Unlock your potential with WHOOP 4.0

If you've been watching the Giro d'Italia over recent weeks, you may have noticed the small black, and occasionally pink,  devices on the wrists of a number of riders in the peloton. Or perhaps you've seen the on-screen heart rate data pop up at points throughout the broadcast, showing certain riders' Strain scores and real-time heart rate data. In both cases, you've been introduced to WHOOP. 

WHOOP is a highly personalised fitness and health coach that uses a wearable device and an accompanying app, as well as proprietary algorithms and an AI-based coach  to help optimise training, recovery, sleep and lifestyle in a bid to maximise fitness, performance and health. 

It monitors the wearer's strain, recovery and sleep, providing tools and coaching around each pillar to drive knowledge, understanding and positive behavioural change. 

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WHOOP 4.0 explained

WHOOP's latest device, the WHOOP 4.0, is a wearable, non-invasive monitoring device that uses an optical heart rate sensor and an accelerometer to track a range of metrics such as heart rate, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, skin temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and sleep cycles. 

Like previous WHOOP devices, the 4.0 is designed to be worn 24/7. It's waterproof rated to IP68 level and comes complete with an equally waterproof slide-on battery pack that allows you to charge the device without removing it. Like the riders you may have seen in the Giro d'Italia, it's most commonly worn on the wrist, but it can also be worn as part of smart 'WHOOP Body' clothing items that place the sensor against your skin in a variety of alternative locations such as an underwear waistband or the strap of a sports bra. 

It is Bluetooth compatible, and will automatically push its data to the accompanying WHOOP app, where the advanced algorithms and AI-powered coaching functionality come to life. 

Strain, recovery and sleep

Strain

All throughout your day, both on the bike and off, at work and at home, you're accumulating strain. Whether you're walking the dog, working out, delivering an important presentation at work, playing with the kids, or stressing about bills, they're all strenuous in their own way, and therefore, they all contribute to the strain you put onto yourself. Recognising this is key to understanding the value of WHOOP. 

Using the data it collects 24-7, the WHOOP app calculates a Strain score. This is a score from 0 to 21, and it's utterly personal to you, your heart and your fitness. If you are a highly trained professional cyclist, a stage of the Giro d'Italia might only be moderately difficult, and the heart rate would respond accordingly, but a company-wide presentation might be a different story. For normal folks, meanwhile, a presentation might be a walk in the park, but that Giro stage would likely be bordering impossible, and our heart rate would respond in kind. Tracking this individual response, WHOOP's Strain score provides a truly tailored experience to each and every one of its wearers. 

What's more, WHOOP automatically detects and tracks activities when it notices a prolonged period of elevated heart rate. Not only that but it is able to learn the types of workout you do, even as granularly as understanding the differences between cycling and spinning. These workouts are all stored within the WHOOP app, allowing you to check back and compare sessions to quantify how your body is responding as you get fitter. 

Recovery

Balanced against Strain is your body's ability to recover from it, and the more recovered you are from a previous day's strain, the more you can take on. It's fairly simple, but it's impossible to quantify your body's Strain and Recovery on feel alone, so it's common for people (athlete or otherwise) to push this limit too far. Understanding this balance can be immensely valuable for a wide range of people, such as athletes wanting to maximise their training without stepping into the realms of overtraining, and professionals working themselves too hard. 

To this end, WHOOP uses the many metrics it monitors during your sleep, like heart rate variability, resting heart rate and respiratory rate and uses them to calculate a Recovery score, which it scores as a percentage out of 100.

Alongside this, Whoop's AI-powered coaching functionality will provide advice and recommendations to improve Recovery, and its journal tool can help you track and monitor your behaviour, to see how it affects your Recovery. Within the journal, this includes a host of common actions from eating late meals and drinking caffeine or alcohol, to whether you had a COVID vaccine or slept in your own bed. It can even allow you to track whether that dog you walked earlier is now sleeping in your bedroom (likely snoring or jumping on your bed at inopportune times and disturbing your sleep). With this data, it provides a monthly performance assessment in which it aggregates the data, providing insight as to how your behaviours affected your recovery score. 

Sleep

We're all aware that it is the most important component of recovery, and WHOOP provides a host of features that will monitor your sleep performance. This includes your sleep cycles, disturbances and sleep quality i.e. the number of minutes spent in REM, light, and deep sleep. It also monitors the amount of time you spent sleeping versus time-in-bed, your usual bed and wake times, how many hours you slept versus how many you needed.

But perhaps more importantly, WHOOP can also tell you how much sleep you need. It takes into account your baseline sleep need, your, sleep debt, any naps you've taken and your day's Strain score. Then, you can set yourself a sleep goal. Do you want to simply get by tomorrow? Do you want to perform? Or perhaps even peak? The difference being the amount of sleep you get, which will in turn improve your chances of having a great Recovery  tomorrow. If you know you have a big workout coming up, Recovery is key to ensuring your body is ready to take on that Strain, and the WHOOP Sleep Coach is the perfect tool for such a job. 

How WHOOP can optimise your training

In each of the sections above, we've already highlighted a host of ways in which WHOOP can add value to your life. However, where it's truly unique is in the varied and personal way in which it will do so. To some people, WHOOP is a sleep coach that provides tailored guidance on how much sleep is needed each evening. To others, it's a motivator to get out and exercise more. To others again, it's a tool to enable positive behavioural change. 

WHOOP can help its members train smarter, taking on optimal amounts of additional Sstrain through exercise when possible and reducing the exercise-induced strain on days where life stress has already taken its toll. 

WHOOP can help its members recover faster. Knowledge is power, and with the knowledge of which lifestyle choices, behaviours and dietary habits positively (and negatively) affect recovery, members can adjust their lifestyle accordingly. 

WHOOP can help its members sleep better. With an entire section of the app dedicated to sleep, in which it not only states what you've done, but what you need to do to improve, it is a self-contained sleep coach providing the necessary amount of sleep, the optimal time to get it. 

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