Is WHOOP’s Strength Trainer worth using?

Two years ago, Screenless fitness tracker hop The problem noted that no contestant has managed to solve any contestant: Answering this question “How difficult was your weightlifting workout?” Its initial implementation was Clunk and Finnish. I don’t think I managed to log in to a single workout properly. But now, with improvements in years, it has become a much more useful feature.

Game changer for me? Being capable of connecting exercise to exercise after You do workouts. In this way you cannot mess up trekking during workouts, but you still get the thing you really care – a stress score is sufficient to give strength to the app’s sleep and recovery recommendations. Read for more information about how to use strength trainer, and what it can do and (still) what can not do.

What is the strength trainer of Whup?

Credit: Beth squareki

Strength trainer is a way to track strength workouts, the way you are different from the way you track any other workouts. It was introduced in 2023, and its purpose is to give you a more suitable stress score (shows how hard it was on your body) than to track it purely at heart rate.

To use the strength trainer, you need to make a workout in the app (or choose), it is necessary to tell what you actually practice, what weight you are using, and how many sets and representatives. You can either follow the app with your workouts in real time, or connect the workout to an activity after the fact.

Why Hoop’s strength trainer gives it a big advantage on other wearbals

Generally, when you track a workout with whoop, you simply start an activity, and it measures your heart rate during activity. This makes the perfect understanding for cardio activities, such as running. The higher your heart rate, the longer, the higher stress score you will get as a result. A high stress activity is difficult on your body, and requires more recovery. A low stress score is easy, perhaps restore as well.

This approach never worked for power training, however – and it is a warning that applies to tracking power training Any Heart-by-competent wearable. During a weightlifting session your heart rate graph will show a lot of rest time, and only brief spikes in the high area. Those heart rate spikes do not tell the whole story how hard your muscles were working to lift weight. So i keep saying Ignore heart rate during weighty sessions,

Before Whoop introduced the strength trainer, my weightlifting session would always appear as a mild workout in the app, equal to an easy run or brisk walk – whether I have a killer, heavy workout. But with convenience, strength workouts now show appropriate amounts of stress. And since the strain score power gives power to your recovery recommendations, it is important. The strength trainer added to a weedable, which only understood for endurance athletes, which makes the strength athletes, as well as for everyone in the middle.

The best way to use WHOOP’s strength trainer is after fact

By adding a description of my strength workout, it brings it 13.1 (the upper end of the medium – perhaps accurate, but of course close to reality).
Credit: Beth squareki

Below, I explain how you are using strength trainer during workouts. But leave me to your conclusion: it is useless to use it during workouts. using it after A workout is a stroke of talent by the WHOOP team, and gives me everything that I really need from this feature.

You just have this:

1. Tap “Start Activity” And select activity type in the form of weightlifting, powerlifting, functional fitness or box fitness. Workout your strength.

2. End activity And wait for what to process.

3. Tap on activityIts abusively low stress score, and tap the box that invites you to add a power workout to calculate the muscle load.

4. Choose or make workouts I match what you did.

5. Wait while re -processing workoutsAnd enjoy your new, high stress score.

I keep the track in a notebook on my workouts, while I do them, so it is easy for me to fill the details later. If you like you can use an app – Heavy is one of my favoritesAnd yes, you Be able to Follow with the Whoop app, but this is an experience so disappointing and error-prone to that I cannot recommend it. Nevertheless, to be completely, let’s dig.

How to use the strength trainer of Whats during workouts (and why not)

Before you start using a strength trainer during a workout, you have to set a workout with specific exercises you want to do. If possible, you will also want to fill the representative and load of each practice.

To start a workout, you go to the plus icon in the corner of the home screen of the app, and instead of selecting a start workout, select the Strength Trainer instead. Choose the workout you create, and hit the start workout from that screen. The app will start a warm -up timer, and you can start your practice by starting the first set.

The irony is that one of the things that makes Whoop ideal for welifting – that you can wear it on a bicep band so that you can wrap your wrist, keep free for strips or kettlebell movements – here is not the cell. The app asks if you will wear your lawop on your left or right wrist. They are your only option. (I wear it on my bicep anyway. I don’t know that it affects the results.)

To workouts, you have to tap on a button in the app every time you start a set and each time you complete one. It’s funny if you do not want to keep your phone with you, and if you are double strange to do Want to use your phone for anything during workouts. For example, if I am making a video of a set, I need to start the set, switch apps, start my camera, set my camera, switch my camera, switch the apps and stop the set in the WHOOP app. Miss one step, and you screw your workout tracking.

