Should I Switch to the New Whoop Strength Machine?

Wearables that track activity have always done well with cardio workouts. When you’re running or cycling, your heart rate is a fairly accurate reflection of how hard you’ve been working. But strength training stresses your body in a completely different way, and wearables have never been able to handle that — until, perhaps, just now.

Whoop , a screenless bracelet that tracks both sleep and exercise, has always had a “weightlifting” workout that you could log in much the same way as a cardio workout: just hit the start button, do your thing, and get a score at the end. But this will come with a disclaimer that “your stress score [estimate] may be lower than your estimated effort.” In other words, they know they are not accurately measuring the intensity of their workout.

But this is changing. Whoop introduced a feature called Strength Trainer that aims to track the impact on your body of each repetition of each set in each exercise. If it really works in a useful way, it’s a huge industry first. None of the other consumer wearables on the market track strength training other than treating it as a weird flavor of cardio. (However, Garmin can count reps for you, which is awesome.)

If you play sports and are currently using a different wearable device, such as Oura or Apple Watch , it may be worth switching devices for this feature. So does this keep the promise?

Why wearables should start tracking strength training

Lifting weights takes a lot of your energy. There are pains that many of us are familiar with, but serious athletes know that the effects of lifting weights can go beyond that. If I deadlift to my max (keep adding weight until I can literally get the bar off the ground), I know not to expect too much of myself for at least a few days after that, no matter what. whether I hurt or not.

To track your recovery from workouts, wearables typically measure something called heart rate variability (HRV) . HRV measures whether your heart is beating at a constant rhythm or not – it turns out, the less rhythmic, the better.

It’s good to know that now I have recovered, I am now , but he can’t tell the difference between when a hard workout lowered my HRV, but I slept and ate a lot, so I recovered well, compared to when I trained normally . but really relaxed in the recovery department. For now, human judgment is the best yardstick we have for this. My trainer does not need to see my HRV data to know that I will be tired by the end of a hard training block.

In addition to HRV, recovery-focused wearables use a variety of other metrics to tell you how much you’ve recovered or how much recovery you need. (By “recovery,” they mostly mean sleep.) So they’ll take into account how many hours you slept last night, how much your heart rate dropped during the night, and they might try to explain the amount of exercise you did—what’s on help comes Strength Trainer.

What it’s like to use the Whoop’s Strength Trainer

The strength trainer is in a different part of the Whoop app than the regular workout types. With the plus sign at the bottom right you can open Strength Trainer and from there you can either create a workout or choose one of the pre-loaded workouts developed by Whoop.

The best thing about the workout creation tool is that it includes a huge library of exercises, about 200. I was pleasantly surprised to find many Olympic exercises and their variations: snatches, power snatches, hanging snatches, and power hanging snatches. there. It’s impossible to create a snatch-pull+snatch complex that I hope they add in the future. If you are doing an exercise that is not in the database, you can add it as “Other”.

The worst thing about this – and the one that could potentially break the deal – is that he needs to be constantly supervised. When you create a workout, you enter exercises, sets, reps, and weight. (Reps and weights can be updated during a workout.) When you actually do the workout, the real hand holding begins. You need to press a button to start each set and then press again to finish it. That means constantly switching apps if you’re also using your phone for something else, like shooting videos.

And if you get confused, then you screwed up in a way. While you can add exercises or sets that you haven’t done yet, you can’t tell the app that you just recorded something you shouldn’t have done. Here are a few mistakes I made that I couldn’t fix:

According to an excerpt from the Push blog archived here , the app “provided recommendations on what load to use during weight training to achieve specific adaptations based on the speed of the lift.” In other words, watch the bar like a coach and tell you what to do.

On the other hand, choosing a Whoop design can prevent a weight machine from ever being useful.

I’m both intrigued by the possibilities the Strength Trainer presents and pessimistic that Whoop will ever be able to do anything cool with it. Whoop bought Push, but that doesn’t mean Whoop is Push. Whoop’s marketing materials seem to be careful to avoid using the word “speed” at all (it’s “explosive” or “use of accelerometer and gyroscope sensors”), and they definitely don’t call their new offering VBT.

When I sent Whoop detailed questions about whether the strength training machine uses speed data and how, I received vague answers like “It uses the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors in the device to calculate the effective volume for each repetition of each exercise, measure the intensity for each repetitions.” of each exercise, estimate the maximum volume based on your training history and take the maximum intensity for each exercise from performance profiles to calculate your unique and specific muscle load for each workout in the app.”

This is not very impressive, given that the number of repetitions and sets is entered by the user; volume can be calculated from these numbers. In the conventional strength training world, intensity refers to the weight on the bar , which is also entered by the user. In other words, a simple spreadsheet can do everything Whoop says its accelerometers and algorithms can do. (And I can enter my 1-rep max into the chart for a more accurate intensity measurement; Woop prefers to guess how strong I am rather than asking me directly.)

So what exactly does a strength coach do ? It’s honestly not clear yet. Instead of building a VBT app – which would be cool even if it doesn’t change your recovery rates – Whoop seems to have decided to use speed data in a completely different way. A spokesperson for Whoop said in a Reddit AMA that they believe a heavy load is moving quickly to cause a high load; it sounds like the opposite of how VBT usually works.

In keeping with this, the app’s help screen states that intensity “is a measure of how explosively you execute each movement.” As the term is commonly used, if my best squat is 100kg and today I am doing 90, I would call it a high intensity lift. Whoop will notice that the bar is moving slowly and call it low intensity. It’s right back.

Another difference between a VBT system like Push and something like Whoop is that VBT is the tool you use to implement a learning program. You use speed to determine what weight will give you the desired stimulus for your day’s workout. But somewhere, the coach has to decide what is the desired stimulus for that workout, based on your goals for your current training block. This means that if you do this to an application, it is the application’s job to tell you what to do.

The Whoop and other consumer wearables trying to be everything to everyone don’t seem to be interested in managing your workouts. They also work in the short term rather than understanding where you are in a training block or season. As I described here , they want to tell you how much to exercise today based on how much sleep you got last night. They don’t know that you have eight weeks before the competition and that your coach thinks you should train at 70% to 80% intensity today.

Whoop has a platform where coaches can manage teams of athletes , and I’m optimistic that Whoop will somehow integrate Push-style coaching into it. (In a Reddit AMA, a Whoop rep said the company is “considering” introducing VBT-based coaching.) But for now, as someone who’s just trying to work out, the Whoop weight machine is a clunky mess with no transparent payoff for the user.