Has anyone received a Whoop 4.0 strap yet?
There’s product information and teasers; straps have supposedly been shipping (although most orders are delayed).
Anyone have direct experience with a new 4.0 strap?
Has anyone received a Whoop 4.0 strap yet?
There’s product information and teasers; straps have supposedly been shipping (although most orders are delayed).
Anyone have direct experience with a new 4.0 strap?
do you have experience with prior generations?
where have you seen that straps are supposedly shipping? i’ve looked on youtube for video reviews from people that actually have them, have not found one yet. i’ll admit they suckered me in to extending my membership to see if this is any better than whoop 3.0, which I think has some value, but not much.
where have you seen that straps are supposedly shipping? i’ve looked on youtube for video reviews from people that actually have them, have not found one yet. i’ll admit they suckered me in to extending my membership to see if this is any better than whoop 3.0, which I think has some value, but not much.
Emphasis on the Supposedly? Just going based off their original date, but no confirmation anything has actually shipped. I do fear it was a ploy to get people to re-up their membership.
do you have experience with prior generations?
2.0 and 3.0, but cancelled my membership a while back. I think there’s merit to the platform, form-factor, and purpose; but it’s plagued with inaccuracies. My hope is that 4.0 can eliminate those so it can meet it’s potential.
My hope is to get some first-hand knowledge prior to starting a membership again.
2.0 and 3.0, but cancelled my membership a while back. I think there’s merit to the platform, form-factor, and purpose; but it’s plagued with inaccuracies. My hope is that 4.0 can eliminate those so it can meet it’s potential.
My hope is to get some first-hand knowledge prior to starting a membership again.
I should be somewhere on the early-ish adopter list, if they have one. Nothing yet. I’ll post results here when I get them.
I had the 3.0 for about a year, but cancelled it. I just couldn’t see much correlation between their primary recovery metric and reality. And, as widely reported, the performance as a pure HRM during workouts was horrendous. I was using it for Zwift for a bit and got some jokes about cheating because it would show a HR of 80 while I was in Full Send.
Edit: Or might not be on early adopter list…occurred to me they might take care of their existing 3.0 users before taking on new subscribers.
I hope it is better. I used 3.0, but didn’t renew…I think for individuals who aren’t used to to a chest strap HRM, they might think it’s accurate. But the HR data from my 3.0 wasn’t accurate, so if bad data is going in, I’ll get bad data out.
I’ve seen some chatter on a Whoop fb group that they’re starting to ship. But NO ONE that I’ve seen has one yet. I didn’t feel like renewing for 6 months to get a 4.0 right away and decided to wait until they (hopefully) offer a Black Friday membership discount (I’m paid thru January). And THEN I’ll get on the 4.0 wait list.
Just updating this … I did receive my whoop in November. Charging with Whoop 4.0 is complete crap, much worse than 3.0. The charger only does ~20% charge and also needs to go onto the strap directly from being charged (will discharge regardless of whether it is charging the strap or not). There was also a video by ‘The quantified Scientist’ on YouTube showing the 4.0 as less accurate than 3.0 for both heart rate and sleep tracking. In particular he found it was not measuring deep sleep accurately. Since whoop has made the design decision to take your daily HRV measurement during your final deep sleep cycle, this is a huge problem. I sent my 4.0 back and am waiting for a refund for the membership extension I purchased to get it. I’m going to move to checking HRV first thing in the AM with a chest strap and an app like elite HRV (still trying to decide which app … happy to hear opinions), which I hope will give more useful results regarding preparedness to train.
I am, without question, about the last person to defend buying a Whoop, but purely for the purposes of correctness, there’s a few misconceptions there.
Notably:
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Whoop no longer uses just the last deep sleep HRV values, they haven’t since last June (for both 3.0 and 4.0). They now use the entire night’s worth of data. Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with their recovery scores (in fact, I find them mostly useless).