During a workout, you Be able to do,

• Add a set

• Remove the final set of an exercise (but not a specific set in the middle)

• Rehabilitation exercise

• A set again (if you have started it from an accident)

• Add an exercise

• Remove an exercise

• Change the weight of an exercise (including a single one)

You Can not,

Being capable of editing workouts on fly, or undo a set, is great additions that the strength trainer did not have when launched for the first time. But there is still no way to address a general problem (for me, anyway) to forget to start a set. When I set for anything during the workout, or using my phone – saying something else about a lesson, says – I can easily lose the track of the WHOOP app. I say, “This is enough texting,” put the phone down, lift your weight, and then return on the phone and realize my mistake. Lets me crazy.

This will help if the strength trainer can do a live activity on the lock screen, as if it does when I go for a run. Unfortunately, live activities for power training are available only on Android at this time. (I use an iPhone.)

Why power trainer still disappoints me

I still have such mixed feelings about the strength trainer. On Pro Side: This Does Give me a suitable strain score for my weightlifting, and adding workouts after the fact is convenient and does not mess up my workouts. (I wish I had a push notification, so I could not forget, but until I remember it all is good.) Nobody does anything else to wear; They track the effects of all power training such as it was a type of cardio.

But follow the version is high maintenance, such as covering a baby of a child during your workouts. I am always making mistakes that is not an easy way to fix. It also does not want I use my Bicep band (sorry, but I can’t Use a wrist device for some of my exercises). There is no way to enter the stagnant exercise (such as a squat where you count three before standing) or complex (eg Clean + Front Squat + Jerk as a representative).

These boundaries seem tied to the origin of the trainer. WHOOP acquire 2021 pushA company that practice strength through a wrist-based velocity sensor. The WHOOP users were excited to see the Velocity-based training (VBT), who come to the whoop, but it never happened.

In a VBT workout, a coach (or app) explains how fast you were moving – say, how fast you can stand with a squat – and using that data to tell you if you have to add weight to your next set. In this way, you will get customized coaching that answers how you are actually performing that day. If you are tired and everything seems heavy, you will move slowly and app will cue you to use low weight. If you are feeling great and even heavy weight move forward rapidly, the app will push yourself a little harder.

But who never brought that promise to users. (If they have plans, they are still wrapping.) Instead, they think they have used some underlying techniques to train their own algorithms to identify exercise. If you do a squat when using a strength trainer, your whoop device, possibly, notices when your representative starts and ends, and records how fast you have done the squat.

What does this with this data is not clear, though. Company content, like Press release Avoid using the word “Velocity” anywhere from the launch of the strength trainer. Instead, they use “intensity” as an alternative, which only leads to confusion. In traditional strength training, an acute (heavy, rigid) representative will appear as a slow movement in VBT. But a whoop spokes Said on reddit When you carry weight rapidly, they believe that you are working hard.

Unfortunately, since whoop is very squirrel in describing its algorithm, it is really difficult to know what it is doing, or even what you are missing (if anything) When you log in to a power work after this fact, follow together in the moment. I emailed with the WHOOP team ahead when the strength trainer came out for the first time, trying to understand what it was calculating and why, but they kept sending me unclear statements, whatever they explained.

There is also no verification study that I can find, compare the results of strength trainer, well, anything. Who is now They say This “estimate (ton) is the maximum volume from your workout history,” but I don’t know whether it is any change from the initial implementation. They also say that “takes the highest intensity of each exercise from your profile and calculates your personal muscle load.” Does it mean the heaviest of the heaviest (using the traditional meaning of intensity) or the fastest (using intensity as a expression for velocity)? Then, they do not define their terms.

Therefore, I am disappointed at many levels. I am disappointed that whatever does not provide, it seemed to a VBT company to cannibal to provide anything. I am disappointed that who does not tell you what the power trainer is doing There. I am disappointed that the strength trainer is so difficult to use in his most full-specialty versions, and I am disappointed that I do not even know if I am remembering using a more convenient logal later function.

The irony is that the part of the Strength Trainer that I login to the late – perhaps never require any heart rate or velocity tracking. Just enter your number, and let the algorithm see how much and how heavy you were raising. What was not needed to acquire a company or create a follow-follow-feature for it.

But here we are. Great if you find it convenient to follow the workouts through the app. You are lucky with I.