Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Wearables
  3. News

Whoop athletic wearable stresses recovery for better performance

Lulu Chang
By

Whoop Wearable
The wearables market already seems implicitly targeted toward those leading an active lifestyle, what with their sleep, exercise, and calorie counters as standard features on most devices. But now, one company is making it even more obvious that when it comes to athletics, wearables are the future. Meet Whoop, a next-level device that describes itself as “a system robust enough to prepare a Navy SEAL for battle, but with the form factor and design that the average athlete would be comfortable wearing 24 hours a day.” Sure, skeptics abound — after all, how different could Whoop really be from a Fitbit or an Apple Watch? But while it may not be altogether different, it does offer some unique insights that are key to heightened athletic performance — by applying predictive analytics, Whoop wants to help teams and individuals better understand their bodies and how they recover after a hard game or workout.

In a video on the Whoop website, company founder and CEO Will Ahmed explains that the problem he perceived when he first set out to create Whoop was that athletes “didn’t very well understand the body.” Many active individuals, forever over- or undertraining, Ahmed continued, live in a “circular world” in which improving performance is more predicated on a “feeling” than on data and science, making the risk for injury much greater.

Related Videos

“Ultimately, the goal at Whoop is to live a step ahead of the athlete,” Ahmed says. Over the course of a day, the wearable tracks the amount of strain or stress an individual puts on his or her body, by examining heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductivity, ambient temperature, and accelerometery and motion. These factors are affected by everything from work to exercise to simple day-to-day activities.

Related

As Whoop continues to monitor energy expenditures, it can tell the wearer how much sleep he or she needs in order to fully recover, ensuring full preparedness for the following day. When this technology is applied to more than just one person — say, a team instead of an individual — Ahmed believes that coaches and trainers will be able to better optimize performance across the board.

The Boston-based company certainly has caught the attention of funders, who recently invested $12 million in a Series B funding round. And better still, pro athletes and their trainers seem to be on board as well. “At the elite level, it’s no longer just about outworking your opponents to get an edge,” said Mike Mancias, LeBron James’ longtime trainer and a Whoop adviser, in a press release. “In fact, research shows that 30 percent of athletes are overtrained, which can lead to injury and poor performance. It’s only by balancing intensity with recovery that athletes can optimize performance. Whoop’s system and the data it provides helps me gain a better understanding of each of my individual athlete’s bodies, their capabilities, and their limitations, leading to better and safer athletic performance.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
How taking your blood pressure is about to be as easy as taking your heart rate
Valencell Blood Pressure monitoring.

“We think blood pressure monitoring will change more in the next five years than it has in the last one hundred years,” Ryan Kraudel, Vice President of Marketing at biometric sensor maker Valencell, said as we talked about the company’s innovation in blood pressure monitoring over Zoom for CES 2022.

Such a bold statement could often be glossed over as hyperbole, but the thing is, after hearing what Valencell is working on, his prediction doesn’t sound farfetched at all. Its cuff-less, calibration-free blood pressure monitor could make taking your blood pressure as simple as measuring your heart rate is with a smartwatch today.
What is Valencell working on?
When you want to measure blood pressure, you use either one of those familiar cuffs or a slightly higher-tech cuff-less product to do so. Both are clearly medical devices, though, they are rarely particularly portable and certainly not friendly to use in that they’re noisy and somewhat intrusive. The cuff-less versions are better, but still regularly need to be paired with a cuffed version to make sure they remain accurate. Valencell’s innovative new technology is very different.

Read more
This light bulb can track your sleep and monitor your heart rate from afar
Sengled health monitoring bulb

You may be familiar with smart rings and watches telling you whether you’re getting any deep sleep. Soon, that expertise could extend to a light bulb near you.

In the last few years, advanced medical tools such as ECG monitors, have made their way into all sorts of personal accessories. But if the early days of CES 2022 are any indication, there’s much more yet to come. At CES 2022, smart home device maker, Sengled has offered a glimpse into an upcoming light bulb that can track your sleep and heart rate with radar waves.

Read more
Withings Body Scan scales go far beyond just showing your weight
Withings Body Scan scales.

Withings' new Body Scan smart scales go way beyond just measuring your weight, and instead bring monitoring technology you may have only seen at the gym or the doctor’s office into the comfort of your home. Announced during CES 2022, the Body Scan adds body composition data, heart rate and Electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements, nerve response, and vascular age calculations to the usual information given by a smart scale, saying it will, “turn the morning weigh-on into a sophisticated home health check.”

The Body Scan has a tempered glass platform with 14 electrodes hidden inside, plus a built-in 3.2-inch color LCD screen to show relevant data and an extendable handle with a further four electrodes in it. These are used for the ECG and to complete the body composition measurement. Using Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis, the Body Scan will assess body fat, visceral fat, bone and muscle mass, and water percentage to provide readings for individual body parts. Over the long-term, this helps understand high-risk areas in your body, along with sports-related data including muscle imbalance.

Read more