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I don’t really get the value in measuring sleep phases for the most part, since even the accuracy stated of the ‘known good’ is only 90% accuracy in a best case scenario. So it’s basically comparing two maybe accurate things and deciding one is more or less accurate than the others. At the end of the day, it’s just gradients of useless info with very little actionable you can do from it anyway.
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The new charge is SLOW AF, without question. Additionally, they’ve had a boatload of issues from it - primarily in earlier shipments. But, assuming it does work, there’s no need to go straight onto the unit, nor is it limited to 20%. It’ll do a full charge, but it will take about 2 hours to charge the battery itself, and then another two hours to transfer that charge to the Whoop 4.0 unit. I think the whole charging thing was waaaay overengineered this time solve a problem that didn’t exist, and involve an unknown tech company with unproven tech. But, I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker (assuming the pod you have isn’t defective).
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In terms of workout HR accuracy, I’ve seen very few people say 4.0 is highly inaccurate. I’ve done a ton amount of comparison data on it, with dozens of workouts across a number of sports to numerous sensors - and by and large Whoop 4.0 is FAR better than the dumpster fire of Whoop 3.0. Now, is it accurate enough for load (which is what Whoop is all about)? In general, yes, but only when worn in specific locations depending on the sport. If we look at non-workout HR issues, there are issues with fake strain issues.
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Finally, as for doing daily HRV, I’d ask yourself what problem you’re trying to solve. Everyone keeps pointing at HRV as some magical unicorn, but the more these companies dig into it, the more it’s showing itself to be a less reliable indicator of recovery than some want it to be. It can, potentially, be a portion of your recovery score, but it shouldn’t be your entire recovery decision matrix. HRV was never intended to be used for recovery in athletics, it was intended to decide whether or not someone has a good chance of dying in an ER.
Just my two cents…
I am, without question, about the last person to defend buying a Whoop, but purely for the purposes of correctness, there’s a few misconceptions there.
Notably:
-
Whoop no longer uses just the last deep sleep HRV values, they haven’t since last June (for both 3.0 and 4.0). They now use the entire night’s worth of data. Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with their recovery scores (in fact, I find them mostly useless).
-
I don’t really get the value in measuring sleep phases for the most part, since even the accuracy stated of the ‘known good’ is only 90% accuracy in a best case scenario. So it’s basically comparing two maybe accurate things and deciding one is more or less accurate than the others. At the end of the day, it’s just gradients of useless info with very little actionable you can do from it anyway.
-
The new charge is SLOW AF, without question. Additionally, they’ve had a boatload of issues from it - primarily in earlier shipments. But, assuming it does work, there’s no need to go straight onto the unit, nor is it limited to 20%. It’ll do a full charge, but it will take about 2 hours to charge the battery itself, and then another two hours to transfer that charge to the Whoop 4.0 unit. I think the whole charging thing was waaaay overengineered this time solve a problem that didn’t exist, and involve an unknown tech company with unproven tech. But, I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker (assuming the pod you have isn’t defective).
-
In terms of workout HR accuracy, I’ve seen very few people say 4.0 is highly inaccurate. I’ve done a ton amount of comparison data on it, with dozens of workouts across a number of sports to numerous sensors - and by and large Whoop 4.0 is FAR better than the dumpster fire of Whoop 3.0. Now, is it accurate enough for load (which is what Whoop is all about)? In general, yes, but only when worn in specific locations depending on the sport. If we look at non-workout HR issues, there are issues with fake strain issues.
-
Finally, as for doing daily HRV, I’d ask yourself what problem you’re trying to solve. Everyone keeps pointing at HRV as some magical unicorn, but the more these companies dig into it, the more it’s showing itself to be a less reliable indicator of recovery than some want it to be. It can, potentially, be a portion of your recovery score, but it shouldn’t be your entire recovery decision matrix. HRV was never intended to be used for recovery in athletics, it was intended to decide whether or not someone has a good chance of dying in an ER.
