Thanks…So are you saying it will auto process and I don’t need to open the app and click the button and leave my phone on?
I ask because it sent me a pop up that it had been 3 hours since my last synch…which scared me.
I can’t believe this thing doesn’t come with ANY instructions.
I think you may be completely closing out the app. Whoop recommends that you let it run in the background. if you do, it stays synced all the time. Don’t worry, I haven’t noticed any additional battery drain from doing that.
If you do that, what @c-h-a-d says will work fine. It will stay synced. It will auto detect sleep and activities. All you’ll get it is a pop up / notification on your phone to review it.
@CoachNate, it all works better if you never actually hit the process now button (especially for sleep). Let it just take its time (never more than an hour) to work itself out and send you the review pop up / notification. If you do, it’ll combine the various sleep sessions, assuming they are within something like 25 minutes of each other.
And whatever you do, do not edit the sleep times. If you do, it will completely throw off HRV. The HRV reading you’re getting is timed to match the end of your last “deep sleep” session. If you edit sleep times, it will throw off what Whoop thinks was your last deep sleep session and the resulting HRV number. If you sleep after it shows your wake up time, just enter a nap as an additional activity. That will keep both your total sleep number and your HRV accurate (still not ideal, but it is a decent work around).
Hope some of this helps.
Will
Thanks Will. That’s very helpful. I never leave any windows open. I’ll try it!
@Wad06 @c-h-a-d
Where did you guys learn this stuff? Is there an online users manual or website or user group or something?
Thanks again for your help!!
If it’s the 3.0 strap it will catch itself up assuming it’s legit connected to phone by Bluetooth. To me it’s not an inconvenience as I don’t really ever look at the app, it sends everything important to TrainingPeaks each day (email support to enable this if you want it). The subjective interviews I miss a lot because it doesn’t sync to where I do my analytics so I just enter that stuff in TrainingPeaks directly and ignore whoop app for the most part. Initially I felt it really did help with fine-tuning habits, but over time I’ve come to use it as a forensic short term rear-view in if I find myself struggling for more than one or two days to see what has changed. It’s nice data to have available to look at trends even if you don’t look at it directly that often.
For my use-case (following a professionally designed training plan) I don’t adjust training in real-time based on whoop data unless it tells me I’m THRASHED at which point it’s yesterday’s news anyway. I just started with a coach so I’m interested to see how he might make use of the data.
Lots of trial and error and several back and forths with customer service (which has been great, by the way).
And try not to judge it for a while. After about 6-8 weeks, mine got “more accurate.” I say more accurate, because the numbers started lining up better with expectations.
For the first month, any legit cycling workout would show off the charts calorie burn (it was showing close to 5,000 calories a day on days I rode for more than 1.5 hours). I also had strain numbers near 18.5 several cycling days. Now, the calorie counts look a lot more accurate (and get close to matching what I would derive from KJ in TR). And strain numbers have more normalized. Finally, it’s gotten good at guessing whether my workout was cycling, functional fitness (that’s what I assigned to a workout class I go to), and weightlifting. Before, I would have to assign what each workout was.
As far as whether it’s worth it, I think that’s going to differ from person to person. It seems to track sleep awfully well. For me, it’s a good heart rate device. The recovery numbers do help inform some workouts and almost more, explain the results of others. And this may just be me, but I just like knowing the numbers, period (whether it changes behaviors or not). I’m a bit of a numbers guy. All of that said, it’s not a magic bullet that will fix all of your training issues. And it will not replace a professional. But both of those things cost more than $30 per month.
Will
If you are going to keep the sub long term, it’s well worth it to buy the gift cards from their store rather than the 30/monthly billing. With the biggest card you get it for 18(ish)/mo, it sucks to have that up front cost but it’s worth it if you’ll wear the strap for a while.
Great tip!
@Wad06 I did not hit “Process Now” this morning and it took it about 30-40 minutes, but it processed my sleep on its own. Right down to the minute my alarm went off this morning. I’ll use this method in the future, but on days when I’m planning on riding at 5:00 AM, I can’t really wait around to see if I should modify my workout and do something easy or something harder. Normally, I can kinda get an idea if it’s going to be a red recovery day, because I slept like crap or I was awoken numerous times by my kids. The green days are harder to predict.
