If you are new here, I have been using Whoop since August of 2019 and it has been my go-to training aid. It has helped me get better results from my workouts and recovery. I have made several videos on the subject and have nothing bad to say about it. Except now, I am leaving…
I first started using Whoop to monitor and learn what was happening to my body while training for the Ironman triathlon. If you are unfamiliar with Whoop, they are a company that provides a wearable tracking device that monitors your heart rate throughout the day and night. The reason I initially chose Whoop is that it collected and presented my workout and sleep data with a wearable device and tracks your physical strain and recovery on a day-to-day basis. It has been an incredibly useful tool over this past year.
Using Whoop for the past year has provided me with a keen understanding of what helps and hinders my sleep, which influences my recovery, which in turn influences how I train.
By now you might be asking, ‘If Whoop has been helpful, then why are you saying goodbye?’
To best explain my reasons, I will breakdown the value of Whoop for me into three main areas: sleep, recovery, and training.
First, the greatest value I derive from Whoop is sleep tracking. Over the past year, I have gained a great deal of insight into my sleep. The daily journal within their app helped me identify factors and patterns that positively and negatively affected my sleep. Limiting the negative factors while promoting positive ones has led to an increase in the quality and quantity of my sleep. With this insight, I feel confident I have built a foundation of good sleep practices that I can continue without Whoop. In turn, as long as I maintain these practices, it should lead to continued positive gains in recovery and training.
The second reason for this decision is I have recently acquired an Apple Watch SE. For me, there are several benefits to owning an Apple Watch and I will go into them in another video. As it relates to Sleep, the Apple Watch can keep track of how much time I spent in bed and asleep. One of the best things I learned from my time using Whoop was how to create a reliable sleep pattern. This means I know within a half-hour my ideal time to go to bed in order to wake up the next day and feel refreshed. The Apple Watch allows me to set a Sleep Goal which reminds me when it’s time to wind down before bed and then gently wakes me up in the morning. And because my body has adapted to a consistent sleep pattern, the haptic alarm on the Apple Watch is enough to wake me up and I haven’t yet slept through the alarm.
My third reason to leave Whoop has to do with the inter-relatedness of recovery and training. Training influences recovery, i.e. the harder the training, the more recovery needed. At a basic level getting more sleep can promote better recovery, though it doesn’t provide the whole story. When you don’t account for training effort and volume on a given day, you risk underestimating how recovered you are on a day-to-day basis. Fortunately for me, my primary training zone as an endurance athlete is aerobic in nature and when executed correctly, does not put as great a strain on my body as more intensive training efforts. As I have said before, I have never used Whoop as a heart rate monitor when training for triathlon. My preference has always been a chest strap heart rate monitor which is connected to my Garmin. At the end of each workout, the Garmin provides the recommended hours needed for a full recovery. Training for an Ironman, the majority of my workouts are performed within my low aerobic zone, i.e. Zone 2 heart rate, and the intensity of the workout is not that great, which does not require extended periods of recovery. With regard to workout intensity, the general rule I follow is to maintain an intensity that does not require more than 24 hours to full recovery. There are times when I disregard this rule, e.g. during a build phase, or a singular intense workout, though this isn’t that frequent during the base building phase. For me, my Garmin watch has become a reliable indicator of time to recovery and by keeping within these recommendations, and maintaining good recovery habits and practices I can keep my training on track.
Why am I now making the switch? For the past two months, I have been operating both Whoop and Apple sleep tracking systems in parallel to see how the data I am accustomed to from Whoop relates to the same data on the Apple Watch.
As a sleep tracker, both the Apple Watch and Whoop strap tracked my time in bed the majority of the time accurately. When I first got Whoop I was interested in the different phases of sleep but as time went on, I became less interested as there wasn’t a significant variance between each phase of sleep on a day-to-day basis. Currently, the Apple Watch does not track phases of sleep, and since this is not as important to me as time in bed, switching from Whoop to Apple works.
From a recovery and training aspect, as I said earlier I use Garmin and a heart rate monitor chest strap to track my heart rate data from endurance training. The Garmin provides a recovery guide in terms of hours before I should workout again, which has been a reliable guide between workouts. An additional aspect related to recovery is resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Whoop has an optical sensor that reads heart rate data throughout the day and factors that into its strain and recovery scores. The Apple Watch has an optical heart rate sensor which through a third-party app, helps me keep track of resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Prior to using Whoop, I used HRV4Training and found it helpful, though at the time it was measuring my heart rate using the flashlight inside my iPhone and my index finger. The HRV4Training app has an Apple Watch integration which now lets me track my resting heart rate and heart rate variability.
Given I can now replicate the benefits of Whoop using items I currently have, it made sense for me to switch. In these past two months, I have come to understand how each system works and how the data from one relates to the other. Running these two systems in tandem has given me the confidence I can move forward with one versus two. And because the Apple Watch provides a greater set of apps, tools, and integrations for my life, plus it can handle the most important aspects of Whoop – the choice to switch was easy for me.
As I go forward with the Apple Watch based sleep, recovery, and training tracking system, I have to acknowledge the switch would not have been as seamless had I not been a loyal Whoop user prior. I learned a great deal from wearing Whoop over the past year and that knowledge is what gave me the confidence to switch to a system that integrates better with my lifestyle. A side benefit of leaving Whoop is I won’t have to spend $30 a month for the data I can now get for free.
If you want to learn more about Whoop, please check out these videos, or visit their website: Whoop.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end, until next time…
Edited Life 