Facetime: Peak Performance

As the co-founder of WHOOP, the favored fitness tracker of professional athletes, Will Ahmed ’08 is revolutionizing how we think about training and recovery – and tracking how COVID-19 affects the human body.

Ian Aldrich

Will Ahmed '08 holds up the WHOOP fitness tracker, a revolutionary device for professional athletes now also being used to monitor respiratory rates in relation to COVID-19.

If you want to see where the future of professional sports training is going, a conversation with Will Ahmed ’08 would be a good place to start. The Long Island native is the CEO and co-founder of WHOOP, a fitness wearable that has upped the game in how athletes and workout enthusiasts measure the way they train, recover, and sleep. WHOOP gathers data across five metrics, taking some 100 measurements per second to give users up to 10,000 times more data than a typical Fitbit or Apple Watch.

Since founding WHOOP in 2012, Ahmed has grown the Boston-based company to 150 employees and raised more than $100 million in venture capital. More impressively, WHOOP has become the leading performance wearable for athletes across professional sports. It’s the official tracker of the National Football League Players Association, was the first product approved by Major League Baseball, and the company works with several NBA teams and many of the top players on the PGA tour. A-listers from Rory Mcllory to Lebron James swear by the device.

What’s WHOOP’s origin story?
I was an athlete who used to over-train. I adopted a mindset of more is more. A lot of the fittest athletes have that mental ability to push their body further than it’s willing to go. It’s a strength in a lot of ways but it can become a weakness. I got interested in how you could understand your body on a really fundamental level and what does it mean to over-train. What was actually happening to my body was I was getting fitter and fitter and then all of a sudden falling off a cliff. I read something like 500 medical papers when I was as a student. Nobody told me to read those papers. I was a government and economics concentrator who had no business being in the science department. But I read these papers because I got really fascinated by what I was learning and I told myself that, if I kept at, it something good would come out of it.

You’ve said that sleep is the new steps. What do you mean by that?
Five years ago, the mainstream talking point was you have to get 10,000 steps a day. I think people have come to realize that’s a ridiculous metric; waving your hand can give you a number of steps but squatting 300 pounds in the gym doesn’t give you any. So it’s not accurately reflecting what you’re doing to your body. What is fundamental and important is sleep. You spend around 30 percent of your life doing it, so you want to make it as optimal as possible.

You work with many professional athletes. How have they benefited from WHOOP?
Most companies are founded on a belief that is contrarian at the time but later turns out to be right. Our contrarian point of view was that coaches and teams cared way too much about what happened during practice and didn’t know anything about what happened the other 20 hours of the day. My belief was that understanding sleep and recovery would be the next frontier in sports. It’s not just how talented a player is but understanding the status of that player on a given day. The biggest thing coaches and teams are getting from WHOOP is the ability to look at a dashboard of every player and see how recovered each one of them is. Rather than have the same practice plan for 20 individuals, you can now have an individual practice plan based on the status of everyone on the team. That makes your training methods and the way you think about every individual on your team so much more personalized and effective.

Does that mean the 43-year-old Tom Bradys of the world will be the rule rather than the exception in pro sports?
I think so. Lebron James comes to mind. He’s as talented at recovering as he is at playing basketball. He’s heavily invested in that and I think most athletes are going to be approaching their careers that way. [Late NBA Commissioner] David Stern was a mentor of mine and he would always say to me, ‘Imagine if every player lasted just one year longer at the peak of their career. Imagine how that would change sports and change the fan experience.’ He was right.

Do you look at how athletes used to treat their bodies and shake your head?
The fact that all professional athletes aren’t measuring their sleep and recovery will be looked back on like baseball players smoking cigarettes in the dugout. It will just seem so dumb. Your livelihood is based on your performance and your performance is completely tied to how you’re sleeping and recovering. And you’re not going to measure that? And it’s worth a $100 million?

We’re speaking at a time when COVID-19 has made personal and public health front-of-mind issues. How has WHOOP worked to address these times?
We were the first consumer app to add COVID-19 tracking. What’s amazing about that is we now have about 1,000 responses of people reporting having or having had COVID-19. As a result, we have one of the largest data sets of anybody on what the virus looks like from a physio- logical standpoint. And we partnered with Cleveland Clinic and Central Queensland University [in Australia] to do research on what that data means. What we’ve seen is that people who report having COVID-19 have really elevated respiratory rates. That’s the number of breaths per minute, which is normally a very boring statistic – it doesn’t change much, if at all. But what we’ve seen with people who have COVID-19 is it jumps off the page. It’s much higher. That makes sense because COVID-19 is a lower respiratory tract infection, so it follows that your lower respiratory rate would be elevated.

It would seem that the very things that are at the center of what WHOOP is trying to help people improve upon – getting more sleep, recovering more efficiently – are going to be even more important going forward as we manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s proven by science that getting more sleep boosts your immune system. It’s a good time to get more sleep. But, also, our sense is that, in general, society is going to move toward more predictive and more preventative forms of medicine, treatment – healthcare really. At WHOOP, we want to do everything we can to understand this virus; measuring your respiratory rate is one very important indicator as to whether you have COVID-19.