\u201cSleep is the most important tool that I have,\u201d insists Cristiano Ronaldo, sitting in a chair in a non-descript dressing room. \u201cTo be consistent in the time that I go to bed and the time that I wake up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Portuguese footballer is wearing a jumper emblazoned with W\ufeffhoop, a wearable fitness product that helps track a variety of health metrics such as sleep, strain and stress. Ronaldo invested in the company last year, alongside other athletes \ufeffincluding Rory McIlroy and Patrick Mahomes. Having been founded by Harvard\u2019s squash captain Will Ahmed in 2012, it was valued at $3.6 billion in 2021.<\/p>\n
W\ufeffhoop is just one of a number of wearable fitness devices that have proliferated at the highest levels of sport. Tennis players like Aryna Sabalenka and Maria Sakkari have been spotted wearing one, as have cricket players like Virat Kohli. But these devices are also increasingly popular among the general population, where there has been a boom in interest in fitness.<\/p>\n
Whether it is via a Fitbit, an Oura ring or a Garmin, we are all suddenly more likely to be talking about our HRV (heart rate variability) or time spent in deep sleep.<\/p>\n
Arsenal defender Katie McCabe has been using W\ufeffhoop for around five years now.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing how our hormones change as female athletes, and how that can impact your performance, is something that I\u2019ve really zoned in on, especially in the last year and a half.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can squeeze those extra percentages within your training session, at the gym, or on the pitch, but also be mindful of when you actually need to taper down.\u201d<\/p>\n
There has been an uptake of female athletes using fitness wearables which has been noticed by Jo Perkins, female health and performance lead for The Well HQ.<\/p>\n
\u201c\ufeffIt\u2019s an individual choice,\u201d she says. \u201cCollecting any data has to be relevant and useful. If there\u2019s no plan with what to do with it after, it can cause confusion and stress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perkins gives the example of knowing an athlete has only slept for five hours. In a team sport, where they can\u2019t change when they train or when they play a match, that can create negative feelings for the athlete and affect performance even more.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s got to be player first. Data should always be supportive. Treat whoever is in front of you. But the data can certainly be really helpful to intervene early if [an athlete] isn\u2019t feeling well mentally or physically.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe human body has been around for a long time,\u201d says Renee McGregor, a sports dietitian who works with Olympic athletes. \u201cIt\u2019s done pretty well for itself, and we should probably be listening to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are getting more and more obsessed with [devices] and losing track of listening to their bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
McGregor\u2019s concern, both at an elite and population level, is that metrics from these devices can become distorted based on a variety of factors such as mood, menstrual cycle or nutrition.<\/p>\n
But becoming too obsessed with the data can lead to unhealthy behaviours.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are certain people that can use the data and it doesn\u2019t affect their daily life, but there are a lot of people who will become psychologically impacted by that data.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenerally, we\u2019re in a problematic era where everyone wants to train like an athlete. Why? Why are we feeling like that\u2019s an identity that we have to tick? What\u2019s wrong with being someone who just likes exercise?<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like everybody\u2019s trying to control everything. Everything\u2019s being digitised. Everything is becoming a metric. Everything is something you can improve on. I don\u2019t know how healthy that is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a really big market shift happening where people want to feel in control of their health,\u201d says Alexi Coffey, VP of Product at Whoop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want to be able to act when there is time on their side. So we\u2019re seeing this shift into preventative\u00a0health.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really take responsibility of this daily engagement. It is an honour that people choose to wear our product.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are purely there to add value, so we very intentionally do not do behavioural gamification principles that can be a little sneaky.\u201d<\/p>\n
The global uptick in physical data collection of this kind is also creating large data sets for companies, which comes with concerns around privacy. A recent collaboration between Oura and Palantir, Peter Thiel\u2019s data analytics company, was condemned by some users of the technology given Palantir\u2019s history of working with organisations like the Israeli Defence Forces and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n
An Oura statement clarified that the partnership related solely to US Department of Defence employees who opted in, but how individuals\u2019 health data is looked after and by who remains a live question.<\/p>\n
It is unlikely the interest in fitness wearables is going away any time soon, with devices only lowering in price and fitness obsessions continuing to grow. Not all professional sportspeople are convinced though. As Danny Welbeck said when talking about the trend \ufeffthat has been adopted by his teammates at Brighton on BBC Radio 5 Live: \u201cI know when I wake up, if I feel good, I feel good.\u201d Sometimes elite sport can still really be that\u00a0simple.<\/p>\n
Photograph by Michael Owens\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cSleep is the most important tool that I have,\u201d insists Cristiano Ronaldo, sitting in a chair in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[337,97],"class_list":{"0":"post-269444","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}