I Tracked My Health Using Whoop and This Is What I Liked (and What I Ignored)

When I wrote my Whoop 4.0 review , I focused on the main points: how the band looks, works and charges, and what activities it can track. Today I’m going to dive into all the metrics Whoop reports and check out what’s most useful and what’s not worth paying attention to. I’ll leave the activity tracking features here since I covered them in more detail in the review. (Bottom line: I like how it tracks the intensity of your workouts, including strength training, but for most people they won’t replace a real fitness watch.)

I don’t wear the Whoop ring as regularly as I wear the Oura ring, for which I was able to do a four-year retrospective . But for the sake of both this article and my updated review, I’ve been wearing Whoop for about the last six weeks, regularly tracking my workouts and sleep.

So here’s a deeper dive into what it’s actually like to wear a Whoop strap for a long time, using it to assess and manage your habits and performance.

A typical day with Whoop

Let me walk you through a typical day. I wear the Whoop bracelet either on my wrist or shoulder, and it’s probably been a few days since I last charged it. (I get about five days on a charge.) I made sure it was on when I went to bed. If I look at my Whoop app first thing in the morning, it will sometimes tell me that it is still “processing” my sleep, and there is a button I can press to “interrupt sleep” and get the recovery results.

The Whoop app will show you a survey called “your log” every day when you first open the app. I will tell you more about the magazine in the next section. Let’s say you’ve already filled out your journal and are looking at the main application. On the main screen I see:

• My recovery is at the top , color coded. Green is good and you will get it if your recovery is 66% or higher. Yellow is normal (34% and above) and red is bad. Today I have yellow recovery, at 48%. (During April I received 19 green recoveries, 9 yellow, 0 red, and two nights I forgot to wear the strap to bed.)

• A few notes on things I should pay attention to . Today it says my HRV is lower than usual, which may be due to my hard workout yesterday.

• A health monitor that tells me if my breathing rate, blood oxygen levels, resting heart rate, HRV and skin temperature are within my normal range. Today all five are within striking distance.

• Stress monitor , which I think shows me how stressed I am. I don’t find this useful.

• A Daily Forecast button that I can click . A conversation with the Whoop trainer begins – more on that in a minute.

• Today’s timeline showing when I slept. When I do other activities, such as working out, they will appear here.

• Today’s sleep recommendations , including recommended bedtime.

This then brings up a scorecard for my current “plan” (more on that below) and a dashboard with individual metrics I might be interested in, such as heart rate variability (HRV) and my number of steps to date – a feature that’s still in beta.

At the top of the screen, I can select tabs specifically for Sleep, Recovery, or Stress. The “Voltage” tab is interesting because it gives the recommended voltage level for the day. Today, for example, it tells me to set the voltage to a “moderate” level, between 8.9 and 12.9. You get most of your exercise from exercise and some from everyday activities such as walking. As I write this, I haven’t worked out or left the house, and my voltage is 2.7 just from sitting in the morning.

A Whoop Coach can help you plan your day, but don’t ask for it to be too specific.

Let’s go back to the Daily Outlook button. Tap this and you’ll start a conversation with Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot. This is probably the only AI bot I talk to regularly because it does a good job of explaining the app’s metrics and recommending workouts for the day.

Today he complimented me on my running workout yesterday and told me that my training schedule was consistent: I spent 162 minutes in active heart rate zones this week. He then describes several trends in my metrics, including that my resting heart rate has improved over the past few weeks, but my recovery is lower than usual today.

Then comes the fun part. He makes recommendations for today’s workouts and habits to focus on. He advises me to drink three liters of water today (a little more than usual) with plenty of fruits and vegetables. And for training, I might meet the recommended stress rating with something low-impact to “support recovery” since my heart rate and HRV indicate I may need a little rest.

Whoop Coach offers three workouts to choose from depending on what activities I enjoy. These include a 30-minute run, mostly in zones 1 and 2, or an 80-minute low-to-moderate intensity weight lifting workout. I can click the button at the bottom of each workout that says “Accept” and it will add it to my schedule for the day. I can do a workout later by simply pressing this button and it will start the activity timer.

I love that he can recommend these workouts to me because otherwise “get the 8.9 strain” is an incomprehensible instruction. Unfortunately, you only get a small graphic showing the time in the heart rate zones. I asked the Whoop Coach if it could time these intervals, perhaps beeping when it’s time to switch from one zone to another, but it doesn’t have that feature.

