things in flight. We're actually doing a study right now with.

Arsenal and the mindfulness app Headspace. So that's gonna be pretty interesting. I can't talk about the results of that yet. We've got a number of studies that are in flight. One study that we just finished was actually on float tanks. So you're pretty familiar with float tanks. We did a study on 16 members of the military who were using float tanks. Float tank, as you and your audience probably know, is supposed to put you in an instant deeper repair state, effectively giving you the benefits of sleep without sleep. And we monitored heart rate variability, we monitored respiratory rate, heart rate, and motion. And we actually found that the act of being in a float tank was physiological, similar to a meditation session or even, in the best cases, sleep. So from a physiological standpoint, we couldn't tell the difference between someone who's in a float tank and someone who's meditating, or someone's in a float tank and someone who's actually sleeping. So that was a pretty interesting validation.

And what were you measuring on people? What were the metrics? That you were measuring.

So everyone was equipped with a whoop strap and we were monitoring heart rate variability, respiratory rate, heart rate, and motion. And, you know, those are all things, obviously, that trigger while you're sleeping or meditating or in this case, it seems like. And being in a flow tank where obviously you want your heart rate variability to go up, you want your respiratory rate to go down, which correlates with your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems effectively being more in balance. And then you'd expect your heart rate to go down and to limit motion. And we saw all of those things occur across these three different events. Being in a float tank or meditating or actually sleeping.

Interesting. Except you aren't getting wet, or I guess you aren't getting the mineral absorption either from the float tank. But basically what you're saying is you're simulating during a state of meditation pretty much most of the physiological variables you'd get if you were to spend the money and go spend like an hour in a float tank.

Yeah, that's the other way to look at it is that the act of meditating emits a very similar physiological response to being in a float tank. Right. We actually had one woman who conducted a mindfulness study on herself where for three weeks she had no mindfulness practice in her life. And then for a three week period, she introduced mindfulness where she meditated for three to five minutes four times a day, so spaced out across the day. And she found that her heart rate variability actually increased during that period by 15%. Her resting heart rate decreased by 10%, and her quality of sleep actually improved over that period of time. So that was a pretty interesting study as well.

And that was with mindfulness based meditation.

Yeah, so we're talking about a shorter meditation period, you know, something like three to five minutes occurring four times a day.

Okay, got it. Now, what about. You mentioned some work with the Navy seals and the Special Forces. Have you been doing anything new there in terms of any research studies or work with them?

Yeah, we've actually had some fascinating work there. We've been expanding really across all of Special Forces. And a lot of that, I mean, obviously you have to keep confidential. We did one fascinating study with the US Explosive Ordinance Division. So, you know, these are like the total hero badasses, like the characters from Hurt Locker who are actually going out there in enormous suits and disrupting bombs or taking them apart. Right. So we outfitted 40 people in the US EOD with whoop straps and we gave data to half the group and the other half of the group couldn't see their whoop data. Right. So you've got 20 people who can see the WHOOP data, the other 20 who are wearing whoop but can't see their data. And there was really no instruction on how to use the data, just see it. Okay, so over the course of the observational period, those with access to to their data actually went to bed earlier, they woke up later, and they averaged a hugely significant 45 more minutes in bed per night than those without data access. Now the real test came later when they went through the hpt, which is called the Human Performance Test. Effectively, it's the military's measurement of their ability to perform on a mission. And, and the amazing thing was that 100% of the tactical athletes who could see their whoop data improved on the HPT and only 60% of the folks that couldn't see their data improved on the hpt.

Hmm, interesting. And you guys also did, didn't you have some kind of a deal where you had a bunch of seals do some crazy expedition where they were doing skydiving and swimming and running a 100 mile ultramarathon? Did you get any data out of that?

