All-new Body Composition and Weight trends: Insights that Lead to Progress

With WHOOP, you can now track your body composition and weight to get direct insights into muscle mass and body fat changes. These new metrics can help you make progress against your goals – and take control of your long-term health.

Weight is so much more than a number – and doesn’t always tell the whole story. You might still be making progress, even if a number on a scale isn’t changing. Understanding the composition of your body – meaning the muscle, bone, water, and fat your body contains – offers more than just aesthetic benefits. Metrics like HRV often increase as muscle mass increases, and as you decrease fat or reduce body size, there’s often a decrease in resting heart rate. Balanced body composition also has benefits like reduced risk of chronic diseases, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. 

If you’re looking to change your body composition, whether that's increasing muscle mass, decreasing fat, or maintaining where you are, understanding the components of your composition is essential. Lean body mass is defined as a combination of your muscle, bone, and water mass. Body fat refers to fat that functions as a source of stored energy, as well fat that plays an active role in body function. Changing your composition comes from adopting healthy habits, like consistent sleep, wake times, meal times, and exercise. A healthy balance of fat and muscle is key to improving your long-term health. 

Body composition is unique to everyone, and there is a lot of variability. These are reported lean body mass averages in America by gender and age:  

By incorporating body composition and weight data alongside WHOOP metrics, you’ll get a more comprehensive view of your health, and gain insights into how your body composition impacts your sleep, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and more. 

How Do You Track Body Composition with WHOOP?

You can start tracking your body composition and weight data by connecting existing data from WITHINGS, the preferred partner for the most seamless integration, or connect through Apple Health, Google Health Connect, or manual entry. You’ll be able to see weekly, monthly, and 6 month Lean Body Mass and Weight Trends. 

There are several different options for tracking body composition: 

• Using a WITHINGS scale:
  • Visit More>App Settings>Integrations>WITHINGS to connect your lean body mass and weight data to WITHINGS, the preferred partner for the most seamless integration. Only the WITHINGS Body Scan scale offers segmental body composition insights within the Lean Body Mass trends.
• Other smart scales or apps: 
  • If you choose to use a different smart scale, you’ll need to ensure it connects via Apple Health or Health Connect. Visit More>App Settings>Integrations> Apple Health or Health Connect to connect your lean body mass and weight data with your connected scale, device, or app.  
• Manually:
  • Tap into any of your "KEY STATISTICS" from Home> tap down into "Lean Body Mass" or "Weight"> "ADD MANUAL MEASUREMENT"> then follow the prompts including saving by hitting "ADD MEASUREMENT".

By using a WITHINGS Body Scan scale, you'll experience the most instant, immediate, and comprehensive integration, and you can also import segmental body composition data to see trends like fat and muscle mass across your arms, legs and torso. Just connect your WITHINGS account to automatically import weight, lean body mass percentage, and body fat percentage. 

If you don’t want to see your body composition data, you can hide those metrics when you want to. Go to More > App Settings > Hide Metrics and follow the prompts. 

You can also highlight Lean Body Mass or Weight metrics so your WHOOP Home view has the data that matters most to you and your goals. Start at Home > scroll down slightly to “Key Statistics” > tap “Customize” and tap into the metrics you want to highlight. To add these to the Home view of your metrics, drag Lean Body Mass and/or Weight to the top of the “On Overview” list.  

How to Improve Body Composition

Cardiovascular-centric exercise is typically the most effective in decreasing fat mass, while muscular-centric exercise like weight lifting is typically the most effective in increasing muscle mass. The most important thing is maintaining habits and being consistent with the movement that’s best for you.

Typically it takes a few months to see significant changes to body composition and weight. There are many factors that impact body composition including consistent healthy habits like sleep, exercise, meal times and diet. Make sure to view the changes to your body composition or weight trends in the 6 month view for a holistic view of progress against your goal.