Like running a marathon: Here’s the strain AFC Championship put on Patrick Mahomes’ heart
If Chiefs and Bills fans thought the thrilling AFC Championship Game Sunday put a strain on their hearts, imagine what it did to Patrick Mahomes’ heart rate.
Actually, we don’t have to imagine.
We know what it was like because the Chiefs quarterback wears a WHOOP health and fitness tracker every game and the company has shared his stats from Sunday.
The tracker gave Mahomes a “strain” score, which rated his cardiovascular exertion on a scale of 0 to 21.
Mahomes logged a 20.5 strain during the game, the company’s CEO and founder, Will Ahmed, revealed in a video posted on social media Tuesday.
Most marathon runners score “somewhere between a 20.0 and a 20.4, so a 20.5 shows the extreme exertion that was put on his body during that game,” Ahmed said.
“It means his heart rate was probably at 70, 80, 90% of its max heart rate during a lot of the game.”
“My heart rate was 70-80% max just watching this game!” a Chiefs fan wrote on Instagram.
Ahmed’s video solved a mystery for some fans who have wondered about the bump under Mahomes’ left sleeve during games.
The WHOOP can be worn on the wrist but its tiny sensor can be removed from the band, Ahmed showed.
WHOOP “designed a custom impact sleeve for some of our top athletes,” Ahmed said. “Actually a decade ago we originally designed this for LeBron James.”
The sensor slides into the sleeve, designed “to be able to be worn on your upper arm,” he said. “And because the sensor is calibrated to different locations you still get the same accuracy of data from up here.
“So you’ll notice Mahomes wears it on his left arm. And you’ll see a little bump on his left arm during games.”
Mahomes is one of WHOOP’s growing roster of global ambassadors and investors, a who’s who that includes Cristiano Ronaldo, Eli Manning, Rory McIlroy and Michael Phelps.
Mahomes partnered with the company in 2020.
For Christmas last month he gifted WHOOPs to the Chiefs offensive line, one of the goodies they received inside Chiefs-red YETI wheeled coolers.
(Just FYI: When he was the captain of Harvard’s squash team, Ahmed fired up his teammates before matches with the phrase: “Got whoop?”)
Ahmed said the company will offer more data from Mahomes’ Super Bowl performance.
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