Oh, yeah. That was pretty amazing too. So we had three veteran Navy SEALs preparing for what they called the Spectre series, which was ultimately to raise money for the SEAL future fund. And the event was insane. They skydived from 14,000ft into the Pacific Ocean. They then swam three miles in combat stroke, which is effectively like a doggy paddle. You know, essentially you want to try to come up on shore in a low profile way. You're going to do compact stroke versus something more efficient like freestyle. So they did that for three miles. They got to shore, and then they ran 100 miles with 25 pound plates on their back. So really, really amazing. And it was interesting. We got to work with them for about four years, four to five months leading up to the event in terms of how they were training for it, because. And you've done some crazy events yourself, Ben, but like, you know, there's so much you have to invest, a lot of time.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone's done that. I think that was part of the point. So, you know, there's obviously a lot of training that goes into that and we really wanted to make sure they didn't over train because. And especially one of the guys cases, I mean, he's 39 years old and he's like in good shape, but he's not like A former marathon runner who's now deciding to run an ultra. This is a guy who's like longest race before that was maybe a 5K. So he's literally learning how to run an ultramarathon in five months. And so there was a lot of focus on preventing over training. And we saw literally in the first couple weeks of just working with these guys that they were putting enormous amounts of strain on their body and yet their body wasn't recovering properly. And you know, if you're dealing with a population that's as mentally tough as a group of people like Navy seals, it's actually to their disadvantage because they can just push through their body feeling over trained for an extended period of time. What will then happen though is that when they actually go to do the event, you know, they'll crash. And so just by seeing their own data they were able to dial it back on certain days. And sure enough, over the course of four months they have some fascinating, fascinating increases in heart rate variability, fascinating increases in sleep I think in July and August. So the event just occurred, it was a couple weeks ago, and in July and August they were averaging less than six hours of sleep per night. And by October they are averaging seven and a half hours of sleep a night. So just another example of you give people information, you give people data and then all of a sudden they have something to manage, something to work.

Same with me. Whenever I'm wearing a self quant device, I'll always take at least 15,000 steps a day. Like I'll eat dinner and check and sometimes go on a walk after dinner to get my 15,000 steps. Like I'm, I'm pretty strict about it. Sometimes when I'm traveling I don't hit it. But yeah, I mean that's simply the fact that I'm wearing a self quant monitor. Same thing when I'm in bed. It's like I don't spend a lot of time laying in bed on my phone because I don't want my sleep latency to be affected. I don't want my sleep score to go down because I was in bed but not actually sleeping. As a matter of fact, I watch a movie about once a year to twice a year max. And last night I was going to take my wife on a date and actually I wasn't feeling that well.

There's been like some kind of a stomach bug going around and so I just decided I wanted to stay in, have a nice romantic movie night with my wife at home. But my sleep score actually this Morning was not that great because it calculated that the two hours I was laying there on the couch, which, with my wife watching this movie we watched. What do we watch? Upgrade. It's a movie about a guy who gets like a. He gets this thing called a stem put into his head and it upgrades his entire body. Yeah, it's kind of like right along the lines I was like, if I'm watch a movie, I want to watch something that's kind of relevant to artificial intelligence and transhumanism and longevity and biohacking. So this was. This was right along those lines. But ultimately, just being on the couch for a couple of hours, it assumed that I had a really high sleep late. And see, because I was just laying there not asleep. So, yeah, when you wear these things, you pay a lot more attention. Another thing I want to ask you was it might be related to that meditation or the float tank study that you did, but have you done any studies on what things actually do the best job decreasing stress, particularly by either decreasing resting heart rate or increasing heart rate variability? I know you guys are trying to collect a lot of data, but I'm curious specifically regarding that if you found specific protocols really make a dent in stress?

Yeah, I mean, decreasing stress and increasing heart rate variability are really closely tied. And so we look at both of those things, and especially for increasing heart rate variability, I mean, there's just some really simple things like less alcohol is super fundamental. And mind you, we measure some of these things because people can report in our app whether they consumed alcohol, caffeine, after a certain period of time. We're starting to do more around hydration anyway. Generally speaking, we've seen less alcohol. That's really fundamental. No caffeine after 4pm makes a big difference for sleep, which in turn increases heart rate variability. Exercise is really good just period. But it's important not to over train or under train. So we found that whoop users, for example, who listen to their recovery, that's the score we give people in the morning saying how ready their body is. Effectively, people who listen to that recovery and then tried to match the amount of exertion that they put on their body with how recovered they were. So if you have a lower recovery, you take on less strain. If you have a higher recovery, you take on more strain. The people who tried to do that ultimately had higher heart rate variabilities the next day. So we looked at how closely paired is your strain to your. To your recovery. What's the next day heart rate variability. We saw that across the board, it was higher if those two things were paired more closely.

Drinking more water is something that I think a lot of everyone from athletes to just, you know, your average Joe who wants to survive the day. Like, I think across the board, drinking more water is underestimated as something that you should do.

