Will Ahmed
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I also had a lot of conviction in what I was building, more conviction in the thing than I had in myself, which is an interesting concept in itself, but... I believed that what I was building should exist in the world and would exist in the world. And what I struggled with for years in building it was, can I do this? Am I capable of this?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh gosh, I feel like I'm under a lot of stress or I feel like I'm under a lot of pressure or I don't know the answers to these things or how do I hire someone or how do I fire someone or how do I raise money? For me, it was dealing with that sort of trauma of building the company.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I don't have a lot of self-doubt now. I think that... I think that I've gotten good at questioning why I have conviction in things and then, you know, sort of examining that through other people's perspectives or through my own, you know, sort of deeper examination, if you will.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I don't think that you ever stop entirely having self-doubt and you probably shouldn't, you know, because then I think you get a little unhinged, so to speak. But I do think that confidence and self-belief is sort of a prerequisite for doing anything really hard.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And they also had like a great community and a great brand, which are two things that are, that are pretty resilient. Like when things go wrong and there's like elements of dysfunction. And even with that, I mean, it's unbelievable how, yeah, how sorry of a place it is now.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, that's really well said. I mean, for me in building... Whoop, it was helpful to sort of disassociate building the company and building myself as a CEO or an entrepreneur. And I think for years, I had kind of wrapped those two things up as one. And so if Whoop had a good day, I had a good day. If Whoop had a bad day, I had a bad day. If Whoop was failing, I was failing.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And it's not a particularly productive sort of framing, if you will, for actually growing either yourself or the business. And the reality is that You know, the business could be doing great and you could be spiraling out of control or vice versa. You know, how many businesses suffered during COVID to no fault of their management team. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so there's it just it's it's quite important to separate those two things, I think, literally. And then I realized also that if I didn't start growing better. I was going to be the detriment to Whoop growing because as the CEO... Lame duck in your own company.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, because as the CEO, if you're projecting all sorts of stresses and you're not managing the company properly and you're kind of spinning out of control yourself, well, the business isn't going to be successful.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so I felt, yeah, I felt especially early on, I was very much that chaotic founder. Now it's hard to, it's hard to go back and say, well, I wish I could change the way I behave for the first few years of the company's history, because there is an element of, and I think I believe this, there's an element of you change one thing and, you know, everything else changes going forward. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And of course I'm, I'm super grateful with where I sit today and, and, you know, what we've been able to build, but, um, Yeah, I put up real walls in those, so that the period of like 22, probably to 24, 25 of just like real walls to anyone's feedback. And I was so certain about things and I was so stubborn.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I think it's in a way, it's a good, it's a helpful mechanism to get something off the ground because there's no ambiguity, but you're very hard to work with.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, the unlock for me in that category has been... to be driven and grateful. And I feel like it's easy to get stuck on just the drive train and the dopamine system of, you know, when the company's worth a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars or $10 billion, you sort of keep telling yourself when I get to X, I'm going to be happy.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And what's good about that from a drive standpoint is it drives you there. But of course, when you get there, there's sort of enormous letdown. And it's also, uh, You have to balance it with being grateful for the moment that you're in. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs worry that or sort of misinterpret gratitude as complacency. But I think they are fundamentally different things.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And they work different aspects of your brain. Like the drive system is dopamine and the gratitude system is serotonin. And both of those have a way of making you happier. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
No, I mean, so I would say my sort of, broad operating principle is that I want to be of service. And that's a helpful framing because just out of the gates, it makes it less about what you accumulate and more about what you do for your company or society or your customers or fill in the blank.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And beyond that, I also get to work in unlocking human performance and healthspan and this sort of like what I would call noble mission, which is around making people perform better and live longer. And so by not having – My sole mission be around revenue numbers or company valuation or those sorts of things.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think that alone helps you get a little bit outside of the miserable successes, so to speak. And so it's very easy to... just gloss over numbers that get bigger and not really associate any meaning with them.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But when you go from getting one testimonial every six months to getting hundreds a week from people that are like, your product changed my life, and you get to stand in front of your company and read that to 500 people who are blood, sweat, and tears trying to make this product great. You feel something. I mean, there's a lot of gratitude for me that comes from that experience.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so I can still want to push for the company to be bigger and more successful and be affecting more people. But I can also at the same time, I think, appreciate the impact that it's having. and, and that's, I would say, will the entrepreneur or CEO, right? We all have these different identities and, uh, You know, I've sort of looked at hard things that happen in your life as a path to growth.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like we talked about early on when I was 22, like not really knowing what I was doing running a company and just having to go through that sort of painful period of becoming a better CEO or becoming a better human. I think that in general... Um, you know, pain in some form leads to growth.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so if you, if you kind of adopt a growth mindset, it makes you much more comfortable with being in that painful state. Now you don't want to be at it. You don't want it to be in sort of a masochistic way where you're, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like what you just described where you're like, you want to force yourself to be in pain, but more just in the sense that like, wow, a bunch of things just went wrong in a row for me.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And this is very painful. My best friend committed suicide a little over a year ago. And in my personal life, that was the most pain that I'd ever felt in my life. I'd never lost anyone, let alone someone who I had seen a week earlier. And I think when you're first going through the...
