is the Whoop recovery watch worth buying? Who has one that is happy and glad they bought one? Who has one that regrets their decision that they bought?
I have a bday coming up and my wife asked if wanted this as a gift.
Any advice/comments would be appreciated.
I used it for about a year. You can find several of my posts, screenshots in forum search.
I’ve finally given up on it.
It’s not terrible. It’s more than snake oil.
But, damn, the main selling point which is using HRV as an way of estimating the recovery state of your body just wasn’t that reliable an indicator for me. It did seem to correlate with stress/training load to some degree. But was dead wrong just enough to make me not trust it much.
It was great as a HR strap - it has a broadcast mode so sent to head units, etc.
The final straw for me was an overhaul they did on their app that made the daily poll on sleep, etc, take about twice as long as before.
I was already wearing a Garmin watch with optical HR sensor, which did most of the Whoop things (though maybe some not as well), but a ton more. Like being a watch. So I stopped double-wristing, and dropped the Whoop.
I briefly considered it, but am not sold on HRV as a reliable metric. The deal-killer for me is having to sign up for $30/month subscription to use the thing vs. being able to buy one outright. No way am I paying $30/mo to track a metric of questionable value.
AFAIK polar vantage pretty much has the same stuff. Tracks recovery via HRV and quantifies sleep, also happens to function as a quite nice sport watch at the same time. Only had mine a short while but I really really like it so far. Plus it’s a one time deal, no subscription
Like others have said Whoop isn’t doing anything that you can’t do with any number of modern Heart Rate Monitors. The challenge is that you need to spend a lot of time recording other data like sleep, diet, illness etc before you can effectively use the HRV data. In 5-10 year when they have tons more data to conduct meta-analysis on then they will have the ability to do some pretty powerful things but they aren’t there yet. At this stage you are buying into the data collection/data mining phase and the subscription price seems very high to me to help a company effectively develop an offering.
I would think of it like a power meter with not auto-zero/calibrate function or like a running power meter. The value it provides are indicative of something in the broadest sense do follow the patterns you feel. On certain days and under certain conditions it really seems to nail things but on other days it seems off but you can’t work out why. There are a huge number of variables involved in HRV and so the current methods of predicting performance based on HRV are imperfect. The end result is that you always have to validate the number you see with how you actually feel. To me $30/month is too high for this but when they can figure out how to calibrate the results then they will be onto something and its the current members who are building the database to allow the calibration to happen.
My opinion may contrast a bit the above replies. I am a user for 9 months and find it very helpful to monitor sleep and HRV. Yes it is a $30 monthly subscription but once paid you don’t think about it and just enjoy the ease of gathering data (and transfering it to TrainingPeaks if that’s a thing for you). Is Whoop data reliable? Research tend to show that yes but in any event you can always use it as “trends”. I have no idea whether my sleep is accurate to the minute and my HRV to the ms, but the trends correlate quite well with my subjective feelings (that I define before looking at the data in the morning). It is not a game changer for people that can force themselves to sleep more, but for result-oriented people like me who are keen on improving their sleep and recovery stats, Whoop forces you to rest more and that’s a good thing for sure.
I haven’t given up on mine yet. But what trail said matches up pretty much exactly with my experience. Other than I don’t mind the survey thing as much as he does 
My experience was pretty much the same as trail’s, and I too gave up on it.
Executive summary:
(1) There is some scientific evidence in favor of HRV (Whoop’s recovery score), but it didn’t seem to match my performance well so I gave up on it as being useful for me.
(2) I found the sleep stuff very cool, but it turns out that part is basically total junk. Just google around a bit and you’ll see that the available science says you can’t track sleep with heart rate alone. Here’s one blog post I enjoyed reading on the topic (it’s overly negative but I think basically right): https://nutritionalrevolution.org/2019/07/20/why-the-oura-ring-sucks-for-tracking-sleep-and-might-be-harming-your-health/
(3) I felt like it was ridiculously expensive.
The subscription is a dealbreaker
The last thing I need is another monthly credit card charge that I either forget about or dont get enough value out of.
I personally have been using an Oura ring instead of a whoop for the last 4y (i never tried whoop).
Very expensive but its a one off cost. After a short while I got used to wearing it and its probably one of the best pieces of training gear I have. Super helpful at saying whats the trend in my overtraining, sleep, etc. Looking at the ring everyday allowed me to better prepare my recovery and put an actual threshold on “this morning i really feel like s*** and im not gonna swim” > lets see what oura says for hr/body temperature/breathing cycles over the last night.
The Oura ring looks like a compelling option. I just wish that they would incorporate some pretty basic activity tracker functionality in it, like step tracking. That would allow me to finally ditch my Fitbit. I think I’d much prefer the form factor of a ring vs. a bracelet-type tracker, but Oura seem to have focused almost entirely on sleep tracking vs. being a well-rounded activity tracker.
is the Whoop recovery watch worth buying? Who has one that is happy and glad they bought one? Who has one that regrets their decision that they bought?
I have a bday coming up and my wife asked if wanted this as a gift.
Any advice/comments would be appreciated.
First all, it’s not a watch. It’s a 24/7 heart-rate monitor, and that’s pretty much it.
Listen to their podcasts first and decide for yourself if you are the type would enjoy and use that information. There are still some debates as to the accuracy of the HR info from Whoop, as well as the interpretation of that into the summary metrics they provide: recovery, strain, and sleep.
Personally I love it; I trust my how I feel but also use the Whoop information to confirm or ask questions.
I gave up on mine within the window to return it, and found the return process extremely frustrating. Even though I returned it within the window of time allowed under the terms of my purchase, Whoop continued to keep charging me a monthly fee and I had to continue to keep involving my credit card company to get the charges reversed until finally Whoop gave up its repeated attempts to keep charging me a monthly fee.
I returned it because I didn’t think it was giving me accurate data about my sleep duration and quality or about the intensity level of my day, both when training and when at rest.
I have been using mine for about 15 months. The v3 is much better than the v2, which had horrible battery life and numerous other problems. There are numerous problems that others have noted. The bigger ones to me are: 1) It takes up room on your wrist but doesn’t tell time or track activity; 2) And cost. $30 forever. Despite these drawbacks, I continue to use it and currently have no plans to stop. Why? Because the value, to me, is getting me to think about things and how they will impact my recovery score. I now think twice about having a beer at night or how running at night vs the morning will effect my recovery.
Another thing to consider is accuracy. If it is all garbage data anyway, then what value does it really have? Although I had some issues with accuracy during workouts when I first started using my Whoop, over time I have found it to be fairly accurate - or at least consistent with my other devices (Apple Watch, Garmin Watch, Garmin chest strap). That said, I believe DCRainmaker will post something relatively soon, but from what I have seen on his instagram story, I doubt the review will be positive.
I have also tried the “body battery” functionality of Garmin and found Whoop more accurate and useful. If I got hammered drinking but slept 9 hours, my Garmin would show me with a high body battery percentage while my Whoop would provide a very low recovery score. Ultimately though, my choice of Whoop over Garmin is because I wear an Apple watch as my primary “watch” and find the various smartwatch functionality more useful than wearing a Garmin - most notable the ability to answer calls without my phone. That means I either wear two watches to get the recovery advantage of the Garmin, or I wear a Whoop, which looks more like a bracelet than a second watch, and my Apple Watch.
The Oura ring looks like a compelling option. I just wish that they would incorporate some pretty basic activity tracker functionality in it, like step tracking. That would allow me to finally ditch my Fitbit. I think I’d much prefer the form factor of a ring vs. a bracelet-type tracker, but Oura seem to have focused almost entirely on sleep tracking vs. being a well-rounded activity tracker.
I think of oura as a recovery tracker and use it exclusively for this. I does track steps, and calories you burnt throughout the day. That’s plenty to track my recovery. Have I slept well, if not why, how do I feel when I wake up, what’s oura saying? Resting HR has been on the decline over the last month, well that might be the extra booze since the lockdown.
To me It’s a great addition to a Garmin watch which track anything workout specific. Wish oura was integrated in golden cheetah or TrainingPeaks to analyze their data over time in a PMC.
I think it would’ve filled a bigger purpose a few years back before Garmin etc started adding the HRV/sleep tracking functionality to their line of products. I have an Instinct Tactical that I wear 24/7 unless it’s charging, it tracks sleep and rHR and all that stuff…I would not pay for another device to do just that, and particularly not when I don’t find the data super useful to begin with. On the grand scale (ie over the course of a week) trends are more reliable, but I don’t find the day to day data helpful.
The Polar Vantage is a one time purchase vs subscription and it has:
Plus all of the features of a multisport GPS training watch.