TL;DR
I highly recommend Whoop to understand your body better, it’s a phenomenal teaching tool. After almost 5 years with Whoop I am switching over to my Garmin watch which doesn’t present the data as cleanly as Whoop, but still gives me the main points I’m looking for to optimize my training and health.
The Overview
Whoop is a “fitness wearable” that helps users understand the daily physical (and mental) strain they endure each day, and the associated recovery needed/gotten.
For example, do you have any idea how much sleep you NEED (like, physically, actually need) after doing a CrossFit workout? Or on a rest day? Or in general? You’d be surprised.
I’ve used a Whoop since October 2018. I’ve accumulated 1,694 days of data.
In that time, I’ve done:
1,581 fitness activities, with the top activities being:
432 running
388 CrossFit
241 weightlifting
Whoop tracks:
- Heart rate (resting and active)
- Heart rate variability (HRV)
- Body temperature
- SpO2 (oxygen in blood)
- Respiratory rate
- Sleep (Deep, short wave, awake time)
It uses all this data and calculates a daily “strain”, basically how hard you worked that day.
From there, it uses science and tells you how much sleep you need in order to recover. It even has a “sleep coach” that tells you what time you should go to bed based on what time your alarm is set to.
From there, you fill out a customized habit journal each day about the previous days activities. This is what helps you see (with concrete data) what gives you a better recovery and gives you a worse recovery.
It also gives you a clear daily indicator to how well your body is recovered.
GREEN – Go hard
YELLOW – Train, but don’t go all out
RED – Rest, or go easy in the gym
The Good
I believe everyone should use a Whoop for period of time. The more advanced we get as a species, the more we seem to be losing our connection to “self”.
Most people don’t know what their resting heart rate is, what their sleep quality is like, or how much sleep they even technically need.
Whoop does a fantastic job (better than most I argue) at presenting this information to the user.
With increased awareness of our bodies metrics, we can make better decisions to our daily habits going forward to tweak our health in our favor.
It also gives you weekly, monthly, and yearly performance assessments. I found these super cool to analyze the data for trends. What was my RHR over the course of 2022? It shows you. How does that correlate to my training habits at the time? It shows you.
The Bad
Honestly it’s mostly the cost. Right now its about $20/mo.
For a new Whoop user, totally worth it, high ROI.
For me now, 5 years later … not sure the ROI is there.
I’ve learned so much from it, I can now gather most of the same data from my Garmin running watch, it’s just not presented as well as Whoops. I also understand my body so much more and have the awareness of things like resting heart rate when its “high” and when it’s “low” for me.
(By the way, measuring and tracking resting heart rate – RHR – is great for seeing how rested your body is. Once you know what your average RHR is, a lower RHR means your rested, and higher RHR means you may need more rest. Some people simply track RHR to determine how recovered they are.)
The other downside, is if you aren’t the kind of person that will log your habits daily … you wont get the same ROI out of it. I logged EVERYTHING daily, so it told me that when I take magnesium at night, for example, my recovery improved by 7%. Neat right? But only useful if you take the time to give it the data.
Conclusion
If you are new to fitness or don’t know much about your body metrics like resting heart rate, daily strain, sleep data, etc … I highly recommend Whoop.
Many devices nowadays do similar, like the iWatch, Garmin, FitBits … I just think Whoop has a leg up on how it presents the data to you, which makes it more useful, which increases its ROI.
Check it out at the link below
