Will Ahmed
speaker
249 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 31 Mar
Will Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Modern Wisdom · The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness - Will Ahmed - #943 · 19 May 2025
podcast
I think so, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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,
Yeah, there's a lot of people it's going to turn off like right out of the gate.
So last year, the biggest uptick was pickleball.
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.
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.
And it's, it's pretty dynamic and fun.
Yeah, in terms of like the percentage increase of activities we've seen on Whoop. Wow. That was the biggest one last year.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, we call that social jet lag. And it's interesting for a lot of people on Whoop, it's quite common.
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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