The Campbell Academy Blog (12)

The end of WHOOP (for me)

In a week or so, my WHOOP subscription runs out after buying it for a year during the sabbatical last January.

For those of you who have not heard of WHOOP (and where have you been?), it's a biometric measuring device that you wear on your wrist, around your bicep, in a pouch in your WHOOP-designed pants (no joke), or in any number of other places.

It measures a load of metrics, particularly heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is certainly, as far as WHOOP is concerned, one of the most important biometrics measuring overall health performance, fatigue and progress towards a better lifestyle.

WHOOP also measures your sleep in infinite detail, as well as your body temperature, respiration, and various other metrics.

It gives you a massive raft of data in the App on your phone, which works like a data dashboard and calculates your recovery on a day-by-day basis, suggesting whether or not you are ready to take on heavy strain or light strain or need to put your feet up and not do anything.

In essence, it's designed around the athlete, but the problem with WHOOP is that it tells you when and when not to train and when you don't feel ok because when you get a red recovery on WHOOP, things are not great.

The reason I started on WHOOP was to try to measure my progress through the other side of chronic fatigue that I had suffered for a year last year by the time I subscribed.

I wanted to see if there were any patterns in my lifestyle (which is a long way away from perfect) that I could obviously change to make things obviously better.

And so, I started with WHOOP last January, and away we went.

I got WHOOP 4.0.

I know people who'd been into who since 2.0, but I was really relatively early on getting into this a year ago compared to the later early adopters who have picked this up in the last 12 months.

It's certainly fallen over itself WHOOP, and it's now becoming more and more accepted and more and more widely available and widely recognised, but I decided a year ago that it may be something that could help inform me and hold me accountable for a better lifestyle and better health moving forward.

The biggest issue for me, though, for WHOOP is that I obsess about these things when I have them on my phone, and it also leads to huge comparisons with other people; as I always talk about in these pages, comparison is the thief of joy.

It's possible to join groups in WHOOP to see how you're doing compared to your age group, where you live, or any number of other things. It's possible to pull your WHOOP data with your friends and compare it with them to hold you accountable, to make you better and to push you in the right direction.

In that regard, it's really not any different to Strava, which is something that I came off some time ago (I still subscribe to Strava, but it's all private) because it didn't motivate me to move forward; it demotivated me when people were doing a lot better than me and when I was in my rough patches.

Much the same happened to me with WHOOP, but worse than that, I would find myself sitting downstairs every morning waiting to download my WHOOP data to see whether I was having a green, a yellow or a red day.

If WHOOP told me at seven o'clock in the morning that it was a red day, it would be a bad day, regardless of how I actually felt.

The other problem was that sometimes when it was telling me I was green, I felt like I was red, so I stopped trusting WHOOP and as soon as I stopped trusting it (probably on me, not on the thing itself), that was the end.

It is, though, a parable for other aspects of our lives.

As we move towards a situation where we can measure more and more of our own health and biometrics, the question should be, should we measure more and more of these things?

In training for endurance events, there is a format called RPE, which is the rate of perceived exertion.

You can rate your training scores on an RPE subjectively as to how you felt it went and how much effort you put in out of 10. You can rate how you wake in the morning out of 10.You can rate how you think your sleep was out of 10, or you can get a biometric device to rate it all for you and tell you what you're doing and why you should be doing it.

In the end, I started to look at some stats from WHOOP over the broader population (they have an extraordinary amount of data), and my average recovery was pretty much the average recovery for a WHOOP individual, about 58% per day.

I was getting much, much better at making greens than I was reds, but that was because I was getting better, not because WHOOP was making me better, and my HRV, which always seemed to be really low, was absolutely normal for someone of my age.

So, I don't want to use WHOOP to show people what my WHOOP score is, and WHOOP itself was beginning to demotivate me and tell me that I was feeling worse than I actually felt.

So, I've saved myself £200 not subscribing for the next year and will perhaps go back to subjectively asking myself how I feel in the morning instead of looking at the screen.