It does offer a specific workout plan that I could enter into the workout timer app of my choice—in theory. Whoop Coach, like many AI chatbots, cannot perform mathematical calculations and cannot make sense of its own results. I asked him for specific intervals for the recommended 30-minute run, and instead he gave me three different workouts I could try, none of which added up to 30 minutes. I again requested a 30-minute workout that fit my daily workload, and he gave me a “30-minute run plan,” which adds up to 25 minutes and does not include zone 2. He kindly provides this as a card with a “complete” button, but the workout on the card is still different—a 28-minute workout with three minutes in zone 2—and none of the numbers match what the bot told me in the text of our conversation. You can see the screenshots above.

Sometimes, after enough thought, the AI ​​can provide something useful. But this is not enough to rely on training ideas. I’ve found that the best way to use it is to see what it recommends and then use that as a sort of loose guide if I have flexibility in my workout routine or my actual plans for the day. For example, I have a hard 45-minute running workout planned today, but based on Whoop’s feedback, I may see if I can replace it with an easy run scheduled for later in the week.

How to use Whoop sleep metrics and features

Whoop gives you so many sleep metrics that it can be difficult to know where to start. The two main useful features I see here are a report of how long you slept compared to how much sleep you needed, and smart alarms that you can set in any of a variety of ways.

The Sleep tab will give you an estimate of your sleep “efficiency” by comparing the amount of sleep you’ve gotten to the amount you’re estimated to need. I slept more than I needed today, which doesn’t match how insecure I felt dragging myself out of bed. However, the timing seems right: I was very tired yesterday, so I went to bed early and stayed up a little late.

I think it’s silly to worry about how “accurate” sleep tracking is, since no wearable device is truly accurate, but most are pretty good. But for comparison, total sleep time is usually similar to what Oura reports, and sleep stages are often more or less the same. This is what I receive today:

• Light sleep: 5:02 (Oura: 5:22)

• Deep Sleep: 2:36 (Oura: 1:41)

• REM sleep: 1:46 (Oura: 1:37)

• Total: 9:18 (Ourah 9:22)

Total sleep matters more than other numbers in my book. Increase your overall amount of sleep and you’ll likely sleep better. (I have data to back this up from my long-term Oura trends —total sleep volume correlates highly with other sleep quality metrics and scores.)

Whoop also tracks your “sleep debt,” or how much sleep you need but aren’t getting. Six times in the last month I have had a “high” sleep deficit of 45 minutes or more. In nine cases it was moderate (30 to 45 minutes), and in 14 cases it was 30 minutes or less.

Sleep coach and smart alarms

One of Whoop’s most intriguing features is the sleep coach, which can advise you on when to go to bed and even help you decide when the alarm should go off. (This is also one of the most hidden features. Tap on the “today’s dream” card on the overview screen.)

On this screen, called “Sleep Planner,” you can choose whether you want to “meet my sleep need” (to make up for lack of sleep if needed); “Improve My Sleep,” which will recommend times to help you be more consistent with your sleep schedule; or “reach your weekly plan goal,” which I’ll talk about in more detail below.

And then there is a second set of preferences. When you try to set an alarm, the app will ask if you want to wake up at a specific time, or when you’ve reached your sleep goal for the night, or once you’re in the green. The latter refers to a recovery of 66% or higher, which may not be ideal, but should ensure you stay on your feet.

I don’t actually use these features too often. I have a sleep goal in my weekly plan, but I don’t fiddle with the app every night to decide when to wake up. On the other hand, if I had a chaotic schedule, like a student or professional athlete, I could definitely use this feature more.

Track your habits with a journal

Activity and sleep tracking happens more or less automatically, and almost any fitness tracker or smartwatch can do these things. From a health perspective, what’s really great about Whoop is that it helps you track all the little habits and factors that might be affecting your sleep or your athletic performance.

This is where the Journal comes to the rescue. You can fill it out at any time during the day, but it will also pop up first thing in the morning and ask you what happened yesterday. Did you have lunch late? Did you have alcohol? Are you well hydrated? If you don’t like these questions, you can set it to ask you different ones. It can also pull data from other parts of the app or from connected apps—for example, if you record your menstrual cycle in Apple Health, that might show up here as well.

Each habit or factor becomes useful only if you write down at least five “yes” and five “no”. Anything you almost always do or almost never do will not be of much benefit. So I narrowed down the list of questions in the journal to only include things that I would answer differently from night to night, or things that I was trying to improve.

One important caveat: leaving a question blank does not count as a yes or no answer . Initially, I would only answer the question if I could say yes, and otherwise I would leave it blank, such as answering yes if I had consumed alcohol that day. But when I later looked at my results, I discovered that with seven yeses and zero nos on alcohol, Whoop was unable to provide me with any reports that used this information. I was able to complete the log entries for the last few days, but I can only go back a week at most.

