What secrets are your body trying to tell you? How do you know if you should keep pushing or if you should rest?  If you listen to the podcast where our unifying theme is about high performance living, then I think you'll love today's topic.  It's about measuring strain and recovery.  There's a great deal of research uncovering biomarkers to give insight to your sleep, recovery, and HRV (heart rate variability).  Today's guest is the CEO and Founder of the wildly successful and rapidly expanding company, WHOOP.  His name is Will Ahmed and if you listen to WHOOP Podcast, you're familiar with Will and WHOOP's mission.  Their goal is to unlock human performance by monitoring heart rate 24/7, creating smart algorithms to gauge the stress on your body, prevent overtraining, provide an individualized in depth analysis of sleep, and help contribute to the broader picture of not just athletic performance, but life performance. WHOOP's software uses sleep, HRV, and real time heart rate that is measured 100 times per second to calculate a strain score, a recovery score, and a sleep score.  Strain is not just based on your workouts, but also based on the entire impact of the things you do to reduce stress and the things that cause stress to calculate a score.  For example, meditation contributes to a lower strain score while chasing around your toddler would increase your strain score. With this data, you can change your habits.  They also have the most advanced way to measure sleep, showing how long it took you to fall asleep, how much time you actually spent sleeping, number of disturbances (most are unconscious), and how much time you spent in each sleep cycle.  You are surveyed with the same questions each morning to look for patterns so that the "sleep coach" can give you feedback to improve your sleep.

 

Will is hooking you up:

Use the code LOONEY for 30 bucks off a when you sign up for WHOOP membership, and you get a free strap.

Topics Discussed in the Podcast 

• how Will Ahmed started his company WHOOP
• Personality traits Will looks for to build a business team
• Will Ahmed's approach to scaling WHOOP
• the framework & fundamentals of WHOOP: Strain, Recovery Score, HRV, Sleep
• how to optimize your sleep and sleep better
• importance of slow wave sleep
• What HRV is actually measuring
• how meditation effects strain score & recovery

Listen Now

 

Resources

• WHOOP
• WHOOP Podcast
• Follow Will on Instagram
• WHOOP Podcast with Kate Courtney
• Computer App I mentioned for blue light reduction: Flux 
• Book I mentioned (humble, hungry, smart); The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni 

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co.