So I wear a Whoop band to track sleep, exercise, and recovery daily. The strap is your digital fitness and health coach. In my opinion, it is the best wearable health technology on the market. It is obtuse or obstructive, and the data it gives you can be life-changing. The four main metrics it tracks daily are resting heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and sleep. These four metrics combined give you a daily “recovery score.” This score essentially lets you know how well your body recovered overnight and the extent to which your body is ready to take on “strain.”
Before starting “75 Hard’, my recovery was all over the place, and my sleep was not very efficient. Nearly three and a half weeks into the challenge, my recovery and sleep have dramatically improved almost every day.
As you can see, on February 4th, I completed a registered activity of 8.3 strain, which was 333 calories burned in 42 minutes. In total, I burned 3,037 calories for a day strain of 14.6. I had relatively poor sleep, which led to a poor recovery the next day. 39% recovery isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but notice that I had zero activities for the day and burned considerably fewer calories.
Above is another example from February. I had a high day strain followed by poor sleep and a low recovery the next day. On February 17th, I burned just 1,477 calories, and it took a 9.8-day strain out on my body. That was approximately two weeks before initially starting “75 Hard”.
Let’s fast forward to this week, the fourth full week of the challenge.
SSo far this week (Sunday through tonight, Friday night at the time of writing), I’ve maintained an average day strain of 15.95. My highest strain day of the week was Tuesday at 18.1, the lowest on Thursday with 14.3. As you’ll notice, I’ve had green recovery every day this week, although it has started to dip as the week has gone on. This pattern suggests that I’m probably due for a lighter strain day in the coming days.
My sleep time and wake time variability are still all over the place, but it’s a work in progress. However, the quality of sleep I’m getting now compared to back in February is quite noticeable.
Above is my sleep overnight from Saturday the 2nd to Sunday the 3rd. This night of sleep may have been one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had in my entire life. I’ve recently been waking up far less in the middle of the night, which sticks out to me more than anything in the data.
Overall, the trend that appears to be developing is better sleep and better recoveries as I learn to optimize “training” and taking on strain. It will be interesting to monitor this trend throughout the rest of the endeavor.
Footy Foster 