So, I did it, and I bit the bullet while I was on my sab.
In many ways I thought that I’d have to be in a great position before I started using the WHOOP (I'd been looking at this for a long period of time) but decided that even if I was at my lowest ebb, it was probably interesting to get some objective data on what my lowest ebb looked like.
For those of you who don't know what WHOOP is, it's effectively a wearable HRV measurement device, which 24 hours a day, 365 days a year measures your HRV, stress, strain, temperature etc and reports back.
You even charge your WHOOP while they're still on your arm or your wrist or in your pants (they sell their own underwear) and we're now on WHOOP 4.0 after the development phase of the first three versions has been passed.
WHOOP has passed over the line and is now becoming a profitable business after much early investment in HRV.
They went head-to-head with Garmin and Nike and developed something which doesn't even have a screen on it, and you can wear either obtrusively or unobtrusively to measure lots of health statistics and report back.
This is not for everyone (and it's certainly not for Alison, my wife), she thinks it's ridiculous and hilarious and pointless.
But I have always been the type of person who needed to understand before they could do.
In my very short skiing career (two winter trips over two years before my knee completely broke) Monica, our ski instructor who was a brilliant ski instructor from Brazil who taught my family how to ski in those two visits, realised very quickly that I couldn't do and then understand, I had to understand and then do.
She took ages trying to find a way of explaining to me how to ski until she realised that using a bike as a metaphor and peddling was the best way.
I see this in many other people to, some people just understand, some people just do, and then later they understand.
I've always been the other way around.
That's why something like WHOOP and HRV measurement works for me.
I've written about HRV over several years because I've used my Garmin watch as a HRV monitor for the past five or six years and I remember an interchange with Neil Cooper from the Lake district who was very early into HRV and quite a spectacular athlete who used the HRV ring to get 24-hour wearable technology.
WHOOP has moved on from that and gives an extraordinary number of statistics and data that you can then decide what you want to use.
In essence, it measures my sleep, my recovery and tells me why and tells me (over time) what I'm good for today and what I'm not good for today.
You can take that or leave it, you can even see whether you're becoming unwell, and you can also see parts of your life that cause you much more or much less stress than you otherwise imagined.
HRV is heart rate variability, and the ability for us to have a variability in our heart rate is an indicator of health that's long been understood by medics.
If you understand it this way, the more consistently your heart beats with a gap in-between, the worse that is for your health.
Variability in heart rate is healthy.
Once you see this, you can see exactly the damage that 2 pints does to you one night or the eating carbs before you go to bed, or that having not enough sleep or that falling out with your wife.
These things have enormous impacts on how you feel and how you recover and once you have the objective data, you can understand and once you understand, you can decide to change or not.
I wear my WHOOP using a bicep band, really so that nobody else sees it because I'm not fussed about talking about it on a day-by-day basis.
I also do that because I want to wear it during work and during surgery to see exactly the damage that surgery or teaching or any of these things does to my overall long-term health.
It might not make me live longer, but it is interesting along the way.
It's a hobby.
Blog Post Number - 3352