(explosion)
- Wearable technology is quietly revolutionizing
physical performance and one company
at the forefront of it is Whoop.
They invited us out to their HQ in Boston
to see what it was all about,
and that video is up on GCN now.
I hadn't heard of them until a few months ago,
but colleague Jeremy Powers has been working
with a Whoop Band for a long time.
And so, when they asked us to make a video,
we thought well yeah, you might be interested
to know about it too.
So what is it exactly?
Well, this is a Whoop Strap.
In it are five different sensors that measure
an array of data, and also a battery that lasts five days.
You pair it up to an app, and then together,
they unlock a whole load of insights into your physiology.
Including how recovered you are.
Your cardiovascular strain for that day.
How much training load you should
take on at any given moment.
And also, your sleep quality.
Now those sensors will monitor your heart rate,
your heart rate variability, the ambient temperature,
your movement and also your skin conductivity.
And in total, it will generate up to
100 megabytes of data per day.
And you can also, if you wish, pair it up
to a third party device to add
heart rate functionality to it.
So for example, your Wahoo device.
I will start with heart rate and heart rate variability.
So you see these, whoo, green lights underneath there?
So they shine directly into your skin
and they tell you how much blood
is pumping beneath the surface
because as your heart beats, the volume of blood
momentarily increases and that absorbs more light.
And then in the gaps between your heart beats,
there is less blood flowing and then more light
is therefore, reflected back to the Whoop Strap.
And through that, it can then tell you what your pulse is
and also, by timing the gaps between heart beats,
it can of course, tell you what
your heart rate variability is.
Now, I'll admit, I thought that heart rate
was quite a constant thing, but no.
And not only is it not constant, actually,
the variability between heart beats
can be an indication of your recovery status.
When I say can, what Whoop say they do differently
to other wearables, and they do indeed have a patent on it,
is to measure your heart rate variability
and your resting heart rate at a specific point
during your sleep cycle each and every day.
And what that does is it generates consistent
and comparable data as opposed to being prone to errors.
Like for example, if you try and measure your resting
heart rate after you've just woken up.
Those values that it generates are unique to you,
and so in order to work out your baseline
when you first put it on, Whoop will take
a few days to get to know you.
Then once it's got an idea of your own unique parameters,
it can then start to generate things
like your recovery status.
So it works that out from your resting heart rate,
which as much as we always thought actually,
in that high resting heart rate is a sign that you're
fatigued or perhaps coming down with an illness,
whereas a low resting heart rate is
a good sign that you are recovered.
In contrast though, heart rate variability is the opposite.
So a low heart rate variability is a sign
that you are fatigued or perhaps coming down with an illness
and could do with a day off or at least an easy day,
whereas high heart rate variability suggests
that you are ready to go and take on
some serious training load.
Then the final piece of the recovery puzzle
is your sleep, both duration and quality.
And we'll get onto that in a moment.
All the data is displayed in the app,
both for a given day and then later over time
so you can observe trends.
There is a desktop version as well
that gives greater visibility over longer periods of time.
Now when you open up the app, that is your landing screen.
So you can see on there a snapshot
of the data it's recorded for today.
You've got My Recovery status, yellow,
unfortunately this morning.
Just below that you've got My Sleep.
Then above it, you've got Strain Scores.
Firstly for my commute this morning which is auto-detected,
and then above that the Strain Score for the day.
Now if I swipe right, then you get
a bit more detail about that.
Because you're wearing a heart rate monitor
effectively for 24 hours a day, Whoop is able
to calculate how much cardiovascular strain
you have undertaken in that given day
and it ranks it on a score of nought to 21.
Before you go, wow, that's an impressive figure,
now do bear in mind that that is unique to me.
And so perhaps, if you had joined me on my commute
this morning, and for the rest of my day,
yours might be a little bit different.
If we press on that, we get a little snapshot
of what I've been up to, so max heart rate,
average heart rate for the day,
and also estimated calorific expenditure.
Now if I click on that bit there,
then we get to see the activity.
As I said, it was auto-detected earlier on.
That too, is given a strain score on the same scale,
nought to 21 as previously, and there you go.
Again, we've got a snapshot of my average heart rate
and my max heart rate, calories and so forth.
If I scroll down, you then get to see seven days
of strain score plotted on a graph.
You can see on mine, it's pretty polarized between
the days when I ride and the days when I don't.
I put that down to the fact that when I ride,
I tend to ride as hard as I possibly can.
If we then swipe left, you can see a graph
where strain score is plotted against my recovery status.
And this is super interesting,
'cause actually, I don't think there's all that much
corelation between the two for me
and I attribute that to factors other than my cycling,
perhaps being more significant to my recovery status
than exercise, and I think that's one of the strengths
of using heart rate variability in this instance.
And that is it's affected
by factors other than just exercise.
So things like stress and diet and sleep
and alcohol and hydration status.
And so you could over time, work out what it is
that's mainly influencing your recovery status
with an aim to try and improve it because, don't forget,
if you're trying to get as fit as you possibly can,
you need to train as hard as you possibly can,
but that is limited by your ability to recover.
So improve that and potentially,
you'll unlock a little bit extra.
Then we have the Sleep page.
Now because you're wearing your Whoop 24/7,
it records whilst you are sleeping.
From that, it can therefore work out what time
you went to bed, what time you went to sleep
and the quality of your sleep as well.
So, how many disturbances you got and indeed,
the types of sleep that you were getting as well.
If you then scroll over, every morning you can answer
a really short little questionnaire
that basically gets indications of how you prepared
for sleep, so whether or not you had any caffeine
before bed or alcohol, the way that you were working
before bed, anything that might affect your sleep quality.
Now, you can see that it gives you a percentage score
for your sleep performance and that's based
on the amount of sleep you got versus the amount of sleep
that Whoop calculates that you needed.
And if you scroll down, as with the other pages,
you can see that that's then plotted
over the previous seven days.
Now a really cool little extra bit is the Sleep Coach.
And this is where you can use Whoop to help you
actually get more sleep, and so you can see at the top,
"I want to", I've gone for Get By,
fairly lowly ambition at the moment,
but you can tailor that to Perform or Deep Peak.
And you'll see that it therefore tells you
how much longer you need to spend in bed,
hopefully asleep and it tailors the time
that you should go to bed and the time
that you need to wake up.
The last point to mention is one of Whoop's
latest developments which is called the Strain Coach.
And basically, this will give you recommendations
for your training at any point in any day
based on your recovery status and also,
your current strain score and it will gauge
what level of workout you need for optimal training.
When you start an activity, you will then see in realtime,
how much work you have to do in order
to reach that optimal strain score.
And indeed, when you are doing too much.
There is a bit of a degree of manual adjustment
that you can do.
What constitutes optimal is fairly broad
which is good for people like me who like to tend
to smash it every time they go out.
If Whoop is something you are interested in,
I would definitely recommend heading over to their website.
Loads of good info on there.
They also have a regular podcast as well
which has some absolutely great stuff on.
To get Whoop itself, the Band is actually free
when you signup for a membership.
So if you signup for the minimum
six months membership, it's $30 per month.
The longer your initial commitment,
the more the cost is reduced, down to $18 per month.
If you haven't seen the GCN video yet,
I would definitely recommend heading over there now,
you can through to it by clicking onscreen.
Otherwise, just give this video a big thumbs up.