7/8 Whoop! Wednesday

The basic Whoop strap is black, I upgraded to this cute purple one.

I recently started using a Whoop strap and I love it! 
The Whoop strap is a performance monitor that you wear on your wrist or upper arm. It measures your daily strain (how hard you workout), your sleep and your recovery. 
I have been interested in wearable performance monitors for a while and noticed several folks in our gym who wear Garmin and Apple Watches. I'm most interested in tracking my recovery and after comparing all three models, I chose the Whoop because it tracks the metrics I'm most interested in, resting heart rate and heart rate variability and it cost only $30. 
The Whoop is a subscription service. I committed to a 6 month subscription for $30 each month. Longer subscriptions are less per month. 
The Whoop app is where you download and view all of your performance data. For the first 3 days I simply wore by Whoop strap and let the app and device sync as needed. This allowed the Whoop to calibrate to my routine and biometrics.
Now that I've been wearing it for a solid week I can tap into the Strain and Sleep Coaching features. These features will give me insights and suggestions for how hard I should workout and how much sleep I should get to perform the next day. I'm very excited to unlock and starting using the coaching features. 
My first week's impression is that the Whoop is telling me with data what I was feeling in my body - I AM NOT RECOVERING FROM MY WORKOUTS. I have been feeling under-recovered for a few months now and wanted to get some real data on what my body is doing and boy did I get it. A good recovery score is over 66% and I have yet to score over 60% and most days I'm in the solid 30th percentile. 
Whoop calculates recovery based on sleep, heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate. Since my sleep is at 99% I will focus on improving my HRV and resting heart rate. Some things I know I can do to improve my recovery are doing ROMWOD, drinking enough water, eating enough protein, and managing my stress. I write about the importance of these things every week, yet even I struggle with living my optimal lifestyle. 
I will continue to share my Whoop journey with you. I've you'd like to learn more about Whoop you can go here. 

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