Healthy Leaders are Better Leaders with Kristen Holmes

We wanted to start by saying thank you to all our listeners for their feedback and the comments over the past two years and everyone who has played a role in helping us launch and produce this podcast. This marks our 50th episode of Leading the Rounds and we couldn’t have asked for a better guest!

Today we have the Vice President of Performance Science at WHOOP, Kristen Holmes. Kristen drives thought leadership by engaging with industry leading researchers and partners to better understand performance data across high stakes verticals. 

Before joining WHOOP in 2016, Kristen was a 3x All American, 2 x Big 10 Athlete of the year at the University of Iowa competing in both Field Hockey and Basketball and recently inducted into the Hall of Fame Class of 2021 and was a 7-year member of the U.S. National Field Hockey Team.Kristen was then Head Field Hockey Coach at Princeton University where she was one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history, having won 12 league titles in 13 seasons and a National Championship.

Kristen blends her academic and applied background in athletics, coaching, performance technology, psychology, and exercise physiology to drive research, partnership, and product development initiatives to strengthen WHOOP as a leader in Human Performance.

Please enjoy this wonderful discussion about health optimization, WHOOP’s work with front line healthcare workers and insights into maximizing human performance.

Welcome to Leading the rRounds!

Questions We Asked: 

• How did you transition from a player to a coach and leader? 
• Did you feel like creating team buy-in was something you could do naturally or have to learn? 
• What did you learn as a player and coach that has helped you now as vice president of performance at WHOOP? 
• What behavior have you found is most correlated with performance and health? 
• What are the biggest barriers to performance in front line healthcare workers? 
• Can you lead us through some breath work? 
• Have you studied cold immersion for autonomic health? 
• How can a resident physician optimize their sleep in a state of chronic sleep debt? 
• What is your goal with bringing WHOOP to healthcare? 

Quotes and Ideas: 

• If you want to perform at your best, you have to know your physiology and what your body needs to be at its best. 
• For an athlete, it’s often not the 2 hours of training that determines next day training capacity, but what the athlete does within the other 22 hours of the day. 
• We will be much better as a society if we can understand our physiology and how we modulate stress. 
• Stability of sleep cycles may be the most important metric for health and recovery. 
• Leaders who are underslept lead teams who report poor psychological safety. Managers rated with higher psychological safety bring in an average of 4.3 million dollars more of revenue each year. 
• Breathing protocol for decreasing sympathetic drive “the physiologic sigh”: Two inhales followed by a longer exhale 
• You can see the benefits of cold immersion with only 12 minutes of exposure per week. 
• Tips for better sleep: 
  • Keep your sleep environment cold, dark, and quiet 
  • Avoid nigh time meals
  • Avoid alcohol
  • Keep a regular sleep schedule and nighttime routine 
  • Avoid blue light before bed 

Book Suggestions: 

• Awareness by Anthony De Mello 
• Waking Up & Making Sense by Sam Harris 
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris 
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman