The Ultimate WHOOP Review

cardio

Jul 1

I’ve been using WHOOP for a couple of months. WHOOP is a biometric device you wear on your wrist, or bicep, to help measure cardiovascular inheritance from aerobic Strain training during your workouts as well as the mounting recordable stresses of the day based on heart rate beats per minute. My WHOOP device, worn exclusively on my upper bicep, has taught me the hard way that Kettlebell workouts are great for increasing anaerobic strength, but Kettlebells also need extra help to push the body into aerobic cardiovascular fitness, and for me, that translates into having to add running, Kettlebell EMOM (with cautious variations), jumping jacks, and cycling to my daily workout routines. Those additions compete to complicate both time and trouble.

As you know, I use my Apple watch on my left wrist to measure my heart rate all day. I wear an Oura Ring on my left hand in marriage position — as does my wife! — to help track HRV every day. I wear my WHOOP all day and all night, on alternating biceps, to bring it all together in the ultimate triumvirate of health in exposition.

I’ll give you my ultimate WHOOP review bullet points in a moment, but first, I want to discuss my initial experience with getting to know WHOOP by sharing my initial conversation with support.

QUESTION ONE

BOLESBELLS.COM: Is there any way to tell Whoop that I am on medication that affects my heart rate? I'm on Blood Pressure meds, and while I may be able to peak at 150bpm, my sustainable max is really around 135. With other Apps, I can tell them I'm on meds, and the expectation is lowered. When my heart rate jumps to max, it almost instantly drops back down to my RHR of about 60 while exercising. Will Whoop eventually figure this out on its own?

WHOOP SUPPORT: You can track your blood pressure medication in the WHOOP Journal! To add it to your journal, you can edit your journal topics and under "Medication" there is an option to add blood pressure medication. If you would like some more information on your personal HR data, I would be more than happy to connect you with our Data Analytics team. They are the experts!

BOLESBELLS.COM FOLLOW UP: I found the BP meds part of the journal! Thank you. Initially setting up the journal, I remember seeing something about anxiety meds, but nothing about BP meds. I fixed it, and was able to go back in time, and adjust the journal for BP meds. I do think more options need to be added above 100mg a day, though! What happens when you read that plus one upper limit in the way WHOOP interprets the BP meds data? As well, are BP meds that significantly affect my upper heart rate, influencing my daily Strain requirements? Or does that only happen once a month? Or never?

QUESTION TWO

BOLESBELLS.COM: Why no connection to Apple Health and Apple Watch? What is the point of siloing your App and data? I have to use Strava as a bridge to get my workouts recorded, so the investment into Whoop now becomes a multiple of a Strava subscription as well.

WHOOP SUPPORT: Our only two integrations at the moment are Strava and TrainingPeaks. We currently do not have any plans to integrate with Apple Health or the Apple Watch, but I am more than happy to send this feedback over to our Product Development Team for future updates.

BOLESBELLS.COM FOLLOW UP: Thank you for submitting the Apple Health request function. By including two applications, you appear to indicate you are willing to allow Apple Health functionality, but not directly, as some web analysis suggests the WHOOP team is not large enough to offer enough software management muscle to support Apple Health and the Apple Watch.

QUESTION THREE

BOLESBELLS.COM: I'm not certain why Strain is so complicated to comprehend when -- "Do This, Get That" -- is much more relatable. I've read all your info pages on Strain, and I've read all the online forums, but Strain appears to be a proprietary, and secret, algorithm that you don't want end users to figure out to actually meet the goal. Keeping us in the dark makes us work harder to reach a metric that is unclear and muddled. This makes for a frustrating workout experience in the end because you are withholding clarification and confirmation of progress.

WHOOP SUPPORT: We do not intend for Strain to be complicated to comprehend! Strain is a measurement, on a 21-point scale, which quantifies the total cardiovascular load undergone. The score is not “linear”, in that it is easier to go from a 0 to a 4 than it is to go from a 10 to a 12.

This [sic] non-linearity reflects physiological processes in the body, for example why you are unable to sustain an all-out sprint for longer than a couple of minutes. Unlike counting steps, Strain is personalized and accounts for differences in fitness and ability such that two people who complete the same run (with the same amount of steps) could get very different Strain scores based on differences in the relative difficulty to complete that run. In the case of this run, the more fit athlete would get a lower Strain because he or she did not have to work as hard to complete the run as the less fit athlete did. Strain starts to build at the beginning of each cycle (when you go to sleep), and the score will get harder and harder to increase as it gets higher. If you don't do much activity outside of walking and/or working, it may not increase.

Strain for an activity is calculated by combining a weighted sum of the duration of time you spend at various heart rates. Each heart rate has a different weight to how much Strain will increase. To accrue Strain points, you must have a Heart Rate that exceeds 30% of your Heart Rate Reserve (Max Heart Rate - Resting Heart Rate) plus your Resting Heart Rate.

