Fitness device goes the extra, restful mile
IF you can’t have a coach by your side on the track or in the pool, you can aspire to the new virtual trainer WHOOP — a training and recovery wristband with more features than most other wearable fitness devices.
Users include some of the medal winners at the Rio Olympics last year and US basketball star LeBron James. But that’s the catch. WHOOP is targeting professional and elite athletes, not the run-of-the-mill active adult. This means the WHOOP Strap 2.0 comes with a price tag to match: $500 (about R7 000).
Wearable fitness devices such as Fitbit or Apple Watch already offer powerful ways of tracking training and improving performance.
But WHOOP’s Boston-based founders say their invention goes further in measuring “personal readiness to perform each day”.
When they wake in the morning, users get a recovery rating expressed as a percentage, which shows them how much to exert themselves that day in workouts and other activities.
Energy expenditure and strain on the body are measured 24 hours a day. After assessing this data, the WHOOP tells the user how much sleep they need that night to recover.
This device measures up to 150MB of data per athlete each day.
WHOOP claims on its website that after only four months its users are, on average, sleeping 41 minutes more a night, drinking alcohol before bedtime far less often, cutting their injury rate by 60%, increasing their heart rate variability by eight milliseconds and experiencing lower resting heart rates.
“We believe that the data we’re collecting on athletes is unprecedented,” said company CEO Will Ahmed.
Perhaps somebody should sponsor WHOOPs for the Springboks in 2017?