Moneyball Medicine

Most fitness gadgets, like the Fitbit or the Apple Watch, encourage you to get out there every day and “close your rings” or “do your 10,000 steps.” But there’s one activity tracker that’s a little different. The WHOOP isn't designed to tell you when to work out—it’s designed to tell you when to stop. Harry's guest this week is Emily Capodilupo, the senior vice president of data science and research at Boston-based WHOOP, which is based here in Boston. To explain why the company focuses on measuring what it calls strain, rather than counting steps or calories, she reaches all the way back to the beginning of the company in 2012. That’s when founder and CEO Will Ahmed had just finished college at Harvard and was looking back at his experiences on the varsity squash team. Ahmed realized that had often underperformed because he had overtrained, neglecting to give his body time to recover between workouts or between matches. To this day, WHOOP designs the WHOOP band and its accompanying smartphone software around