A Year with a Whoop Band: Lessons Learned

What is a Whoop Band?

The Whoop Band is a wearable fitness tracker designed to “Unlock Human Performance”. Created by athletes who realized they knew more about the health of their computers than they did their own bodies, Whoop tracks your heart rate 24/7 to measure Recovery, Strain and Sleep Performance.

What differentiates the Whoop band from other wearables like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch is something called Heart Rate Variability or HRV for short. Whoop measures HRV while most other wearables do not. Simply put, HRV is a measure of the variance in time between heartbeats. Your heart rate may be 60 beats per minute (BPM), but the time in between each beat varies slightly. Check out this article for a better understanding of HRV.

A higher HRV signals your body is primed to perform at a high level while a lower HRV signals your body needs to recover. Whoop’s founder Will Ahmed likes to refer to HRV as a physiological secret your body is trying to communicate with you. Whoop measures heart rate data countless times each second to provide users with a Recovery Score, Strain Number and Sleep Performance summary each day.

Why did I get a Whoop?

I’ve always been an athlete and I’ve always loved to measure data and trends. I had a Fitbit for a while, but I would always forget to put it back on after it was charging and I would lose a bunch of data. Eventually, I never put it back on and I didn’t miss it.

I was listening to a podcast with Tim Ferriss and Kelly Starrett in which they discussed many topics related to training and human performance, but when HRV was mentioned I realized I had never heard of it before.

Starrett described HRV as the best indicator of recovery and preparedness to train. I did some additional research and stumbled across Whoop’s website. My initial thoughts were “Fitbit on steroids”. I wasn’t in the market for a wearable device, but the benefits of Whoop compelled me to spend the evening further researching Whoop and other similar products. Before the night was over I had placed my order.

I certainly don’t fit the typical profile of a Whoop customer. The band is worn by some of the most elite athletes in the world, like Lebron James and Tiger Woods. It’s also popular in the Crossfit community and among high-level personal trainers like Kelly Starret.

As a 22-year-old college student, I have to imagine I’m an outlier in the Whoop community, but the value and insights Whoop has provided in the last year are certainly worth sharing.

Lesson 1: Alcohol is Bad

I think we all know alcohol isn’t good for you, but I had no idea the extent to which it was affecting my body. Not too long ago Joe Rogan, Tom Segura, Bert Kreischer and Ari Shaffir all embarked on a journey called “Sober October” in which they abstained from alcohol for the month.

They tracked the changes on their body with Whoop bands throughout the challenge and the results were remarkable. I have seen similar trends in my own experience and want to share how Whoop has changed the way I think about alcohol below.

The first thing I noticed with Whoop was how much my heart rate increased when I was drinking. Even if I was sitting around at home instead of out and about, my average heart rate drastically increased after a few drinks.

On some occasions, the increase in my heart rate was so profound that a night of drinking was more strenuous than my hardest training sessions. My average heart rate has gotten up to 150 bpm some nights and I’ve built the same cardiovascular strain as a 5–7-mile run other evenings.

I also started to see weird sleeping patterns after a night out. There were large jumps and crashes in my heart rate throughout the night. Some nights my heart rate would stay well above 140 bpm for hours when on a normal night my heart rate would never get above 60 bpm.

Before Whoop, and like many others, I used to think that I slept great after a night of drinking because I was able to easily fall asleep and I never woke up in the middle of the night.

After Whoop, it’s clear this couldn’t be further from the truth.

On particularly rowdy evenings my heart rate stays so high that Whoop thinks I’m exercising instead of sleeping.

This was a profound realization for me because I was completely destroying the quality of my sleep any time I was going out even for just a few drinks with friends.

Because sleep is so important for our body’s recovery there were also negative effects on my recovery scores the morning after drinking. It’s not uncommon for my resting heart to be double my normal average and my recovery score on a scale of 1–100% is rarely above 33% corresponding with what Whoop considers the “Red Zone”.

The worst part about these negative consequences is they are not limited to the morning after. I don’t return to my usual averages until at least 2–3 days after drinking, retarding my ability to train and recover effectively until the middle of the week.

Since I have gotten a Whoop, I have started to think about alcohol in a completely different way. I try to avoid it at all costs in addition to being much more mindful of how much I’m drinking when I do choose to go out.

Before Whoop I knew drinking wasn’t good for me, but the hard data and metrics I’ve been able to observe have shown me how much I am damaging my body both mentally and physically.

Lesson 2: Sleep is Good

Again, this is a painfully simple observation, but the implications Whoop has had on my sleep habits have been profound.

Before Whoop I knew the basics. The more sleep I get the better. I should try and get 8 hours of sleep a night. There are different stages of sleep and some are more restorative than others.

That was about it for me. I thought my sleep habits were pretty good compared to some of my peers. However, as with most things, there was much more to a good night's sleep than I ever could have imagined.

I used to aim for a minimum of 6 hours a night. Sometimes I got more and other times I got less, but for the most part, I felt rested when I woke up and then I would start to get tired sometime in the afternoon. I always thought that was the way things worked.

