Olympic rower Gevvie Stone has been getting more sleep.
She owes it in part to the WHOOP performance monitoring system she’s been using since last December, a wristband she wears at night that evaluates her strain and recovery. The thin, lightweight band does so by measuring and analyzing heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), ambient temperature and motion, among other data points.
Stone is also a doctor, which helps her more deeply understand the data that WHOOP collects, and she believes that HRV is essential in measuring fatigue and recovery. “The fact that WHOOP was measuring HRV it definitely made me particularly interested in the product,” Stone says. “It’s one of the things that I really rely on within the system.”
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In fact, WHOOP claims that athletes using the system for four months reduced reported injury by 60%, got 41 extra minutes of sleep and even drank 79% less alcohol.
“Athletes on our platform show meaningful improvements in their fitness levels,” said WHOOP founder and CEO Will Ahmed. “Overtraining, undertraining, recovery, fitness peaks, injuries–these are very meaningful problems that no wearable or company has properly addressed until now.”
Stone is one of several Olympians that will be using WHOOP during the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Brazil. Others include swimmers Ryan Lochte and Connor Jaeger, basketball player Kyle Lowry and wrestler Adeline Gray.
“Much of your success in the pool comes from what you do outside of it,” Lochte said. “WHOOP has given me insight into my sleep and recovery which ultimately helped push my training to new levels.”
Previously offered exclusively to top athletes and the US Military, the WHOOP Strap 2.0 is now available to the general public to pre-order for $500. The strap itself, which Stone describes as “unobtrusive” won the 2016 Red Dot award for product design. WHOOP users don’t even have to take the strap off to charge it, allowing for uninterrupted monitoring.
“One of the most fundamental things that WHOOP does for athletes is it goes from making an athlete think of themselves as an athlete for two or three hours a day when they’re exercising to making them think of themselves as an athlete for 24 hours a day,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed, a Harvard grad and former captain of the Harvard Varsity Squash team, said WHOOP helps athletes value rest and recover as much as exercise. Stone echoed this idea, noting that WHOOP has allowed her to better understand when her body is fatigued.
Ahmed sees the “aspirational athlete” as a group that could see substantial benefits by using WHOOP. This includes high school athletes, those who work out several times per week, and those who engage in endurance sports like swimming or cycling, he said.
Armed with a team of creators and advisors in disciplines ranging from mathematics to cardiology to physics, WHOOP looks to create the most scientifically sound wearable available. WHOOP is also on the forefront of data privacy, allowing users to adjust what they share and what they don’t.
“We’re collecting information that is very personal,” Ahmed said. “We’ve made it an important piece of our company to really understand privacy, have a lot of optionality around privacy.”
It is clear that WHOOP has the ability to instigate positive change in the lives of Olympic, professional, and amateur athletes. Which is fitting, considering the strap was named with positivity in mind.
“We wanted to come up with something that really evoked a positive emotion,” Ahmed said, laughing.