Testing The Impact of Our Multivitamin Using the Whoop 4.0

Okay so in this month’s blog we wanted to do something a little different. Being the creators of a performance multivitamin, we are always interested in new technology that can improve performance.
One of the most popular devices right now is the Whoop 4.0. The Whoop is a fitness strap that uses your heart rate to provide data on your body's readiness for performance. It’s similar to a Fitbit or Apple Watch, but provides a lot more insight.
So that got us thinking - would taking our Daily Driver Multivitamin have any positive impact on Whoop’s 3 core insights: Recovery, Strain and Sleep Performance?
And therein was born The Test. Our founder (Josh) stopped taking the Daily Driver for 4 weeks to ensure he was receiving no benefits from the product. He then started tracking with the use of Whoop for one week whilst not taking the Daily Driver. After the week had ended, he then started taking the Daily Driver and continued to use Whoop to track his performance and recovery.
A huge caveat from us: This is a fun test and in no way replaces a clinical trial (although that is something on our list we’d like to do!).
Before diving into the results, let us explain how Whoop works.

How does Whoop work?

Whoop is a fitness band that is worn 24/7 by its user - yes, every single second of the day! It even comes with a portable charger that clips onto the strap, you never need to take the Whoop off.
The benefit of not taking the Whoop off is that it is constantly collecting data (via your heart rate). The Whoop uses a variety of heart rate measurements (HRV, RHR, Respiratory Rate etc.) in combination with sleep to provide your scores each day.
Whoop was originally designed for elite athletes (2 of its first 100 customers were Michael Phelps and Lebron James). It's since become mass-market and is great for anyone interested in performance and recovery.
 
Whoop 4.0 strap

A quick overview of Josh's routine (our test subject)

We thought it would be worth giving you a quick insight into the lifestyle/routine of our test subject (who also happens to be our Founder… this won’t be biassed, promise!).
Josh wakes up around 07:30 and goes to bed around 23:00. He has oats for breakfast and then 2 meals later during the day that resemble a typical dinner. He will consume typical snacks throughout the day. Unlike most, he doesn’t drink much coffee at all (so we don’t expect to see any heart rate increases due to high caffeine consumption).
In terms of exercise, he usually does 3 strength workouts per week and on the weekends either plays tennis or golf. For this experiment, he made sure to keep his training frequency identical in order to conduct a fairer test.
For the first week of the test he didn’t consume the Daily Driver Multivitamin. For the following week, he took our Daily Driver each day before bed.
Right, let’s get into the results…

What impact did our multivitamin have on Sleep Performance?

What is Sleep Performance? Whoop define their sleep performance as:
“The Sleep section of the app provides in-depth sleep performance monitoring by tracking your time in bed, hours asleep, sleep need, sleep performance, disturbances, sleep efficiency, and stages of sleep. Additionally, you receive daily optimal sleep recommendations based on your recent sleep performance.
Sleep Performance is reported on a 0-100% scale; 100% indicates you achieved all the sleep you needed for the night.”
Now, the Daily Driver Multivitamin isn’t specifically designed to improve sleep but it does have some vitamins that can contribute to a better 40 winks. Side note: if you do want to know more about our multivitamin you can check out our blog 5 Reasons Why Our Daily Multivitamin Is The Best For Your Goals.
Sleep is impacted by other things such as caffeine, exposure to phone/TV screens etc. prior to bed and simply general tiredness.
So, his Sleep Performance score on the week without the Daily Driver was 78%. That’s a pretty decent starting point to be honest (anything over 70% puts you in the ‘green’ on Whoop).
Josh then kept his routine exactly the same for the next week, apart from now he was taking the Daily Driver before bed each night.
Over the course of the week he saw his average Sleep Performance increase to 81%. This represents a marginal increase in Sleep Performance of 3%.
What’s interesting is that Josh’s total sleeping time also increased from 7:01 hours per night to 07:06 hours per night. Note: Whoop calculates Sleep Performance based on sleep not total time in bed, Josh lost ~1 hour every night due to ‘waking up’ during his sleep, primarily due to moving - this is pretty standard.
Looking at Sleep Performance and total sleep per night, the week on the Daily Driver showed marginal improvements. We wouldn’t claim this is a clear indicator the Daily Driver improves sleep, but it’s an improvement in an area we don’t claim to specialise in, so we’ll take it.
Onto Strain…
Whoop 4.0 sleep performance

What impact did our multivitamin have on Strain?

