2 weeks ago I did Norway for the first time at 100%. Before that I had almost 2 full months off from training. I had only been back to scheduled training for a couple of weeks and my fitness level was pretty poor. My LTHR usually tests between 156-159. Once the video really got going my heart rate never came back down below 145. Even early on my HR was almost entirely above 129bpm - even for the recovery sections - and then it peaked at 175 bpm. I averaged 151 bpm for the whole workout! That’s VERY high for me.
Today - 2 weeks later - and after 4 days of hard TOS stages (i’m doing GMTI, but I did do both versions of Fight Club for stage 3), my HR situation couldn’t really have been more different. Yes, I did it today at 90% instead of 100%. But my normalized power from today was actually higher than it was when I first did it at 100% (I’m using the same 4DP numbers). Today, my HR rarely ever went above 140. The differences between the peaks and troughs were more pronounced. And my average HR was 127 bpm with a peak of only 161.
I dare say it’s a sign that I’m riding myself back into shape.
Will be interesting to do Norway again next month at 100% again after finishing the Tour and getting some recovery. Then I can compare fresh numbers to fresh numbers.
It’s also normal to see lower HR levels after consecutive days is strenuous excercise. Your cardiovascular system is under stress. Dienst necessary mean you are fitter (although it could be) but that your heart can not go as faster as it did under the same stress / power. I saw this last tour when after 3-4 days i was recording low HR levels for the same sessions i was doing before the tour. Once I recovered my HR levels kicked back to normal
I’ve read his review also, and being perfectly honest, I disagree with his key premise. The purpose of the Whoop is NOT to tell you when to go hard and when not to. That’s a decision, and decisions are our job. The Whoop just provides data which we can use to make decisions, but teh data is not the decision itself.
Just like a power meter, just like CTL and training stress balance, just like fitness freshness from strava, all of these things are data and not decisions, the decisiosn are up to us.
so, grab a Whoop if you’re interested in experimenting the data and figuring out whether it’s useful in your decisionmaking. Definitely don’t NOT get one because simply because it can’t tell you what to do.
Now that we are at the end of the Tour…what stage left you with the highest day strain? And is it the stage that you would have predicted based upon your 4DP?
For me the highest strains were of course the longer stages (weekend) and personally struggled mostly with the Defender. Longer steady efforts are not suited for me while quick punches are more appropiate.
Anyhow, as I said in hte post, Whoop doesn’t take in account the accumulated fatigue, so my heart rate levels were lower for same type of effort and higer resting heart rate than normal every of the last 3-4 days.
It seems like the major strain points for me were the toughness of stage 1 and then the external factor of really bad sleep prior to stage 4. Sort of expecting to take see a big shift in the morning, since stage 7 looks to have been even more stress than stage 1. Surprisingly, RHR and HRV are identical on the mornings before/after stage 7!
Apparently, at least based on HR metrics, I’m not experiencing a particularly high strain response to all this training stress.
Today my whoop.shows 77%, well in the green. And as my HR increased my RHR is highest ever. I take the latter more as a recovery metric than the former.
I’ve been a Whoop user for 2years. I’ve been using a Kick’R, Tick’R along with Whoop on the wrist. I’ve closed the Whoop App while running SUF App (on iPad). I still get inaccurate HR numbers - seems like they’re doubled for the first 10min or so and then sometimes they return to what would be expected (or reported by Tick’R). I know my HR isn’t 190 (and, of course, then Whoop makes inaccurate strain calculations based on wrong HR data); so I guessed the Tick’R might have been crossing (or adding) signals with the Whoop - I took the Tick’R off and instead tried just Whoop with the strap on HR Broadcast (broadcast had been shut off on my prior HR reading errors). My next experiment was to try and run SUF on my laptop using ANT+ connection and seeing if I could bluetooth HR. I really don’t know this tech stuff and the SUF articles speak of App to App interference but I haven’t been able to sort this out.
Has anyone a solution to getting Whoop HR data correct?
