What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes,

scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their

peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed,

founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop,

where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, we're going back

to the basics and talking about one of the most important metrics that affects your ability

to perform, heart rate variability or HRV, as you'll see in the Woop app. We're compiling our top

episodes on HRV over the past two years to help you understand what it is, why it's important

to track, and what you can do to optimize it. You know, when I first got interested in this

space, I was doing research at Harvard, and

heart rate variability was one of the most fascinating statistics that I discovered.

This would have been 2010, 2011.

The studies at the time were a small number of studies.

We're talking about 10 people, 12 people at a time being measured by electrocardiograms, but they were fascinating

results. Olympic power lifters using heart rate variability to predict how much weight they should

lift. The top cyclists using heart rate variability to determine what their load should be the

next day. The CIA using heart rate variability for lie detection tests.

Cardiologists using heart rate variability to predict whether former heart failure patients would

have a heart attack. This is a truly fascinating statistic and a lot of the origins of WOOP or this

idea of what if we could take heart rate variability

and measure it continuously and non-invasively.

And that was really the breakthrough with the original WOOP 1.0, which goes back to 2012,

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