Whoop - After Three Months - A Runner's Long Term Review
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- čas přidán 16. 07. 2024
- The Whoop is a unique wearable that has no screen and promises to deliver insights on how hard you're working, how soundly you're sleeping, and how well you have recovered for whatever your day may bring. But how useful is it for runners, especially if you've already got a running watch? I've been wearing both a Whoop and a GPS watch constantly for the last three months to answer this very question.
0:00 intro
1:47 disclosures
2:21 daily data
3:27 long term data
4:45 sleep data example
7:23 activity data example
11:26 HR issues
15:03 things I didn't like
17:10 redundant
19:08 beautiful data
disclosures: I purchased the Whoop strap and service. No one sent it to me or is paying me to make this video. I also reference a Polar Vantage V2 and a Polar OH1 HR monitor. The Vantage V2 was previously provided by Polar for purpose of review in a prior video. I purchased the Polar OH1. No one has paid to have their device included in this video, and no one will have a chance to preview any footage or thoughts before the video goes up on youtube.
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Running footage shot on:
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Fun seeing you back on the water front. Thanks for the review I have a few friends who love the Whoop but I don't want another service to subscribe to. 😬
Great review thanks for being so transparent. It was helpful I think for now my Coros Apex Pro gives me as much info as I need and pairs well with other info.
If I have to hear that monotoned ad one more time...."Tinman elite is thrilled..." yea. You sound SUPER thrilled.
I always thought they were called "titman elite." Tinman makes more sense (and might justify the monotone VO).
Hahahaha YES this commercial is so annoying
wow, you are a crazy man!!...your ice running style is amazing...congratsssss...i follow from Monterrey, México...thanks for your job!!!
What I found after about a month is that it took me a few workouts to figure out where to position the Whoop Strap so my HR reading was the most accurate. I found it works very well about 1-2 inches up past the bone in my wrist. You might need to tighten it a bit and/or move it just a bit higher on your arm to get it to be more consistently accurate. Regarding it over-estimating your strain and it's impact to your recovery score, those two are not connected according to Whoop. Your Recovery score is based primarily on your HRV, and secondarily by RHR and respiratory rate, with just a small check against how much sleep you got, but not based in any way on your strain from the day before.
Once I dialed in the position the strap needed to be in for my workouts, the data was outstanding like you said. I don't remember you mentioning the daily log of individual characteristics you can set, but I really like that I can tweak my behavior, log it, and track over time how it helps or hurts my recovery and performance.
Overall, good review however. Thanks for posting this!
You definitely don’t have the strap tight enough. I can see the green lights from the hr monitor while you’re moving your arms around. I’ve had mine for 2 years and don’t get those weird readings.
Great review. I have a whoop also and have the same issues. I mostly use it for recovery data as I find the workout HR not very useful. However, now that I'm using a polar watch with their nightly recovery I feel like they are doing an even better job at those metrics. I just hate the battery life on polar. After using a coros apex with its 20 plus days of battery life its hard to go back to anything less than a week.
Thanks for all of the info.
Having Whoop for 1 month now, so far no issues with running or cycling HR as well as with activity detection. Seems to be spot on. But I put it quite tight, so it does not move freely on my wrist like it does on this video.
Came to the same conclusion myself. The 6-month commitment is a sneaky way for WHOOP to keep making money off of me after I've already decided I don't want the product anymore haha
Omg I’m stuck in it atm! 2 more months to go😩
Same experience for me. I threw mine in a drawer after 3 months or so.
Well it’s sorta the way they get you to pay for the band which is obviously not free. I figure something like this would be $99-150 and the service $5-14 a month in a more conventional setup (even Fitbit has a premium service fee) so 6 months basically pays for the device. It’s month 6+ that becomes huge profit for whoop IMHO at their prices even factoring in software development and hosting costs.
May I suggest getting the Oura ring for an alternative. Also REM is one thing, Deep Sleep better indicates recovery. In his book "why we sleep" Pr Walker does mention 7-9h for adults for a proper night sleep.
Thanks for your reviews.
