Anyone have sleep monitor info

I hear a lot about proper sleep and tracking on the podcast. I know that I usually wake up at least once a if not more a night and am not sure how much good sleep in getting. Doing done searching on sleep monitors there doesn’t seem to be much good info unless you want to get a smart watch, and the info isn’t the greatest either. Is there knowledge here or elsewhere on sleep monitors that don’t need to be warn on one’s self.

I have my eye on this one: https://www.emfit.com/

Apparently you put it under your bed and it is able to track your heart rate and sleep cycles. However, I’m still in the research phase.

Santa brought me a WHOOP 2.0 for Christmas, so I am using that to track sleep. It is remarkably accurate, as it measure heart rate/heart rate variability.

Prior to having a fitness tracker, I’ve used sleep cycle (iOS app) as an alarm clock/sleep tracker. I find that it tracks pretty closely to what WHOOP is saying, just in a less sophisticated way. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to get an idea of the kind of rest you’re getting at night.

YMMV, but I’m really enjoying having WHOOP data to analyze and compare to how I feel.

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I bought a fitbit ionic for this reason. I think just the act of tracking sleep and being aware of the good and bad can help you in your journey to better sleep.

I have also been using a whoop since Christmas, I have found it to be quite accurate for the most part. It tracks my sleep time very well.

I want to use it for a month or so to really get a feel for it but so far it has been a positive experience.

If anyone is interested I might try and compare it to hrv4Training once I get more time on the WHOOP as I have been using the concurrently for the last few weeks.

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I use Sleep Cycle with my iphone. Goes off sound. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it seems like it has decent precision. I always evaluate how I think I slept before I look at it.

What I really like about it is the alarm will go off up to 30 minutes early (you can change this) if it senses you are awake. Then the snooze starts at 9 minutes and gets shorter as the wake-up time approaches. So you get up at the time you set.

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I also wanted to track my sleep better and have started using the SleepScore app on my iPhone (no extra hardware required)

It seems to do a good job of breaking down my sleep in various cycles (awake vs light sleep vs deep sleep) and gives you an overall score for the night. For instance, last night it took me 40 minutes to fall asleep. I can’t comment on its accuracy though as I don’t have a second data source. But it gives me a good high level picture of how I am doing.

I got a Whoop strap right after Thanksgiving on a Black Friday deal (two for the price of one, and a teammate of mine bought the other one from me). I’ve been using it pretty much 24/7 ever since. I like that I can charge it without taking it off, but the battery only lasts about 36 hours before it needs charging again. I just charge the charger pod everyday while I’m at work, then charge the Whoop strap while I’m chilling at home in the evening and watching TV or reading. I like the sleep data information. It’s much more detailed than my Garmin vivosmart activity tracker that I used previously. It combines several metrics to calculate a recovery score, which includes sleep performance (hours slept + how well you slept), HRV, RHR, and yesterday’s “Strain” score to give you today’s recovery score. It’s pretty interesting. The downside is the $30 a month membership fee. It’s normally $180 up front cost for the first 6 months, and then $30 a month thereafter. There are ways to decrease the price, such as purchasing a “re-up” card for 12, 18, etc months, which can decrease the average cost per month to about $18 a month. It’s great information. And I’m hoping it can take my training to the next level by helping me to track my recovery and sleep. Not sure how long I will use it though. I don’t like the idea of paying for something forever.

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I have the Emfit solution and am super happy. I used Beddit before but Emfit is much better:

  • HRV measurement throughout the night
  • sensor is 100% reliable - no complaints at all (no missing data or anything)
  • very good statistics
  • TrainingPeaks integration
  • Extremly helpful customer support

There is only a website and no app though.

In principle you have 3 indicators that show you the recovery status: (1) resting heart rate (2) HRV and (3) Autonomic Nervous System Balance (if you are cranky from doing too much you see it in this chart). Over time you get a good feel how to use those for going harder or slower with your training. I used Beddit, Elite HRV and HRV4 before but this was not giving me reliable indications when in doubt of training intensity.

Emfit is definitely recommended from my site.

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I just wear my vivoactice all of the time. The data doesn’t seem especially useful to me though.

Does the Vivoactive have HRV?