BOLESBELLS.COM FOLLOW UP: I understand Strain, but I don't understand if Strain understands me. Because of my BP medication, I'm not able to sustain much of an upper heart rate and, right now, WHOOP is holding that against me statistically because the base Strain expectation is too high. I don't know if that will change if WHOOP learns my maximum heart rate and adjusts, but right now, it's frustrating that I'm stuck in "recovery" for Strain, when I'm actually killing myself just to get above the 50% level of Strain for my WHOOP workouts. I wish the BP meds were not part of a journal, but an integral part of determining my daily Strain effort.

That conversation with WHOOP support was about two months ago, and I was pushed over to a WHOOP data technician to continue the approach; and here are my extra thoughts, and analysis — in informational bullets — concerning my ongoing interaction with the WHOOP strap, and the reasons behind the how, and why, of WHOOP data dislocation:

WHOOP data support and I had a long conversation about Blood Pressure medication, and Strain, and my ability to move my maximum heart rate into the recordable aerobic range. I’m old and I’m on meds — both of those things negatively affect my achievable maximum heart rate. At the time, my default heart rate max was set at 185bpm server side with WHOOP. I can barely reach 150bpm in any workout, even at my full Strain capacity, and even then I cannot sustain that 150bpm heart rate for any longer than a minute or so. That means I’ll never reliably reach my daily Strain goal, especially if I sleep well the night before, and over the last two years, I’ve worked really hard — in concert with my Oura Ring — to always make sure my sleep is right. WHOOP support, based on reading the initial 10 days of my metrics recordings, agreed to lower my server side heart rate peak from 185bpm to 160bpm. I agreed to that change because I’ll never hit 185bpm with my medication holding me back, but I still believed 150 should be my actual peak — because my true, sustainable max heart rate is 135bpm — and I’ve been proven right in my first monthly WHOOP assessment that just dropped this morning. However, WHOOP data support, at that time, was unmoved by my 150bpm request because, they could see, I’d hit 151bpm once. That echoing decision makes the idea of continuing on with WHOOP beyond the six-month minimum subscription a hard task to imagine because I’ll never achieve acceptable cardiovascular health in that WHOOP world.
It is a real hassle to get WHOOP involved in your Apple life. WHOOP will not directly write the Apple Health, or allow Apple Health to directly access WHOOP data. So, if you want the full inclusion of WHOOP into your workout life, you have to make a kludge connection by “hiring” the Strava run App to mediate — to become the “middleman” of record in the Apple world — by negotiating the writing of WHOOP data to Apple Health. That is just a bad user experience. There’s no direct WHOOP data available on your Apple Watch. You can’t start a WHOOP workout from your Apple Watch even if you’re wearing the WHOOP strap. That makes WHOOP technologically feel very old and isolated.
No matter how hard I work out — right now it’s three times a day — I cannot move my Strain gauge into anything other than recovery. That means, according to WHOOP, that I will never be able to meet the daily Strain challenge unless I perform something along the lines of three hours of jumping jacks every day. It’s an impossible task and, in all the time I’ve had my WHOOP on my bicep, I’ve only met my basic Strain requirement once, and that was after a slightly bad night of sleep.
Yes, you can manipulate WHOOP to significantly raise your Strain meter by: Not sleeping enough, drinking alcohol, and not allowing your mind to quiet. All of that will tank your HRV, and WHOOP will then lower your achievable Strain score for the next day. So, we can beat the WHOOP Strain game with intentional bad behavior, but for those of us trying to live, and eat right, WHOOP will not give us that benefit of that doubt because we are “punished” by their Strain algorithm, and then forced to work harder, and push stronger, especially if we are feeling good, and doing well. Sometimes, it feels like WHOOP wants to push me to the point of bodily danger to surpass my arbitrary Strain goal. The stronger you become cardiovascularly, the more WHOOP raises the base Strain expectation of your performance behavior. It feels like a never ending circle by design you can never successfully close. Sometimes, you need to let the dog win the bone.
The fight to beat the WHOOP Strain gauge every day has raised my HRV. That’s pretty amazing. I’m seeing a 10 point increase in HRV in just a month of changing the way I schedule my training and expectations. That’s one behaviorally-enforced miracle on the WHOOP side that cannot be denied.
The WHOOP journal is not a great pathway for determining expectations or habitual implications. I suggest you only include journal variables that are always changing, because if you routinely do a “good” thing every day, it won’t be counted in your monthly report unless you also don’t do it at least five times. That’s a confusing metric that really only allows for the inclusion of bad habits you’re trying to break, and not all the good habits you religiously covet into your daily grind.

WHOOP is amazing technology, but often the promise appears more valid than the proof.