Lionel has been promoting Whoop. He posted some screenshots from race week, praising Whoop for accurately estimating his fatigue levels.

Now, those numbers don't make any sense to me.

1) The strain from swimming is absurd, relative to cycling and running.
2) According to Whoop, Lionel incurred daily strain of 20 and 19 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 21 on race day. (I'm obviously rounding the numbers).
3) Friday and Saturday, the sum of all "strains" from workouts was ~30 PER DAY, whereas the the strain from the race was 20.
4) Lionel burnt 2500 calories on a day that he barely trained and 5000 on race day. Not possible. At 350 watts, you're going to need at least 1250 calories an hour on the bike, meaning the bike leg uses 2500 kcal+ (assuming 28% efficiency of the human body, the conventional wisdom being 25-28%).

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"FTP is a bit 2015, don't you think?" - Gustav Iden

I just think their pricing model is absolutely ridiculous for anyone other than professional athletes or people with more money than sense.
If they just made it a thing that was actually better than the $800 obnoxiously massive, rad fucking badass watch I already wear to track everything I do, that looks cool, tells me the fucking time and doesn't try and charge me $16-25 per month after I pay for the device.... I would consider it.
Otherwise, fuck off with that noise.

...this is coming from a guy with a styrd pod, zwift, power meter, and all the other expensive, connected shit on the market.
I haven't joined REI's $20 lifetime membership scam and I never will. I hated GNC's bullshit gold card scam where the markup is 20% if I don't pay $20 a year to get the discount that amounts to actual retail pricing you get everywhere else that sells vitamins.

Whoop can lick my chamois after a 100 mile ride, post Chipotle.

dcrainmaker has two products he loves to hate on. And he hates on them with such excellent Monty Python-esque comedy, that I relish those snipes for days after they pop in a review. The two are Apple Watch and Whoop. It seems Whoop is such a failure in every objective measure of heart rate, that it is hard to take any downstream analytics seriously.

I tried it for a few weeks and then returned it within the return period. It was a heck of a fight to get the company to accept the return even though I was well within the guaranteed return period. Even after I returned it and cancelled my subscription, the company kept charging my card every month and I had to involve my credit card company multiple times before they finally stopped charging me every month. I returned it because I felt the data it provided was highly inaccurate; for instance, I was dealing with insomnia at the time I was using it and many nights I was wide awake for hours in the middle of the night only to find the next morning that my Whoop reported me having slept through the whole night. Also, on days when my only exercise was a short walk, the Whoop told me I exerted myself very highly. Every time I wore the Whoop in the shower, it recorded the shower as a vigorous activity, etc.

I wear a Whoop because I pre-paid for a year [to make it cheaper] . . . It's not great, and they clearly spend all their money on marketing. They made a critical mistake on their measure of HRV, which is that they measure it during something like the the first 10min of the last deep wave sleep cycle or something random like that. Except the device is not sufficiently accurate at measuring sleep cycles, so picking just that small window for the HRV is pretty terrible compared to some *obviously* better options like overnight average, overnight median, the HRV during the 5,10,15,30 min where your HR is the lowest, etc. And now that they've made this choice it is unlikely they can unwind it.

That being said, it's not a 0% accurate, more like 50% accurate. If I drink or eat a huge meal before bed, or both, then you can see it in the numbers. Same for a giant training day. I have no interest in its measurement of my strain, just sleep and HRV metrics . . . if you cared about that, then you'd probably be even more disappointed than I already am, it has no idea.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

LMAO. I spit out some coffee after seeing this reply. Epic!

Whoop's big challenge is DCR's damning quote "It’s the least accurate heart rate sensor I’ve tested in a long while" This chart is one of many that illustrates basic HR accuracy relative to other devices. DCR continues to include Whoop in several other product reviews, and it always looks the same as this. So, the big doubt is that if it cannot measure basic HR, is it more or less likely that it can measure anything else related to HR?

Right, but I think the overnight HR is probably pretty accurate . . . you're not moving [much] . . . but agreed, the HR during activities that it uses to calculate the strain, pretty poor as expected from a wrist based measure. 0% chance that I will renew when my thing is over, and I literally just begged a friend not to buy one (think he will anyway).

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Why do you think REI's membership is a scam? I've received way more than $20 as a % of my purchases over the last 10 years or so.

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Pink? Maybe. Maybe not. You decide.

You can find most things that REI sells for less elsewhere and aren't tied to spending the price difference at REI. That said, I am a member, but more for the other benefits like the garage sale items.

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Strava

I bought a year or 18 month subscription. I liked that I could get my sleep and other data into TrainingPeaks (C'mon Garmin.....), but it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. I accidentally swam with the battery charger on one morning which killed it and I was too lazy to buy another one (btw...swimming w/ the strap is rather annoying). The battery eventually died and I stopped using it. My subscription was up few months ago and fortunately they had an old CC on file that had expired so they couldn't charge me the monthly subscription. The hounded me via e-mail for weeks to update my CC info. I thought about getting a new charger and start using it again but no way am I paying that monthly rate (and I'm one that has a zwift account, TP premium, WKO5, strava premium).

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blog

I've been a Whoop user for a year and I really like it.

Couple of things.

I get stupid high strain scores from swimming, I just don't think it does well in the water. But I've never worn a HRM in the pool, so I have no idea where my HR is when I swim. I'm ok with that because the strain scores are consistent (i.e. they're not high one day and low another). So over a few days, it really all balances out.

The point of Whoop isn't to measure HR during activities. Sure, it will do that. With the exception of swimming, my Whoop is within 5 beats of my Garmin chest strap for riding and running. That's where I disagree with Rainmaker's review. It's a recovery tool, not an active HR measurement tool.

Strain score is NOT cumulative based upon activity, it's cumulative across the day and logarithmic with a theoretical max of 21 (that no one can actually achieve). So you can have a run at 11 and a ride at 15 and still have a total strain score of 15 because it measures the TOTAL strain of the day. (there are blogs and podcasts which go into this in detail)

The power of Whoop for me, is that it gives me a way to maximize my recovery practices through experimentation and then the resulting data. Thanks to Whoop, I have data showing that I need at LEAST 80 oz of water to get a green score. CBD has a positive recovery impact on me. Meditation really helps me. Alcohol destroys me. And eating a bunch of sugar before bed is really not a good idea. It's really helped me dial in my recovery practice to maximize things.

This has always struck me as one of the easiest ones to get ROI on (buy it once during the 20% sale if you're buying something over $100, or buy $200 of stuff at REI ever and get the dividend). Do you not buy from REI at all?

We are going a bit off topic here, but there are plenty of items that REI sells that you can't find for less as well. For example, I have a hard time finding Garmin or Hoka products discounted anywhere. In those cases, you get your 10% (and occasional 20%) member discount.

So yes, shop around, but if you can't find it lower, get it at REI.

Well, at least it got one thing right. 😁

Because I can shop at Backcountry and not have to and their reward program is fantastic.
Yes, I understand paying a one time $20 fee to get all the rebates/refunds and discounts is worth it, but paying for the privilege to shop at a store is inherently anti-consumer. Price gouging and then requiring your customers to pay money to receive the non-marked up price is inherently anti-consumer. When I join as a "member", I'm now complicit in their anti-consumer behavior strategy that rewards members and screws over non-members to generate reward money, refunds, and discounts. I refuse to support such business practices and thankfully I have choice where I spend my money.
Plus, I would never join any club that would have me as a member.