A fusion of fitness: Whoop improves Apple Health sync
Whoop has announced some improvements to the Apple Health sync functionality which make logging of meals easier. This feature has been on many Whoop user’s wish-lists for a while now.
How to sync data from Whoop to Apple Health
Enabling this integration is a straightforward process. For starters, users need to update to the latest Whoop smartphone app. Then its a matter of navigation through a few steps that include accessing the Apple Health option from the menu, connecting, turning on all (or select) categories, and finally allowing the Whoop app to send data to Apple’s platform.
Once the link-up is established, Whoop starts transferring data, typically syncing a week’s worth of data. This includes Active Energy, which tracks the calories burned during activities; blood oxygen levels (SpO2); heart rate; respiratory rate; resting heart rate; sleep times; and workouts as defined by Whoop.
Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets
The frequency at which Whoop updates this data in Apple Health varies. Active Energy, for instance, is recorded only for workouts identified by Whoop, while metrics such as blood oxygen, respiratory rate, and resting heart rate are updated once per day upon waking up, showcasing average overnight values. Sleep data is written in chunks for ‘asleep’ and ‘awake’ time, similar to many other watches. When it comes to Workouts, Whoop creates entries in Apple Health but omits the heart rate values during the workout itself.
Unfortunately, Whoop does not write the heart rate variability (HRV) values from the 4.0 bands to Apple Health. The company cites differences in Apple’s method of writing HRV values compared to the rest of the world. That also explains why Garmin watches do not sync HRV data to Apple Health.
Transferring Apple Health data to Whoop
The integration also works the other way around. The full gamut of stats that can be synced to Whoop includes workouts, workout routes, active energy, distance, Mindful Minutes, weight, height and nutrition information.
The last on this list is particularly interesting. Whoop refers to it as “Auto-Log Nutrition”.
The feature works with a number of nutrition tracking apps that are compatible with Apple Health, including MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, and Cronometer. WHOOP makes it simple by importing data from these apps via the Apple Health connection. Data that is transferred over includes calorie, carbohydrate, fat, protein and water intake.
If you happen to use multiple apps to log nutrition on the same day, WHOOP selects the data from the app with more entries for that day instead of mixing data from different apps. So it will not aggregate the information.
Those that already use these nutrition tracking apps will be thrilled with this integration. It will make the logging of this type of data in Whoop’s Journal much easier.
There has been no new hardware from company this year but they’ve been adding lots of new functionality to the Whoop app. If you are serious about recovery tracking, there’s simply no better device on the market right now than Whoop 4.0. Check out our full review on this link.
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