Measuring Your VO2 Max Made Easier with Whoop
Kickin' It Up a Notch:
Whoop, the screenless, wearable band contender that left Oura in the dust during my non-watch fitness tracker face-off, has leveled up with the addition of a VO2 max feature to its app. Now, just like Garmin, Apple Watch, and other heavy hitters, it can spit out a numerical assessment of your cardio fitness and keep tabs on how it changes over time.
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VO2 Max: A Familiar Fitness Metric
VO2 max is a measure of cardiovascular (or aerobic) fitness, a two-digit number that ranges from a sedentary person's 20 to an athlete's 50+. Simply put, it reveals how efficiently your heart and lungs deliver oxygen to your muscles during exercise.
Technically speaking, it represents the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use per minute while exercising, divided by your body weight. The higher that number, the better your cardiovascular performance.
Measuring VO2 Max: The Science Behind It
A lab test is required to obtain an accurate VO2 max reading, but wearables like Whoop, Garmin watches, and Apple Watches estimate your cardio fitness through other means. Most commonly, they'll analyze your heart rate during different activities, such as jogging or walking.
Apparently, Whoop employs a more sophisticated approach, leveraging a proprietary algorithm to calculate your VO2 max score. Thisincludes monitoringyour resting heart rate and heart rate variability, recognizing your exercise patterns, and analyzing GPS-tracked performance metrics (when available). Furthermore, it factors in age, height, weight, and biological sex to adjust for naturally occurring changes and physical discrepancies in oxygen utilization.
How Does Whoop Determine Your VO2 Max?
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I expected Whoop to use a running/walking-based calculation like other wearables, but its explanation hints at something more advanced (and tough to fact-check) under the hood. Whoop claims its algorithm is trained on gold-standard laboratory data from its diverse user base, but it remains unclear what the Whoop band is measuring precisely to calculate your VO2 max or if it's relying on AI guesswork for people with similar metrics. I've reached out to the company for further clarification and will update as needed.
Currently, I don't have a VO2 max score displayed in my Whoop app, as it requires 14 recoveries (essentially, 14 nights of sleep) to provide this information, and I haven't worn my Whoop band recently.
Locating Your VO2 Max in the Whoop App
According to Whoop support, you can find this feature on the Strain tab. Simply tap "VO2 max" to view monthly or six-month trends. Users on Reddit have reported that the rollout of this feature has been happening over the past few days, with everyone expected to have it by March 13 (today).
- The addition of a VO2 max feature in the Whoop app allows it to join heavyweights like Garmin and Apple Watch in calculating and tracking health-related metrics, such as cardiovascular fitness, following the renowned wearable band contest against Oura.
- Curious about your cardiovascular fitness? The Whoop band, along with other wearables like Garmin watches and Apple Watches, can estimate your VO2 max score by analyzing various factors, including resting heart rate, heart rate variability, exercise patterns, and GPS-tracked performance metrics.
- In the future, wearers may wonder about the specifics of how the Whoop band calculates their VO2 max, since the company claims its proprietary algorithm is trained on gold-standard laboratory data from its diverse user base, but more clarity is needed on the exact measurements it takes and the role of AI guesswork for similar users.
