From Performance to Longevity: My Five-Year Journey with Whoop
What 2,095 recoveries taught me about the shift from optimizing workouts to optimizing lifespan
With the release of Whoop 5.0, I thought it would be fun to relive some of the things I have learned from being on Whoop for over five years. With over 2,095 recoveries logged in Whoop, I have a lot of learnings that I think could help others looking to optimize their performance, sleep, and healthspan.
Exciting Technology and a Desire for More
When I joined Whoop in August of 2019, the Whoop 3.0 band was the fitness tracker of the time. There were of course other fitness wearables on the market, but they were bigger, focused on the immediate nature of an activity, and they had screens.
The big selling point for Whoop as it was bringing Whoop 3.0 to market was how recovered you were from a workout or a tough day. Up until this time, every other fitness wearable was focused on the intensity of the workout, or the day, itself. No one was trying to tell you how worn out, or primed you were, to take on the next day on a large scale. Whoop was trying to do that by not only tracking a Strain Score, but they also gave you a Sleep Score and a Recovery Score.
Your Strain on the day could be from activities, or just a rough day from manual labor or yard work. 21 is the highest strain score a user can achieve, and after a marathon, an ultra marathon, and multiple years racing enduros, the highest strain on the day for me has been a 20.7 (many times mind you).
A Sleep Score is monitoring the quality of your sleep. The amount of time in bed factors into the score, but the amount of Light Sleep, REM Sleep and SWS Sleep also factors into a user's Sleep Score. If you’re getting the amount of sleep that Whoop thinks you need for the strain your body has been under, you’ll get a higher sleep score.
A Recovery Score looks at multiple physiological metrics like HRV (heart rate variability), RHR (resting heart rate), and sleep performance from the night before. The goal with this score is to indicate how prepared your body is to handle strain, or take on the day. This number has been controversial to some, giving members a false sense, positive or negative, of their capacity. As well, it could feel like you failed because you didn’t get a high enough number. I discuss this more in the video, and below.
Over the next two years of me wearing the Whoop strap, I felt a shift in the way the company was talking about data. Performance seemed to be at the forefront of the discussions, with ways to optimize sleep and recovery so you could attack the next day for a higher strain score.
As COVID took over in 2020, and the years after, Whoop realized they had a lot of data on a lot of members. This caused them to lean into the Whoop Journal, allowing users to document more habits for better ways to optimize all parts of a users life, not just performance of the day. This also allowed more insight into behaviors a user may have taken that would lead to a better, or worse, recovery score.
It has to be said that any of these scores can feel very gamified. I talk a bit on how I treat them now, but I did feel the need to improve them in the beginning. I needed higher strain scores, I wanted to sleep better, and “damn it why can’t I recover better”. All of those things ultimately led to me learning a lot more about myself, but that’s because I didn’t let the numbers rule me; I let them guide me.
As we work our way through 2025, and the release of Whoop 5.0, we’re seeing the next evolution of Whoop and the wearables they’re creating. Even though wearing a Whoop can still be “just a fitness tracker”, the addition of Whoop Age & Healthspan to the 5.0, and Blood Pressure Insights & ECG Capabilities to the new MG (Medical Grade) model, shows that Whoop is broadening its user base and planning on staying on members wrists longer.
Tools, Not Rules: Using Whoop Without Letting It Use You
Whichever Whoop Membership you do choose to get, you have to remember it is a tool to be leveraged toward a goal. By just wearing a Whoop wearable, you don’t get fitter or live longer. You have to leverage the tool in a way that helps you make the desired changes you’re looking for.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Whoop app will ask you a lot of questions, and ask you to input a good number of things. You can’t let these alerts become prescriptions that you have to fill out every time it asks. Some inputs should be more important than others, those are the ones you’re focusing on for the time being. Don’t let the Whoop alerts for input rule your life. A Whoop device is a tool for betterment, it’s not a rule on how to live.
I was very focused on journal entries from year one through year three of my Whoop journey. Sleep was the number one thing I wanted to optimize the most, so I wanted to see how my daily life was affecting my sleep. At the time, I was still drinking a good amount of beer and I would consistently go to the local CrossFit box. I thought because I exercised, I was ‘earning my beers’. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much the alcohol in the beer was affecting my sleep, and my overall wellbeing.
As I saw the under 10% recoveries rolling in, I became much more aware how drinking was affecting my physical, and physiological, being. This caused me to drink a little less, and go to bed a little bit earlier. As I saw an increase in my recoveries over the next mornings, I would also feel better throughout the day. I know some could say it was relational, because I saw a number get better, I could lie to myself and say I felt better. The truth is in the data, where my sleep quality increased, and my ability to tackle workouts also improved. Within the Whoop ecosystem, my metrics were improving. In life, I just felt better.
All of these improvements, as well as others outside of Whoop, were what brought me to the realization I didn’t want, or need, to drink anymore. As I started to look forward toward my future self, I knew this was only going to decrease my ability for a long, healthy life. On January 1st, 2022, I woke up and realized today was the day I was going to stop drinking.
I’ve also gone overboard in looking at Whoop metrics and logging habits in the journal. There was a time where I had close to 20 behaviors I was logging throughout the day in the Whoop Journal. This became an unsustainable routine of trying to keep up with ‘all the things’ that I said were REALLY important.
