Whoop = Gimmick

Look, you make some good points, but I refuse to believe that the Tinman crew would push a product just for some free gear and a little money to fund their team. That is just extremely out of character.

If a company came to you and said "we will pay you $15K to wear and promote our product", would you turn it down? Probably not. It wouldn't be smart to turn it down that's for sure.

Tinman Elite is also a business. They aren't selling apparel for fun. They use that money to fund training trips, travel to meets etc.. Would be willing to bet that aside from Drew Hunter, Sam Parsons and Reed Fischer (has an actual job), the rest of the Tinman crew makes around 15k a year if they are lucky so any endorsement money helps the team.

Agreed with 99% of your post but what GPS watches have battery life of a month? I need to get one of those... feel like I am charging my Garmin every few days.

I had a Whoop Strap 3.0 for 6 months. I don't know if it was placebo or not but the days it said I recovered the best I ran so much better than the days when it was red. I think it was legit though.

I would say as a person who is a hobby jogger and not much changes in my life that frequently the need to understand what was contributing/detracting from performance daily really diminished after a few months. I'm not against it but don't need it every day when I run less than an hour a day a few times a week now.

If I ever train for an ironman or try and go after a 2:30 marathon I'd probably re-activate my subscription though.

last point and them peaceeeeeeeeee. I love the subscription model. I'd much rather a company give you the piece of hardware and then I pay for the service. Makes it easier for someone like to not have to drop big money on a Garmin 900 series forerunner for the same thing up front.

Whoop reminds me of Zachary Levet. Both dishonest, gimmicky, and all in all...useless.

Lampost wrote:

Whoop reminds me of Zachary Levet. Both dishonest, gimmicky, and all in all...useless.

+1 on the 'next to useless', since a Garmin GPS watch with HR monitor does what this thing is supposed to do, and SO MUCH MORE that this device cannot do.

You make some decent points but I still think it's an ok enough product. It highlights things that runners often overlook or ignore. It can be helpful to get daily HR & sleep information & then see your recovery score. It's totally valid that this kind of data can come in other ways & for less money. I don't have Whoop. I feel like you should probably know if you're cooked heading into a workout or if you haven't been sleeping well. If you have the means, go ahead and use something like Whoop if you think that it's beneficial.

I think Coros has a couple of watches that last for a really long time.

We are supposed to charge GPS watches? I went to the store to have the battery changed and they told me that the battery wasn’t changeable. I just buy a new watch whenever it quits working.

Man! I feel so stupid!

I mean you aren't paying for the wearable. You are paying for their platform and analytics.

You're paying for a algorithm that will use your HR and HRV data to assess/predict recovery and fitness and store your data!

Sure you can get those data points from your Garmin or whatever but knowing how it fits into your past data and in data drawn from similar athletes is not something most users could figure out or have the time to!

If your HRV is XX 12 hours after a mile repeats workout and 9 hrs of sleep would you know what to do with that info?

okay, BUT wrote:

Agreed with 99% of your post but what GPS watches have battery life of a month? I need to get one of those... feel like I am charging my Garmin every few days.

I agree. On sedentary days, it might last a week or so. Active days drain it to where two days is the max.

When I tried it a few years ago, I found it valuable to help hold me back from overtraining. The wrist HR accuracy during activity seemed similar to Garmin (not great). It also sometimes said I was sleeping when I was actually just laying in bed awake. But I do think it does a great job telling you if recovered or not upon waking up. I got annoyed with needing to charge every 2 days at the time (better now it looks like).

Even if is partly a gimmick, they recently managed $100 million Series E financing at a $1.2 billion valuation.

I would go back to using if it had better HR activity accuracy and was an actual GPS watch on my wrist. Maybe they are putting some of their 100mil towards that?

I just think it's crazy that you're essentially paying $20+ a month for access to some fairly basic algorithms. Garmin et al. could easily do the same thing (and maybe are? I don't follow them closely) for free. Or just, you know, pay attention to how you feel...your body will tell you when you're training too hard.

But at a deeper level, everything's moving to a subscription model because they make way more money that way. Of course that also means you pay way more -- instead of $200 for a watch that lasts 4 years, you pay $1000 over the same time. Smart business.

Yeah I was actually very surprised when I saw that they are valued at 1.2 billion. I mean Fitbit's EV is 1.5 billion so how much more could they grow?

Also, Mahomes and Larry Fitzgerald are major investors in it so hats off to them i'm sure they are pulling it in.

Wasnt Whoop the idea Ryan came up with on The Office?