Founder’s note. MOTIONE.
About a year ago I strapped on a WHOOP and turned myself into the experiment.
I did it because I was hungry for more data about myself. Optimizing my health and slowing my aging are genuine passions of mine, and I knew there was a lot I still didn’t understand. I wanted to challenge my own assumptions.
I was already tracking my sleep with an Oura ring, and Oura is very good at the night. But I only ever wear it at night. I don’t like having a ring on during the day, and I can’t lift heavy with it on. So my daytime and my training were a blind spot. WHOOP filled that gap. It stays on my wrist through everything, hard sessions included: weightlifting, tennis, cardio, swimming.
I wanted the full picture. Not just how I slept, but how it all added up over time. Sleep, consistency, how hard I pushed, and what the sum of it was doing to my body.
WHOOP puts two numbers on that which I’d never been able to see before: your Pace of Aging and your WHOOP Age. More on those in a second. The reason I wanted them is simple. I knew I was healthy. What I didn’t know was how healthy, and what I could still do to slow the aging down and push myself further. I wanted to find out what I didn’t know.
Twelve months later the patterns are clear. Here’s what I learned, and the five habits I’d hand to anyone who cares about their healthspan.
First, what “Pace of Aging” actually means
Your Pace of Aging is how fast your body is aging compared to the calendar.
1.0 is the baseline. It means one year of biological aging for every year that passes on the clock. Anything above 1.0 and you’re aging faster than real time. Below 1.0 and you’re aging slower.
That number quietly became my scoreboard. Not the scale, not the mirror. One figure telling me whether the last stretch of choices added time or took it away.
The net result after a year: my WHOOP Age comes back well under my real age, usually about six years younger, and my Pace of Aging sits consistently below 1.0. On my best weeks it drops to around minus 0.2, which on WHOOP means I’m not just slowing the clock, I’m briefly turning it back. I’m aging slower than the calendar, and for the first time I can point to exactly which habits are doing it.
You don’t need to wear a band forever to learn this. Give it twelve months. In a year you’ll see your own patterns, know your levers, and then you can take it off. This is the one self-experiment I’d recommend to anyone serious about how well they age, not just how long they last.
The five habits that actually moved the number
1. Same bedtime, same wake time, every day
The biggest lever is also the most boring one. Go to bed and get up at roughly the same time, weekends included. Sleep on a rhythm and your recovery follows it.
I’ll be honest though. This is my weak spot, and it’s the thing aging me fastest. I don’t get enough hours. Between the workload and constant travel, sleep is the first thing that gives. Consistency helps me hold the line, but don’t read any of this as permission to sleep less. A large 2024 study of tens of thousands of adults found how regular your sleep is is a powerful predictor of a longer life. On my own WHOOP data the hours matter just as much, and mine are the number I most need to fix. Regular and short is still short. Both count.
2. Strength train four to five times a week
Muscle is not vanity. Lean body mass is one of the clearest signals of how well you’re going to age, and you start quietly losing it in your thirties unless you push back.
So I lift a minimum of four times a week, sometimes five, and I lift heavy. I keep pushing the weight up, not just going through the motions. The goal is to at least hold on to the muscle I have, and add to it where I can. On WHOOP, the weeks I train the most consistently are the weeks my age reading improves.
3. Walk, then walk more
The most underrated longevity tool I own costs nothing and never needs charging.
I walk everywhere I reasonably can and I chase the step count. The research keeps landing in the same place. The payoff climbs fast through the first several thousand steps a day and keeps rewarding you from there. Steps are the base layer under everything else.
4. Get your heart into zone 4 and 5
This is the one most people skip, and it turned out to be my single biggest takeaway from the whole year. You have to push yourself genuinely hard on a regular basis. You have to get your heart rate up.
Heart rate zones run from 1 to 5, based on how close you are to your maximum. Zones 1 and 2 are easy and conversational. Zones 4 and 5 are where you’re breathing hard and can’t hold a sentence, roughly 80 percent of your max and above.
That hard zone is what builds your VO2 max, and VO2 max is the single biggest driver of my Pace of Aging. This isn’t just my data talking. High cardiorespiratory fitness is one of the strongest predictors of a long life we have. A study of more than 120,000 people found that low fitness carried a risk of early death on par with, or greater than, smoking, diabetes or high blood pressure, and there was no point where getting fitter stopped helping.
The good news is you need surprisingly little of it to move the number. I aim for at least 20 to 30 minutes a week in that top zone, and I get mine from tennis and a short, sharp cardio session. (I’ll write more about exactly how I do this soon.)
5. Learn to switch off
The last one is obvious, which is exactly why most people ignore it.
A high resting heart rate is one of the quiet drivers of aging, and nothing keeps it high like unmanaged stress. When I got serious about lowering mine, my resting heart rate came down and the numbers followed. It now sits just above 50, which is a good place to be.
So I guard my evenings. A slow dinner, a walk, a book, a proper massage. I do one of these every single night. It sounds soft. It isn’t.
The honest version
None of this is a hack. There’s no supplement in this article, no cold plunge, no device that does the work for you.
What the WHOOP actually did was confirm a few things I’d assumed but never measured, and show me one or two I’d genuinely missed. If you already train and eat well, it’s very good at finding the small opportunities you’re leaving on the table. If you’re missing the basics, it points you in the right direction. And I won’t pretend the gamification doesn’t work. You spend the week trying to beat last week’s Pace of Aging, and in chasing that number you quietly end up healthier. That’s the real trick of it.
So yes, I recommend it. A year of data, five habits that genuinely moved the number, and a body aging slower than the calendar.
Here’s my honest ending though. My membership is almost up and I’m about to take the band off. I think I’ve learned what it had to teach me. The open question is what pushes me next, because I clearly need something to. Maybe that’s the real lesson. The tool matters less than having a number you’re trying to beat.
More on what I try next soon.
Sami, MOTIONE.
Every week I test the wellness tools and habits worth your time across Asia and send you the one thing worth doing. Free, short, made for how we actually live here. That’s The Edge. Link in the profile.