Since I’ve gotten Whoop, my average night's sleep has been steadily increasing and I started to notice the subtle differences in how I feel each morning based on the previous night's sleep.

The longer I spent in bed the lower my resting heart was and the higher my HRV was. This also contributed to a higher recovery score. No surprises there, but having hard metrics to back up these conclusions has been the driving factor to improve my sleep habits.

Slowly, I realized my bedtime routines started to have an impact on my sleep. Whoop doesn’t only measure the amount of sleep you get, but it also measures how long you spend in each stage of sleep and how much time you spend awake.

I was finally able to objectively measure the effects different bedtime routines had on the quality and quantity of my sleep. Like most people, I always heard you shouldn’t look at screens before bed, but I never followed this rule until Whoop was able to show me how much faster I was able to fall asleep when I read a book before bed instead of watching Netflix.

Since then I have been experimenting with other things to try and improve my sleep habits. Another thing that I have been able to quantify is the quality of my sleep. When I am intentional about my actions before bed, for example reading a book and drinking decaffeinated green tea instead of working on my computer, I spend more time in Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) or deep sleep.

Because this is the most restorative stage of sleep, I have been able to improve the quality of my sleep and my recovery without increasing the quantity of sleep I need. Without Whoop, I used to rely on my own qualitative observations which I’ve since learned are useless compared to real data.

With quantitative observations around all aspects of my sleep, I have not only been able to increase my quantity of sleep, but I’ve also increased the efficiency of my sleep. The biggest impact of this has been a drastic increase in my energy throughout the day.

Now I only start to get tired late in the evening when I’m getting ready to go to bed and instead of getting sleepy in the afternoon, I have continued focus all day long allowing me to get much more done.

The importance of sleeping better and sleeping longer are becoming more apparent every day and Whoop has been instrumental in helping me implement changes that have made me a champion sleeper.

Lesson 3: Everything Affects Your Body

The effects of alcohol and sleep have been the most profound learnings from Whoop, but there are countless other factors I’ve discovered that have an effect on my body.

The first I’d like to discuss is food. I never would have thought what I eat and when I eat it would have such a big impact on my performance and recovery, but over time I started to see distinct patterns.

The first was the effect of eating later in the evenings. Whether it was a late dinner or just a snack close to bedtime, I began to find that the closer I ate to bed the worse my sleep performance was and the lower my recovery score was the next day.

I’ve since learned this is because my body is working to digest food instead of working to recover and prepare for the next day. I never could have expected to notice something so nuanced on my own, but the discovery has prompted me to experiment with intermittent fasting.

Recently, I’ve started an 18:6 fasting schedule. In short, I eat during a 6-hour window each day and fast for the rest of the day. While this may sound intimidating, all it involves is skipping breakfast, eating lunch around 12pm and dinner before 6pm.

In addition to making me more mindful of what I am eating and eliminating mindless snacking throughout the day, I have also seen benefits in my Whoop data.

When I stick to my schedule on a given day my recovery score is almost always “in the green” (between 67–100%) the next day. If I end up snacking later in the day or eating a late dinner I usually drop down to yellow the next day (34–66%).

This has been an awesome change in my daily routine that’s left me with more energy, better focus and it has simplified my day more than I expected.

Another important factor Whoop has brought to my attention is hydration. My recovery is always lower after a day where I don’t drink enough water. Water is such an important piece of our health and it’s often the last piece of the puzzle in my recovery.

If I’m eating right, didn’t have a crazy training session or drink the day before and got enough sleep, but my recovery is still lower than I was expecting, 9 times out of 10 I can look to the day before and realize I didn’t drink nearly enough water.

I’ve also been able to measure how stress plays a role in my recovery. All other things equal I’ve noticed a higher average heart rate in the days leading up to big events like job interviews or important games which puts additional strain on my body.

Finally, I’ve enjoyed being able to monitor my heart rate in real-time. It’s fascinating to see breathing exercises or meditation lower my heart rate in only a few minutes. I can also feel the difference in my mood and mindset after lowering my heart rate and taking a few minutes to chill out.

The same things have also been true for increases in heart rate while I’m delivering big presentations or participating in anything that makes me a bit nervous or gets me out of my comfort zone. Looking back and seeing the increases in my heart rate has been not only interesting but has also helped me identify and mitigate the reaction during stressful events.

Closing Thoughts

To summarize how Whoop has impacted my life in the past year I would say this.

Whoop provides me with quantitative data that has allowed me to experiment and identify daily habits that improve my health and performance.

I’ve always tried to optimize habits to improve my mental and physical performance, but they never stuck because I had no evidence they were improving my life in any way.

Whoop has helped me identify the habits that hold me back and the habits that catapult me forward. It provides constant feedback to keep me accountable and to help me continue learning.

Whoop is ridiculously expensive at $30/month, but it only took me a few weeks to realize I’d never be able to live without it.