Great review again
The ice and lake looked so cool I wish I could be there on a day like that
Great video!!!!! 🙌🏃🏻♂️
thanks David!
a great option is to download the Elevate add on for Strava in Chrome - shows graphically really helpful fatigue, freshness, form. I find their algorithms match very closely to how i feel. key is to make sure your strava data is sound, i use Stryd which gives accurate power/distance/pace etc which integrates with my apple watch where I sometimes pair with my Wahoo heart rate strap (or just the apple watch if i am running steady without much HR variation). This gives me so much data that I am confident is sound.
I feel like your review was a bit unfair. I’m not trying to promote the whoop strap, but if you’re going to review it at least use it properly. I’m at just about 3 months with mine and went through the same issues wearing it on my wrist. Spoke to customer service- which they are very helpful and Switched to the bicep band and got excellent correlation with my HR on my Garmin. If you weren’t using it right- how can you really give it much of a review.
I think you’re right- there is some redundancy on metrics but if you’re interested in HRV- you should ask yourself if you buy into how they measure it(at night when your in your last cycle of deep sleep). They’re concern that measuring HRV at other times can lead to erratic results and thus are less meaningful. If you were aware of that distinction it would have been nice to mention it.
Expensive- yeah. Going to use it forever- doubt it. Customer service and data presentation- both excellent. I’ve corresponded several times with them about data interpretation and received prompt thorough replies- until i finally understood what was going on. Anyway- appreciate your effort- but just felt compelled to balance things out a bit.
Must be a crazy good dinner 😂
Great review. I had exact same thoughts, hr is usually off. Detected activity multiple times while cooking dinner.
I have exact opposite problem with HR, it never gets my max hr which is 203 (from a professional test). And always thinks I m working more harder than how I feel.
Nice review
I have been using whoop for 6 months and agree with most of your conclusions. The bicep strap did work well for me and gave me a similar HR reading to my chest strap, but agree it shouldn’t be extra. The biggest drawback to the whoop is the cost. $30/month is absurd. If you intend to use this long term, it is ridiculously expensive especially compared to other similar devices. I am cancelling my membership and was considering getting the polar vantage v2 to get similar features.
Thanks Mike.
my pleasure
Had similar results during my run. I send the Whoop Team some pictures of the whoop HR and the HR that my garmin recorded with a HR-strap. Whoop send me a new device. I'm still testing, but I really think it is more accurated. Still have some "activties" like your cooking-activity.
I had a bad experience with the Oura ring. Ended up returning it.
Unfortunately, my Garmin Fenix's HR sensor is going bad quickly, especially because when running the watch moves around a bit. Using the Garmin chest strap on runs gives me the best readings. For "sedentary" activities the HR sensor on the Garmin is still OK since it's not moving around my wrist too much. I tend to check its accuracy with a good old school pulse check or IOS app using the flash/camera on my iPhone. Not bad for a 4-year-old watch.
Comprehensive review as it pertains to whoop and running.
Maybe suited for non-running (or biking) activity like the gym or walking?
Great review.
I got to the same conclusion with the (similar?) Amazon Halo strap, which is a lot less on the analytical side than Whoop. I'd always assumed that it's usually a general rule of thumb that we tend to use things that give us more back than what we give to the thing/device in the first place.
As you say, devices like this are probably meant for a different type of 'active person' (than say a daily runner who probably uses a smartwatch maybe with a chest strap anyway).
Thanks Ko - that’s generally what I thought would be the case. Software/interface sounds good, but - as they say - garbage data in = garbage out.
Thank you for your honesty review. I am glad I went for the garmin forerunner 945 instead of whoop. I really dislike the subscription model.
I had a very similar experience where some of the data wasn't too accurate and also that the software can't take into account what I had planned. I felt like WHOOP had a mind of its own in terms of what it wanted or recommended me to do and I didn't see the value in that because I had a pretty well structured training plan.
I like the shirt, is that a church of the Sunday longrun? Aka Ben barrows... digging u supporting other you tubers!
I wish they would either license their metrics to other manufacturers or figure out a way to let us use the heartrate data from our other devices with their service. I feel like Garmin's devices are great but the HRV data and recovery info leaves a lot to be desired.
