Whoop: Yay or Nay?

bump - curious to hear people's thoughts.

Overall, my vote would be nay. To sum it up in a sentence, their product is not a medical device yet they are sort of trying to claim it is without saying anything they can't legally because of that non-designation. They claim x% injury reduction, better sleep, etc., but how? By what guideline? They say its the first such device backed by research, but as far as I can tell that means they selected a handful of scientific journal articles about related subjects (recovery, sleep, etc) to quote on their website that sound impressive, yet at the end of the day its just a very expensive heart rate monitor and sleep log that encourages users to use HR zone training and sleep more.

Improving your sleep, pushing yourself while avoiding overtraining, etc. -- are obviously good ways to improve as an athlete. My complaint is basically they're throwing the word 'analytics' around like its some sort of panacea. At the end of the day, did the device really make good recommendations that were specifically tailored for that user based on their data OR did the user get better because they had a daily sleep log that basically forced them to confront the fact that maybe they were sleeping 6 hours a night when they should have been sleeping 8. Going back to the fact that they're not a medical device with professional medical direction (i.e. staff MDs, NPs, PTs, etc. acting in an official sports medicine capacity), my gut reaction is 'no', this is a correlation does not imply causation situation.

Oddly enough, I saw a testimonial of theirs that basically proves the same point. It was someone saying how whoop was such a great thing for them as an amateur athlete who couldn't afford a coach to help them with their athletic development. Yet, what is a coach -- who is a human -- going to do. Are they going to run sleep analytics or are they going to have you write down how many hours of sleep you got/how you felt and either back off or ramp up training according to whatever qualitative information you give them? Are coaches saying 'man, you haven't been hitting your REM sleep targets this week, we gotta back off the mileage', or is it "coach, I feel really beat up and I'm not sleeping" "OK, take a rest day"?

As soon as you start measuring something in your life you're going to pay more attention to it. E.g., do you need a fancy expensive food tracking app or would simply starting to write down every bit of food you ate help you eat less junk food and lose weight? Yeah, the app would accomplish it, but so would the 5 cent piece of paper. It's the process that caused the change -- it's up to you to decide how much you want to spend for the tool to use in it.

I will readily admit that I am biased. Despite being an engineer, I feel like "analytics" has gotten to the point whre it's almost astrology for tech bros. Whoop seems like a fancy expensive toy for people that like gadgets. If that's you, by all means go for it. If not, start with the simple, almost free, approach and see if that helps before making any major spending decisions.

I’ve been toying with getting one for a few years. I have a few friends who hopped on the hype train a while ago and they’ve said it’s not worth it.

Basically, all it will say is sleep more, and don’t drink alcohol. If you can do both of those then you’ve saved some money.

Neigh.

Nay. Expensive and other watches do the same work better.

Am I allowed to vote “yea” without making it rise to the level of cheering “yay”?

Is anyone using this in running? If so, how would you apply the data to your training? If it said you weren't recovered on your interval day, what would you do? Postpone it a day?

I don't get it. Sometimes, my best workouts are when I feel tired from the previous day.

I'd be willing to give it a try for a few months, but I don't see a clear benefit... or a way to even judge if it's giving me a benefit.

Whoop is a borderline scam. They are using HRV essentially the same way that Polar and Garmin (Firstbeat) do in their newer watches. But they charge $30/month for the privilege and their hardware doesn't do anything else. They spend a ton of money on marketing and they have a lot of pro athlete endorsements.

If you care about recovery metrics, get a new Garmin with "body battery." It's actually a better implementation of HRV-based recovery metrics because it doesn't pretend to do more than it's capable of. Whoop gives you a whole bunch of granular data that's probably not legit considering they purport to be getting it all from a wrist-based optical heart rate sensor. There's only so much USEFUL data you can get from the current crop of sensors.

Bump. I’ve been seeing this app more and more on my Strava feed so curious if it recently got better.

I say nay.

I do a LOT of personal data tracking (sleep, hr, hrv)and have done a lot of research on Whoop. I am convinced it doesn't do anything that tons of free or cheap apps don't do already.

I measure resting HR and heart rate variability every morning when I wake up to get a consistent baseline. Whoop would automate that.

I paid $10 for a lifetime copy of HRV4Training and $130 for an Apple Watch, which both contain robust data analysis. Whoop is $30 per month. Do the math yourself.

This is sound.

Tracking yourself is sound too but analytics only go so far. Like I'm a week post virtual marathon and my garmin has said my Vo2 max has gone down from 69 to 65 because of the metrics it tracks. BS garmin dude. I don't need that negativity.

And yes I've had days were I didn't sleep properly and I rocked a workout and days I did sleep and still failed.

Listening to your body is the best skill you can develop.

+1.

There's gotta be a good placebo effect for people who aren't always thinking about some of the little things. There might be a correlation to injury because people are doing too much quality back to back and then stop because Whoop says they got bad sleep & are 50% recovered. I don't think it's a BS product but if you're in tune with your body then you should be able to track some of these things. It might be nice to just have a product like this do it but I don't think it's next level tech that's a requirement to set a PB.

I worked on one of those validation studies, which was focused on sleep. Essentially we collected subjective, self-reported sleep metrics using validated surveys, and then correlated those with the metrics whoop collected. Long story short, they were correlated and the study is somewhere on their website- i encourage you to read it and form your own thoughts on how applicable this conclusion is

Where they lose me is the strain scores they give you. to my knowledge, that hasn't been validated and certainly should not be used to dictate training. I consider it in the same category as the "performance condition" metric garmin gives you.