If you're a non-athlete, just a regular person looking to get in good shape and trying to figure
out if the WHOOP Band is something that could help you, or if it's just overkill,
this video is for you. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher, I'm a teacher trainer. I put this
WHOOP Band on about two years ago and I really haven't taken it off. In fact, I wear it so often,
I have kind of a mean tan line here. I wear this when I do yoga, when I run, when I swim,
when I ride a bike. I wear it every single night. I wear it every single day. It's made a huge
difference in my life, much to my surprise, and in this video here's what we'll cover: my biggest
"aha" moments for me, really, really surprising things I didn't think I'd discover. Number two,
we'll talk about how this thing actually works, and we'll have a special guest, the quantified
scientist Rob ter Horst join us to explain some of the technology. Number three, we'll walk through
some of the considerations you might want to think about if you're considering investing in a WHOOP
Band. A quick note here, I am not affiliated with WHOOP at all. They don't pay me for this,
I pay for my own device. All of the information presented here is biased based on my experience,
but not with any kind of financial incentive. It's just to hopefully help you in making your
decision. Let's start off with my biggest "aha". I put this band on and the first thing I discovered
is that my sleep quality is horrible. This wasn't news to me, I knew that I've been a bad sleeper.
My entire adult life, I've struggled with sleep. If you've watched any of my old videos
you probably noticed I often have bags under my eyes. I knew it was bad, I figured I was sleeping
about six hours per night. Turns out it was more like five hours per night, sometimes even less.
Terrible sleep quality also, which means very low REM sleep. Here's what happened. With WHOOP, when
I open that app every single morning and I'm in the red - WHOOP has a red, yellow, green, rating
system - and I can see how poorly I've slept, and how bad my recovery is, and in my case how little
REM sleep I have, after about six weeks of that I just had to do something about it. I could see
that my health was getting degraded. Here's what I did. I did three specific things. Number one,
I started sleeping in what I call a lightning bolt position. Super weird, but your head is elevated
and your legs are elevated. I'll post a photo in the PDF down below. It made a huge difference with
my breathing, my sleep quality, and my sleep quantity. In fact, I'm about 45 minutes longer
and my REM sleep is around 20 percent, so a lot more balance. The second thing that I did is I
started taking cool showers before bed, not cold showers but cool, it reduced my body temperature
a little bit. Number three, I started using yoga breathing, which is something I've been teaching
for years. Now to learn more about how the WHOOP band tracks sleep and some of the other sensors,
let's check in with Rob, the quantified scientist, and he'll explain some of the technology
that's inside this band. My name is Rob ter Horst, I'm trained as a data scientist, so
for several years I've been tracking everything in my life, I've been getting weekly brain MRIs for
four years now I think. So how is WHOOP tracking your sleep? Is it just using heart rate? Or what's
happening? In general these types of devices will use heart rate, which can be an indicator,
but also some movements, so usually they try to estimate REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep,
and when you're awake, and each of these phases has unique properties. During REM sleep your
brain is very active but your body is paralyzed, because you don't want to act out your dreams.
Whereas during deep sleep you also don't move so much but your brain is in a way much less
active. And light sleep is a relatively active brain and also more movement. What do you think
about the the SpO2, the the blood oxygen read that now comes in the WHOOP 4.0? There's cases
where it can can help you. If you get some kind of respiratory infection and you don't know about it,
then you can actually get a warning signal, like "hey, i'm not getting enough oxygen, there's
something wrong". And this is like a typical use case where people get COVID and then they
detect it that way. But it can also be if you have sleep apnea or some other sleep issues that you
didn't even know about. When you tested the WHOOP against other lab grade, scientific grade devices,
did you find that it consistently fell short in certain areas? Or what was the comparison?
Yeah, so the device I use is an EEG device and it's now used in several scientific studies.
So what WHOOP does well is for all sleep stages quite good. It estimates my deep sleep quite well,
but a bit too much. So for me the deep sleep I have it finds, but it usually finds a bit more.
But overall it's very consistent over the the different sleep stages. Where many devices somehow
cannot measure REM sleep very well, WHOOP is particularly good. It's good, consistent
overall. What are your thoughts on the heart rate variability data that comes out of the WHOOP? And
do you find that interesting as a data scientist? So it's interesting, but I always struggle a bit,
especially for instance during sleep, with how much value is there in heart rate variability when
you already have a resting heart rate. Because basically those two generally anti-correlate
pretty strongly. Like if you have a high resting heart rate, you'll have a low heart rate
variability and vice versa. The next big insight I had was around my heart and cardiovascular
training. When I first started doing yoga about 20 years ago I put a chest strap, a Polar chest
strap on, and I was really excited to learn that my power vinyasa practice, my go-to practice for
yoga, was elevating my heart rate very similar to running or jogging. I was regularly hitting
160 beats per minute during peak poses and I was getting a great cardiovascular workout.
