Why use health tech?
Health and technology are continuously binding together, and now it's not just for athletes. Everyone can use these tools to their advantage and have a deeper understanding of the progression they're making. But, surely I can just feel this?
Of course, generally you know your body better than anyone or any bit of kit, but how about your bodies trends overtime? That's pretty deep knowledge to truly understand, but your health progression or worse, regression. Added bonus, you can get cheaper health insurance and better life insurance. As they take into account risk factors, and if you've a daily healthy resting heart rate, proof of physical training and your sleep. Well that's stats you can use to your advantage. However, we're not here to chat about your insurance, but it's a benefit.
Whoop Whoop
At Resilient Human, we've aligned ourselves with Whoop. Why? We believe that it has the most accurate data to align with those that exercise.
The technical jargon
Let's get into the basics and build you a little key to use throughout this.
- Rest Heart Rate (RHR), generally means the lowest you have your heart rate whilst in a lying or seated resting state over a 5 minute resting period. Whoop quote "WHOOP measures your resting heart rate each night using a dynamic average weighted towards your last period of slow wave sleep, when your body is in its most restful state. This allows for the most controlled and reliable reading as possible". Average is 60-80bpm but fitter cardiovascular systems will be below 60bpm and many athletes are down at sub 40bpm.
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV), this is the amount of time between heart beats and the fluctuation that it has. This can change due to rest, exercise, stress and so on but check this article by Cleveland Clinic for a deep dive. Whoop also uses the same sleeping time to detect your HRV as it uses to detect RHR. This has become slightly more gold standard of measurement as fluctuations are more noticeable than that of RHR.
- Maximum Heart Rate (MHR), the calculation we've all seen (220 - your age) and there's your maximum, that's not exactly true and why using fitness technology can increase your personal knowledge. You'll find that fitter people tend to have higher MHR than inactive, but you will find that your MHR will drop over the years, so knowing this you can then work in your heart rate zones to create more return from your training sessions.
- Average Heart Rate, (Avg HR), letting you know how hard your heart works over a whole day. We find this useful to show clients their fitness levels change and their cardiovascular health improving. You may find that your exercise sessions are reading the same average and the same time of work but your daily average being lower. This shows that your normal day is much easier for your body to handle and true health improvement is taking place.
- Respiratory Rate, pretty simple, how many breaths you take in a 60 second interval, in a normal person this would be between 12-25 breaths whilst rested. Yip, Whop calculates this in your sleep too.
- Blood Oxygen, not always the best metric for all of us, but normal rates of 95-100% are what we're looking for. This is a great tracker if you do any altitude training or spend anytime being at altitude as it's something that can lead to hypoxemia. Otherwise for us it's just a health monitor thats good to keep an eye on.
- Skin Temp. (from baseline), like the rest of Whoop calculations, it learns you and figures you out, same for your baseline temp. on your skin. This enables you to know if you have a possible fever or illness coming on due to alignment of your baseline skin temp.
What does it all mean?
Now you've had a big dump of terms, we can now look at some pieces that let you understand truly how all this adds up to aiding you.
Open your Whoop app at the overview and see how your day looks. Recovery, HRV, strain, calories, sleep and health metrics. Now you're lost again right? Each day you really only need to know 3 of these, Recovery, strain and sleep, unless we're working on your nutrition then calories might come into it also, but we tend to work with other concepts for your nutrition.
What does my recovery mean, and how did Whoop come to that percentage. As we've said about the above health metrics, most of them are figured out whilst you sleep, so when you awaken Whoop has all your daily health metrics, how long you slept for and how good that sleep was light sleep, REM sleep and deep sleep plus if you had disturbances and if you were awake too. (This might be a bit too big brother for some of you, but we love it). Of course this is all put into an algorithm, and out pops your daily recovery percentage. Now this leads into how much daily strain can you take on. (Quick note, if you have some big night out planned, we'd say remove your monitor, unless you want to see exactly what alcohol and lack of sleep do to you).
Here comes the strain (pain), jokes. Strain is just Whoops way of saying how much work/strain your heart is under in a day. We think this is a great point for you to note, Whoop like all monitors are looking at your heart rate. If for instance you have an awesome cardio engine, so a strength workout may not register as much as you feel your body has pushed. That being said, you still need to be mindful that your heart is a relationship to your whole body and the more rested it is, the more rested your whole body is, even if you've DOMs from that heavy strength sessions. Anyways, taking into account your days recovery, can help you plan your days lifestyle and training.
Sleep, one of the most important factors of your health, and good sleep at that. Now you have a way to measure it accurately, you're on to a winner. At the end of each day Whoop will give you 3 sleep needs you can [100% Peak, 85% Perform and 70% Get by]. We think you understand each of these. Your sleep need is made up from how you've been sleeping and if you have any sleep debt, added to your baseline and your "todays strain" and it's minus any daytime naps you might have hit.
To explain all your data on the daily, the apps software builds graphs and adds explanations to every data point. We use these data points to build your Resilient Human Health Profile. For our online clients we get you to use the daily and weekly feedback to support how your days work, if like us you're up early for work daily, you may find your sleep isn't always as it should be, but these are the things we learn about ourselves and our lifestyles. It's why only full time athletes can do what they can, the rest of us have shit going on that doesn't always align with our goals and where support can be hugely beneficial.
It's working, am I improving?
Our aim is to improve your cardiovascular health and build protocols that best aid this for you to become a resilient human, and why we as online personal trainers focus on your monthly reports. This allows us to see longer term trends of your RHR, HRV, sleep, physical activity, and your lifestyle, Then we can adjust what we need to each month on a manageable scale to see if this can be a solution that works with your lifestyle and gives us healthier results for you. If you watch on the short term and we watch on the long term, then we get to use technology to not only show us numbers but actually build the data into efficient protocols
Ready to join Resilient Human and learn about your cardiovascular health metrics, then sign up to whoop with our code or better yet be the in the first 5 sign ups to gain 12 months free whoop access with Resilient Human membership. Call us now to go!