How Useful are Recovery Wearables When Doing Pole and Aerial?

The year of our lord 2025 has really been a doozy. I’ve been feeling like a corpse lately, and I wanted to figure out: is it post lockdown blues? Turning 35? Have I finally gotten out of the trauma response to my divorce and now I’m feeling all my feelings? So, I decided to get a fitness wearable to see how my health is doing. Whoop offers a 1 month free trial of their service and sends you the device for free so I thought I’d try it out. I also had a sleep study in the middle of this Whoop trial so I can compare it to major medical machines.

What Does Whoop Track?

Most wearables track the same metrics, but Whoop is the only one I’ve tested personally. Whoop takes about 14 days to calibrate. After 7 days it’s partially calibrated. It tracks heart rate (which then gives resting heart rate and heart rate variability), VO2 Max, body temperature (via skin temperature), steps, sleep, daily strain, and a bunch of other factors. Most of these factors are calculated by the app based on your heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin temperature.

In my experience with the Whoop, it gets a lot of things wrong. Maybe it’s because I focus on breath work when I’m doing silks, maybe it’s because I take a lot of rest breaks and don’t push myself to a breaking point as a student (only because I coach now and I can’t be broken and coach—it’s a bad look), but it’s gotten many, many things wrong.

The Sleep Study That (Likely) Confused the Whoop

As I said above, I did a medical sleep study during the time I wore the Whoop. For those of you who haven’t done a sleep study, it started with a night time sleep study where I showed up at the hospital around 8 pm, a tech attached a ton of electrodes to my head, face, chest, and legs to track brain activity, eye movement, respiration, heart rate, and leg movements while I slept through the night. Since the night time study showed no immediate reason why I should be tired, they continued on with a daytime test. The daytime test involved leaving all but the leg electrodes on, staying awake for 2 hours, then being given a 30 minute window to nap; this process repeated 5 times. During the nap periods I was given up to 15 minutes to fall asleep and 15 minutes to be asleep. If the devices hadn’t shown me falling asleep per whatever metrics the tech was looking at, I’d have to get out of bed and forgo the nap (though this didn’t happen for me, I slept all 5 times).

I was curious about what the Whoop would find with all this unusual napping so I made sure to record each one of them in the app. For all but the second nap, the Whoop reported “nap incomplete.” I still don’t know what that means, but I’m assuming it means the Whoop didn’t register that I had fallen asleep and there was no data. Only nap #2 counted per the Whoop and it had me marked as asleep for 18 minutes. In that 18 minutes, 7 was spent in light sleep, and 11 in Slow Wave Sleep (SWS)—a restorative type of sleep categorized by decreased brain activity, it’s the stage of sleep just before Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.

Now, the weird napping schedule very likely confused the shit out of the whoop because that’s a really weird data set to get. A few days following the sleep test, I camped out on my couch to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters and was admittedly pretty still for a while and the Whoop recorded that as a nap complete with REM sleep. I wish I had taken a screen shot of it before deleting the “nap” from my tracker.

Other Weird Readings from Whoop

I’ve also worn the whoop while coaching aerial silks, taking a lyra class, taking a handstand class, and taking a straps class. Because I focus on my breathing for all of these and take lots of breaks between reps so I don’t trigger an asthma attack, my heart rate stays low. For the studio where I took handstands, lyra, and straps, we don’t have control of the thermostat so it’s cold; which also meant my skin temperature didn’t increase much. I suspect it’s these factors that caused the whoop to call straps a “low strain” activity that’s “great for rest days.” [Please note this is absolute bullshit and if anyone tells me working on straps is a good rest and recovery activity I will yell at them].

Why People Love Whoop–And Why I Don’t

People love Whoop for its heart rate variability tracking—this is usually a good indicator for how fit you are and how recovered you are from a previous workout. It’s really only a good indicator of cardiovascular health. The Whoop doesn’t measure other things that are important for recovery like how balanced your workout plan is (do you do equal amounts push and pull; do you do both upper and lower body), how much water you’ve had, or what your nutrition looks like (it may have a nutrition section that I haven’t discovered).

I liked the sleep tracking aspect until the sleep study showed me just how far off it is. I also hate wearing the damn thing. I’m not a watch girlie, so wearing it like a watch has been highly irritating and it gets caught on stuff. For straps I moved it to my ankle so I could use wrist wraps and having on the ankle def gave ankle monitor vibes. Wearing on my arm like an armband felt wayyyy too much like wearing a nazi arm band so that was also a nope from me. There are other places you can wear it, but I don’t plan on buying any extra accessories for this thing because I don’t plan to continue with it.

Also, the band is safe to wear in water but super absorbent, so it’s like wearing a wet scrunchie on your wrist all day. You aren’t supposed to take the Whoop off, because that can mess up its calibration, so I’ve been wearing this thing nonstop since starting the free trial. After about 10 days the band started getting smelly, even though I’m showing in it and cleaning it with my bodywash. This means if you’re in it for the long haul you’ll need more accessories for it so you can change out and wash the band.

Whoop is a subscription model. This seems genius at first—get the tech free, shipped to your house. For most people, finding the inertia to enact change is hard, so once they get the device and sign up for the subscription, behavioral science shows they’ll probably stick with it because going out and finding a replacement device is too much work. The Whoop has 3 tiers: Whoop 1 which is $199/year, Whoop Peak which is $239 a year, and Whoop Life which is $359, each tier tracks more metrics than the cheaper tier. For comparison, an Apple watch SE is $249, tracks the same health metrics, and has additional functionality with Apple devices. If you’re more of an Android person, a Samsung Galaxy Watch8 is $349, tracks all the same health metrics, and has additional functionality with a Samsung or other Android based phone.

In Conclusion

I get why some people like these wearable fitness trackers—it’s good information if you trust the accuracy, but I flipping hate this thing. I also think it does an incredibly poor job at recording strength-based activities like a high level tricks class for pole, weight lifting, and aerial arts. I know I need to do more cardio for my overall health—but I knew this before entering this experiment. I find the fitness tracker to be an unreliable record of the data it claims to collect. If I had a way to verify the data collected was correct, I would trust the insights provided by the app. I’m very curious to see the results of the sleep study (which I will get back soon!) and see if I can get enough data to compare to the Whoop.

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Cora

Circus Cora is a Virginia-based aerialist, variety performer, and fitness instructor. She has been training aerial silks since 2015 and will try any apparatus she can get her hands one. She currently coaches at several gyms in Virginia and Maryland and enjoys spending her downtime with her cats, Cookie and Lena.

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