Strain? What’s that? According to Whoop it is:
“Strain is a summarizing metric of the cardiovascular load - the level of strain your training takes on your cardiovascular system based on your heart rate - achieved during an individual activity or over the course of a day. Strain is scored on a scale from 0 to 21.”
We’ll caveat up front that we see Strain as the least accurate score Whoop provides. This is due to the Strain score being derived from heart rate. During Josh’s time using Whoop, he did see his Strain score increase more from long walks than some strength workouts. Clearly we’d expect the body to be under more strain due to strength training even when average heart rate is lower.
Therefore, let’s take this section with a pinch of salt!
During the week without the Daily Driver, Josh’s strain score was 10.2 out of 21. According to Whoop, this represents “moderate stress is being put on the body, which helps maintain fitness.”
The key word here is fitness - this doesn’t seem to represent strength gains, which the majority of training sessions this week were focused on.
During the week with the Daily Driver, Josh’s strain score was 9.4 out of 21. Again representing moderate stress on the body.
Similar to Sleep Performance, there is a marginal change here, but again in a positive direction. It seems Josh’s body was able to better cope with strain whilst using the same intensity in his workouts for that week.

What impact did our multivitamin have on Recovery?

It’s time for the big one. The creme de la creme, the one we all care about. Recovery.
So in the Whoop world, recovery “reflects how well prepared your body is to take on Strain, and is a measure of your body's "return to baseline" after a stressor. The size of these stressors - which can range from illness, exercise, psychological stress or sleep deprivation - determines how much your body needs to recover”.
The best recovery score you can get is 100%, the worst is 0%.
We see Recovery as a pivotal score because it considers pretty much everything. Sleep Performance, Strain + a whole bunch of other heart rate measurements (literally it even monitors how many breaths you take per minute). And simply, if you’re not recovered you won’t perform well - which is what we care about!
Drum roll please….
For the week that Josh didn’t take the Daily Driver his recovery score was 40%!!
This is pretty poor (a score of 33% puts you in the red on Whoop). Getting this low of a score was a big surprise to Josh as his routine is fairly solid, he doesn’t go to bed too late and his diet is good. To get a score of 40% really made him think about how much it’s been impacting his performance.
For the week where Josh took the Daily Driver, his recovery score increased to 57%!!
To us, this is exactly what we’d want to see. We know there is no ‘magic pill’ that increases your score to 100% and to be honest there shouldn’t be. But it does show a strong increase in recovery whilst taking the Daily Driver. It’s worth noting that Josh actively noticed how much more energy he had during the day and he felt he had more stamina during his evening workouts. A win all day long.
 
Whoop 4.0 recovery

Our Closing Thoughts

Doing a test like this is always nervy because imagine if the scores were worse after taking our multivitamin! This is exactly why most big supplement companies don’t run clinic study on their products, because they know they don’t work. One of our big ambitions is to run a clinical study on our multivitamin, once we have the funds to do so that’s exactly where it’ll be going.
But in the meantime, we wanted to have a little fun and stack our little Daily Driver up against Whoop. It’s certainly not the perfect test, Whoop has its own challenges but it’s something fun and had the potential to provide some cool insight.
We went into the test quietly confident because all of our Trustpilot reviews have been 5* and always reference the positive impacts of our Daily Driver. But, you know, there’s always that 1% chance of something going wrong…
But, seeing improvements in all 3 of Whoop’s key metrics when using the Daily Driver was a perfect result for us. Marginal improvements to Sleep Performance and Strain were good to see but we were most interested in Recovery. To see a 17% increase in Recovery was as good as we could hope for and brings some scientific validation to our humble DD.
A fun experiment, but one with some grounds to show the positive impact our supplement can bring. If you're interested in picking up our Daily Driver Multivitamin you can purchase it - here.
Onwards and upwards!
Cheers,
The hakamount team