Does the Whoop strap actually improve training?

no

The heart rate monitoring part of it is very poor, as many studies have shown, and so therefore it is pretty useless.

Your body’s feel + your watch’s reported mileage and grade-adjusted speed data for the last 3 days is the best. It is not possible for any strap anywhere in the body to give you more “accurate information”. Whatever they give you, if it’s inconsistent with what you feel (and it will often be), you are going to ignore it anyway, so why even seek it?

I used a whoop for around 7 months. The thing it was most helpful with was learning about how things affect your sleep. I think it can be useful as a mental tool, but it isn't perfect.

I got it for the same reason, wanted to focus more on recovery because of constant injury. The app would tell me I needed about 10 hours of sleep every night... While that may be true, it ain't happening.

If you've got money to blow on the subscription, just try it out

Props to DCRAINMAKER for telling it like it is:

"And while Whoop’s platform/software has largely been fantastic and innovative, the optical heart rate sensor within the Whoop 3.0 band could only be described as a dumpster fire. And thus, as the saying goes: Crap data in, crap data out. No amount of analytical processing could fix the flaming river of bad data into the platform. I talked about this at length in my review, and some 346 comments since then confirmed this by everyone else. Literally, nobody has managed to show me a single good hard/interval/etc workout with accurate comparative HR data. And yes, I’ve actually continued to wear the Whoop 3.0 sensor since my review. And with 379 workouts worth of data in every possible body location, compared to 2-4 other heart rate sensors per workout, and 531 ‘recoveries’. I’m pretty sure nobody has as much comparative data as I do on this thing. Which, means I’ll be well suited to talk about what, if anything, has changed on the 4.0 edition.

Whoop’s new 4.0 sensor is apparently all about improving accuracy of that data (as well as adding more data). We’ll get to those technical bits in a second."

Don’t they use HRV, and not just HR?

There may eventually be something useful to get out of HRV (heart rate variability) data, but I have no idea if what Whoop does with it is proven useful. Assuming of course they get good HR data to begin with, as noted above.

For me, my HRV data from my Apple Watch is consistently very low and presumably very bad. So I ignore it on the assumption that my baseline is just a low number in the mid 20s. I’m not going to just skip workouts everyday because my watch says I’m stressed. I’d like to think that eventually connected devices will give more and more useful information though.

ViperDom wrote:

the optical heart rate sensor within the Whoop 3.0 band could only be described as a dumpster fire. And thus, as the saying goes: Crap data in, crap data out. No amount of analytical processing could fix the flaming river of bad data into the platform.

<---- Ouch! Sorry to anyone who has been paying a subscription for this thing. Sounds like its HRM hardware is on par with what is built into the majority of activity watches.

If you want good HR data there are several options available in either Chest Band, or Arm Band format. Each have their positives & negatives but give accurate results if properly implemented.

I've had great success with the Polar OH1 (optical) arm band. When compared simultaneously with the "gold standard" chest strap (which uses electrodes) the data was closely matched in magnitude with a minor delay in time which was not significant enough or relevant to my intended use. In contrast i did a similar comparison with the GarminForerunner35's wrist based HRM and it was obvious that the data was useless. Some people are fine with that though and just want to see that pretty picture on there watch like Hey my VO2 max just went up 2points!!!!, ignorant to what is going on behind the scenes.