WHOOP! There it is.
Y’all know how much I love movement & fitness. It’s a huge passion of mine and I get genuine joy from each and every one of my workouts (side note: it’s so important to enjoy whatever form of movement you do!) But I also love information - I enjoy tracking my movement, and analyzing the information given. For the past couple of years, I had used an apple watch to track this information. It was working just fine… but I wanted more. Thankfully, a friend turned me on to WHOOP - and I immediately wanted to try it out.
What WHOOP is about & why it’s different:
WHOOP is about unlocking your inner potential. Your body is constantly speaking to you, but since it doesn’t speak english, it’s a little difficult to interpret exactly what it’s saying. WHOOP helps decode that - helping you prevent overtraining, injury, fatigue, and ultimately optimizing your performance.
WHOOP has 2 main metrics: Strain & Recovery, which are pretty self explanatory. Your strain score shows how hard your body has been working, and your recovery percentage lets you know how you’ve recovered - and if your body is prime to take on strain. Recovery is also color coded with green, yellow and red.
Every workout you record comes with a strain score, which also affects your overall day strain.
There are so many features - an insane amount of different types of activities, a journal to help you habit track & see what affects your recovery, a community section where you can join ‘teams’ to compete or see how your friends are doing, and a detailed sleep tab that assesses your sleep performance (which is a huge component in recovery!)
Why I love WHOOP: first off, I love the amount of data. There’s so much! Not only with tracking workouts (mileage, calories, heart rate, etc), but especially with sleep and recovery. Prior to WHOOP, I never really gave recovery much thought. I would workout daily, and if I wasn’t super feeling it or was partcularly sore I’d opt for something with a little lower impact. But with the data provided by WHOOP, it’s easier to respond to the changing conditions of my body so I really know when I can push my limits and when I need to take it easy.
I was also seriously unaware of the fact that sleep does not equal recovery. I always thought ‘I’m getting my 8hrs. I should be good. My percieved exhaustion is not real’. But with whoop, I’ve seen that the quality of sleep is what really matters, not the time.
One of my favorite parts of WHOOP is the immense amount of information available to you. I especially love the monthly performance assesment! It really breaks down the trends over the past month of your sleep, recovery, strain - and my favorite: how your daily habits affect your recovery & ability to work. For example, I learned that on days I meditate, have steady energy levels, eat well & focus on un-processed foods, and am in a generally better emotional state: my recovery increases. Where as on the days when I consume added sugar, gluten, and alochol; my sleep, recovery and performance the following day suffers.
I’ve been wearing WHOOP 24/7 since the moment I got it, and I find it absolutely invaluable. As much as I love WHOOP, there are three key reasons that I still put on my apple watch for just my workouts. The first is the social aspect. On whoop, you can’t find and ‘follow’ other members, where with apple watch, my trainer has access to see my information (which can be great for motivational purposes!). The second is specifically for outdoor running. While whoop is awesome, I haven’t yet been able to find a way to track mileage splits, which I really enjoy seeing and comparing with past runs. The last reason is purely for the connectivity between apple watch and peloton bike+ rides (I like watching my strive score change colors!)
All in all; I love my WHOOP and plan to keep on wearing it for the foreseeable future. I enjoy seeing how each different type of movement affects my strain score, and I find all of the information it provides so helpful.
If you want to give WHOOP a try, use this link here to get a free WHOOP strap & your first month free!
Do y’all track your workouts or find the information it could provide interesting? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments below, and as always, feel free to follow along on all of my adventures (inlcuding those in fitness & with WHOOP!) at my instagram @sarah.kowalchuk!
xx, Sarah
This is not a sponsored post.
