As humans, we wander through life with remarkably little information on how our bodies are performing. As my co-founder John used to say, “I can predict the weather next week, I know detailed health and performance metrics of my computer, but I don’t know when I’m going to get sick or how hard I should workout today.” Why are you tired, sick, injured, fatigued? What sequence of actions (or lack thereof) led to that state? Conversely, why are you peaking physically, alert, primed…in the flow state? How can you get back there? Stay there?
I grew up loving sports and exercise. Many of my childhood heroes were athletes. I was recruited to Harvard and became Captain of the Men’s Varsity Squash Team. As a D1 athlete, I was amazed by how little I knew about my body. I would train for 3 hours a day with my teammates without knowing what gains I made, I was surrounded by athletes, myself included, who overtrained, misinterpreted fitness peaks, underestimated recovery and sleep, and got injured. Being prepared for game day often seemed… random.
I became inspired by a simple idea: Humans, especially athletes, could optimize their daily performance. Optimizing performance was not a random sequence of events and decisions, but rather a systematic approach to understanding your body.
At Harvard, I met with cardiologists and physiologists. I read over 300 medical papers because I became obsessed with understanding the human body. What I learned was amazing. There are secrets that your body – your physiology – is waiting to tell you. These secrets can help prevent overtraining and injury, they can detect fatigue and even sickness, and, sure enough, they can be used to optimize human performance. But until now, no one could monitor those metrics.
Our team has spent the past 10 years building our technology-the WHOOP System. We assembled a world-class advisory board and we’re proud to work alongside our team of over 500 brilliant engineers, designers, data scientists, and support professionals.
We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the best athletes in the world. What we’ve discovered has amazed us. This is truly a product that can transform your life: Positive behavior change, fitness improvements, injury reduction.
We believe that the data we’re collecting on athletes is unprecedented, both in its sophistication and scale. No physiological studies have ever occurred on this magnitude. WHOOP benefits from the fact that athletes also have tangible performance data (wins/losses, batting average, time trials, etc) across sports. We want to share this data. The unbelievable correlations between physiology and performance; the approach to health monitoring and the different ways to interpret or action your body’s feedback. Beyond building a product that people love, we hope to advance human knowledge with our discoveries.
WILL AHMED
FOUNDER & CEO