Now as the decades have gone on my body has really adapted to a lot of the common yoga poses and I
still get lots of benefits, but not so much for my heart. In fact, I can do an entire yoga class
and my heartbeat sometimes never even breaks 100 or 110. And again, when I saw that data every
day in the app I figured I really needed to do something about that. My family on both sides has
heart disease historically, I need to take good care of my heart. So I started running and I kept
running and I've still been running now for about five to six days per week for a couple of years.
Here's what else I did, which again really surprised me. Inside the app they have these
groups and I joined a group for 40 to 50 year old men. When I say join the group, I just hit join, I
don't chat with anybody, I don't talk to anybody. But there's a leaderboard and the leaderboard
shows you where you are ranking, and in my group I think there's about 20,000 men in my age group
and I was in the bottom 25 percent when I started. And for whatever reason that really motivated me
to start running more, and more, and more. Long story short, I've now run two marathons, I've
run two 10ks. I'm using the word run, I should probably say jog, I just gotta stumble along.
But regardless, it's really objectively improved my cardiovascular health. My resting heart rate
now is in the low 40s. I think I'll get into the high 30s before the end of the year. My recovery
is a lot better, my cardiovascular conditioning is really the best it's ever been in my life.
I don't think that would have happened without that accountability. Not everybody responds to
data the way that I did. Not everybody needs that accountability. But for me it made a very big
difference. The third thing, and this is probably the most remarkable for me as a yoga teacher,
heart rate variability. I've been teaching and advocating for heart rate variability for years,
but it's very hard to measure using traditional apps or chest straps. You just don't get a good
reading. Heart rate variability is a measure of the difference between each beat in your heart
rate. If I say your heart is beating at 120 beats per minute, that's an average in a healthy heart,
your heart beat speeds up on the inhale, boom, boom, boom, and it slows down slightly on the
exhale, boom, boom. I'm exaggerating but you get the idea. The healthier your nervous system,
the more variability there is with your inhale and your exhale beat-to-beat change. This is a very,
very important metric for checking in with your nervous system, to measure your readiness state
for stress, or exercise, or exertion. But it's very hard to quantify. It's a very complicated
mathematical calculation and without 24/7 monitoring it's very, very difficult.
So most of my students, and myself included, aren't really tracking it. We're aware of it,
but we can't track it. Here's what I learned. My heart rate variability is very, very high,
almost every day. What I realised is the only reason I've been able to survive on five hours
of sleep is because my heart rate variability is very high, very likely from all my yoga practices.
What does that mean? Well, what I've learned is if I can keep my heart rate variability high
and I can get my sleep up into at least a moderately good range, my mental health,
my mental focus, my cognition, and my physical performance, all of those things improve. That was
a really big revelation for myself and a lot of my breathing students are also excited to finally
have a practical way to measure their heart rate variability on a daily basis. Okay, with all those
things aside, if you're trying to figure out if the WHOOP is right for you I think the number one
question is do you do cardio training? If you're not running, or swimming, or cycling, or doing
some type of cardiovascular training, I don't think the data will be very interesting for you.
This band is very much geared towards people doing heart rate training. If you're not doing that,
you won't get great data. It also doesn't do amazing data tracking for things like
high intensity interval training or weightlifting. Sometimes there's a bit of lag with the tracking,
so you might be a little bit disappointed. And there might be a cheaper option available for
you. Another important question is to think about data and tech in general. If you hate tech, if you
hate computers, if you don't like data, number crunching, if none of that stuff excites you it
might not be worth it. And the last consideration is that this thing is expensive. I think I pay
about $30 per month for it, that adds up pretty quickly. Depending on where you live, you can
get a cheap gym membership for $30 a month. For me it's really been worth it. Like I mentioned,
it's really, really transformed my health and my life, but if you have other things you might want
to invest in, whether that's fitness equipment, or excursions, or gym memberships, that's a totally
valid reason to maybe consider something else. Hope you like this video, hope it's helpful
in making your decision about the WHOOP Band. If you'd like more science-based yoga videos,
hit subscribe down below. Remember to follow the quantified scientist. Big thanks to Rob
for joining us in today's video. If you would like to find me online, my teaching calendar is
at yogabody.com. I have a pdf of the sleep tips that I mentioned down below. And lastly, I try to
answer all my comments down below. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you in the next one.