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
the trauma of an experience like that it's hard to find perspective in it but you know if my emotional range at that point in my life was like from a six to a ten where like you know zero is about zero is like the worst thing in your life and and ten is like you know you feel great euphoria like in hindsight my emotional range was actually kind of narrow
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
right and so being able to go down to a to a one or a two for some period of time actually opened me up in a in a really healthy way in the months later and in a way that i never would have anticipated from having this terrible thing happen in my life and uh and so you know some of it's a little bit of just how you reframe everything but i have found that
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
in whatever category of your life that you're feeling some kind of enormous pain, there is something on the other side of it that you'll benefit from.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think there's an opportunity for a lot of these different fitness communities. I mean, you have F42, you've got Barry's, you've got Orange Theory, you've got these different types of Pilates studios. And it sort of seems like people are looking almost for the new thing. And that in turn allows for these different micro-communities to pop up around a particular activity.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, your first reaction is to try to go numb because that is a coping mechanism. If you don't feel the pain, you can kind of still get through the day. And you have to process the emotion. You have to feel it. And so I think in the first 10 days of it, I was sort of white knuckling through it. And especially kind of day to day in running the company.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Now, fortunately, the company is also at a stage where I've got, you know, an executive team that's pretty functional and they knew what I was going through. It wasn't like it was a secret. And then at least in this specific case for me, I... I delivered the, uh, the eulogy.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Um, and it was, I mean, he was a very popular young man and it was in front of 800 or a thousand people in this massive church. And, uh, and so that, and that was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life was having to talk about his life. Um, and you know, someone I loved and cared about and, uh, And just a whole wave of emotions went through me doing that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so that, one, I felt enormous relief from doing it. And then, two, in the aftermath of it, I was proud of being able to celebrate his life. And so there was sort of a weight that was taken off from that experience. And then, of course, you deal with these other stages of grief, which is around like I would play squash with them every week.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so now every time I go to the squash courts, I think about them. Or I go to the steam room and I would sit with them. So you have these different stages of grief. But I think in those first 30 days, the best thing that I could have done was to go through that huge wave of painful release of emotion.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think that that's sort of a natural thing that's a sort of a natural thing that I, anyone can do because it's, it's scary how your body feels like it's a physical overwhelming, um, uh, state and, uh, and it, it's distracting. Like you, you know, you think you're in the middle of a conversation next thing you're, you're crying.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I understand that, but I, if anyone's listening to this, who's going through grief, I would encourage them to, uh, take whatever time or whatever process they need to release what they're feeling in that period.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And at the end of the day, I think... Weightlifting for a lot of people is intimidating. Exercise is lonely and hard. It makes sense that there are these boutique communities, so to speak. And so... I wouldn't actually attribute the success of these other communities solely to CrossFit's downfall.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, it was huge. And I think it was an exaggerated experience because I had to write down everything I felt about him. I had to, you know, deliver that in front of actually a large number of people that happened to also be all of my closest friends.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And it was, you know, a large public speaking event too, which is, you know, its own form of whatever. And I had never, you know, experienced death like that. And I wanted to celebrate someone who was a really important person in a lot of people's lives. So, yeah, I think that it was a very exaggerated experience, and I'm grateful that I got to do that aspect of it.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. They're kind of out and about trying to chase a bunch of things, and they're upset they're not getting what they want, but they've never actually declared what they want.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, I think the first thing to know is that it's an inwards examination. You have to ask yourself what you want. You can't go asking everyone in your life what you want. You'll never figure out what you want. And so that's a very internal and introspective pursuit. And I do think that It's hard when you're young because you haven't quite figured out how to talk to yourself yet.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
At least I hadn't when I was 18 or 19 years old. But you can be sort of self-aware of things that you're drawn to. So... Let's start with things that you're not drawn to. Well, you know, I did a bunch of internships, so to speak, when I was like 18, 19, and 20 or whatever. And I worked in finance, which sort of seemed like what I should do because other people I knew were going to go into finance.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I just didn't enjoy it. And by the way, in my free time, I was, you know, doing research on the fitness industry or the wearables industry or the sorts of things. And, and then, you know, when I would go play squash practice at Harvard or whatever, like I would love working out and love like pushing myself. And, and through that, I also was somebody who used to overtrain.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I got interested in how you can figure, you know, how can you understand overtraining? And through that, I found myself doing physiology research on things that in the past I wouldn't have been interested in or not drawn to. And I think the things that you think about Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think CrossFit in itself, it probably appeals to you and me, but you know, it had a high injury rate before they even had dysfunction as a, as a company. It is like a pretty intimidating workout out of the gates. Like there's a lot of people that it,