However, this extra week of data was enough to give me an answer about alcohol: it was harming my recovery, reducing it by an average of 9% on the nights I had a couple of beers. Or at least that’s how Woop presents it – they’re correlations, and Woop doesn’t actually know what causes what. For example, taking melatonin harms my recovery by 4%. But is melatonin really to blame, or is it just a correlation where I take melatonin when I’m already having trouble sleeping? These results should be taken with a great deal of skepticism. To Whoop’s credit, it does include a note that “this impact differs significantly from the Whoop average. Please note that impact can sometimes be influenced by other correlated factors that you are not tracking.”

Two things that really help my recovery, according to Whoop data (which you can access at the top of the log screen), are regular sleep times (8% improvement) and good hydration (4% improvement). My exact sleep times were automatically filled in based on Whoop data, and for hydration I simply answered a yes/no question each day.

By the way, you can speed up the process of setting all the little yes and no boxes by tapping the box that says “use previous answers.” It will set the answers to everything you marked yesterday, and then you can manually change the ones that are different.

Making a plan for the week

Weekly plans are a good way to work on a small set of habits in a short time. Instead of trying to track each and every outcome, you choose, say, three things you want to work on. Here are a few examples the app provides and the habits or factors each one tracks:

• Improve fitness : Increase time in high-intensity heart rate zones, meet your protein goal four days a week, do any strength training one day a week.

• Feel better : Increase your daily steps, meet your hydration goal four days a week, do “any recovery activity” three days a week.

• Sleep deeper : improve sleep stability, improve sleep quality, avoid eating late.

After experimenting with a few of them, I eventually created a customized plan for myself. I chose:

• Sleep on average 7:30 hours.

• Avoid using your phone in bed four days a week.

• Achieve your hydration goal five days a week

Throughout the week I can check in on how I’m doing and at the end of the week Whoop gives me a little report and asks if I want to do the same plan next week or change it. I find this to be a useful way to work towards a mini-goal, and it’s much less overwhelming than studying huge dashboards filled with all the data Whoop can collect.

View weekly and monthly reports

If you want to take a closer look at all your data, Whoop can share detailed weekly and monthly “performance scores” with you. Each one is a PDF file with graphs showing what you did during the week or month and how it compares to previous data.

For example, my monthly report for April shows how my stress and recovery compare to previous weeks throughout the year. I don’t wear my Whoop often enough to get any meaningful information out of it—like I said, I only really wear it when I’m testing features or writing a review—but damn, I’d love it if it were available on one of the devices I carry month after month. (As much as I admire Whoop, I can only carry a certain number of devices in addition to the ones I test for functionality.)

My weekly report is more focused. The most recent one begins with the statement: “The workload was optimal. Sleep could be improved.” My tension was also down a bit this week compared to last week and my sleep was poor. I like the graph that shows how my sleep and wake times line up (or don’t line up) with the times the app recommends to me.

What not to pay attention to

The Whoop app gives you a ton of data, and to be honest, I’d say most of it isn’t worth paying attention to. There are so many data points and rabbit holes to get lost in the app. You can spend hours reviewing reports and adjusting settings. You can spend an unlimited amount of time communicating with the artificial intelligence of Whoop Coach. And you don’t have to do that.

It helps to pick a few things to pay attention to and let the rest go. Luckily, the app gives you plenty of ways to do this. You can select a few things that are important to you in your weekly plan, and you can also hide things on your dashboard that you don’t need to check every day.

As for the things I (almost) never pay attention to:

• Don’t overestimate sleep stages. Getting enough sleep and staying asleep will protect you.

• Don’t put too much emphasis on recovery rates; you’re resilient enough to handle a planned workout even if your sleep isn’t ideal. The exception would be if you’re feeling really terrible—sick or something—in which case you’ll know it by how you’re feeling rather than by the number on the app.

• Remember, the data tells you correlation, not causation—like in my melatonin example, where melatonin correlates with worse sleep, perhaps because I take it when I expect my sleep to be worse. It’s not really an “idea” at all, just data that you’ll need to use your own brain (and further experimentation) to understand.

I’ve found that focusing too much on the recovery app can drive me crazy. Instead of waking up and not thinking about how I’m feeling (I’m probably fine), I wonder if the app agrees that I’m feeling tired and sore. Or I think I’m fine, but the app says my HRV is down, and now I need to think about what could be causing it. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of intense tracking for people who find they can easily get carried away by numbers. But if numbers bring you joy, the Whoop app can certainly give you plenty of it.

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