Just my two cents…
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I see they have changed this, but they do still use the sleep cycles. Per Whoop.com: WHOOP calculates your HRV using a “dynamic” average each night while you sleep - measured using a dynamic average throughout one’s sleep, giving more weight to periods of slow-wave sleep.
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If they use their estimation of sleep cycle then it matters quite a lot. Besides this point, the sleep measurement is one area where I did find value with whoop as I was able to learn through experimentation how to improve my sleep.
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‘Assuming it does work’ is a bad assumption.
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😂
Yeah, I’ve seen the review and like his stuff. However, if you want a more comprehensive look at workout data beyond two 2-minute sections, I’d look here ;): https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2021/11/whoop-4-band-platform-in-depth-review.html
but it shouldn’t be your entire recovery decision matrix. HRV was never intended to be used for recovery in athletics, it was intended to decide whether or not someone has a good chance of dying in an ER.
I think few of the HRV vendors have used pure HRV for a long time now. It’s increasingly hard-to-impossible to get a raw HRV graph. They seem to use questionnaires, sleep quality measures, training stress metrics, etc. to get more wholistic look. Some have claimed their daily questionairres are independent of the “score” but I have my doubts as to the purity of the independence. Though I have no problem with using questionairres, as mood is the most reliable indicator I have for myself, still. (which is kinda of surprising that in 2021, science still hasn’t beat “are you kinda cranky and snapping at your wife unecessarily” as an indication of excessive training stress.
Exactly.
It’s such a bizzare thing, the deeper I look into it. There’s basically two camps of HRV people:
A) Those that say: Only trust the purest of HRV values after waking up in a 2-minute test, and ignore all other data points/inputs. Unless you simply feel fine, in which case, go forth and train.
B) Those that say: Take HRV values, combine them with other data aspects (load/sleep/etc…), and then make a decision based on whether you trust those things more than you’re body.
Even the most science-focused high performance coaches that look at the purist approach (the first one above), without question, will ignore the data if the athlete’s perceived feeling is good/strong, and has no basis for being off. The problem here, is that both approaches essentially admit that HRV-driven metrics can be fishy in countless circumstances. Even the biggest champions of HRV driven metrics say that you can’t really use HRV values day to day due to acute changes.
I think there can be some value in longer term trending, but even that line of thinking is questionable if enough given data points are wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And neither do 30 half-wrongs.
Undoubtedly this stirs the pot, but that’s OK, it’s a pot I think probably needs more stirring.
without question, will ignore the data if the athlete’s perceived feeling is good/strong,
This could be purely personal, but my problem is that “feeling bad” seems to be a lagging indicator. So there were some number of workouts where I felt good/strong, but still should have dialled back. By the time I’m “cranky” I’m pretty deep in a hole. So there’s massive value in something that can be a leading indicator, if anyone can ever nail that. Which they haven’t yet, seemingly. Whoop seems to be taking the “fake it until you make it” approach. Which is somewhat questionable, but at least they’re not pretending to be a real medical device, like the Theranos thing.
Thanks Ray, perfect summary.
If it would be about HRV no one would ever do a race again as HRV is probably tanked in the morning of a race due to less sleep, anxiety,… And still incredible world records were produced.
If you want to train by how you feel, train by how you feel.
You can and will have bad trainings on a good day. Also on a bad day. But you will also have awesome trainings on bad days.
I mean just taking Body Battery from Garmin… The times were the score was low, also might not have felt well but knocked a workout out of the park it’s obvious to me that there’s no consistent correlation.
The other consideration is that these companies are doing themselves a disservice in calling this metric a “recovery” score.
Because it’s not.
As an acute indicator there are many, many, confounding factors that can alter the values and as such daily readings need to be interpreted in the context of a rolling average.
Additionally, there are many factors that play into “how you feel”. This is a complex integration and a simplified, specific, metric will not be able to accurately describe this feeling at all times. How much have you slept, how hungry are you, are your favorite socks clean all play into how we feel.