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, that's well said.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, I would say it's recurring fleeting thoughts because the things that matter to you keep coming back. At least I've found. And then I think the other thing that everyone should learn in some form is the ability to close their eyes and breathe. And whether you call that meditation or mindfulness or fill in the blank, develop some process to sit with yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, one step is to state it. I mean, don't be coy about it. I want to build this company. I want to be a musician. Fill in the blank. What do you want? And state it to the world. And then... you cannot underestimate hard work and consistency. If you are hard charging and consistently hard charging, that is such a differentiator on sort of everyone else. And that's in turn what creates luck.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You know, like if you keep showing up and... you keep getting rejected and all of a sudden you meet this person and they introduce you to that person. And next thing you know, you're on a plane and you showed up to the city and it didn't quite make sense. And now you're meeting the person who all of a sudden has the answer to that thing you wanted to that break that you needed.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, there's a lot of people it's going to turn off like right out of the gate.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so I, you know, I think getting what you want is some carb combination of hardware consistency and luck. And you could probably bolt onto that, like a comfort with rejection. because you're going to get rejected enormously. And the more ambitious what you want is, the more you're going to be rejected.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And that goes back to my point about people, when they're trying to get what they want, actually get insular rather than going out. You want to be introspective about what you want, and then you want to be extroverted about getting what you want.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I think people get stuck sort of going out and about because they're afraid of what's someone going to think if they know I want this thing or, you know, what if they say no to me?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think commitment is another criteria to get what you want, like being deeply committed to it. And whether that's a relationship or, you know, a pursuit that you're after in your career, like staying committed to it is huge. I meet a lot of young founders who are kind of, they're sort of in school, they sort of have a job, they're sort of starting something, right? And there's a safety in that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Because if any one of those things sort of blows up, they've still got the other two and you'll still sound good at a dinner table, you know? I will say though, getting over fear of rejection is part one, but getting over rejection is part two. Like I struggled with that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, from the age of 21 to, I mean, look, I've now dealt with rejection throughout every phase of building this company, but I would say it was most painful from the ages of like 21 to 24 because I hadn't experienced actually a lot of rejection in hindsight up to that point in my life. And everyone I was telling this idea to about like, hey, I want to start this company.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So last year, the biggest uptick was pickleball.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
This is the thing I'm going to do. a lot of people I respected, like they were all kind of telling me like, this is a bad idea, dude. Like you should not do this. And, and then of course you go try to raise capital and investors tell, you know, and you try to hire people and they tell, you know, and, and, um, and I, you know, looking back on it, I think there was good reason for that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like I was a kid, I was starting something that is big in engineering and medicine and computer science and math and, um, You know, I'm not an engineer or a computer scientist or a doctor or a mathematician. And like, and so there's just, and I was super young and naive. And so like, I understand why I faced all that rejection, but it still was very painful.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then in the last... So I mean 2023, actually. And then 2024, the biggest we saw was paddle. So two racquet sports, interestingly. Pickleball grew a lot in the United States. Paddle... which people in the States call padel, but paddle, which is what it's called internationally, has just taken off. And so that's a pretty fascinating game too. I grew up playing squash and tennis.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And, and then that's where the conviction piece wavers, like your commitment and your conviction wavers. I stayed very committed to the idea, again, because I believed it was going to exist in the world. And I had deep conviction around that. But my self-belief, that's what wavered. Because when you get told no enough times, you're kind of like, well, either they're all crazy or I'm crazy.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And at some point, you're looking at numbers like 50 to 1, 100 to 1. You're like, well, okay. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I just hadn't proven enough at that point in time to make it more obvious or to make it a more acceptable idea. And that was both in the form of the idea and the maturation around the idea and the capability of the tech as much as it was also – sitting there like a future CEO and entrepreneur. Dude, you're 23.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So for me, paddle's like maybe the most fun game I've ever played because it's a sort of perfect hybrid of the two. Are you familiar with what it looks like? Yeah. So it's, you know, the whole glass courts all the way around and you're sort of, you're sort of in a tennis court in like, you know, a glass cage and you can essentially play the ball off of anything.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And I didn't have great answers to the competition either. That was the sort of other variable in building the business that was quite complicated. It was just... Any sensible person was going to ask the 22-year-old or the 25-year-old, like, well, how are you going to beat Nike? How are you going to beat Apple?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How are you going to beat Adidas and Under Armour and Microsoft and all these sort of big gargantuan companies? So that probably played a role in an appropriate level of skepticism.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. I mean, there's an element of, I think, building anything where you have to see a version of the future that other people don't see. And then at some point you either need to be right or you're not.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And it's, it's pretty dynamic and fun.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