That’s what I wish for, too. But I just don’t see it happening
So I can’t swap intervals for cooking 😪
A very informative video❤️❤️
Hello Michael, have you noticed any difference on the HR readings from the Polar Grit to the Vantage 2?
Good comparison video. Regarding Polar Running watch and its app - after a run can you upload your data to your PC and view it, without an internet connection ?
Garmin wont allow it, so if you are in a location without Internet connection you cannot review your data on PC/phone, only the limited data available on your watch (Garmin's PC interface is pretty poor too, shame because i think the watches are generally really good).
Kofuzi..... if you are training regularly in the cold, check out the Airtrim heat exchange mask. It’s a game changer
Great review. I have a Garmin Fenix 6X Pro and after some research I found it was going to be completely redundant. Garmin has it's body battery protocol which isn't as nice as the GUI for whoop, but honestly, I would never use that data to "decide' if I would do a workout but rather a sense check in conjunction with other signals. I literally can get anything the whoop provides from the watch and then some. I definitely see the utility of it for some, and the aesthetic may be more pleasing than a bulky watch to many, but I think I made the right decision passing on this. Your review definitely provides additional confirmation of that. Very pragmatic and direct.
I have similar results from Whoop. Max HR can be adjusted if you email tech support. I had a 184 as well and 63 years old so that was not going to ever work! You can manually start your activities for better data.
I don’t actually mind that the activity tends to include my warmup. And it’s not the max HR number in and of itself that is a problem. The problem is that it thinks I’m at max HR on an easy run
I feel like the optical sensors are getting better on watches. Also, if it's true the next apple watch and galaxy watch will have blood glucose monitoring, I feel like that will kill all the halos/whoops/fitbits. Watches getting better and better, even if all the bp/ekg/ect things work even somewhat well.
Hmm that is so weird with the HR on the whoop strap. I love my whoop, been a user since 2017 and I never have had issues with that. I would reach out to whoop and see if they could send you a replacement strap.
I think part of the issue is how loose he is wearing it. They have instructions for how tight it should be on the wrist for accurate readings.
If you're wearing it as loose as you are in the video as in runs, that's definitely the issue. According to the app, it should be hard to slide your finder underneath the sensor on the band. Looking at the side by side of your heart rate in whoop and polar, it looks like the whoop possibly picked up on cadence or was just wrong with heart rate. I have this issue every now and then too, but generally my heart rate on my whoop and coros pace 2 match up really well. Like REALLY well. I had a run where I didn't pause the watch at all and compared whoop to the coros, and average hrs were the same, max hrs were within 2 bpm, and all of the trends in hrs were exactly the same. Your dinner comment kinda solidifies the point that motion in the wrist is contributing to the issue. Not trying to say it's user error, but you can tighten the band.
My Whoop band doesn't move at all. I never see the green light shining out from underneath like I was observing in this video. It did take a couple of days to get the strap tension just right. The wrist-based HR may not be perfectly accurate, but it sure is better than the readings I was getting from my Suunto 9 that would pin my HR at 220 on some of my easy runs and at 80 for hard efforts. And that's with a chest strap! One of the things I like about the Whoop is that it is so low profile. I like taking off my bulky Suunto and still getting my full day metrics recorded and tracked. My hope is that Whoop will continue to improve and I can eventually go to a simple GPS watch when my Suunto dies. In other words, I like the idea of specialization and hope that Whoop becomes the leader in their area of focus, rather than trying to be all things in one device.
Same here...I just got a Fenix 6X with the HRM pro just to be on the safe side for detecting HR (and for more running specific metrics). My WHOOP is pretty similar (so far) to the Fenix- usually within 5 beats high in the average. It also reads a bit high on the max, so I’m assuming that the WHOOP reads a bit high. I’m going to keep testing as it’s only been a week so far.
I usually utilize the WHOOP for sleep info because it’s the only third party verified sleep tracker on the market (at least from what I’ve found).
@@ckokomo808 that's interesting, my WHOOP is typically on the lower end when compared to my Coros, especially for resting and non-activity heart rates
@@ckokomo808 What has happened now? 4 weeks later?
