WHOOP - Thoughts after a year

Today marks the 350th day I’ve consecutively worn the WHOOP strap, so it seems safe to say that I’ve accumulated sufficient experience to report back on my findings. If you don’t know about the WHOOP band, this video will give you a quick 40 second overview. Head over there and come back :)

To back up my claim of “sufficient experience”, here’s my overall statistics in terms of activities for the last year:

• 229x Boxing.
• 96x Running.
• 50x Cycling.
• 35x Functional Fitness (HIIT, Bodyweight training, etc).
• 22x Elliptical.
• Other <10x miscellaneous activities.

Caveats

Here’s what the video doesn’t tell you: WHOOP operates on a subscription model. The band itself is free, but you have to pay a membership fee (~$18/mo if you purchase the 1.5yr membership) to access its analytics. It’s a more sustainable business model in my opinion and well worth the price for its ease of use. More on that later.

Why then?

I originally purchased the membership after suffering a patellar tendon injury due to overtraining. Everyone who trains regularly has probably had those “off” days where the energy just isn’t really there. But I could never really tell whether it was because I was exhausted physically, or if I was simply feeling lazy. Unfortunately I usually told myself “no pain, no gain” and tried to push through. Cue injury :(

So the intent was clear: use the WHOOP band to track my recovery so that I can rest guilt-free.

Why now?

On Strain

My experience with the band has been positive largely due to the context I now have in addition to the data that the WHOOP provides; this means having an understanding of your basic energy systems, heart rate zones, and understanding the conditioning needs of your sport.

For example, roadwork is a fundamental pillar of boxing. The most iconic scenes in boxing films centered around running: Muhammad Ali running through the streets of Kinshasa in his army boots with kids following behind him, Rocky running up the famous stone steps… the list goes on. Yet one of the most frequently asked questions in terms of conditioning for boxing is “how much roadwork is enough?” And the answer is often difficult since it should be tailored to the individual. If you’ve run long distance your entire life (or played team sports, which typically have a huge aerobic component to them), then your aerobic base is probably sufficient and should instead focus on developing your anaerobic systems. Conversely, if you’ve mostly done short-duration, high-intensity sports, then building your aerobic system so you can sustain a strong work output for a longer duration would be a better use of your time.

So where does the WHOOP band come into play? The band has accurate live heart rate tracking, annotated with the heart rate zone that your current HR falls in. Using this, you can specifically target your training (i.e. stay in 80-90% of MHR, or zone 4, for a duration of 30 minutes in order to increase max performance capacity). Conversely, you can look back at a HR graph from a skills training session and identify the areas that you need to work on.

Over a longer time span, you might see that the same perceived effort begins to correlate to a lower strain number for a largely identical workout. In that case, congrats you are getting stronger.

Note that strain is mostly tailored to endurance athletes; if you lift a lot, you won’t see a lot of useful information from WHOOP’s strain data.

On Recovery

WHOOP determines your recovery based on your resting heart rate and heart rate variability during the last SWS / deep sleep stage of the night, and uses the information along with other sleep scores (number of disturbances, sleep duration, sleep efficiency) to determine a recovery score.

I won’t go into the science of heart rate variability here, but simply think of it for now as a gauge of how responsive your body is to stress signals; a low HRV indicates that your body is preoccupied with stress and inflammation, whereas a high HRV indicates that your body is readily responsive to stress signals. Generally, I’ve discovered that if I’m in the red (under 30% recovery), or in the high greens (90%+ recovery), I can feel the difference in training. The middle grounds are difficult to tell. However, what’s nice about this is that your HRV isn’t solely dependent on how hard you’ve worked out the previous day, but also whether you’ve experienced any stress in general life, affecting your performance. As such, this takes a lot of guesswork and guilt out of training planning.

WHOOP also prompts you each morning with a nice little survey on your diet and sleep habits of the previous day. This offers insights into how your nutrition and sleep hygiene affects your recovery, as well as incentives and/or guide on how to improve them.

Specific to Boxing

Here are some things that those of you who box might wonder:

• The strap is sturdy. It will remain fine underneath your wraps / gloves through bagwork, mittwork, and sparring.
• WHOOP offers an arm sleeve which might offer more protection if you prefer that.
• Caveat to those with a coach: I got my ear chewed off recently because WHOOP’s HR graph essentially gave proof to my coach that I was not pushing hard enough (despite my own perceived effort). So proceed at your own peril.

TL;DR

The WHOOP band is an extremely versatile tool that helps endurance athletes plan their training. But it remains a tool. You still need to understand the science behind conditioning programs to make realistic use of the data that WHOOP provides. Most hobbyists likely won’t have a need for it, as it provides little utility outside of recovery-driven conditioning (no watch face, no step counter, no built-in GPS). But if you enjoy knowing the whys and hows behind what you do, you will probably have a blast looking at the data.

Written on December 10th, 2020 by JY