Leading up to WODAPALOOZA, it’s been a relatively slow news week. Today, I scrape together one little story and try to make it last as long as possible, but that means you get to go home early and focus on the weekend. Right? Tell your boss I said so.
Good morning and welcome to the WODDITY podcast for news about CrossFit. We are a daily podcast, Monday through Friday, doing CrossFit news in five minutes or less.
My name is Ben Garves and today is Friday, the 21st of February, 2020.
No podcast yesterday because I was at a complete loss of amazing news stories. So I took the day to heal up from a miserable cold, and now I’m back!
The biggest story of the day is this lil’ diddy titled, “Effect of Wearables on Sleep in Healthy Individuals: A Randomized Cross-Over Trial and Validation Study” by twelve researchers from the University of Arizona, Tucson and the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Are you following?
The study looked at fitness wearables and how accurate their measurements were against the medical industry standard test, called polysomnography. Which wearable did they use for the comparison? That super CrossFit-friendly one we all love: the WHOOP strap.
The results of the study were super WHOOP-friendly, finding that the company’s latest device was accurate within one breath per minute for sleep respiratory rate of polysomnography and within one beat per minute of an electrocardiogram. If you’re non-technical, those are the machines that beep when you breathe and the other one is the machine that beeps when your heart beats.
And this is where I get to rant and rave for a little bit. I think the WHOOP Strap has become famous for CrossFitters because of how great it is at measuring your strain and recovery each day, assigning a score to each. But the real value of it, at least to me, is how they handle that data. It’s not like FitBit, where they just say, “looks like you slept like crap last night. Do better.”
The biggest reason I recommend WHOOP to people in my life is because it’s constructive with the feedback and personalizes the data and the feedback to you and your behaviors. Mine noticed that I was sleeping poorly after a couple of days having drinks before bed. I stopped drinking within a couple hours of heading to sleep, and my sleep performance went off the charts. And the advice seems endless. I’ve changed things like the types of light I’m around close to bedtime, my relationship with caffeine and alcohol, whether I read or use devices at certain times of the day, how, when, and how long I nap – so many things.
I can’t say enough great things, and it’s just another reaffirming thing to have a scientific study vouch for the accuracy of their device. Not even as an advertisement. I mean – go to them if you want to. They aren’t paying me.
And that’s it for news about CrossFit for Friday, February 21st. Thanks for listening. Please be sure to rate, review, subscribe, and share. For WODDITY, I’m Ben Garves. Behave yourselves out there.
