Fitness trackers; something that once began as a bit of a gimmick we were all sceptical of. Starting with Fitbits to track your steps, to when athletes began to use heart rate belts to understand and unlock the different energy systems in their training. Apple then brought the two together and released their own watch serving the purpose of both an accessory and a health monitor. From then on the market has burst beyond the offerings of Apple and today, fitness trackers are no longer fastened only to the wrists of athletes. Whoop are at the forefront of this movement.

Worn by sports stars including LeBron James, Tom Daley, and a kaleidoscope of major CrossFit athletes, the audience of Whoop go beyond professional athletes since you too can see the benefits. What makes it better than an Apple watch?

How does it work?

The screenless strap works by using your heart rate, temperature, and a clever algorithm to provide you with actionable insights into your health in three key areas: 1. Recovery 2. Strain 3. Sleep. This data is then projected via the easy to use phone app. Like with anything, the more data collected – the more accurate it is, so you can see highly personalised scores as you wear the strap for every element of your day. 

How the Whoop fitness tracker actually works:

Strain

Strain captures all of your effort whether that be a workout in the gym or the effort in your daily commute. You’d be surprised how seemingly menial tasks rack up strain (mine seems to shoot up as soon as I’m getting ready to go out or about to jump on a Zoom meeting!). The key here is cardiovascular stress, and Whoop will provide you with valuable insights using the metric score of 0-21 to tell you how much stress you’re putting your cardiovascular system under. The app then uses this data alongside your sleep and recovery stats, to work out your ‘optimal’ strain score so you can shape your training accordingly. The higher the strain, the harder you need to recover.

Recovery

This is where Whoop really comes into its own and provides you with information no Apple watch or Garmin is capable of. Put simply, the recovery data gives you an insight into how much petrol you have in the tank. It’s not realistic for your tank to be full every day, but you can see when you’re running low and may want to approach your tasks for the day differently.

More specifically Whoop uses a metric called HRV (Heart Rate Variability) – which is the variation in time between each heartbeat. It uses HRV in combination with your resting heart rate, respiratory rate and hours of sleep to calculate your readiness for the day’s activities. Generally, a higher HRV indicates that your heart is more ready to exert a higher level of output and has a better ability to recover strongly from prior accumulated stress. This is why HRV is often seen to be indicative of a healthy heart. However, you will learn from using Whoop that there’s not much point in comparing your HRV to anyone else’s. The key is to notice trends or deviations in your own HRV so you can review training and lifestyle factors accordingly. Consistently going in on every workout and not seeing your HRV increase? It’s likely your recovery is insufficient or you’re burning out. Notice a shockingly low score the morning after a night out? Yep, alcohol completely severs your ability to take on additional strain! You can probably tell how lifestyle plays a huge role in your general readiness to perform. To find out more about HRV read this article directly from Whoop.

Sleep

As mentioned, sleep significantly contributes to your recovery. Whoop measures the length of time in each sleep stage (awake, light, REM and deep sleep) and uses this to assess the overall quality of your sleep. It features additional metrics such as efficiency, latency, respiratory rate and it counts the number of disturbances you’ve had throughout the night. Seeing these metrics was a game-changer for me. While I thought I was getting a solid 7 hours of quality sleep every night, I was blissfully unaware that a lot of this was disturbed. This meant that my sleep was equating to less than 6 hours a night! From using Whoop I’ve discovered the impact of having a good sleep routine and its impact on my readiness for the days ahead.

Additional features:

The Journal

You know when doctors say “Start a diary” (I was told to do this so many times to figure out the cause of my migraines) – the Whoop journal is basically a diary that will do the work for you. All you need to do is tick off all the factors which may be relevant to your sleep or recovery, such as how much caffeine you drank or whether you took CBD, etc, and this information will then be collected daily, ready for your in-depth monthly assessment. Discover the behaviours you didn’t know were impacting your recovery. 

The Whoop Podcast

Even if you’re not convinced by the subscription, the Whoop podcast is free for everyone, meaning you can learn a lesson or two while going about other daily tasks. With interviews from medical professionals, athletes, to leading entrepreneurs in the fitness industry, key topics are discussed in a humble yet stimulating way that makes sense to the regular person like you or I. Interviewees include NFL athletes, Olympians, Pro-golfers, Navy SEAL’s and CEO’s; all of whom use Whoop to optimise their performance (and no these aren’t paid or ambassadors in the usual sense of the term!), so content is genuinely engaging and connects you to a community of like-minded fitness enthusiasts. There’s an entire library of content, so I have no doubt you’ll find a topic that interests you.

Strain coach

Train smarter using Whoop’s Strain Coach. This provides activity level recommendations for you (at any point during the day) based on your Recovery.

Sleep coach

The Sleep Coach tells you exactly how much sleep you need to reach your desired performance level the next day.

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Sure there are lots of other fitness trackers out there, but there’s no other that will improve your overall health, fitness and understanding of your body quite like Whoop does! If you want to actually see how impactful your diet, sleep, recovery, and changes to training are using real-life, personal data, Whoop is the only means to doing just that.