Is the WHOOP watch accurate enough to use with players?

Speaking with football performance practitioners recently, it appears that there is a significant increase in the number of players engaging with wearable technology to monitor their health outside of training.

In particular, WHOOP appears to have broken into the professional football setting, no doubt due to the popularity gained through elite player endorsement, such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Virgil Van Dijk.

One Premier League club I spoke with said around 75% of their squad are now using WHOOP to track their health metrics.

Like with any technology we use with players, its important to understand the accuracy in order to make effective performance decisions.

One of the key features of WHOOP is its ability to track sleep and heart-rate based metrics 24/7, as the design of the watch allows portable charging without the need to take it off.

In terms of sleep measures, WHOOP stacks up well against the gold standard approach (polysomnography) in this systematic review published earlier this year.

It scores well for quantifying overall sleep, but not so well for specific sleep stages - particularly for rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

The heart rate measurement uses photoplethysmography, which is the pulsatile blood flow between the heart’s systole and diastole via LED-emitted light.

This 2021 study using an older version of the WHOOP watch (2.0) revealed a good level of accuracy in terms of general heart rate but some lower accuracy for heart rate variability calculations.

With a limited amount of independently-tested data on the accuracy of the newer WHOOP 4.0 watch, use of the new bicep band approach and talk of the released of a 5.0 version, there is much more work to be done in this space.

I have personally been using WHOOP for 2 months now. Whilst I don’t 100% hang my hat on the data, I have found it useful to help better inform my daily habits to improve my health and wellbeing.

Looking to understand more about how to keep your players healthy and injury free using wearable technology?

Check out my Football Physical Performance Community where we do deep dives into football training and player monitoring.

See you next week!