Whoop adds new Recovery Behaviours

 

TL;DR – Beneath the pretty veneer of the WHOOP app, some clever correlations are used to assess the impact to readiness of textual “tags” that you manually add as journal entries each day. From well over 100 tag types, you choose one or more that you think might be of interest. After 5 responses per tag, Whoop gives feedback. You don’t have to do the tagging every day but when choosing tags, select a sensible number that you will realistically be motivated to continuously add over time, say 5 to 10.

Must Read: Detailed Whoop Review – Is Whoop Accurate?

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As athletes, we are always striving to improve our performance and optimize our recovery. However, it can be challenging to identify which behaviours are positively or negatively impacting your recovery. The latest addition to the WHOOP app helps you to gain a deeper understanding of your body and the impact of your daily behaviours.

The new feature, called “Behaviors,” tracks and analyzes daily behaviours such as alcohol consumption, caffeine intake, and exercise. It then compares this data to our recovery scores to determine which behaviours are positively or negatively impacting recovery. The Behaviors feature provides a detailed breakdown of our recovery score, including how each behaviour affects our score and recommendations for further optimizing our recovery.

For example, if you notice that your recovery score is consistently low on days when you consume alcohol, the Behaviors feature will quantify how much alcohol consumption might be negatively impacting your recovery. This information can help you make more informed decisions about your daily habits and you adjust accordingly to improve your recovery.

Another example of how the Behaviors feature can be helpful is in monitoring caffeine intake. While caffeine is often used to improve athletic performance, excessive evening consumption can have negative effects on sleep quality and, ultimately, recovery. By tracking caffeine intake and the time of your latest coffee,  you can identify how much caffeine is optimal for your body and adjust your habits accordingly.

Whoop Behaviours – Tip 1

Whoop should give you some on-screen tips the first time you get started. If not you’ll need to enable and tweak your journal. It’s likely your journal is OFF and hidden if you’ve never previously used the journal.

Whoop Behaviours – Tip 2 – Choosing Tags

If you are married and sleep with your partner almost every night there is no point in recording this as a tag. However, if you have a more periodic relationship then it might make sense to record your nocturnal encounters.

Whoop Behaviours – Tip 3 – Choosing Tags

Today you might be highly motivated to learn about every effect of everything on your life. After a week of answering 100 questions every morning, your motivation will have waned.

Choose 5 tags.

Whoop Behaviours – Take Out

This is a mathematically sound approach used in other tools. For example, I have done the same thing in HRV4Training (HRV4T) for the last two years. HRV4T also lets me enter the readiness/HRV scores from other products like Whoop, Oura, Garmin and Apple Watch to compare to my ‘consumer-grade gold standard’ reading with a Polar H10 each morning. You might have thought the leading products in the market will all highly correlate, but you might be surprised that they don’t!

This is a sensible feature to use and it looks good. Furthermore, Whoop’s nightly HRV scores are pretty accurate for most people so you should be comparing the tags with some good data to get genuinely meaningful insights/correlations.