How Whoop CEO Will Ahmed Achieves Peak Mental and Physical Fitness

IN AN ICE bath on the roof of Whoop’s Kenmore Square headquarters on a frigid spring day in Boston, Will Ahmed is slowly and deliberately inhaling and exhaling, box breathing his way through three excruciating minutes. He inhales on a five count, holds it for five, exhales on five, holds it for five, and repeats.

Ahmed began cold plunging two years ago to help reduce inflammation and found it helped him go harder on the squash court and in the gym—the two places he’s already worked up a sweat this morning. “I also just loved the way I felt mentally—not just immediately after, but for the next 12 hours,” he says. “If I can do a hard workout first thing, followed by a cold plunge, it’ll clear my mind and make the stresses of the rest of the day easier. If you kick your own ass, no one else is going to.”

The stress level can be high running a billion-dollar company, and thanks to the technology he’s developed and made accessible, Ahmed, 35, has the data on himself to prove it. Whoop’s flagship product is a wearable health and fitness tracking device that monitors sleep, strain, recovery, and stress.

On May 8, Whoop dropped two new models, 5.0 and MG, which both offer 14-day battery life in a sleeker, seven percent smaller form, and new software called Healthspan with Whoop Age, which gives insights on how your daily habits will impact your long-term health, with guidance on how to correct negative behaviors. “MG” stands for medical grade, and it features Heart Screener with ECG, a FDA-cleared ECG that allows a reading to be taken from your wrist and shared with a healthcare provider, and patent-pending technology to give you blood pressure data from your wrist.

Whoop ONE with 5.0 Band

Ahmed first began developing the concept for Whoop as an undergrad and student athlete at Harvard, where he was recruited to play squash. “Whoop was a word that expressed energy and excitement and made people smile, and that made it a good name for a brand,” he says. He still hits the courts twice a week, and his goal is to be able to do that for the rest of his life. “I love to play with a 22-year-old college player and see if I can keep up,” he says. “I may not win, but I can keep up.” Squash is a super-efficient cardio workout, and his Whoop lets him know that he spends up to two-thirds of a squash match in heart rate zones 4 and 5.

While squash is his passion and revs his cardio, Ahmed builds strength by lifting weights with his trainer, Mike Urso, three times per week. He didn’t start lifting until his mid-20s. Back then, he had trouble doing one pullup. Now he can do about 40 in a single session. He likes weightlifting for the focus it requires. “It’s also powerful to hand over your autonomy to someone else who’s an expert,” he says, “especially if you spend a lot of your time telling people what to do.”

Guido VittiIce ice baby! Will Ahmed, CEO of Whoop, in the cold plunge on the roof of Whoop HQ in Boston.

The breathwork practice is a newer part of his fitness regimen, an extension of the Transcendental Meditation habit he forged at 24, when his company was a few years old and he was drinking too much coffee and alcohol, feeling overwhelmed and fatigued. Daily meditation gave him a tool to cope. “Me as an ineffective CEO, I was reactive,” he says. “All of a sudden, you’re yelling and you don’t even know how you got there. Becoming a meditator and learning how to see myself in the third person helped me feel like I was ahead of my emotions and more in control.”

Breathwork techniques, like box breathing, help him manage discomfort. He turns to them during heightened moments throughout his day, whether it’s in an ice bath or a boardroom. Ahmed experienced a different kind of heightened moment in February, when he and his wife welcomed their first child, a boy. The flood of emotions was new—and so was the data. He’d been measuring his body every day for 11 years, and he’d learned to intuit some of what his Whoop reports every morning. But part of the magic of monitoring your body, part of why there will always be something to learn, is that it uncovers things you can’t feel.

“With the newborn experience, my Whoop data was like red, red, red, red, red, four or five days in a row,” he says. At the same time, “the feeling of joy and love that you have for this little human that you’ve created is remarkable.” The lesson: It’s easy to sacrifice yourself in service of someone (or something) else, he says, but the data reminds you that you’ve got to take care of yourself too.

Guido VittiAhmed doing hammer curls at the Whoop gym.

Between Sets Frenemy exercise?“When I first started, the deadlift just seemed really uncomfortable. It’s now the thing I look forward to the most. I rep at 360 pounds, which is more than twice my body weight, so that’s exciting.”

Fantasy training partner?“Muhammad Ali.”

Workout tunes?“Something I can almost dance along to, like Michael Jackson. If I’m trying to hype myself up, I listen to hip-hop—Jay-Z or Lil Wayne.”

Typical breakfast?“A ton of scrambled eggs—like, six or seven—avocado, crispy bacon, fresh fruit, black coffee.”

Electrolyte fuel?“LMNT—Citrus Salt flavor. It’s like a lemon-lime.”

Tips from working out with Whoop ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes?“They’re very deliberate. When they’re warming up, it’s to warm up. When they’re lifting, it’s to lift. There’s a sense of purpose that resonates for me.”

This story appears in the May-June 2025 issue of Men’s Health.