By the way, around that time, we became partners with CrossFit. And I mean, I've now been building for 13 years, without question, the most dysfunctional partner we've ever worked with. And we've worked with a lot of partners. And a lot of dysfunction, I imagine, as well. A lot of different partners. And then the tragedy at this recent event. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, in terms of like the percentage increase of activities we've seen on Whoop. Wow. That was the biggest one last year.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I'd go a step further. I think it's actually in part to get people over the fear of failure. Sort of get them out of the blocks, right? Take the leap. Stop being paralyzed. Don't be paralyzed, yeah. I think that's where, to your point, the failure porn's coming from is trying to convince people that it's okay to put themselves out there.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's a much more noble way to think about it if it's... Because, yeah, my reflection is that I've learned more from successful endeavors than I have from ones that have failed. And I think failure is largely overrated. That's interesting. Why? So sometimes, I think this is particularly true of startups. I think that a lot of startups all kind of fail for the same reasons, right?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
you know, they didn't find product market fit or they burned cash too fast or, you know, ultimately the product or service was something that another competitor did faster than them or they got undercut on price. Like there's like five things that most of the co-founders got angry at each other. There's like five things that like all startups essentially fail from.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But the companies that really make it, they all kind of have some kind of like secret in a way. Like they have some magic and, And, and I think that there's probably more that's unique about each of those than, than sort of, it is the same. And, and so, so for people who have been on that sort of one in a hundred rocket ship, I think that you're learning some special sauce.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, we've got a lot of data. That's for sure. The thing that people still struggle with the most is sleep. It's amazing how... I think it's 22% of people on Whoop get over seven hours of sleep. So you just think about that. Roughly 80% of people are getting less than seven hours of sleep. And I think sleep sometime in the last...
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And in the future, you're going to look for, hey, what is the special sauce? Like, we actually have to create something here. We have to spark something that otherwise we're not going to have.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And I think what's happening a little bit with people that say they've learned so much from failure is it goes back to the pain thing. It's like they realized how much they can sort of personally overcome the suffering of a failure. One takes away, I think, the fear of future failures. It's like, okay, I know what that is. I've been through that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And it sort of broadens that emotional tolerance going forwards. And ultimately probably makes you more resilient in a way.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, right. You try to take that positive from it.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I mean, look, I think whatever, whatever can be done to make people have a, like a, like a lower fear of failures is probably good. So I'm not, I'm not out here like, you know, bashing the, the failure energy, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, uh, but I do think you learn more from these unique successes than, and the one thing I reflect on is whoop almost failed a lot of times.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like we really almost ran out of money a few times in the, in the history of the company. And, uh, in particular about six years into the company, like we were right on the verge of bankruptcy. And I think a lot about if the company had failed then, like what would have my lesson been? And
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It almost certainly would have been to have been less ambitious with the technology, to have gone to market sooner with something that was like less cutting edge, to be mass market faster rather than working with athletes. You know, a lot of sort of, to be honest, the feedback that I got from people who rejected the business was, I would have taken those as the lessons.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But in turn, actually, when we did ultimately become successful, those were the reasons we were successful.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Five years became the new steps where all of a sudden people just realized that was an important thing to care about. And steps maybe in turn was a less important thing to care about in the grand scheme of things. And yeah, we've certainly benefited from people's enthusiasm towards sleep. But it's, yeah, it's super important.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, I think one takeaway is that it's helpful for us in general to take meaning from experiences. And so whether it's a success or a failure, taking something from that is in turn a path towards growth. And so you can question whether or not the lesson could have been actually the exact opposite or completely different. But by taking a lesson, you are in turn feeling like you're growing.