u/osilvr_

Chris had Dr. Jay Wiles on at the beginning of the year which is where I first heard about resonance breathing. Already having a strong meditation practice I was really fascinated by it and started practicing and noticed my HRV shoot up almost immediately.

The apps that I found for resonance breathing weren't great, so I quickly made something that used haptic feedback for pacing breathing instead of just sound or visual cues. I then went down a rabbit hole looking at the research of how to find your own resonant rate, I found a paper on this and adapted open source software to use with consumer HR sensors (specifically the Polar H10 for best accuracy).

I've now finally published the app on the app store (android still in beta as need more testers) completely for free if anyone is interested in trying it. Have been practicing daily for months now and finding it really beneficial!

tl;dr: Built an app (fully free) that reads out your HR streamed from Whoop (or other BT HR sensor) and keeps you in the right heart rate zone. Runs in the background, supplementing Whoop activities.

So I've been a Whoop user for a couple of years now and really like keeping all my workouts tracked in Whoop! Over the last several months I transitioned from doing most of my cardio in the gym where you can stream Whoop HR live and view it on a machine screen to running outside.

I try to do a lot of my training in particular HR zones, some long zone 2 on one day, interval training going up to Z4/5 and a quick run in Z4.

With no way to see your HR apart from looking at your phone screen I tried to find an app that would simply just communicate this with audio. I couldn't find a good free one, so I built my own and have been using it for the last few months for all my runs!

It has two modes, fixed zone and interval training and runs as a companion app in the background. So when I want to do a run I launch my app, then start the run on Whoop - so I still get all the GPS data and workout data tracked in Whoop and the app keeps me in the right HR zones.

The app is very configurable in terms of audio readout, it will essentially tell you to speed up if your HR is too low and slow down if HR is too high for your target zone but you can choose how often to get these alerts. You can also add in optional regular readouts of your exact HR at the time. In interval mode it also tells you when your reps are starting and ending, so all you need to focus on doing is the exercise.

When you're in the right heartrate zone the app basically just stays quiet - so can be nice and relaxing for a long zone 2 session once you get to a stable heart rate. It also auto pauses podcasts / ducks music during readout.

This would be a really useful feature to have in the Whoop app itself and wouldn't be difficult to build at all - but until then if anyone is interested the app is available fully for free (currently on Testflight for iOS, message me to be added as an Android tester) and it would be great to have some feedback!