Following the launch of WHOOP 4.0, WHOOP co-founder and chief technology officer, John Capodilupo, spoke with Ministry of Sport to explain how wearable technology can influence high-performance sport.
WHOOP 4.0 is labelled a personalised 24/7 digital fitness and health coach, with a first-of-its-kind line of smart apparel allowing users the opportunity to wear the technology on multiple locations on the body.
Discussing the launch of the product, Capodilupo told Ministry of Sport: “WHOOP 4.0 is really revolutionary in the wearable space.”
“The biggest splash we made in terms of the technological progress is the WHOOP Body and Any-Wear Technology, no longer confined to the wrist.
“Truly making wearables able to be worn anywhere on the body, it gives you the same functionality and readings as it does on the wrist.
“It’s 33% smaller than the 3.0, but we didn’t sacrifice any battery; it’s a remarkable feat of engineering pushing the boundaries of low power management, new components, but also it is the first product in the world using silicone-nano battery which enables us to get it much more energy rich to enable 5-day battery life in a smaller form and enabling new features,” he said.
On the value of WHOOP and wearables for professional athletes, Capodilupo said the understanding of the data is essential to reaching peak performance and durability.
“Whoop’s central mission is to unlock human performance and help people understand their physiology, what’s going on with their bodies, and how their behaviours, whether that’s working out, sleeping, even drinking, are affecting their bodies and what they can do to optimise that,” Capodilupo said.
“Especially for professional or even recreation athletes, its your job to perform at the highest level or at least have that understanding.
“We have so much data, but most people don’t really know what’s going on in their bodies, knowing all the data and understanding your baseline and how your body’s physiology adjusts to these things can be really powerful.
“It helps you fine-tune various things that work well for you as people are very individualised and respond to things in completely different ways.
“10 years from now, everyone is going to be training according to recovery.
“If your body is not responding well to a particular exercise, it’s better to take a rest and do recovery exercises.
“That’s so obvious from the data and now we’re just starting to see that in practice,” he said.
When asked how sporting organisations are understanding and integrating wearable technology, Capodilupo said there is still an educational aspect for a lot of organisations on the true value.
“We’ve seen a tremendous shift from the last five years,” Capodilupo said.
“When we first started WHOOP, Fitbit was the predominant wearable, and 10,000 steps was your goal every single day.
“It wasn’t fluctuating based on your body, how you slept the night before or maybe you did 80,000 steps the day before.
“WHOOP was the first wearable to tell people, ‘you know what, your body is not ready to exert today, why don’t you take a rest day’, and that fundamental shift has started to take hold both in professional sports and consumers at large who are interested in understanding their body, avoiding injury, and optimising performance.
“For a lot of sporting organisations, Australia is in the lead, most understand it quite well…
“There’s less education needed in Australia, but lots needed around the rest of the world.
“What gets us really excited about WHOOP and the way the industry is moving is combining your physiological data and response with objective performance data and behaviour data.
“Some things no matter how much technology advances, can’t be inferred, you have to know what’s going on, but looking at either one in isolation can only get you so far.
“You can do a lot with the physiological response, but if you know why the body is behaving a certain way because of the things you did, you’re able to fine-tune a lot better and that’s where a lot of the exciting integrations in data are coming from,” he told Ministry of Sport.
