The Whoop’s recovery metric is essential for understanding how ready and recovered your body is. The recovery metric, when combined with the Whoops data analytics and habit journaling feature, can help decrease habits that negatively impact recovery and maximize those that improve rest.
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Why listen to me about the Whoop lifestyle tracker?
I’ve been using the Whoop 4.0 (and the 3.0 model) for about 3 years and have gained significant insight into my lifestyle and body. In addition to being an executive with an aggressive travel
schedule, I’m also a busy dad who is trying to lead a healthier and more impactful life.
What is the Whoop 4.0?
The Whoop 4.0 is a fitness and lifestyle tracker, that is paired with a powerful backend suite of analytics and an smartphone app. Between these tools, the Whoop provides daily summaries of your recovery (how ready you are to take on strain), sleep (how well did you rest last night), and strain (how hard did you work yesterday). For anyone that uses real time and trending metrics in their professional role, Whoop’s graphics will be very intuitive.
See this detailed review of the Whoop 4.0 with a specific eye towards business travelers and executives.
What is recovery in the Whoop ecosystem?
According to to Whoop, Recovery is “a measure of your body’s readiness to respond or perform on a scale of 0 to 100%.” In order words, it’s a measure of how rested and primed your body
is to take on physically and mentally challenging activities. Every evening (or other sleep period, if you’re working on a different schedule), the Whoop collects data across five different sensors. The Whoop’s analytics engine analyzes the quality of your sleep, with a specific focus on HRV and resting heart rate to determine just how recovered your body is.
Why does the Whoop use HRV and resting heart rate to determine recovery?
HRV stands for Heart Rate Variability, and is a measure of the variation (in milliseconds) between successive heartbeats. This might not sound like an important metric to keep track of, but the reason for tracking it is that it provides important insight into our bodies.
HRV is actually a great, non-invasive means for understanding the state of our autonomic nervous system. If you think back to high school health class, you may recall that the autonomic nervous system is composed of two systems – the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system controls our active or action oriented part of our body. It’s often referred to as the “fight or flight” mechanism and redirects blood to our muscles during stressful events, exercise, or perceived threats. Thought it’s crucial to our ability to rise to the occasion, it also requires a balancing force.
The parasympathetic nervous system balances the body by regulating the rest and recovery mechanisms. This pathway slows down heartrate, restricts the release of hormones, and generally helps our body recover. These functions are essential to rebuilding muscles, allowing our mind to clear, and find a sense of peace. When HRV is high, it means that our sympathetic and
parasympathetic nervous systems are in balance. When HRV is low, it indicates that the sympathetic (action oriented) system is overtaking the parasympathetic system.
Why is recovery so important for business travelers who are seeking a healthier lifestyle?
Business travel is hard on the body and mind. From disrupted routines to inconsistent sleep schedules to poor nutrition, a hard week of travel can throw the most dedicated wellness
enthusiast off their game.
How can I use the Whoop to establish healthier habits?
Making changes to habits can be VREY difficult if we don’t have data and can’t immediately see the benefit. The Whoop 4.0
helps with both of these problems.
Data – Not only does the Whoop collect data from 5 different sensors while you are sleep, it also correlates this data with your daily Journal Entries. Within a few days, you’ll start to be able to statistically understand which habits negatively and positively impact your recovery (don’t worry, all of the math happens in the background).
Sleep quality visibility – before getting a Whoop, the quality of your sleep can be quite subjective. Do I feel rested? Did I sleep well enough last night? The Whoop completely changes your ability to see the quality of your sleep and recovery. It does this with a 1-100% recovery score, as well as a tracker that lets you know how much of your needed sleep you got the previous night.
By using the data and sleep quality visibility in your Whoop, you’ll be much better armed to commit to good habits and avoid bad ones.
What are examples of healthier habits that you’ve established based on recovery feedback from the Whoop 4.0?
- More meditation (to increase recovery) – during travel, I really like using the Peloton app to sneak a meditation while taxing to the runway (good headphones help).
- Taking a magnesium supplement (to increase deep sleep)
- Decreasing alcohol consumption overall and especially during the work week
- More consistent bed time (paired with some techniques to maximize sleep in hotel rooms)
- Less salty foods close to bedtime (had to re-purpose a habit to track this one)
- Better hydration while traveling (more on how to do that)
- Use the integrated alarm clock (bonus – don’t wake your partner up) to create better sleep habits
How do I start taking advantage of the Whoop recovery KPI?
To get started, you need to get a Whoop 4.0 and monthly service. We have a special deal with Whoop that will get you started with your first month for free. Hit the link below to get started with Whoop.