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, and reflecting and having a growth mindset, like these are things that are just enormously useful in your life. I mean, one other way to look at everything when you start to see the lens of sports, like, there's so many examples of what you were describing in sports of like this. The most recent example is, is with Rory McIlroy winning the masters.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And Rory has been a friend now for like, you know, seven or eight years. He was one of the first big golfers to wear a whoop. And so I got to know him well. And that final round at the masters was like every version of, uh, like a human experiencing, you know, like this emotional roller coaster and such highs and lows.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I mean, he hit shots in that round that he's the only person on the planet that can hit, right? Like on the 15th hole, he hits this like sweeping seven iron, like 200 yards to five feet, right? And then, you know, on the 13th hole, he had a shot from 80 yards that an amateur golfer would put on the green.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so at moments during that round, not just the tournament, just that one round, like he was the very best golfer in the world by far. And he was a complete amateur golfer. And he had to go through these huge ups and downs to like, you know, overcome what was this painful 14-year trauma that he essentially was experiencing of winning the career Grand Slam and winning one more major.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And there's this amazing photo at the end of, you know, the moment he's won and he's sort of released his putter. And his putter is like, you know, because it's a photo just sort of frozen above him. And what it looks like is gravity has just flipped.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you can just feel the weight that's come off of this man for having to deal with this, you know, essential, essentially like trauma for 11 years.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
There's a lot of common themes amongst the world's best athletes. So, you know, Michael Phelps and Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes and... Rory, like I've spent a lot of time around these guys and there's a certain intensity that burns inside them that is hard to fake. Like you can kind of feel it even when you're chilling.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's the trap is people previously, if you ask them how much sleep did they get last night? They're like, well, I went to bed at 11. I woke up at six. I got seven hours of sleep. And then they realize after you do all the factoring of time away from this, it's five and a half hours of sleep. And, uh, Yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Ronaldo is probably the most exaggerated example of that that I've ever felt.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Just you can feel a drive, like you can feel a certain energy. you know, people, everyone kind of gives off an energy and, and depending on how healthy you are in a given day or how good you're feeling, maybe your energy is stronger or less strong, but like his, the energy that he gives off is one of, of real drive. And there's like an intensity burning there that you can't fake.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like you can just feel it. And, and I think for a lot of these guys, there's a cost that comes with that, that we, the fans don't see. Like you don't see the, The cost of having to be the first person at the practice facility every single day and cold plunging for hours afterwards and the time away from the family and the sacrifices and all these other areas of life.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I mean, it is very inspiring when you really... get a close-up look at it and you realize just like what a grind it is like it is such a grind you see the goals and you see the the master's jacket but you don't you don't see the grind and the pain and the injuries and like the the time that they're not on camera and there's something about it that's
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
both inspiring and also you're like, yeah, maybe I wouldn't want to do that. Intimidating.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So, you know, one of the things we recently did was update how we think about sleep where it's less just the total hours that you got versus how much you needed. And it's now also looking at sleep consistency, efficiency and stress. And so it's sort of a better way. It took us a while to get there, but we did a lot of research around what is quality sleep.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
He's actually easier to compare to some professional athletes than any other business leader.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
In just that it's clear that he's got a drive that he's... tormented by and he's willing to sacrifice everything else for it. And you see that with the world's best athletes.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, and I think athletes have gotten more introspective. Actually, Rory's extremely thoughtful, and he's gone through phases of reading books on the Stoics and meditating and all sorts of things. I think a lot of athletes end up being more introspective because they get into visualization, which becomes sort of the gateway to...
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
meditation, intuition, these sorts of different levels of self-discovery. And then I think there's plenty of really capable athletes who don't actually go that deep in words and they don't really analyze the, how it works as much as know that it works and they just go.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And one of the biggest things that shows up in the research is the importance of consistency, which is going to bed and waking up at the same time. And you and I were just talking about how hard that is in general. I mean, you, the nightclub promoter.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The rest thing was kind of the unlock for getting into all these pro athletes and building those relationships was this idea that you can now measure recovery. And one thing that I was really surprised by, but now makes sense kind of knowing the cast of characters is like amongst the very best athletes, they're actually willing to experiment a lot.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like they're kind of always looking for what is that additional way I can get a little edge. And that's one of the things that separates, I think, the very best from just like a great professional athlete is this like drive towards experimentation. And it's part of the reason that in the early days of building this company, like...