I used to wear my watch which tracked heart rate and sleep but stopped using it as you know if you had a good or bad night’s sleep when you wake up and i felt i slept better without something on my wrist.

Been on a fitbit for months now, it’s ok, but data is hard to get granular.

Installing this soon: Beautyrest

My wife had back issues about a year or so ago and got suckered into a Sleep Number bed that has the tracking built in. I personally havent found it all that useful. It just confirms that when I feel like I slept bad that I did sleep bad.

The other thing I noticed is that not to long after we got it that sometimes it would say I was in bed for WAY longer than I was. Turns out when we leave the dog gets in the bed and lays on my side, so most of the time the data is complete junk! :laughing:

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I got an Oura ring just over a month ago. For sleep it does stage tracking, hrv, resting hr, avg respiratory rate, and temperature drift. It does a pretty good job figuring out when I’ve gone to sleep and identifies all the periods I remember being awake (and a few I don’t). Not sure if there are more specific sleep things you’re looking for?

Being a ring, it’s not very obtrusive and easy to wear while you sleep. It doesn’t have to be worn during the day, but it’s got activity tracking stuff in it as well if you’re into that. I don’t have any experience with any other such device, so I have nothing to compare it to. I’m still trying to figure out how to use the data.

I got a hand-me-down FitBit Blaze from my wife when she got the Apple watch from Santa. So I’ve been using it to track my sleeping for the past 10 days. It’s almost useless because it is so unreliable for that metric. Now I just use it for resting HR tracking.

I use my Apple Watch 4, along with the Auto Sleep App. It works great! The app gives me great detailed information, It even gives me a readiness score based on my HRV, waking HR, and quality of sleep. I highly recommended. The native health app from my I-phone is also good to track my HRV, and get an idea of how my recovery is going.

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I’m also using an Apple Watch (Series 3), but using Pillow app.

It’s pretty accurate, and shows sleep cycles, but doesn’t track HRV as some of the paid apps do (Pillow is free)

I feel like a fool, but I wear both the Garmin Fenix 5x and the Whoop 2.0. I’ve only had the Whoop since just before Christmas, so my experience in comparing the two devices is a bit limited. Prior to these two devices, I used a Fitbit Charge 2.0 tracker.

I will say that the sleep data from the Whoop seems to be MUCH more accurate than from the Garmin device, and would probably be in line with the Fitbit Charge 2 in terms of tracking total hours of sleep. Between the Garmin and Whoop devices, I also note that the sleep stages are not at all similar. HR tracking is comparable, and RHR measurements are very similar (i.e within 1 or 2) and I suspect the differences are more related to methodology, and trends correlate strongly (i.e. if RHR goes up or down on one device, it also moves on the other in a similar magnitude).

The key benefit of the Whoop seems to be the Recovery score that it generates based on some black box proprietary algorithm involving RHR, Sleep, HRV and user inputs. The Garmin app has “Stress” tracking, but is not as simplified in its training application as the Whoop is. I.e. Whoop will give you a recovery score in the morning, and tracks stress through the day. As you get familiar with how the stress score builds in Whoop, you could use this to “optimize” your training stress on the bike.

This seems to work pretty well, and the HRV component in the recovery is a critical one. I.e. last night I only got ~6hr sleep (woke up once, and had very active dreams), yet my recovery score was 95% because my HRV improved dramatically and my RHR came down a couple of beats. While I felt sluggish when I got on the bike this morning, I eventually woke up and was able to push thru “Bluebell” at 104% (3 sets of 6 1x1 minute VO2Max intervals at 120%). In fact, I pushed the last interval of the workout to 110% and felt strong! My HR only got to ~ 91% of max, so I probably could have pushed harder–the Whoop app similarly marked the “strain” relatively lower compared to the power output i had relative to my FTP. Had I just reflected on how little sleep I got, and how tired I felt, I might have just skipped the workout this morning; and got another hour of sleep so glad I didn’t.

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I think the vast majority of people are labouring under the misconception that they aren’t getting enough sleep due to a couple of assumptions; that everyone should sleep 8hrs, and that waking up at any point is a disaster.

Once you get a sleep monitor after a while you’ll realise it’s not telling you anything you don’t know, that is significant.

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