June 28, 2022
<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing: A “Dry Run”
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In September 2021, I started wearing a Whoop strap. A friend had been evangelizing it for months and I had finally come around.
Whoop makes a fitness tracker. In the past nine months, I’ve gotten into the best shape of my life. One of the biggest reasons was that the way Whoop works is incredibly good for the way my mind motivates. I simply work out more.
The Whoop Strap tracks the effort experienced by your cardiovascular system to rate your days—and individual workouts—by strain. Hard workouts, higher strain. Every morning you’re assigned a “recovery score” based on how your body behaved during sleep. High recovery days indicate that your body is ready for more strain and you can push harder in your workouts.
The first thing Whoop taught me is how much I was leaving on the table.
The strain scale starts at 0 and makes out at 21. However, it’s a logarithmic scale—building a strain of 10 requires far more effort than building a strain of 5 twice. It’s impossible to reach 21, and even hitting 18 requires a very intense, long activity.
The first month I had my Whoop, I averaged a strain of 10.3 from exercising like I had always done before. But I started to notice the strain I was building was far below what Whoop was recommending for me based on my recovery. Basically, it was telling me that my body had the capacity to work harder.
So, I started lengthening my workouts. I set loftier goals. And my strain went up and up and up. By April, my average strain was over 14. Again, hitting 14 strain isn’t just slightly harder than hitting 10 strain: it’s roughly double as much work. I was pushing my body like I never had before, twice as hard as before I got my Whoop.
Remarkably, I wasn’t paying for this by exhausting myself. Even as I increased my strain dramatically, my sleep performance and recovery score didn’t waver. I didn’t feel more exhausted day-to-day. If anything, I felt the opposite.
While pushing myself so hard, I got in the best shape of my life. I weigh about 160 pounds, down about 17 from when I started using Whoop and down 35 pounds from when I graduated college 5 years ago.
A 2-mile run was meaningful for me back in September. Now that’s casual. I’m accomplishing athletic achievements I was completely incapable of considering a year ago: a 3-mile run at a pace of 6:39/mi, a one-hour trail run with a 1700ft gain, climbing mile-high mountains with skis on my back.
I respond incredibly well to numbers, and I’m competitive. My experience with measuring the strain I’m putting on my body has taught me how much more I can do, and I’ve become much more physically capable in the process.
As all the work on my body has happened, I’ve also thought about how I’d like to be more productive. There’s a lot I want to accomplish in my life, and I’ve never been a great executor. I want to improve, but how?