Nick Watney didn’t have a cough at Harbour Town. He didn’t have a fever, either. But when the strap attached to his wrist showed a big jump in the number of breaths he was taking each minute, he went and got a coronavirus test.
Watney became the first player in the PGA Tour bubble to be diagnosed with Covid-19 last June and sent interest soaring in the small device that alerted him to seek medical advice.
The Whoop strap is now everywhere in professional golf. At nearly all tournaments you’ll see players sporting the fitness monitor – either on their wrist or on a bicep.
Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas and both Jessica and Nella Korda are just some of the high profile adopters routinely monitoring their sleep, strain and recovery numbers to improve their training and performance.
So could it help sharpen your game? NCG’s Steve Carroll, a 10-handicapper, and Hannah Holden, a scratch player who regularly competes in Britain’s biggest amateur tournaments, have spent several months wearing the strap and poring over graphs and figures. Here’s what they found…
The club golfer
The night before a competition, if it was an event where I really wanted to be at my best, I’d avoid a big session on the ale, writes Steve Carroll.
Hangovers and golf don’t equal a good show – none of us need a fitness device to tell us that. But one of the key things I found using Whoop is what just a small amount of alcohol does to my body.
A single pint after about 9pm can obliterate the parts of my sleep that really matter – REM and Slow Wave – and push my resting heart rate up as much as half a dozen beats.
So I don’t hit the sauce any more if I’m really keen to make birdies.
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I always thought I got a solid eight hours anyway. Whoop has revealed I’m nowhere close.
Did you know we regularly wake up in the night? Some episodes are brief enough that you might not even notice but they all add up.
In my case, it’s an average of 14 disturbances every night – combining to just over an hour of lost shuteye.
We all feel stress sometimes and we all feel tired. But Whoop means I can measure that in numbers. I can see how a hard day affects my recovery as a percentage. I can measure the balance in my autonomic nervous system to see how the way I act, and what I eat and drink, affects my heart rate variability.