I don't know, I actually disagree with that. I think most people get that. I think most people don't get enough minerals or the water they're drinking is crappy. I think that people would actually have to drink a lot less water if they had more potent minerals, trace liquid minerals, sea salts. I think the biggest issue is a lot of people don't actually store the water that they drink because it's mineral depleted water. And I find I have to drink far less when I do things like sprinkle Celtic sea salt into my water or use hypertonic solutions. Like there's a company named Aquatrue that does like mineral drops. Or there's a company called Quicksilver Scientific that does like, like this really, really salty, almost like seawater esque mineral solution. For me that only helps my, my sleep and my recovery, but my hydration status, meaning I just need to drink far less.

Well, you know, I'm not gonna disagree with what you just said. I think a lot of the, the sort of the minerals and supplements that you just mentioned, some people may not have access to, we've seen more. So I would say with our population, especially at the high end, that dehydration plays a big role in decreasing recovery. And we especially see that within athletes in the NFL, and especially college athletes too, who might be going through other forms of stress. But to your point, yes, I think it could be augmented with certain minerals. We've done less research there, so I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on all of that. I mean, the other piece that we talked about is meditation. Really any form of mindfulness is going to improve the sympathetic parasympathetic balance. And then we can talk a lot more about sleep because we've done some interesting things there. But sleeping more, as in longer, is definitely good. And then the thing that we've actually done some really interesting research on is sleeping at the same time. So sleep consistency. So going to bed and waking up at the same time is an amazing way to decrease stress and increase heart rate variability.

Yeah, that's something that you see like way back in Ayurvedic medicine is regular sleep and wake times. But I'm interested in how that ties into chronobiology. Like, if you guys are able to, I know you have like a, a sleep coach that's built into the actual app. Is there a way to customize using the data that you're getting? Kind of like what time would be best for you to go to sleep or what time would be best for you to wake up? Like, are you working any of that into the algorithm?

So, as a general rule, what we like to do is take something in medical literature, see if it applies to the data that we're looking at, and if it does, then roll it out as a feature for WHOOP members and I'll tell you that journey as it pertains to sleep consistency. So Harvard came out with a study published in nature on about 60 people. I'm not sure if you saw this, but it looked at the GPAs of students who slept with high consistency versus low consistency. So high consistency being I always go to bed at 10pm and I always wake up at 6am Low consistency being like, you're going to bed at 9pm, you're going to bed at 1am, you're waking up at all different times. Right. And the study created a score from 0 to 100. And what they found is that every increase of 10 points on their 100 point scale, or like 100 being perfect sleep consistency, every increase of 10 points actually correlated with 0.1 on the 4.0 GPA scale. So the takeaway was that if you were sleeping more consistently, you were having a higher gpa. Now, the fascinating thing about it was actually that the students with higher sleep consistency did not get more sleep, as in hours of sleep. Like they weren't necessarily going to bed at 11 every night and waking up at 9 in the morning every night and getting 10 hours of sleep every night, they actually were often getting the same amount of sleep or even less. It's just that they were sleeping consistently. And so we took that data because it was pretty fascinating. Mind you, 60 people is not a ton of people. But we took that new learning and we applied it to our data on the aggregate. So the power of technology is scale. WHOOP now has literally millions of sleep data sets at whoop. And, and so we ran an analysis on sleep consistency versus output. So across all the sleep data sets that we have, if you look at the regularity in which someone's going to bed and waking up, how does that translate then to things like heart rate variability, quality of sleep, et cetera? And what we ultimately found across again over a million data sets, is that the higher the sleep Consistency on whoops.

The higher your heart rate variability was the next day and interestingly, the more REM and slow wave sleep that you got. So in short, we proved that if you're sleeping more consistently, you're actually sleeping more efficiently. And that's just fundamentally fascinating. And then as a result of that research and what we saw in our data, we updated our sleep coach. So we have a sleep coach in the Woo bath which can essentially give you feedback on your hours of sleep and how much hours of sleep you need or how many hours of sleep you need. And so what we did is then we include now not just how many hours of sleep you need, but actually when we think you should go to bed and wake up based on sleep consistency. So based on when you've been going to bed and waking up, we have a dynamic algorithm that then understands, okay, for tonight, when should you go to.

Bed and wake up, how much does that change? Because I would imagine that if someone were thrown a curve ball by the sleep coach saying, hey, we've been recommending you go to bed at like 9:45pm and then one night your readiness or your recovery is high and it says 11:00pm I mean, does something like that happen? Are we talking about subtle variations like go to bed at 10, 15, go to bed at 10, that type of thing?

Yeah, it's more subtle than that. One thing that WHOOP does is it allows you to tell WHOOP effectively what your goals are. Are you trying to peak tomorrow? Are you trying to perform or are you trying to get by?

