Today’s guest is Kristen Holmes. Kristen has spent her entire career and much of her life in high performance environments. In college, she was a 3x All American and 2x Big 10 Conference Athlete of the year at the University of Iowa competing in both Field Hockey and Basketball. She was a 7 year member of the U.S. National Field Hockey Team and one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history, having won 12 league titles in 13 seasons and a National Championship at Princeton University. She also founded a successful, nationwide field hockey camp and clinics business and ran it for 16 years. Today, Kristen is the Vice President of Performance Science at WHOOP, a consumer technology company that empowers its users to perform at a higher level through a deeper understanding of their bodies and daily lives. Her role is to drive thought leadership at WHOOP by using a meta approach to better understand individual and team performance across military, sports, and medicine. In this interview, we get into Kristen’s sports background, her coaching philosophy and career, WHOOP, and all things performance optimization.

Timestamps

00:02:41 Moving a lot growing up and sports background

00:09:45 College sports days

00:17:42 Outcome dissociation

00:19:53 Happiness is internal

00:21:20 Habits will accumulate

00:23:30 Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation

00:26:16 Coaching and performance work after college

00:38:27 How Princeton Field Hockey became so successful

00:44:05 Opportunity to join Whoop

00:47:30 Heart Rate Variability

00:49:45 Whoop

00:54:51 Her role at Whoop

00:59:37 How she optimizes her performance

01:03:00 Her driving force

01:03:57 Importance of sleep