Recovery Trackers, Training and the Menstrual Cycle w/ Emily Capodilupo

It can be tricky to strike a balance between when our bodies are optimized to go hard and when we need to rest. This is why wearable trackers like my personal favorite, Whoop, are such amazing tools to help you understand the data and analytics behind your performance and recovery.

Key Takeaways

If You Want to Use A Recovery Tracker to Improve Your Recovery, You Should:

1. Find a tracker that provides you with science-based data and analytics unique to your body
2. Don't forget about your menstrual cycle and the impact it can have on your training and recovery
3. Remember that it is necessary to rest in order to see the gains that you want

Making Data-Driven Decisions with Emily Capodilupo

Emily Capodilupo is the Senior Vice President of Data Science & Research at Whoop. A Harvard-educated neurobiology expert, former gymnast, and current runner, Emily knows firsthand the importance of sleep and recovery when it comes to peak performance. She combines her skills, personal experience, and sleep and analytics knowledge to empower athletes to make intelligent, data-driven decisions about their bodies.

Recovery Is Non-negotiable

By now, we all know that rest is an important factor in recovery, but did you know it can also impact your athletic, cognitive, and emotional performance? The average person sleeps for ⅓ of their life, and yet the reason behind why sleep is a universal need is still yet to be fully understood. 

As Emily says, sometimes the best thing you can do for your body is rest. There is no point in training hard if you are not going to see the benefits, and you will not see the results you are hoping for without giving your body time to rest. By using a tracker like Whoop, you can better understand what is going on with your body and how to improve your metrics in order to meet your fitness goals.

Closing the Research Gender Gap

Another area that Emily is passionate about bringing attention to is the lack of female representation in academic research, especially when it comes to exercise physiology research. Historically women have been excluded from research studies, which does a horrible disservice to the females who want to train the right way. 

Whoop works to provide you with information about your recovery and sleep, and menstrual cycle so that you can work smarter, not harder. By understanding your menstrual cycle and how your body is operating, you can actually get fit more efficiently. Using technology to gain more information about ourselves, and learning how to apply this information in simple and straightforward ways, is truly the optimal way to perform in all of your athletic pursuits.

Are you ready to use science-backed guidance to improve your performance and recovery? Share your thoughts on data and science when it comes to your optimal health with me in the comments on the episode page.

In This Episode

• How data collection and algorithms work hand in hand with human physiology (7:58)
• What is taken into consideration when creating a recovery score with Whoop (17:25)
• Why it is important to close the gender gap when it comes to exercise physiology research (29:22)
• What Whoops current and future research tells us about our menstrual cycles (38:43)
• How to adjust your training based on where you are at in your cycle, stage of life, and more (45:52)

Quotes

“It is a pretty powerful metric of how ready your body is to adapt to the varying stimuli you may be exposed to that day.” (19:21)

“The recovery score, because we are getting at these pretty basic physiological measurements of readiness and adaptation, it translates into all these different things. So both your ability to perform, as well as your risk of potentially getting injured.” (24:32)

“By neglecting research into how to comfortably and safely exercise as a person with a uterus, with these ovarian hormones, we are kind of setting these people up to opt out and therefore reduce their health later in life, shorten their lifespan, make them feel less good and less health, and I feel like that is a really big problem.” (36:54)

“We have collected data from thousands of perimenopausal and menopausal females, and we are going to be able to do research… to sort of understand what research in that population looks like in a way that academic research failed to comment on. We are excited to be a part of closing that gap.” (51:08)

“When we make stuff up, we are at such a high risk of getting it wrong and doing this huge disservice to a population who wants to do it right.” (53:37)

Featured on the Show

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Check out the full show notes here!

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LTYB 342: Fitness Trackers and Listening To Your Body

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