How It Feels to Track Your Recovery With the WHOOP Strap
In the final part of the sleep tracking exercise, I will share my experience with the WHOOP strap. That and the Oura ring that I talked about last week are two big players in recovery tracking. Both track your activity throughout the day and your heart rate at night, and aim to tell you if you’re getting enough quality sleep to support your athletic efforts.
Both WHOOP and Oura are more or less doing what they promise. There is also no need to track your sleep ; low-tech solutions can do this fairly well. But if you need more data, any device will do the trick. Both will monitor your sleep and rate you; both will correlate this result with how much exercise you did. WHOOP may work better for you if you are an endurance athlete or do a lot of cardio, while Oura is probably the best choice if you are mainly doing other types of exercise or are interested in sleep in general. I preferred Oura’s day-to-day experience, but the monthly WHOOP analyzes are a real treat for nerds.
These thoughts make up my best guide to choosing between apps, but there are two more important questions you need to ask yourself before buying one or the other:
- Would you find it more annoying to wear a ring or bracelet all the time? If you have a strong preference, this is, honestly, the most important factor.
- Would you rather pay upfront or monthly? Oura costs $ 300 (or more) per device, but after that it’s free to use the app. The WHOOP strap is free, but the membership costs $ 30 a month for six months, although that’s slightly less if you sign up for a longer membership.
The WHOOP pricing model makes me wonder: How long does it take for you to track your recovery? I came across several discussions on the r / whoop subreddit where people said they only use the device for six months or a year. By the end of this time, they had learned to prioritize sleep and find a balance between being active and recovering.
I didn’t have to ask myself this question because the people at WHOOP gave me access to the app to test it out, but I find it somewhat confusing to think about the existential question: How long will I take care of?
Anyway, WHOOP has some interesting features.
How to wear a WHOOP strap
The WHOOP strap is a watch-like gadget, except that it has no screen. It is a lightweight rectangle with an elastic strap. On the skin side of the rectangle, there are green LEDs that measure your heart rate and an accelerometer for motion detection.
The strap is designed to be worn 24/7 and has a smart charging method. There is a small plastic brick that you charge separately, and then when the strap’s battery runs out, you unplug the brick from its cord and put it on your wristband. This way you never have to remove the strap itself.
However, if you wet the strap – say, if you put it on in the shower – you will get stuck in the wet strap. WHOOP sent me a spare that was comfortable to change into on those occasions. (Spare wristbands and spare batteries are additional charges.)
Using the app
The WHOOP app is simple in some places and obscure in others. At first, I always forgot where I saw a certain number or function. But once you get the hang of it, you will find that the app is full of detailed reviews and additional information.
Right ahead, where you can’t miss it, there are two numbers: your daily stress score and your recovery score based on how you slept.
The strain score is based on your heart rate throughout the day. This makes the most sense for people who do a lot of cardio, which made the app a little awkward to use for someone who really only walks and lifts weights. If I was a runner, or if I did team sports or did a lot of aerobics videos, I would love that.
Your tension gets higher as you do more exercise, and this number is calculated in a way that is not particularly easy to understand. However, higher numbers mean you are spending more time with a higher heart rate. This means that if you spend a lot of time with a high heart rate due to being nervous rather than exercising, your tension will be high – which honestly makes sense since it still represents stress on your body.
Recovery is another single number, this time expressed as a percentage. If you have recovered less than 33%, you are in the red; if you have more than 66%, you get green. If you work hard but sleep well, you will see a lot of yellow and green, and sometimes red. On the other hand, a streak of red probably means something is wrong.
When you browse the app, my best advice is to mess around with everything you see. If there is a small card that gives you some information, click on it; it can roll over and give you more details. As you look at your recovery rate, swipe up and a chart of your past week performance will suddenly appear.
The coolest surprise feature that I didn’t notice until someone at the company pointed it out to me is that if you turn your phone to the side, you’ll see a screen showing your heart rate throughout the day, with sleep highlighted. and exercise.
One of the most interesting features of WHOOP is the sleep coach. You tell him what time you would like to wake up tomorrow and he tells you when you should go to bed tonight. In itself, this is not so unusual; many applications do the same. The difference is that you can choose whether you want to “peak,” “accomplish,” or “be successful.” I don’t know how accurate these three estimates really are, but intuitively they were considered correct. For example, on a day when my need for sleep was calculated at 7:48, the recommended sleep time for maximum performance was 8:33; to just get through it was 5:59.
You can learn a lot from weekly and monthly reports.
I found the daily screens a little confusing, but I liked the weekly and monthly reports. You won’t get monthly newsletters until you’ve worn the strap for a full calendar month, but they’re worth it.
These reports will tell you about your trends. Since the whole point of comparing recovery and stress is to find out if they are balanced, there are charts showing how well you aligned them.
I mean, just look at this:
By far the coolest graph in the set, and probably the coolest feature, is the correlation matrix you get from the daily journal feature.
To use the journal, you need to open the app every day (or find the clipboard icon on the past day’s screen) and answer the small survey you created for yourself. Basically, you select the variables to view, and the monthly report will tell you if those variables are correlated with good or bad sleep. I picked a few, including whether I drank alcohol and whether my stress was particularly high. You can use the journal to evaluate the supplements you are taking, to see if your hydration level is affecting your sleep, or to see if your recovery rate will change when you have your period. The only catch is that the application needs a combination of yes and no (at least five each) to be able to calculate correlations. Anyway, here’s mine, on the subject of alcohol:
I think every sleep expert I’ve ever interviewed has mentioned that people rarely believe alcohol affects their sleep and are surprised when they begin to pay attention and find that it does. It’s interesting to see the data right in front of me.
Now these are correlations other than causality. I know that I tend to stay up late at night when I have alcohol, and that those nights tend to fall at the end of a training week when I’m more likely to sleep. If you meditate or take supplements at night that you expect to have difficulty sleeping, this may be negatively correlated, even if it does help you sleep. Therefore, it is important to consider how you interpret your data.
Standard caveats apply: I wouldn’t rely on any consumer sleep tracker to tell me exactly if I’m getting enough out of a given sleep stage (remember, Oura tells me that I always get too little REM sleep and WHOOP usually tells me my REMs are on the high side). I use sleep tracker data as a guideline for my mid to long term planning, not as a hint to skip a workout. However, I think both devices work well to help you see these patterns, each in its own way.