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
someone like LeBron James or Michael Phelps was willing to wear a whoop.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. So that's probably my worst metric on Whoop, in part because travel just nukes it. So for people wondering how it's calculated, like for the last, you look at like for the last four nights, how similarly was your bedtime and wake time? And if you travel over time zones, that of course factors into your consistency.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think... first and foremost, we view Whoop as a tool that anyone can use. We don't view it as your master. We view it as a tool that can make you healthier or live longer or perform better. And the general sort of broad critique of, is more knowledge better? I've always rejected. I mean, you can go back to the printing press and people being like, oh, we can't have the printing press.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
God forbid so many people have access to information. So I think in almost every stage of human history, this rejection of people having more knowledge is sort of a lazy analysis. Now, there's certain things from a technology design standpoint that we've done with that in mind. So I've never believed that having a screen on the product actually made it a better tool.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I've always thought that there's plenty of screens in the world. And do we really need one more screen that's giving you numbers that you're obsessing over and looking at and they're vibrating and alerting you? And so in many ways, we designed the product to disappear into the background and to be there when you needed it and to look at it when you need it.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And for a product that people wear 24-7, It's actually remarkably unobtrusive. You know, it's not talking to you. It's not beeping at you. It's only going to vibrate if you want it to vibrate. If you want it to wake you up. So. Yeah, we've done, I think, a lot of things around the concept of have this be a tool that's in the background versus having it being a master that's trying to control you.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, and look, I think you – well, first of all, the concept of – hiding data, that is actually one thing that we did develop against because we would have these really exaggerated examples. Like imagine you're an Olympian and you're training for four years for one day.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It turned out for the most part, the Olympians wanted to know how recovered they were, but they didn't necessarily want to see how recovered they were. So we created a toggle. This actually exists in the app today. Yeah. Where you can literally have your data collect, but it'll hide your recovery score and your sleep score. Oh.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But essentially there's all this research just showing that if you can build a sort of continuity around bed and wake times, your overall circadian rhythm, your overall performance of your body... I mean, it's one of the key indicators we discovered when we built this health span score for, you know, overall health span and actually all cause mortality.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so in a sense, we built the George feature for Olympians a long time ago. Now, the point about it being for a week, I mean, what I would just say is just don't open the app for a week, right? And keep the thing charged because it's going to store data.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Now, you know, if you're uploading a week of data, it might take, you know, a couple hours to upload, but yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's a little variable, but it's anywhere between probably 25 and 50. Right. So in terms of the number of times we're sampling a second.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That seems like kind of a breakthrough study.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I do think there's an element of if you can't be great at something, it's kind of like dangerous to be okay at it. Like there's part of me that feels like if I was even a mediocre musician, like I'd be playing at, you know, the local bar and that would, I would have, yeah, I'd have no entrepreneurial anything. It just would have been this like... You certainly want to pick your pursuits.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Playing a bad saxophone.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That is interesting. Although it had me thinking that there are things in my life that I like to do or have liked to do just because I was getting a little better, but I wasn't obsessed with, you know what I mean? Like I played in a soccer league from the ages of like 25 to 32. And I was, you know, there were some sports I was athletically I would say more gifted at.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I wouldn't say soccer was ever one of them. But I just enjoyed it so much, like running around like a total goof kid with refs and 90-minute games and whatever. I would say an okay cook, and I like to cook steaks and stuff from time to time. But I don't necessarily feel bothered that I'm not making a better steak than... you know, fill in the blank down the road here in Austin.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like you can, I think you can pursue some of these things with just an eye towards getting better. And I actually think there are, I think there's something for people older in life picking up particularly activities that they can get better at. Because there's sort of this comfort with doing the thing that you did in college or you did on some high school team.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you do like a bad version of it as you're older. And you always think about, oh, I wish I was this younger. But if you can get into lifting weights, for example, and all of a sudden you see the numbers going up a little bit over time or yoga or Pilates. I think that's great.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you don't need to become a yoga instructor. Yeah. Progress. I think progress matters.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's hard to keep score too. Yes.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Golf, golf, you can keep score.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But I do believe that you can't – you have to be careful how many desires you have at the same time because that's essentially this contract with yourself to be – unhappy until you get what you want.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you want to pick a couple of lanes, ideally only one or two lanes where you're really all in, because if you try to do too many things at once that to be great at, you know, it's, you're not, you're not going to be great at all.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's been a theme of this conversation with the athletes and, you know, all of it.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, you go to the Taylor Swift concert, but you don't see her training at 8 a.m., singing her entire set list on a treadmill.