Most athletes especially, but even just your everyday.

Consumer like me, who's trying to just perform in their daily life.

There'S days where we know we need more sleep, but on the days where.

We'Ve got a normal day, the next day we may actually sacrifice getting appropriate sleep. That's where this concept of getting by on WHOOP actually came in, where you can let WHOOP know, hey, I need to get the minimum viable sleep for tomorrow. And WHOOP can actually calculate that for you as well. So based on what your goals are, whether you want to peak for a marathon or an event, or you want to be as cognitively functional as possible, or if you just want to try to get the minimum viable, WHOOP is going to direct when you should go to bed and when to wake up and you can actually change. So say you have to wake up at a certain time, you could say, okay, I have to wake up at 5:45, I've got a flight, blah blah, and WHOOP will then back out of that when you need to go to bed, based again on sleep consistency and how many hours of sleep you need. So it's a fairly dynamic system and as a result, we've seen that within four months, Whoop users are getting over 40 minutes more sleep per night.

Now, does it take into account napping?

Yeah, absolutely. So another thing that we measure is sleep need, which is a dynamic calculation of, based on the amount of stress you've put on your body or strain based on the sleep debt that's accumulated on your body and based on who you are. So like Ben Greenfield gets seven hours of sleep. Will Ahmed normally gets eight hours of sleep. Joe Smith normally gets ten hours of sleep. I don't know. Right. Over time we learn who you are and what you typically get for sleep. So based on the factors of recent stress, sleep debt, who you are, and then of course, naps, like if you take a nap, that's actually going to decrease your sleep need. We calculate how much sleep you need every night.

Do I need to manually enter if I'm napping? If I settle down at like 2pm for an afternoon siesta, will it automatically.

It'll automatically measure that. Okay, automatically measure that. I mean, the idea behind WHOOP is that you just wear whoop. It doesn't have a screen, it's measuring all these things in the background and then it's just automatically giving, giving you analysis when you need it. And you can dive into the WHOOP app or you can dive into the web app and at any time really understand the status of your body. And it's been really rewarding just to see how people have used that information to improve.

How does this work with coaches who are working with athletes or with personal trainers who are working with clients? Are they able to actually aggregate and view or compare each of the athletes or each of the client's data?

Yeah. As part of our new WHOOP offering as a membership, there's a big community component. So you can actually join teams with like minded WHOOP members. If you've got, you know, half a dozen friends on whoop, you can create a team with them and look at each other's information. If you've got a personal trainer who you want to have access to the data, that's something we do. And then the, at the high end level, like, you know, we're working with a professional sports team, you know, the coach, the general manager, the trainers, they'll all have different data access levels. The athletes will share that information with the different constituencies. And as A result you can then make dynamic decisions around, okay, how hard should practice today? Or okay, who should be playing in the game today, should they have less minute minutes or more minutes? And that's in some ways how we're trying to help and influence sports.

Okay, got it. The membership thing though, I think the last time that we talked the Whoop was like 500 bucks and it's way less now. I think it's like 100 and something. How much is it?

$180 to begin. Yep.

Okay, so $180 and then you kind of like have this membership access on the website to be able to do these kind of comparisons you're talking about to join up with other clubs or teams or like mind people.

Yeah.

Okay. Why does it cost so much less now?

Well, we ultimately found that people were so hooked on the product over time that there was an opportunity to lower the entry point and really create a membership around it. So, you know, you pay six months down, up front for $180, you get access to incredible hardware, same hardware that's being used by all these phenomenal top performers that we talked about. You have access to a really deep analytics system. So it's going to give you reports on how you're training, how you're recovering, how you're sleeping. There's weekly performance analysis, so you get a weekly report to summarize the previous week. There's a whole web dashboard that has a much deeper dive. So if you want to look at trend analysis for one month, three months, even six months of trend analysis, you can do that across any of the data points that we've talked about. So for people who really like to get in the weeds and understand everything about their body, that's an enormous benefit. And then the membership of course also includes this community and the ability to interact with like minded, like minded people. So people who are trying to perform at a higher level, or friends of yours, or coaches, trainers, you name it.

Okay, got it. And is the membership required? Like if you get the band, can you just roll on your own or do you need to buy a membership to go along with it?

Yeah, the whole thing's rolled in together. So with the membership, you're getting the hardware, you're getting the analytics, you're getting the community.

And we've seen an awesome response since we've changed change to that business model. So it's a really exciting time. Ben.