@@khayphee Hey! The Whoop and Garmin read close enough during my running activities. The whoop still reads slightly higher average and max HR.
As for sleep, I don’t use the Garmin. It was WAY different than Whoop, sometimes two hours different in various stages of sleep. Again, I trust the WHOOP here as it’s the only third party verified sleep tracker using the “gold standard” as a baseline.
What does it do that my Garmin or the V2 can not?
How does the Apple Watch stands against these especially the Whoop?
Hello Kofuzi, could you please show the metric measurements for HR as well ? Thanks.
Hr is measured in beats per minute, therefore I don’t think metric isn’t relevant.
@@joyridaz t'was a joke
🥶🥶🥶🥶
I found wrist based HR monitoring pointless, if i thinks your at 100% intensity instead of 80% that's potentially 65% as hard.
Its tired for 2 days vs 24 hours, the 178bp dish washing is probably another 4 hours too
Whoop is supposed to be worn on your nondominant hand ie. right hand if u are left handed. That’s why your numbers are high. They said it on their podcast
I’m an athlete that focuses on a mix of triathlon, calisthenics and weightlifting. I used whoop for about 6 months then ended the membership. I used it to learn about what I can do to aid in my recovery (NormaTec, compression, sleep) and it was nice to be reinforced with how I felt about my own sleep/recovery. I wish it wasn’t a monthly membership, that’s super lame and idk why they would do that. Super dumb imo
Absolutely the same conclusion, V2 killed the whoop for me! But big thanks to them about understanding the data!)
I accidentally subscribed for the 6 month subscription. At this point, I haven’t used the WHOOP as much as I should. I feel that Garmin connect does a similar job to tell you about sleep, recovery & Strava helps monitor your efforts. Also, the bands get really dirty & fade color over time. I regret buying the all white one because it’s always so dirty. When my recovery percentage is below 70% is affects me more mentally than physically. Once I do my warmup routine, drills, stretch I feel more recovered.
It looks like the strap is too loose. Optical heart rate monitor will be thrown off by movement when it is not worn snugly. You may observe that the optical heart rate monitor tends to pick up cadence as heart rate during running. I solve the problem by wearing any optical heart rate monitor snug enough.
I'm pretty sure I mentioned all of these things in this video.
tightening the strap more isn't the solution for me at the wrist.
@@kofuzi I guess there is a design flaw with the strap/sensor. Optical sensors basically detects the rate of changes in light transmission through the blood flow under the skin. Movement or light leakage will throw off the sensor. A good optical sensor will have a means like a good elestic strap to prevent movement or multiple sensors to compensate the movement. The design and fit should be good to prevent light leakage when the sensor move. I am a geek for heart rate data and used to always wear both the wrist and chest sensor. Now I have got the wrist sensor fixed such that the chest sensor data become redundant. Cheers! Enjoyed all your videos so far!
@@kofuzi The fact that the strap moves around is a big deal. You can't possibly expect accurate data if you can't wear the strap properly. I use whoop, and it stays in place, even during anaerobic efforts.
the idea of whoop is great, but the tech isn't ready yet
Great review thanks. If it doesn’t have rock solid HR monitoring then none of the other data matters in my opinion. My Garmin Fenix 6 seems to give most of the same data that your Polar does so would make it similarly redundant for me. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Garmin wrist HR is disappointing (I wear a strap when running/cycling) so I take it’s info with a pinch of salt too but given that Whoop’s sole purpose is measuring activity and recovery then it’s not something I could overlook. I do wonder if in years to come if we’ll laugh at ourselves for buying into wrist-based HR, it’s no longer in it’s infancy but doesn’t seem to be improving, either because it’s a flawed concept or because Garmin & the rest have decided it’s good enough and not worth their time to make it accurate
I’ve used whoop for 2years and honestly their website, presentation of data on app and auto activity detection is amazing but... no gps, not able to see data without the phone, paying (in the UK) almost £30 a month and get less sleep data then from Polar nightly recharge, no trainings in the app (polar, garmin have basic 5k,10k half and full marathon trainings, stretching, mobility and core workout outs, Fitbit full fitness trainings etc) also not being able to plan your trainings for a next week or month etc etc etc... whoop’s asking way too much money for such a basic device. whoop definitely has helped me with my fitness and helped to understand the data but polar, garmin offer much more for much lower price.
kofusi,
The images of the strap on your wrist at the beginning of the video clearly show it's not threaded correctly. This can result in the band loosening during the day generating inaccurate data, including HR and sleep.
