The Best Recovery Activities According To WHOOP Members

Recovery is essential to perform at your best, but knowing exactly what to do can be challenging. We took a look at the most popular and effective Recovery activities recorded by WHOOP members that you can try and see how they affect your unique data.

The Most Popular Recovery Activities

WHOOP Recovery is a daily measure of how prepared your body is to perform, no matter what it is that you do. Recovery quantifies how your body adapts to various stressors by accounting for several key physiological metrics including Heart Rate Variability, Rest Heart Rate, and Respiratory Rate.

Here are the 5 most popular Recovery Activities logged on WHOOP:

1. Meditation
2. Stretching
3. Increase Relaxation (breathwork)
4. Ice Bath
5. Massage Therapy

The Most Effective Recovery Activities

Everyone recovers differently on different days, but some recovery activities that can be recorded and tracked in the WHOOP app generally help members recover more effectively. According to WHOOP member data, the activities with the highest average impact on recovery are meditation (+1%) and massage therapy (+.82%). Stretching (+.52%), ice bath (+0.41%) and increase relaxation (breathwork) (+0.29%) have a slightly less significant impact, but still had an overall positive effect. These recovery activities are associated with the ability to decrease your heart rate, improve HRV, and boost mood.

How to Understand Your Recovery Activities

While you can build a strong recovery routine and track many recovery behaviors in the WHOOP Journal, now you can log them as Activities to see how they affect your Recovery score more clearly. To see your Recovery Details, tap into a saved tile on the Home screen. These can save automatically through Apple Health Kit or manually through the action (+) button via ‘Start Activity’ or ‘Add Activity’. Use ‘Start Activity’ to log a Recovery Activity in the moment or ‘Add Activity’ to log that you already finished a stretch or meditation earlier. Tap into that activity on your home screen and drag your finger across the stress and heart rate charts for minute-by-minute data, so you can understand how effective your Recovery activities were and make even better choices for your well-being.

Plus, we've added two new Recovery activities into the app for you to track — breathwork and yoga nidra, or non-sleep deep rest, which is a method of deep relaxation, achieved when the body is in a relaxed state, but the mind is still awake.