@CoachNate, this is something I’m sure others struggle with. I generally workout in the early evening, so I have never had to deal with it.
The Whoop people tell me they are working on speeding this up. That said, logic dictates there will always be a floor. Whatever increment of awake-ness they use as a threshold to decide to string things together (i.e., being awake for twenty minutes but falling back asleep still counts as continuous sleep with an interruption) will always be the absolute floor you have to wait when you wake up for good to see the readings. It’s a trade off.
Will
My method to force speedy recovery scores is to start a “sleep” activity when I go to bed, and hit finish when I wake up. I rarely have to wait more than a couple minutes for the calculation. I do the same for workouts, because I see little point hoping for an accurate auto-detection, and it’s just a couple clicks anyway (similarly, I wear a Garmin Instinct and I don’t let it auto-detect my activities - I found that it’s much more accurate if I start the activities manually).
Short answer is No. It is not a good indicator of how recovered you are. It’s a great indicator of the effect of alcohol on your heart though. Alcohol has more of an impact on HRV than exercise does… If you are sober… it might be a good indicator of recovery. Alcohol screws the data up in a major way. Raises resting HR and drops HRV way way down, which in turn has a huge impact on your recovery score. But it’s no indicator of the condition of your muscle fibers.
I haven’t had 3 days off in a long long time. 3 days off in a row from the bike, not alcohol. So this last weekend I went to a wedding out of town. Sadly, no bike for 2.5 days. I did however, drink a lot.
Before leaving town I rode on Thursday for 1.5 hours at high intensity but a relatively easy day, traveled (slept in the car) Friday and had gallons of booze that night, my recovery score on Saturday was in the red, after a rest day, at 15% but my legs felt pretty good. Drank Saturday night as well and Sunday’s score was 48% but legs felt primed. I went for a ride Sunday afternoon when I got home and I felt great. PR’s everywhere with a couple top 10’s. On top of that I was sustaining speeds consistently lap after lap after lap after lap. There’s an uninterrupted section 30 miles long where I had an average speed of 22.7, which is good for me solo. 1 hour 20 minutes consisting of 45 minutes at threshold and 35 minutes tempo according to HR monitor. According to my recovery score… I shouldn’t have been able to put out those kinds of numbers.
That can be a bit annoying. In my bluetooth settings the whoop shows it’s always connected but it’s constantly behind in updating the data. Near 20 hours behind at times.
I think it’s an issue on their end with their servers. Bluetooth is capable of transferring data between devices extremely quickly. Sending large images from phone to phone via airdrop takes 2 seconds. I believe data from your whoop device goes to your phone, then to a server, then back to your phone.
For example, it will be 5pm and the app will say ‘data available from 12:47pm’. So you double tap the device or swipe down on the app to update… It does its thing and then shows ‘data available from 12:49pm’… So you can sit there and swipe over and over and over updating it in 2 minute intervals or just ignore it and wait it out.
I actually solved it by using the advice in this forum to leave the app open all the time. It doesn’t seem to burn battery and is usually up to date now.
Yeah that’s their official instruction, to let it run in the background so that you aren’t constantly behind on the data.
Mine didn’t come with any instructions. Did yours?
No, but Im fairly certain it says that on their website.
Question for other Whoop users. I’ve been on a break for a couple months, but just picked up my guitar for the first time since I got my whoop. After an hour of playing, the whoop recorded an activity and gave me 11 strain “points”. There’s no way this should be counted. I was sitting in a chair strumming. I deleted the activity, but the App is still showing higher strain than I expect to see.
Any advice here?
What happens if you switch arms with the band?
After a friend raved about his Whoop band, I ordered one tonight.
I’ll be curious to see how it can enhance training and sleep. The fact that it tracks HRV more or less continually makes it interesting, and I can imagine wanting to do a PNOĒ test once they have integration with Whoop to get a better integration of basal metabolism and VO2 information.