Now, if you poll multiple metrics (sleep time, calorie consumption, etc. etc) and integrate them together you may very well get a better description of how someone feels. However, at some point in time you’re just better off asking “How do you feel” which is the endpoint of the line and the most accurate description.
To put this into another testing / prediction context: - Velocity at Threshold is one of the single best predictors of endurance performance. This is because it is a measurement far enough along the physiological process that all the other metrics have already been integrated (e.g. VO2max, Economy, aerobic energy production capacity, etc). Yet, this metric is less meaningful when trying to understand someone’s. This describes a “what”, not a “why”. Measurement of a single factor (e.g. VO2max) may not correlate highly with endurance performance but it does give deeper insight into how an athlete achieved their performance which is valuable to exercise prescription.
Therefore, HRV, ought to be looked at for what it is: a specific metric of a particular component of our physiology system; The state of the central nervous system.
This is a component of how you feel, but it’s only one of many.
It is, however, a larger component of other aspects:
- Your potential to perform (not your actual performance which is again complex (my wife once had a terrible track race because of a stinky port-a-potty).
- Your ability to adapt.
There is research that supports the use of HRV in both of these cases.
e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21812828/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21812828/
But, all of this is very complex AND these companies are in the business of making the complex simple as they are aimed at the general consumer. Kubios and other deeper HRV tools will never catch on with the general population because they do not meet the simplified understanding (and therefore needs) of the general consumer.
Which is why Whoop needs to update their messaging.
The other consideration is that these companies are doing themselves a disservice in calling this metric a “recovery” score.
Because it’s not.
As an acute indicator there are many, many, confounding factors that can alter the values and as such daily readings need to be interpreted in the context of a rolling average.
Whoop seems to really want to use today’s single HRV measurement to give you your recovery score as opposed to the moving average, which is another down side to its approach IMO. It also appears to use a very fast moving average to decide what it thinks is your baseline, which I doubt is supported by the research. My guess is this helps keep people engaged with it, because it wouldn’t be an awesome gadget if you weren’t moving from green to yellow to red and back all the time.
Another funny anecdote from my short time with the 4.0 . . . I was actually treated to an overnight in my local hospital following some health issues post Ironman Arizona. On the day I went in my resting heart rate, sleep score, pulse ox, and especially my respiratory rate were all extremely bad. But it had measured my HRV as very far above baseline that night, so it ignored everything else and gave me a bright green very high recovery score. And I probably couldn’t have run a mile under 8min if you’d held a gun to my head.
Have had my Whoop 4.0 for a couple weeks now.
My initial takeaways.
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HR is decent now. I just leave my Whoop on broadcast mode all the time, use it outdoors, Zwift, TR, etc. And without doing DCR-like graphs, it seems decent. No longer a hot mess. But typically delayed by a few seconds compared to my Polar H10. But overall it’s nice to not have to strap on a chest HRM every time I work out. Battery life is still a few days with broadcast on all the time. Good enough, particularly with the new charger-to-charge-the-charger charge system, which I was sceptical of at first, but works well in practice.
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HR-based strain looks good! Correlates with my power-based strain pretty dang well.
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“Recovery” is, so far, wonky. I had a tough 12-hour training weekend, and my “recovery” score skyrocketed over the weekend into Monday. Sigh. But maybe the baseline needs more baselining. I’ll give it a few months.
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It completely blows the sleep metric on occassion. I’m a world class sleeper. The Tom Brady of sleeping. And for Friday it gave me a 10% sleep score, said I only slept an hour, and started giving me all kinds of advice. That’s just BS. I slept 9 hours on Friday. 9 solid hours.
I noticed this chart in my TrainingPeaks account today, thought it’d be worth sharing. You can see my daily Whoop HRV scores from 7/20 onward, and it is quite clear when I got rid of the Whoop and changed to daily reading in bed first thing. The numbers are much more stable (accurate), which probably means more actionable when something is off.
