WHOOP, There it Is: But Also, What Is It?
A few weeks after I gave birth, it became apparent to me I was slowly dying. Not from any complications of labor and delivery, of course. Just generally dying because I was not getting anything resembling restorative sleep. I was getting 3-hour stretches of sleep at best, and struggling to go back to sleep after 2-3 middle of the night feedings, which forced my into a brief, albeit it dependent Xanax relationship, which fucked up the deepness of that sleep, which in turn elevated my heart rate, which further in turn decreased my HRV.
“Huh?” you might be wondering. “What are those acronyms? And how did you know that?”
They’re all health stats that my WHOOP was informing me of on a daily basis. And on a daily basis, it was telling me “Melissa…you in trouble, girl.” And yet, because I was parenting a newborn, there just wasn’t much I could do about it. So, with little hesitation, I took it off and stopped wearing it to do what most people do when things get hard: ignore the problem and hoped it went away by itself.
Fortunately, several months later, it did! Goldie started sleeping through the night and a couple months after that, I finally felt like a person again. Except now, I was a person who gained a solid extra 30 pounds and moved much slower. Since then, I’ve done a lot to regain control of my health (read all about the ways I’m working on reducing my stress here and what working with a functional medicine doctor has helped me accomplish here), so I finally was ready to re-ignite my love affair with my WHOOP.
The WHOOP is a wearable fitness device that tracks not only your physical activity, but also your sleep, recovery, and microdata about your health overall. The wearable device pairs with an app, because that’s how the world works now. When you check the app, you’ll see your data for day, or even in the moment if you’re working out. The app also provides you with weekly and monthly summaries so you can see trends overtime. For example, if you’re taking a melatonin supplement, or you have a couple glasses of wine at night, you can learn what affects your sleep and recovery to make more informed choices about your lifestyle.
It’s really popular among elite professional athletes to help them perform at optimum levels, but it’s just as useful for normies like you and me who just want to peek under the hood and stay on top of their healthy lifestyle.
Let’s walk through the three primary categories the WHOOP focuses on in more detail.
strain
Put simply, strain measures how hard your body is working or has worked. Across a scale of 0-21, you’re given a strain score to identify how much effort you’ve exerted across the day (you also get a strain number for any workouts you do, which roll into your aggregate day strain). The higher the score, the more strain you’ve experienced, therefore the more recovery your body needs in order to perform the next day.
You influence strain by how much and what kind of exercise you do, along with all your NEAT activities. Strain assesses your heart rate zones across time. So, an activity that gets your heart rate high for 15 minutes will result in a higher strain than an activity that keeps your heart rate low for 60 minutes.
As an example, I weight train as my primary form of exercise. While I work hard and do get my heart rate in Zone 2 and sometimes Zone 3, my strain for a 45-minute lifting workout almost never surpasses a 6. By comparison, when I do a mile jog, my heart rate is consistently in Zone 3, and my strain can quickly hit an 8 or 9, even though this only takes me 10 minutes. OKAYYYYY, IT TAKES 12 MINUTES, I HATE RUNNING!! This is important to note, because it’s easy to confuse strain for effort or even conflate your strain with your health and fitness goals. Unless you’re a professional athlete, don’t use strain to determine if you had a good workout - use other measures like the amount of weight your lifts are increasing by, time improvements, or even aesthetic changes.
Sleep
I mean, this is pretty obvious. WHOOP measures your sleep. But not just how long you sleep. It’s measuring a variety of health data to give you a very specific picture of your sleep quality and function. As you sleep, the WHOOP measures:
your resting heart rate
your heart rate variability (the higher your HRV, the better for your health)
your blood oxygen levels
your skin temperature
your respiratory rate
the time you fell asleep
any periods of waking you experienced
light sleep stages
REM sleep stages
Deep sleep stages
time in bed
sleep efficiency
So…it’s fairly comprehensive. In fact, my sleep data is the first stuff I look at when I open my WHOOP in the morning. I love seeing how much I’ve slept (truly, that post-partum phase of sleeplessness left me with serious sleep PTSD…sleepy-tsd?). You also have the opportunity to “journal” your previous day/night’s choices so you can assess over time how doing things like eating too close to bedtime or wearing blue-light blocking glasses might impact your overall sleep quality. One of the newer features of WHOOP since the first time I wore it is the alarm clock feature. The device will vibrate at the time of day you want to wake up, which is cool because it’s basically a silent way to wake up - great if you share your bed with someone who sleeps later than you, but still not as peaceful a way to wakeup as my favorite light alarm.
For me, the primary value I get from the WHOOP is the sleep data.
Recovery
Recovery is the result of your sleep and strain from the previous day. The higher your strain, the more sleep and sleep quality your body requires (among other healthy choices like diet and stress management) to recover adequately. Being “in the green” for recovery is a sign your body is ready to take on strain for the day, which, for us normies, basically means you should have the capacity to take on a brutal workout that day.
That said, in my experience, my recovery doesn’t always align to how I actually FEEL. I’ve experienced several days where my recovery is technically “in the red,” and yet, I feel rested and ready to work. Because I’m not trying to win any awards at being the best worker-outer, I don’t let it influence my choices too much. I use it more so to determine if anything I did/consumed the day before might not have been good for me. See: alcohol.
It’s absolutely WILD how alcohol, even in moderate amounts, fucks my sleep these days. Ditto poor eating choices, or even just eating later in the day! Life may really only begin at 40, but death starts it’s slow march in your mid-20s!!! Other things that affect my recovery:
NOT moving - if I go more than a couple days without a proper workout and not just my morning walk, I find my recovery takes a dip. Movement = life.
Stress. That why doing hippie shit to reduce my stress has been so important to me. I’ll do a different post about the CNS another time!
Water intake. I’m really good about drinking water like 95% of the time (I aim for a gallon a day), but some days, like last week when we were on vacation and I had no travel water bottle, I miss it. When I’m not properly hydrated, my recovery tanks, along with my usually poreless skin.
In summary, if you’re like me and you’re on a journey to really get your shit tight, the WHOOP might be a great data accompaniment to your lifestyle. This is not a sponsored post whatsoever, but if you’re interested in trying WHOOP, you can use this link to get your first 30 days free, which does, in turn provide me with 30 days free as well. You can also not use the link, and that’s fine too.
Anyone else a WHOOP wearer? What other fitness wearables have you tried? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
