I Got WHOOP’d

​I am not one of those technology people who spend a ton of time and money on the latest gadgets.  For a few years I ran “naked,” no watch, no GPS, no phone… just a glance at the clock on my way out the door and an idea of about how long it would take me to run a specific route.  When I did get my first GPS watch it was the most basic model on the market and for months I didn’t even upload my mileage online.  Then I started studying recovery, including tracking daily heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in time between heartbeats, and sleep.  Next thing I knew I had an app on my phone to track HRV and a new blue tooth enabled Garmin GPS watch with wrist-based heart rate technology.  And then I got WHOOP’d.  
 
I first heard of the WHOOP device from a colleague who was looking into a way to track HRV during activity.  Next thing I knew I was wearing my Garmin on one wrist and a WHOOP on the other.  For the record, the WHOOP doesn’t have a face with the time and date so while it may look a bit silly to wear both there is a good reason.
 
The Garmin needs to be told when you are run and then you must wait for the GPS signal to connect to the watch.  The WHOOP had a feature through the corresponding App that will allow you to set the device to recognize an event, which included anything that increased heart rate for more than 15 minutes being recognized as exercise and anything that resulted in a slow down in heart rate recognized as sleep.  Both the Garmin and the WHOOP tracked heart rate and they were pretty consistent especially for average resting levels. Only the Garmin was able to use GPS technology to track the distance of a run, so while the WHOOP could gage effort, calling it Strain, as a runner it failed to tell me how far I had gone.  The WHOOP was able to better calculate my sleep than the Garmin, except the one night when it claimed I slept for about 90 minutes and then later “napped” for 3 hours between 2 and 5am.  Luckily it has a feature allowing for a readjust to reflect the true timing of the event without disrupting the heart rate data that had been collected.
  
After the first week, what did I learn?  My left arm, where the Garmin resides, burns more calories than my right where the WHOOP has settled. 
 
The one feature that had the most disagreement between the two was the calorie expenditure. During a phone conference with the company they mentioned that the calorie count could be a bit high, especially for more interval training (high intensity for short bursts with lots of breaks).  I do more steady state exercise (heart rate elevated to one level for a longer period of time or in my case distance), so I was curious to see my numbers.  Compared to the Garmin, the WHOOP declared that I was burning 400+ less calories per day.  To put things in perspective that could be an entire meal’s worth of calories. My colleague, on the other hand, had a day where he did not exercise and the WHOOP told him he could eat about 4000 calories… more than twice the “normal” resting limit for a male his size. He dismissed this as a glitch in the system.
 
I had been figuring the Garmin was correct within 100-200 calories to my real calorie expenditure, so I hadn’t been tracking my diet too closely but had been putting on a bit of weight.  Since under-fueling can also lead to a metabolic shut down (and gaining weight), I was even concerned I was my own worst enemy NOT eating to the estimated calorie count. Now what was I to do? What information was I to take as the “truth?”
 
I decided to listen the WHOOP and eat a bit less.  My weight miraculously adjusted to the change in eating habits.  Of course for someone like me it is always a balance between eating enough to fuel myself for each run while also cutting some calories when I am trying to drop weight.  
 
After about a month I gave up my WHOOP as it was time to use it for research and went back to just my Garmin numbers.  I was thankful for the break-up, as I was getting a bit too reliant on technology and less reliant on listening to my own body.  Some days I know I am not recovered and I am okay with that. Training is a balance between working when you aren’t at your peak in order to get your body to adapt and recovering/resting during your program to allow your body to have the time and energy to rebuild.
 
Stay tuned for my follow-up on how I WHOOP’d up on my athletes!