Check out the correct threading technique on the WHOOP website: support.whoop.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019624453
One way to tell if the band is threaded correctly is to check that the plastic bar the band threads into is not visible -- the band should cover it.
Consider re-posting an updated review after several months with the strap threaded correctly.
Also the straps are pretty low quality, I had 2 break on me without strenuous use, not worth it
Hi! I’m in the market for a new watch and have enjoyed your reviews on Whoop. I don’t think I’ll end up going with it though, because I would like something that can track my pace, mileage, HR, and preferably something that is Strava compatible. Off the cuff, do you have a recommendation for a fitness tracker under 200$ that meets what I need?
It took me way too long to cancel my subscription. The amount they charge is nuts. I mean they should at least throw in a free band 2x a year for the sake of the commitment. The whole thing ends up feeling like a way too expensive. the data is solid, but in reality I get it. I need to sleep more. The 1 positive it is far less cumbersome to sleep in
Honestly, I'm most happy that you've moved on from that illegible scribble font!
Is it my lighting, or do you look green?
I turned down the exposure compensation, as it seemed like my forehead was overexposed. But I probably look green. I can’t really tell
@@kofuzi zombie time
Just curious... how come you never review any Under Armour shoes? They no good?
Do they make a shoe that runners actually train in?
@@lancastergerard they don't have a large range of running shoes but they definitely have runners
I was thinking its a good device until you started to show that "184bmp" easy run. This is plain useless in this case, as you said it will recommend the recovery based on this. Also your HRV numbers are waaaay too low, I guess that function is off aswell and that should be one of the main selling point. Disapointing. Good review!
Realistically you're spending $180 to have an app tell you that you need to get more sleep if you want to train better, something I think just about everyone already knows. Which is also something that most people can't readily fix. Whoop letting you know that a travel day (to an event for example) can be pretty taxing is a nice eye opener for people, but again not everyone has the ability to do anything with that information (ie fly to an event a day earlier, get nicer seats on the plane, etc).
I’m still not convinced it’s 100% accurate!
hey im second
yo yo!
You need to readjust your white balance on the camera...
You now look somewhere between the hulk and a Simpson character.
Just thinking...
The Hulk cameo does suit your awesome ice running style >_>
You are wearing it way too loose, that’s probably why is recording those wrong activities... Tight it more! And tread it the right way, from the video it looks like you put the strap in the wrong way. Should go on the outside not the inside. Take a look at this figure: images.app.goo.gl/wJXn8QGA5fWpVSJVA
That also affects readings because the strap moves more around your wrists...
In the video the strap is bouncing around when you touch it. Every time it moves like that it will record wrong readings. Must be tighter
I won't be buying a whoop subscription until the device has at the very least, a digital clock face. At the least.
Seems like a ton of mumbo jumbo. Why not just run on feel?
Dumb unnecessary product. Simply get a running watch. How Whoop is even an actual thing I have NO IDEA.
People who say they are using this for recovery.... If the HR data is off by 60 to 70 bpm... your recovery data is just as worthless. It’s a worthless device even for casuals, 172 bpm washing dishes. Raise your VO2max by bushing your teeth 🤷🏽♂️
It has an awful heart rate monitor. Miles behind the tech currently on market. For a device and service that bases pretty much all their information on the HR you would think they’d invest in a top of the line optical HR at least as good as Apple’s. All the stats in the world don’t matter if they’re based on inaccurate measurements. Hard pass.
Honestly, I'm most happy that you've moved on from that illegible scribble font!
Totally agree, I thought it was just me and my old eyes. Argued with trolls for several videos and then gave up.