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, we call that social jet lag. And it's interesting for a lot of people on Whoop, it's quite common.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, they're good for five days. And then on the weekend, it's like off by three hours and they're kind of back to them. What's people's worst day of sleep typically? Do you know? It's either Friday or Saturday night in the US. Now, it's interesting, now that Whoop is global, we have a lot of different perspectives on this, but the Middle East with sleep is crazy. They're like in their own world.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, I mean... One thing I was just reflecting on and listening to your very healthy day is like... I realized there aren't that many days in my life over the course of a year where I'm like, oh, today I have a big blank. You know, it's almost like it feels like every day I go into it trying to have a similar output and a similar sort of, you know, game plan, you know.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And so in terms of my morning routine, Wake up, shower, work out with a trainer, sauna, cold plunge, meditate, breakfast, off to work. I mean, that's kind of like the perfect morning for me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's three days a week when I'm in Boston. And then... you know, the Tuesday and the Thursday I'll try to work out. So that Monday, that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then like the Tuesday and the Thursday, I'll try to do something on my own in the morning. Um, or for the last six weeks, it's been more like family time in the morning.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I'll have like breakfast with a little, little Tommy and my wife and, um, hang out with the little guy, which is pretty incredible. And, and in a way, like, It's interesting, spending time with your newborn has a similar physiological effect to meditating, at least it does for me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I meditate every day, so that's become a huge part of my life and just being able to manage everything that comes at you. But I find if you have a great first couple hours of the day, It just makes the rest of the day and everything that gets thrown at you so much more manageable. Most of my professional work life is just things coming at me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Wow, CrossFit. Well, CrossFit is, first of all, a great grassroots movement in the sense that it literally began as an email list. And it's amazing to think how far they were able to go with that. And then you've got the Greg Glassman racism stuff and like the craziness during Black Lives Matter. And then you've got this whole new leadership team that comes in.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The whole thing is so poorly run, it's hard to even talk about it. Because it's such a missed opportunity.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I don't know what problem is going to walk into my door that day, but it is a lot of managing problems.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So the average bedtime in Riyadh or in Doha is like 1.55 a.m.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And in a way, I've also kind of started to think of the day starting at, you know, 9 p.m. the day before, which is like, what's your sleep routine? And I wear blue light blocking glasses, which I love. You know, you don't want to get into a fight with your wife before bed. You want to have like, you know.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, I've gotten her to wear them too. Fortunately, Lely's a team player in all of my health optimizations. I haven't gotten off of the devices. I would say that's probably, I don't know if that's a frontier actually I'm ever going to conquer because I'm still optimizing so much around being like a productive entrepreneur and CEO and you kind of- you know, it's such a global world. Yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so I will look at my phone kind of up until I go to bed and, um, But things like red light in your bedroom and warm shower before bed some nights, a little magnesium. If I feel a little tense, maybe I'll have some melatonin, read a book. Those things, that's a good way to start tomorrow.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. I think Doha is the latest. I think it's like a little after 2 a.m.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That is actually hell.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I'm just- Ambien three hours ago. Yeah, that's going to affect your workout.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. So those are two countries that for the most part don't drink alcohol. And so I think in part they're substituting that with things like caffeine and nicotine. And so like those are stimulants that are going to keep you up later.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Do you travel overseas a lot or over time zones? I was last year, a lot. I do it all the time and I find I've gotten pretty good at it. Two great hacks for it are one, not eating at all on planes. So I'll never eat on a plane.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, I'm not going to eat, period. Like 14 hours to Dubai or something, not eating. Yep, that's painful. And I drink a ton of hydrogen water.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I use this bottle called Echo Go.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Is that your thing?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I'll pound electrolytes, but I won't do it in my hydrogen water Echo Go.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, just dial that back in. Yeah. So I think it's entirely cultural. It's interesting.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And that machine, I think it's like a hundred grand or something, but the, I actually shout out again to Gary Brackeye. Like I did one of his hydrogen baths, um, at his place in Miami. And, uh, I felt incredible the next day. I mean, it's a very, uh, It's a very unique mechanism for improving health. And I'm surprised that it's not more mainstream.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But when something's that effective and expensive, it just requires a little bit of technology, so to speak, to make it accessible.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Uh, Ireland, uh, drinks more alcohol than everyone else. Maybe, maybe that's not too unexpected. Um, I think Australia and the U S report, um, the highest rates of sex.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It should be a little service too they provide.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Or like have that be built into their app. It's like, you know, check out your water.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think there's still probably an opportunity to create that high-end experience at a more accessible price point. Even if it's not highly patentable, I'm surprised that there isn't a brand around it.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
