I struggle with recovery. It’s my priority as an athlete to ensure that I’m recovered after a session, ready to pummel my body for the next. But I struggle not because I don’t know what to do necessarily but because what I do is not right for me. Just like training programmes need to be tailored specifically for an athlete, your recovery needs to be individualised. This is where the Whoop 4.0 comes in because it gives you an insight into the condition of your body. Heart rate. Sleep tracker. Strain. Stress monitor. It is your individual coach that uses your personal data to help you maximise your recovery and therefore optimise your performance. As an ambitious athlete, what more could you want?
For those of you who don’t know, the whoop 4.0 is a continuous heart rate tracker designed to give you day to day feedback on your overall strain, stress and sleep. It essentially acts as a ‘coach’ giving you advice on when to go to sleep, how hard to train and how much you’ve recovered based on heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, breathing rate and blood oxygen levels. Yes, a simple strap on the wrist – or bicep – will provide you with all this data. Handy right?
Breaking this review into 3 categories: sleep, recovery and strain, I want to know, is this expensive device truly worth it?
Starting with sleep. My favourite and one can argue, the most important one. I sleep a lot so I was excited to see what information I would get about my sleep quality and quantity. As soon as I woke up each morning, I would receive a notification on my phone giving me a review on my sleep performance. The whoop knew exactly when I fell asleep to the minute I woke up. A myriad of different metrics including light, deep and REM sleep and continuous heart rate tracking throughout the night filled my screen as I reviewed my sleep. Wow. It was impressive to say the least. I can see why long term usage of the whoop would be so valuable as the more nights of sleep logged, the more personalised the data becomes and as a result, the easier it is to see when something is wrong or when training is going right… I loved it. Of course one shouldn’t get fixated but having this data close to hand allowed me to understand why I was under-performing.
Recovery. How well have you recovered? The whoop uses your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, skin temperature and respiratory rate to calculate your recovery. I found this to be quite accurate compared to how I felt. For example, training at Leander is not easy and as the winter season has officially closed opening the gates to the glorious summer season, intensity will be tapping all the athletes on the back and letting them know that it’s time for the true pain to begin. With that being said, on one of the days we had scheduled a 20km row on the water alongside a 30r20 max effort for the second session. While my strain on that day was verging the highest it had ever been, I was able to use this metric data to firstly understand that my body needed rest and secondly that for the next few days I would need to take it easy. Unsurprisingly, my recovery the next day was low which was to be expected as already training adaptations were taking place. Another thing that the whoop made me realise was the amount of time my body takes to bounce back from a high intensity session. After my 2k, my recovery was extremely low for the following subsequent days. Even though I was doing everything right to recover, after those soul-crushing 7 minutes, my recovery continued to be low. Although some people are able to deal with a high volume of high intensity, I’ve come to realise that I’m not one of those people.
Having this data has allowed me to understand how my perceived levels of recovery, sleep and strain play in line with the numbers I receive every day. Numbers are just numbers but when you are training day after day, week after week, it’s very easy to lose sight of your normal. The whoop has made me realise that in order to maximise training you have to listen to your body.
Strain. The whoop allows you to record your activity and afterwards gives you a strain level based on the intensity of your session. Even though during water sessions I wasn’t able to bring my phone with me, the app was still able to calculate my session and analyse my strain based off my heart rate.
These I found to be inconsistent as it largely depends on the maximum heart rate that you initially put in. As I used the general formula of 220-age to calculate my maximum heart rate, I wasn’t going to be expecting accurate results. Nevertheless, I did enjoy seeing key statistics of my workout and time in the heart rate zones. In my UT2 sessions, I’ve realised that my heart rate is too high. Even though this may be due to a number of different factors, heart rate is always a good indicator of intensity, so already I’m making sure I dial it back down observing my heart rate so I’m not going harder than necessary.
Finally but not least, my overview.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed having a vast amount of data at a click of a button. As an athlete I found this extremely useful so I could correlate my perceived rate of recovery and exertion with actual data. I also used this data to see how different sessions affected me and how well I tolerated them. Furthermore, I was also able to spot the early warning signs that my body was under-recovered.
However, be warned: one of the biggest disadvantages of the whoop is the cost. One can do an annual subscription or pay monthly and neither option is going to be accessible for everyone. Nevertheless if you are a serious athlete looking for a performance edge, this is one of the ways to get ahead.
Recovery is the key to maximising your performance.
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