Got it. Okay, cool. Well, this is really cool. I mean, there's a lot going on with this band and especially for People who I know there are other devices out there. I've talked about how I used the ring before and there's of course embeddable chips which I alluded to earlier, which not a lot of folks are doing now. But if you don't like to wear something on your hand while you're working out and you'd rather go with a wristband and if you want to try out something that has more of like this sleep coach option, this is a very unique way to be able to self quantify. And I keep my eyes on the whole self quantification realm pretty intensively. And I do like the whoop as the go to option if you're looking for a wristband for self quantification. So I actually own one and these things do actually work. They collect really good data and the sleep data is particularly good. Impressive. So hopefully for those of you who.

Are wondering, oh, thanks, Ben, I appreciate that.

Yeah, for people who worry about the light and the electricity, hopefully this kind of, kind of fills you in on how all that works as well. And of course I failed to mention that I actually interviewed last year some of the Reebok CrossFit Games competitors about some of their data, what they learned about like diet from their whoop, what they learned about sleep recovery, strain, et cetera. So I'll link to that one in the show notes as well. And the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Whoop the number three. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com whoop3 because this is actually the third podcast that we've done on the Whoop.

Hey Ben, one thing I want to add, you made a nice point about whooping the top wrist worn monitor. I also want to add that, you know, you can wear WHOOP on the forearm or even the upper arm.

Yeah. We just released new arm bands that allow you to wear it under an arm sleeve or even a bicep band. So for people who actually don't even want to wear something on the wrist, there's now additional functionality all for the same sensor.

Could you wear that during sleep as well?

During sleep we recommend the wrist. But for all other forms of activity, say you're a wrestler or cyclist or someone who's playing tennis or certain weightlifter, you know, the way you're holding weights, like there are certain times where you may not want something on your wrist. And that's where we developed the arm sleeve. We actually worked very closely with NBA and NFL players to get something that was Something they could wear during really, really high intensity competition and get it off, off their wrist because they're, you know, in contact sports, there are times where people are grabbing at your wrist or your arm. So the fact that it can now slip under a very small sensor. Excuse me, It's a very small sensor and it can slip under, you know, a very seamless arm sleeve is a point of differentiation.

Yeah, but how does that work? Like if you, if you want to wear the wristband during your sleep and then you want to wear the biceps band or the forearm band during your training, do you just like take one off when you go to sleep, put the other one on and the data continues to collect to the same account?

Yeah, it's like changing a T shirt. You just take the sensor out of one band and put on a sleeve the whoop sensor. As you know. Right. It's a tiny little piece of material and then it's got soft good around it. So in some cases a band if you're wearing it on your wrist, or in other cases a much wider band, a bicep band, or even a sleeve if you're, if you're wearing it on your upper arm. And the same little sensor can fit in that sleeve or can fit around your wrist on a band.

Okay, got it. Cool. Well, I'll link to all of this. I know we've got a $50 discount code for people from that 180 price point. And if you go to the Whoops website, The code is GREENFIELD. That'll save you $50. You can also go to the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Whoop3 if you want to take an even deeper dive into the technology and some of the sensors, I would listen to the first podcast that I did with Will because we explored that pretty intensively. And then I'll link to everything that we talked about today too. I also had a member of my team wear the WHOOP for a couple of months and write a pretty nerded out review on strain and recovery and sleep. So that'd be another interesting one for you to read if you just want to kind of see some screenshots of what the data looks like. And I'll put a link to that one in the show Notes as well. So that'll all be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Whoop3 so, Will, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. I'm sure you have some hot squash competition to get off to or something. Or I don't know, a roe.

No, you know, just, just running the business, Ben, and making sure we keep up with all of you guys.

All right. All right, man. Well, thanks for all the work that you do on this and if you are listening in and you have questions about self quantification in general or anything else that Will and I discussed, you can just go over to the show notes and leave your questions there. Either Will or I will jump in and reply. And again, the $50 code you can use on Whoop's website is green filled. So enjoy your self quantification journey. Will, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just add if people, you know, want to learn more about the technology too, beyond the Show Notes, you can just go to whoop.com, W-O-O-P.com and we've got a lot of different articles, especially for those who want to go deep on on the data side. We talk about how we've worked with different athletes and all the different studies that we've done. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram IL Ahmed and happy to answer any questions that you may have as well.

Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

All right folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Will Ahmed signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can subscribe to my information packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right hand side of that webpage that says Ben recommends where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of of my company kion@getkion.com that's getkion.com.