No, the two that I've found were unlocks were don't eat on planes and drink hydrogen water.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. And you could add this as a third, which is when you get into the right time zone, go to bed on the right time zone. I also try to avoid naps at all costs because I feel like naps when you're jet lagged are a trap. Next thing you know, you're asleep for four and a half hours and you're like, am I waking up? Is this a Sunday? He's got a white knucklehead. White knucklehead.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, yes. The idea is you're going to be jelly for two weeks.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, this is actually a very unwooped point of view, but I think a lot of jet lag is psychological in that people start telling themselves they're jet lagged and they get kind of into this downward cycle and then they start drinking alcohol and napping and they just sort of do all these sort of things that are on a negative spiral.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Whereas if you go in with a real positive attitude of like, I'm going to defeat jet lag out of the gates. I'm going to make it my bitch.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Uh, so, so, uh, good for them. Um, Cold plunging, I think, is very popular in Sweden relative to other countries. Finland fursonas, probably. Yeah, Finland fursonas. And then there's very activity-specific stuff. Like, you know, certain countries do way more of, like, certain activities. Like, in the U.S., the top three activities are, like, walking, running, and cycling.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, we recently launched the Whoop 5.0 and the MG. So that's all of our new hardware with Whoop. It's got a much longer battery life and new features like around health span. So it'll tell you how old you are and your Whoop age and what you can do to get younger. There's a whole feature that's around heart screening. So if you're someone who's worried about having AFib or
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You know, you're talking to a cardiologist or you might need to talk to a cardiologist. There's a whole feature for that that's now medically cleared. We came out with blood pressure monitoring, which is pretty badass. We're the first wearable to do that on a large scale. Yeah, I mean, a lot of new technology that we just launched, which I'm pretty stoked about.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
In some ways, it's been, you know, 13 years in the making. And in terms of me, I think it's, you know, trying to get a little better every day to try to keep building the business. At some point, this is probably a company we'll take public, which is in itself another chapter, another challenge, another growth opportunity. Mm-hmm.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, so you're a founding member.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then also a part, you must have a lot of recoveries.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Thanks, brother. I really enjoyed this.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then, like, after that, it's, like, functional fitness and weightlifting, which is, you know, kind of like the order of operations that you'd expect. But then, like... In the UK, for example, they've got a much higher weightlifting culture, interestingly. So that replaces cycling.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think we have powerlifting and we have weightlifting. And we have functional fitness.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What do you define as power lifting?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Okay, we'll add it, we'll add it. Yes. We'll have an activity for bodybuilding.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's a great question. I mean, I think the first obvious thing is that I do think only children are more self-centered. I think that there's an element of if there's things that you... want in life, there's sort of an element that you believe you can go get them. And I think that that's probably something that only children have a stronger gravitation to or it comes more naturally.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think so, yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
There's also another element, which is that, at least for me, I found I spent a lot of time with adults when I was a kid and I would travel with my parents to different countries. And so I also got comfortable around being people, like sitting at a dining room table with like seven other adults and me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And strangely, the two things that I just described actually boded well for being a young entrepreneur because I think so much of building anything, it's probably even so much of like, what do you want to do in life, is knowing what you want and figuring out how to get what you want. And I think that knowing what you want is like a deeply, it requires a deep sort of inwards reflection.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think the mistake that a lot of people make, particularly when they're young, like I started when I was 22 years old, the mistake that a lot of people make when they're that age is they ask everyone else what they should do and they don't ask themselves. And so I think that the best path of, trying to figure out what you want, like knowing what you want is to look inwards.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And as an only child, you also spend a lot of time alone. And so looking inwards is sort of a natural thing. Yeah. Uh, and then there's of course like practices that you can develop to look inwards. Like I got into meditating and we can talk about that, but, um, so looking inwards was something I became comfortable, you know, comfortable with. And, um,
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then the process of getting what you want, I think is actually, it's really important to get outwards, like to go be around a lot of people and, you know, essentially try to ask for what you want in the world and get rejected a lot and sort of deal with that. And again, the mistake that a lot of people make when they're trying to get what they want is they actually become isolationist.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And so there's an interesting irony to this whole concept of get what you want or discover what you want and get what you want. But then I think there's also an element with being an only child where you can build up, you potentially can build up more self-esteem because your parents have more time to sort of pay attention to you, right?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
and i you know i have great parents and they loved me considerably and i think that helped with self-esteem you know probably throughout my childhood and growing up which probably in turn when i was starting a company made me more resilient in the face of rejection you believe that you can do things that other people might have had second thoughts about yeah yeah now