Show Notes:
In this episode, Kristen Holmes – Vice President of Performance Science at WHOOP and legendary field hockey player and coach – shares actionable insights into the physiology and psychology of human performance that can enable you to literally CHOOSE your performance. At WHOOP, she works directly with hundreds of the best tactical, professional, surgical, and NCAA Athletes/Teams in the world helping them interpret WHOOP data to optimize training, recovery, and sleep behavior.
Not only is Kristen an authority on all things related to human performance optimization, she speaks from a place of experience as one of the most decorated field hockey athletes AND coaches of all time. Competing at the University of Iowa, she was a 3x All American and 2x Big 10 Athlete of the Year before becoming a 7 year member of the US National Field Hockey Team and a legendary coach at Princeton. Her tenure at Princeton is the definition of a dynasty, winning 12 Ivy league titles in 13 seasons and a National Championship in 2012.
This episode distils many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the world of elite performers and provides actionable advice so that you can immediately CHOOSE your performance level. Kristen’s wisdom can change the trajectory of your life.
TOPICS:
[3:09] Performance is the capacity to perform intentionally
[9:06] The North Star: How to access the Flow State
[14:09] The two ingredients in Kristen’s (tried and tested) winning formula
[20:54] How to manifest high performance consistently (Hint: Everything you need is free)
[24:42] Why meal timing is so important
[35:00] You can opt out of jet lag
[40:29] The physiology and psychology of resilience
[54:07] Most impactful changes you can make today – The gold standard of performance habits
Elite Performance is a Choice
Two key themes arise in this interview: 1) Performance is a choice, and 2) Performance depends on capacity. Kristen’s definition of performance encompasses both of these points brilliantly, as she says that performance is “The capacity to intentionally behave at a level equal to your physical, mental, and emotional potential.”
To perform at your potential, you must have the capacity to do so. An oversimplification of Kristen’s in-depth explanation (found throughout the interview) may be that capacity refers to your autonomic nervous system’s ability to be adaptable to changing environments and demands. Quantified by Heart Rate Variability (HRV) – a measure of the irregularity of heart beats that indicates nervous system responsiveness – having capacity enables rapid switching between the parasympathetic (rest, relax) and sympathetic (fight or flight) states.
Years of cutting-edge research and technology, including the brilliant work by WHOOP, have demonstrated that the capacity to perform can be influenced by lifestyle behaviors and habits. Therefore, by intentionally choosing your behaviors, you are effectively choosing your performance level.
This becomes an incredibly powerful concept when considering the elusive flow state where productivity sky rockets and performance reaches new heights. Rather than an abstract state derived from a combination of voodoo magic and chance, you can reverse-engineer flow states and intentionally reach a flow state.
High Performance Behaviors
The most powerful behaviors are free. You read that right; you can optimize your life for free. Leveraging access to millions of data on critical biometrics (sleep, HRV, RHR, and more), Kristen reveals the most important habits that correlate to improved recovery, health, and performance: sleep/wake timing, meal timing, and light exposure.
Sleep Wake/Timing:
An authority on circadian alignment, Kristen stresses that the most important thing you can do is go to sleep and wake up at consistent times. The human body operates on a cycle, and disrupting this cycle with irregular sleep patterns have detrimental impacts on the body’s ability to obtain restorative sleep and generate the capacity to perform.
As I discussed in Episode 005 on sleep deprivation and circadian alignment, there are some key studies that demonstrate this. A 2017 study published in Nature, the gold standard for scientific research, found a direct association between college GPAs and sleep/wake timing. But here is the real kicker – the total amount of sleep wasn’t indicative of academic performance, but rather, it was the consistency of sleep timing that mattered.
To follow this up, WHOOP conducted a study using data from 20,000 people, totaling about three million sleeps. They also found that sleep consistency correlated with higher performance data, and postulated that it was a result of an observed increase in deep sleep, REM sleep, heart rate variabilities, and decreasing resting heart rates.
Meal Timing
Perhaps under-appreciated, meal timing is a simple adjustment that can make a massive difference. Kristen notes that eating within 2 hours of intended sleep can be detrimental to your sleep. The reason is that digestion is an effortful, parasympathetic process, meanwhile, sleep is also a parasympathetic activity.
Naturally, the body will prioritize digestion over restorative sleep processes, so if your body is still digesting food while you sleep, you will be delaying and reducing the time spent in restorative sleep. This is significant because these are the critical stages for recovery processes including muscle repair, memory consolidation, and the removal of toxins from the brain.
Light Exposure
Similar to sleep/wake timing, light exposure functions by aligning your internal biological clock with the solar day. Amazingly, with photoreceptors in the eyes and on the skin, the brain has been shown to respond to light exposure within seconds, and physiological changes occurring within. Kristen recommends viewing the natural sky within 20 minutes of waking up and viewing sufficient light throughout the day. Prior to sleeping, the best thing you can do is view the natural sunlight, dim your lights, and minimize the impact of light exposure to allow yourself to succumb to sleep naturally.
Investing in Yourself
Committing to high performance isn’t about working relentlessly and sacrificing great things in your life, rather, it is an investment in your life. Prioritizing optimal behaviors can enable you to live longer, happier, healthier, and be more successful. And that is exactly what Kristen does.
Her specialty is helping individuals and teams use quantified physiological and psychological insights to accelerate learnings associated with self-regulation and performance optimization. Together with WHOOP, they are transforming the booming field of human performance optimization and much more. From tracking COVID-19 to understanding the impact of pregnancy on physiology, supporting the world’s highest performers and helping people to identify potential health issues PRIOR to symptom onset (see: How WHOOP saved this man’s life), performance science is changing the world.
As a WHOOP user, I can honestly say that it has made a huge impact on my life. For less than $1/day, you can access life-changing information. That’s just a few Starbucks coffees a month or one less dinner at a restaurant.
Can you put a price on a lifetime of health, happiness, and performance? For me, it’s worth a lot more than $1/day, making WHOOP an absolute no-brainer.
Join WHOOP
If you are interested in trying it out, use the following link to get your first month free!
join.whoop.com/learniiperform
For More
And to learn more about Kristen, WHOOP, and listen to the entire episode, check out the following links!
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