Hello. I’m new to Whoop and love the features. I’m a keen trail runner and today did a 24km trail run with 1200m ascent. I’d assume that the amount of ascent and descent would add extra muscular strain (like when you go to the gym and add strength work and it massively increases the strain).
However it seems to simply treat a trail run as ‘running’, but given one key element of trail running is to keep HR down, I wonder if it is missing the strain from a run. What do you think?
Hey Pete, how new to WHOOP are you? It may still be calibrating, and you’ll get more accurate results in a week or so.
Hi Pete - not being a seasoned trailrunner, but I am pretty sure the only times muscular strain is tracked by whoop is during strength training. But you should see more strain as when running with the same pace on a relatively flat terrain. In the end the Whoop is not a running device but should help you gauge how intense one workout is (e.g compared to another). But adding muscular strain to trailrunning would be a nice feature!
I have made good experiences with newer Suunto watches and their Zonesense technology when it comes to estimate the intensity of workouts in realtime (like running in hilly terrain)
Thanks. I just figured that if you’re doing massive climbs, that there’s a lot of strength work involved, so that muscular effort would be factored into the strain score. I was struck this week that a 45 gym session (where I recorded the strength work) had a higher strain than a 4 hour/ 1200m trail run (that left me spent for the rest of the day)!
Thanks for the response !
Was your trial running tracked by other device with GPS data? If so then there may be hope that Whoop could possibly use it to calculate strain based on elev. gain etc. Otherwise it may be hard to expect it to know how hard was given trial run.
May be worth to try and see if it makes any difference in similar runs with and without GPS data.
Other possibility is that Whoop doesn’t use GPS data to such calculations and can base its strain score simply on HR which usually goes up with harder effort ie. when running uphill.