10 Months With Whoop

I’ve been wearing a Whoop strap since November and I’m obsessed with it. I heard someone say recently that the point of working hard is to make money and buy cool stuff that helps us live longer. Whoop checks that box. It gamifies your health and makes it hard not to improve.

Whoop is a fitness strap that collects physiological data 24/7 on three main categories – Strain, Recovery and Sleep. Each morning you get a recovery score that tells you what state your body is in and then it measures your strain throughout the day.

The coolest thing about it to me is seeing how certain things impact my body, especially alcohol and sugar. I had a cheat meal of pizza and ice cream after three months of strict dieting and my heart rate shot so high it thought I was working out. I still drink, but it’s wild to see how much even a glass or two of wine impacts you.

On the left is me with a high recovery following a pretty normal day. On the right is the next morning after having a few drinks and less sleep than normal.

I like the quote, “what gets measured, gets managed.” I never paid attention to any of the things Whoop measures. But now that I know of their importance and can see them everyday, I make more intentional decisions.

Below are the categories that Whoop claims users experience significant improvement in. Obviously putting the strap on doesn’t change anything. But the awareness leads to behavior modification, which leads to improvement.

These are the changes I’ve seen (30 day averages):

• Resting Heart Rate: January 2020: 49 bpm | September 2020: 41 bpm
• Heart Rate Variability: January 2020: 74 | September 2020: 123
• Sleep (hours a night): January 2020: 6:43 | September 2020: 8:02