I started wearing my Whoop strap on July 1st and have been blogging about my experience. The Whoop strap is a wearable performance monitor that measures your strain (workout intensity), recovery and sleep. One of the first things I learned is that my recovery was very low. I felt this is my body, and it was incredibly powerful to see those feelings validated by my personal biometric data. I looked into what factors negatively impacted my recovery and was (not really) surprised to learn about alcohol's negative impact on recovery. I have always known that my performance in the gym suffers if I have 2 or more drinks the night before. Now I have actual data based on my body on how alcohol impacts my recovery. To get a sense of what happens to me when I have more than 2 drinks I listened to the WHOOP podcast. I learned some very, very powerful things. First - Dose make the poison and all it takes is ONE drink for our body to have a decrease in heart rate variability, an increase in resting heart rate, an increase in disturbances, less time spent in the restorative stages of sleep. WOW! One drink does all that. Imagine what 2 drinks will do! Here are some of the negative impacts I learned from the WHOOP podcast.
Here is my recovery for the past week. I worked out Mon-Tue -Wed - Friday and went for an long easy hike on Sunday. I was really surprised my recovery on Wednesday was so high since i had done the workout Kelly on Tuesday. I think it caught up with me on Thursday because I had a few beers on Wednesday and my recovery tanked. Luckily I recovered on Friday and Saturday only to have a gradual slide into the red by Tuesday. I didn't do any workouts over the weekend, just a long slow hike on Sunday. What did I do? I drank. I drank more than 2 drinks Saturday, Sunday and Monday and it shows on Tuesday. The WHOOP sleep podcast discusses at length the deleterious impact alcohol has on sleep. I looked at my sleep data for Saturday, Sunday and Monday it shows a slow decline of deep sleep and sleep efficiency. I rely on both of these for solid recovery. I am very interested to see how I will rebound this week. We have some big workouts and I plan to keep to my regular schedule. The one thing I will be altering? I won't be drinking more than 2 drinks and I won't drink 6 hours before bed. Click on the link below to listen to the entire WHOOP podcast on alcohol. It's just over 30 minutes and totally worth your time. If you are interested in joining me on a Whoop journey, use my link to get your first month free. If you're already a Whoop user, join our True Spirit Whoop Group with the team code: COMM-AD6416.
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