WHOOP, the human performance company, whose bands are visible on many of the world’s leading sports stars and those interested in their own levels of fitness and performance has released its annual ‘Year In Review’ with some fascinating detail around Irish users.
The service allows users to log their own individual activities and behaviours painting a useful guide for them and a pretty cool anonymised insight into who we are as a fitness nation.
One of the stand out numbers from the data is that Irish users are 42 percent more likely to track use of creatine than the international benchmark. Creatine is naturally produced in the body but can also be ingested as a powder for adding muscle mass.
Being a first world nation with a strong fitness sector makes us more likely to take supplements like this but 42 percent above the international norm is an outlier.
The other areas where we show something of an obsession to track ahead of the global average are in calorie intake (26 percent over the average), Hydration (22 percent), Multivitamin intake (17 percent) and protein intake (17 percent).
Possibly overthinking what we are doing might also be part of the reason for us over indexing by 17 percent on anxiety.
The most popular activities logged by Irish users in 2023 have been Walking, Running, Weightlifting, Functional Fitness. cycling and Gaelic Football.
WHOOP members logging Gaelic Football as an activity is up 88 percent on 2022, and Hurling/Camogie is up 110 percent year over year.
While the majority of those logging the sports are WHOOP members in Ireland, there are members from Australia, US, UAE, New Zealand, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Romania playing and logging regularly.
Other interesting elements on a global scale were that the logging of alcohol consumption was down to 29 percent doing so frequently from 37 per cent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2021.
Journaling saw a 34 per cent increase over the year, though not as much as taking ice baths which rose by 183 percent.
Australia has the earliest average bedtime at 22:46 while in Qatar they stay up the latest until 01:50.
Somewhat bizarrely the app also gives the opportunity of tracking sexual activity with the US tracking the most frequent at 1.08 times per week and Ireland hitting the top of the charts when it comes to masturbation at 2.41 times per week. Who knew?
Whoop’s international expansion is based out of it’s Dublin office where it now has a strong team in place. Rory McIlroy and Katie McCabe are two of its global ambassadors with McCabe featuring in the Annual report talking about managing her sleep patterns.