If you’re using Whoop to optimize certain parts of your life, log 2-3 behaviors to see how they affect you over 1-2 months. If it’s minimal, move on to others to see if you can find the big levers. If you’re not a professional athlete, don’t pressure yourself to find the 1% improvements. Try to find the big wins that are easy to implement, or integrate, and that don’t make your life harder to live.
A low recovery score can also feel like a loss at the start of the day. You have to realize what it is though, it’s just a number. It’s a representation of what Whoop thinks is good or bad. If you were going to go train and feel like you want extra sleep, do it. If it’s race day and you have a low recovery score, who cares. It’s race day, you’ve done the work to get yourself here. You ignore the number and rely on the months of training that will get you through to the finish line. Whoop also allows users to hide certain numbers at certain times for this very reason. Yes, we want to try to wake up on race day with a 99% recovery, but that’s harder than it sounds. Optimize what you can during your training months, stick with the plan you know works, and wake up on race day and attack.
Before I made my way to Whoop 5.0, I started using the journal less and less. I’m now at a place in my life where I know the consistent patterns I want, and don’t want, in my life. I’m also a realist and understand sometimes life is going to throw me a curveball. I’m going to adjust and try not to let that adaptation become the new normal.
The shift from Performance to Longevity
If you’re an athletic person, you typically like to see improvement over time in whatever discipline or routine you enjoy. From the beginning, you could do that with Whoop, but you could also do that with every other fitness wearable on the market. Some may not be as capable as Whoop at telling you how far you come, but they can all do it.
After a few years of improving the same metrics, you realize it’s not rocket science. Typically, the same habits that got you from a 300lbs deadlift to a 400lbs deadlift could get you from a 7 min/mile to a 6 min/mile. It’s the consistent application of the correct force needed for the goal. This is where Whoop would lose members after a few months (I’m guessing here of course). After a member has seen their sleep score improve by doing X, Y, Z, they can see the connective tissue to improve the rest on their own, or not care and quit. The same can be true for a better recovery or strain score.
Due to this, Whoop needed to offer more day-to-day and month-to-month desires from the hardware and software. This is where Whoop Coach and their Stress Monitoring features started the current trend of Whoops growth toward longevity. Whoop Coach is a personal trainer in your pocket. You can ask it for a running program, a hypertrophy program, or a hybrid of the two. From there, you follow the program with your Whoop app open and the exact workout it gave you is logged in the app. You have direct feedback on the strain you put in, how long it took, and more. You’ll pay more than 199$ annually for a personal trainer, so this feature is well worth the annual Whoop fee if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
The Stress Monitor feature allows you to see how a “day at the office” can be much more taxing on your body than you may have thought it could be. You can log certain daily behaviors or activities in the journal, and see how it affects your daily stress. This may seem trivial to some, but once you’ve come out of the brain fog of chronic stress, you’ll understand how important a feature like Stress Monitor can be.
With Whoop 5.0 and MG, Whoop is continuing to add features that focus more on Healthspan and Longevity. Whoop Age and Pace of Aging are two connected features that are trying to let members know how they are aging, from a physiological perspective. If you’re 45, but your body is acting like you're 56, that’s a bad thing. If you’re 45, but your body is acting like a 38 year old, that's really good. As before, you can look for behaviors to add, or remove, through the Whoop journal to try and level out a fast Pace of Age. Just because my current Whoop Age is 38.6 doesn’t mean I’ll live forever. It just means that what I am doing now is moving me in the right direction toward walking into my 90’s and enjoying the later years of my life.
Blood Pressure Insights and ECG Capabilities are all features of the first Whoop Medical Grade band. I can’t find an exact definition of what Medical Grade means to Whoop, but it sounds fancy. According to Google, “Medical Grade refers to materials, products, or equipment that are designed and manufactured to meet specific standards of safety and performance for use in medical applications”. Just as with HRV, capturing it is cool, but the insights Whoop is giving you on what it gathers is the magic sauce. For members concerned on these metrics, or aging individuals, it could be life saving to have immediate access to these features, and the ability to share them with your doctor from afar. If this doesn’t showcase how Whoop is pivoting toward longevity, I don't know what does.
The Hormonal Insights feature should be exciting for every woman. Though I don’t have a menstrual cycle, my wife does, and so I hear about the challenges she has to overcome. Being able to know if your physiological patterns are off, so you “train smarter, recover more effectively, and better understand their bodies” sounds like a huge win to me.
Is Whoop Still Worth It?
If you’ve made it this far, and you don’t have a Whoop, I’m guessing that’s the lingering question. I’ll ask you, “What is your health worth?”. If paying an annual fee of $199 (as of the writing of this article) makes sense so you can plan how to optimize your life toward the goal you want to achieve, then yes, it’s worth it.
If you’re in a place in your life where you feel good, you move regularly, and you don’t want to quickly improve past your current status, then no, it’s probably not worth it. And that’s ok.
Decide the life you want to live and go live it. Some of us want to capture data and play with technology to know how our body is reacting to what we put it through. I think the biggest mistake we can make is living a life we didn’t want to live, by making choices we didn’t even realize we were making.
Want to try Whoop? Here's my referral link for a free month (helps us both out): https://join.whoop.com/0DE09B61
Do something today that makes you feel awesome. #PurveyorOfAwesome