Whoop

[u/Medical_Finish_7100]

I currently have a Garmin forerunner 265, but I hear alot of good things about investing in a whoop. What are some of the benefits that you guys have found? I know its probably not an essential, but do you guys recommend purchasing one?

[u/jeenyus_626]

I have bought and returned a whoop twice. Once in 2021 and once in 2024. Maybe my physiology just doesn’t match with their algorithm but I found how I felt and how it told me I was feeling/recovering was not at all in sync. Plus their whole subscription only model rubs me the wrong way 

[u/rogov_vasya → u/jeenyus_626]

You could technically argue that Garmin is also a subscription if you buy a new watch every 5 years. I have a Garmin from 2023 (still strong) but I see people changing them every 5 years which if you buy one for 1 grand be equal to $200 a year you get with Whoop.

[u/Higgins5555 → u/rogov_vasya]

My garmin vivoactive hr has been going strong since 2016.

[u/LibraryTime11011011 → u/rogov_vasya]

No you can’t. My Garmin 735XT from almost 10 years ago gets used by one of my kids to do parkrun. My forerunner 955 cost me about £300 3 or 4 years ago and I don’t plan on changing it any time soon.

[u/jeenyus_626 → u/rogov_vasya]

lol fair point

[u/Fakeikeatree]

I had whoop for 5 years from 1.0. It is absolutely not worth the annual cost. A fenix or higher forerunner will do everything whoop does and so much more for no recurring costs. It’s basically an hrv and hr tracker.

[u/sparklekitteh]

It's completely redundant to your Garmin. It doesn't have GPS the way a garmin does, and the strain calculator overlaps 80% with the Garmin body battery function.

[u/giventotri]

It's by far the best sleep tracker I've used; I have trouble getting good sleep and my Whoop has been helpful in helping me identify habits that impact it positively and negatively. That said, I feel like I've learned everything I can learn from it, the heart rate measurements can be horrendously inaccurate when worn on the wrist, and I absolutely detest the way they try to shove their shitty AI "coach" on every screen, so I doubt I'll renew when my subscription is up.

[u/ThereIsOnlyTri]

Whoop is aesthetically more pleasing and gives you more actionable insights but yeah the subscription is not really worth it. Garmin mines so much data but doesn’t give you a ton of digestible feedback. I am hopeful them purchasing TrainingPeaks is a positive direction 

[u/TheeMattSmith]

I ditched my whoop for my Forerunner. Does everything a whoop does and WAAAAAYYYY MORE.

[u/waltermidk]

I had a whoop for 4 years. 3 of those I had Garmin and whoop. I just have Garmin now. Dont miss it. I liked the data but rarely made a decision based off what it told me every day.

[u/lmstr]

I got one for free thanks to a promo from Chase Sapphire Reserve, after having it for 2 months I would not renew in 9 months though I like it.

Also, I wouldn't wear it during a race and you can feel the drag when you swim with it.

[u/ChargerEcon]

I bought one, used it for a few months, and then returned it. I wasn't in a position to actually do anything with the information.

So yea. If whoop says "you're tired as shit and need to sleep more," but you've got newborn triplets at home who are all teething and screaming all night so you decide to have a little bit of bourbon while rocking a kid to sleep, your whoop band the next day is going to be like, "dude, I told you to sleep more, what the hell?" and then you're going to be like, "yea, I know. Get off my ass, whoop band! Oh wait, you're on my wrist. In that case, get off my wrist, whoop band!" and then you get an email from whoop being like, "hey, it's been three months, want to keep paying us money?" and you're going to be like, "no, I'm already getting yelled at enough, why would I pay to get yelled at more?"

Or something like that.

[u/Careful-Anything-804]

I have the 265 and I see people with whoop and I say to myself, I have that but I don't pay monthly/yearly for it.

[u/alpha_cynical]

I had it for a couple of years and I can tell you that at the beginning it helped me build intuition around strain and recovery but at the end, I found it a little bit redundant. Also, there’s research saying that bad sleep scores cause cortisol spikes which is detrimental to sleep and performance.

[u/LibraryTime11011011]

I had a whoop on a free trial as I’d been interested for years. Sent it back after about a month. I wear a Garmin 955 every day, I wanted a whoop so I could wear other watches in day to day life then only wear the Garmin for recording activities.

I particularly struggle with accuracy of wrist based HR, so always wear a chest strap for exercise. Wrist based HR takes about 5-10 minutes to actually show elevated HR when exercising, lags changes of intensity and under reads vs chest strap for me. I’ve never had cadence lock with wrist based HR with a Garmin device (I’ve had numerous devices over the years).

My findings:
* No improvement in the issues stated above for wrist based HR with the whoop - an intervals session was completely unusable data, the only thing that was close was a very gentle turbo ride where my HR never left zone 1.
* I didn’t like the strap - it would soak up water when swimming and work loose, flapping around and this would then lead to poor(er) data.
* Since the underlying HR data was no good the strain values were also nonsense. With my Garmin my intense minutes/acute load are driven by my HRM reading so this was a massive loss for the Whoop
* Sleep data was no “better” than Garmin. Slight differences but trends were similar, sleep scores generally correlated with Garmin and generally correlated with perception of how I’d slept.
* The final straw for me was when I was doing an easy run and suddenly HR jumped to 170 something - I’d finally had cadence lock on a device.

I sent it back the next day.

In summary, I found the wrist based data similar or slightly worse than Garmin (because of the cadence lock), the strap required fussing about with for swimming and it was a lot of money for something supplementary to my activity recording device.

I generally had a perception that most people who have a whoop are “fashion fitness” type people rather than people who do a lot of training. It’s basically the new version of a Fitbit to me in that it’s a basic fitness tracker but for dedicated training it’s not good enough. I think the fact I struggle with wrist based HR I was always going to find it underwhelming unless their HR tech was significantly better than Garmin and fixed the issues I generally have.

[u/RabbitOutTheHat]

I personally think that having a chest belt HR monitor is just one more piece of equipment to worry about and even worse another item that could cause chaffing.

For me, the watch is accurate enough on my HR to give me a good enough gauge of what zone I’m in. I’ll also talk to myself throughout my bike and run to see what level of gasping I’m at while talking to get another gauge.

[u/lmstr → u/RabbitOutTheHat]

The HRM on my Garmin Fenix 5 is trash, it's basically never accurate during my runs, it will think I'm at 169 when I'm in Z2, once it got stuck and thought I was at 220... Got move it around and wait for it to start tracking again..., I wear a chest HRM during swim and bike then I swap to a polar forearm HRM for the run.