Whoop has an excellent reputation when it comes to paying attention to detail. They seem to constantly add more ways to look at recovery through the Whoop Journal, your strain, and various metrics. By logging a number of important health factors, the system breaks down a monthly review of all your metrics. Furthermore, it suggests what activities impact your recovery both positively and negatively.
We also get a nice weekly breakdown that simply compares us from the week before to take smaller strides into account. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the abundance of information, but it can really be a difference-maker in your health.
Let’s take a look at how the three work together.
Weekly Assessments
Weekly assessments will let you know if you performed optimally by looking at all your strain and recovers and creating a range that is optimal to fall into. It does the same thing for sleep consistency: looking at your range of in-bed times and how much sleep you got.
Here are some important stats the Weekly Performance Assessment looks at.
Average Strain
All your strains are averaged together to complete a daily average that is compared to last week. It lets you know whether your strain increased or decreased compared to the previous week. It also incorporates how many activities you recorded and the total amount of time you put into different activities.
Sleep Stats
Here you can learn about your sleep score and compare it to last week and the previous three. Your time and bed and your actual sleep need stats are compared side by side to those earlier weeks in a bar graph so you can easily see if you are higher or lower.
Read: How does the Whoop 4.0 compare to the Apple Watch 7
Monthly Assessments
Monthly assessments are where the real magic comes in. It’s a breakdown of every day and then comprises a list of important stats that may help or hurt your recovery score so you can optimally perform better. Let’s take a look at some of these most important stats.
- Sleep is broken down into hours of sleep versus sleep needed in a graph to compare where you are meeting those goals. You also see your restorative sleep broken down into the Rapid Eye Movement phase compared to the Slow Wave Sleep. So this is your mental restorative compared to your physical restorative.
- Next is your training breakdown. The number of different activities you recorded is broken down into hours spent while looking at different days of the week you did them. Here we can look at the average strain accumulated as well.
- By looking at the two above, we can start to break down certain behaviors and how they affect our recovery. This comes from logging all the behaviors in the Whoop Journal. Our recovery is mainly shown in blocks colored based on whether you meet the green, yellow, or red recovery zone. This easy-to-interpret graph gives us a quick look at whether we are generally recovering or not.
The Whoop Journal
The Whoop Journal is worth spending some time talking about because it has allowed users to break down what makes them feel good and what makes them feel worse. While there are dozens of questions to go over, and they all play a significant role, it’s worth looking at them in some groupings.
The best way to do this is to look at my own performance.
- Staying hydrated, getting my full recommended sleep, and listening to white noise when sleeping all had significant impacts on my recovery positively. Logging this daily help indicate the association.
- Stress, jet lag, and eating a late meal at night significantly impacted my body and resulted in a poor recovery score. Now not everyone experiences jet lag as often as I do, so if this question or others don’t apply to you, you can remove it from your daily journal questions.
- Other interesting questions that are considered have to do with whether I have been sick or injured or experienced COVID symptoms. WHOOP has been helpful with detecting Covid early on, thanks to its respiratory rate that’s calculated when sleeping. When logging these factors in, the Whoop journal can better track your body’s overall health and make new recommendations.
Other interesting categories the Whoop journal covers but is not limited to are:
- Physical therapy (acupuncture, cryotherapy, etc.)
- Diet (consume sugar, carbs, vegan, protein, etc.)
- Medications including anti-anxiety medication
- Mood such as depression, energy perception, etc.
- Activities affected in relationships like sharing a bed, being single vs. not, etc.
Women’s Health
One thing that I think everyone loves about the Whoop Journal is how they account for female health. Women, in general, have to deal with menstrual cycles that will ultimately affect their performance. Women also train when they’re pregnant. So having these two things involved in your daily journal can help you train smart and listen to your body better as a woman.
Read: How does the Whoop 4.0 compare to the Fitbit Sense
Intensive Overview
Whoop is excellent because it allows you to be as detailed as you want. Some of the work it does for you. And if you don’t feel like entering your journal, you don’t have to. It will still put together the stats you racked up from workouts and sleep.
For those who want to be as detailed as possible, filling out the journal daily will give accurate results and help you determine how to improve your recovery. This is the ultimate goal for many athletes that wear it.
Both the weekly and the monthly performance assessment reviews are incredibly insightful and something that Whoop wearers really enjoy.
Do you use the Whoop Journal? We’d love to hear your comments.
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Last Updated on September 6, 2022
Brittany Collens is one of our top sports writers. She is also a professional tennis player which helps her authority on subjects such as health and fitness.
She has a degree in journalism and has previously written for well-established sports magazines in Massachusetts.
Brittany lives in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States.