Yeah, that was the first thing I tried because that helped fix a prior connectivity issue. Now it won’t even get through the BT pairing process. I can see the correct device ID when I go to connect to the strap, but the pairing just sits there for ~10s and then gives me a generic error.
Update: tried deleting the app cache, rebooting my phone one more time and re-pairing and it worked 
as a software engineer nothing surprises me anymore
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New whoop user update: 2.5 weeks using the Whoop now and overall it’s been great, until this happened…
So this morning I got out of bed at 6am to let the dog out, just for a few mins and then went back to bed and slept a little more until 07.25. when I checked the whoop app it had finished my sleep at 6am and missed the extra HR or so in bed. It also gave me a recovery score of 68%.
So I edited my sleep session to the time when I actually got up, which it logged and gave me some extra time asleep…BUT my recovery score changed…to 38%!!! Wtf!?
How can I spend more time in bed and my recovery score go down, and not just down a little, but to actually completely tank!!?
This has really rocked my confidence in the data, or the interpretation of the data.
I sent a support ticket to whoop and am awaiting a response.
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This happens to me every night. I’m a terrible sleeper and tend to wake up several times a night, the longest time usually being around 3 AM. Whoop would generally end my sleep there. I would then edit the sleep, and that would drastically affect HRV and recovery score. I wrote Whoop about this. Quoting the response I got below:
WHOOP typically measures HRV and RHR during the last 5 minutes of the last slow wave sleep cycle but there are exceptions because sleep stages aren’t actually discrete categories (it isn’t really true that you are either in SWS, REM, Light, or Wake) - rather there are continuous distributions where there is deeper light sleep and lighter deep sleep and extremely deep sleep, etc. In order to display things in discrete categories, we use the standardized definition of these stages and apply a threshold to break down the continuum. Behind the scenes, we have a continuous distribution of these stages where every second of sleep is assigned to a "degree of slow wave sleep”.
Even if your sleep is edited by minutes, that can drastically change Recovery as HRV and RHR play a major roll in this number. When you edit your sleep, WHOOP reassigned every second of sleep to a degree of slow wave sleep therefor taking HRV and RHR during a different time period and changing your Recovery. It’s also important to note that when you edit a sleep you can only edit to the minute when WHOOP detects sleep it is to the second.
I followed up and asked whether I should avoid editing the sleep and just enter a nap for any sleep after the initial “sleep session.” The answer to that is quoted below:
When you wake up around 4am, don’t hit process now. If you fall asleep again under 50 minutes from the time you woke up, the device should merge these together and your wake up time will just appear as a “disturbance” in your sleep calculation. When you wake up fully for the day at your 7:30 period, then you can process your sleep.
If you wake time is more than 50 minutes, then yes the best suggestions would be have the second part of your sleep as a nap.
I’ve followed this advice since, and my recovery scores look a lot more “right” (match up with my feeling). Some nights, it merges the sleep sessions; some nights, like last night, it doesn’t. I’m unconvinced I was awake for a full 50 minutes last night, but I have no way of knowing. For now, I have decided to trust the technology.
I hope this helps. I have been using the Strap to dictate some of my workouts (I currently combine TR with a group class and solo resistance training, and yes, some days, there is overlap). I tend to move the TR workouts to days Whoop says I’m most recovered (they are the most cardio intensive days of the three types of workouts I do). There is no question these moves have yielded “better” performance (as measured by how “strong” I am in the workout and how I feel during and after it).
Will
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This is great info for those of us who are considering Whoop because of sleep issues. Thanks for taking the time to detail it out.
Any update Tom?
My whoop just arrived.
I’m curious.
If it never sees me in a recovered state how will it know if I’m recovered?
I’ve been needing a rest for over a month. My heart rate won’t get to max on efforts that make me almost vomit. I’m tired despite improved performance. I rarely feel better than 80% when I go for a ride. I can hold threshold for a while but my heart just wont go near max no matter how hard I’m going. My max is 180 but haven’t been above 173-175 in a while.
I live at sea level but I just got back from a week in Denver, Colorado 5,500ft elevation. I rode 7 days in a row. Did about 400 miles, 26,000 ft of elevation, 25 hours on the bike while a was there. A lot of it was over 8,000 feet up. That’s a big week for me.
After all that work on top of needing a rest, I put on the whoop for the first time. It’s telling me I’m 95% recovered… i know it takes time to learn me but like i said, if it never sees me in a recovered state it’s going to continue to tell me I’m good to go when I’m not. Or am I wrong?
Are you training because your whoop says you should or is there another reason why you’re not resting when you’re saying you need to? Any HRV device will need time to accumulate data across all states of your wellbeing. You’re absolutely right that it won’t know what your recovered state actually is until you do have a recovery week(s).
I’d say take a recovery week or two. Check the data for curiosity sake but don’t act on it. Listen to your body and do things how you would without the tech. Let it gather data for a month or two while you go through your cycles of fatigue and recovery. Once it starts correlating with how you’re feeling, then you can start taking it into account.
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If you know your max heart rate then you can email whoop support and they will edit that on your profile. This is important because daily strain HR is used to calculate daily strain and hence recovery also. This is what I did as I hadn’t had my HR past 180 and wasn’t planning any super hard workouts for a while for the whoop to pick up my actual max of 197 (if I’d done a workout where I’d hit this I wouldt have had to email them as the whoop would’ve them recalculated it automatically)
Now I’ve done that my daily strain looks more inline with how I ‘feel’
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Interesting, might actually do that.
My max on Whoop now is 193 (had one for the last two weeks), but I’ve hit 200 and 201 early this year registered by a chest strap.
I’ve just been riding because I’ve got the time to do it. Poor weather and shorter days are on the horizon. I figure I will have plenty of time to rest in the coming months. I’ve taken a couple days rest here and there but It’s just really hard to go all the way with a proper rest.
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Is your data from previous months readjusted to show what you are really capable of? Does that make sense?
Give it 3-4 weeks and it will calibrate. I doubt you’ll be training so hard as to be completely buried in fatigue for that long. If you are then WHOOP isn’t useful for you anyways…
The WHOOP does adjust to changes over time, but it’s incremental, and you likely won’t notice it much. I knocked out a pretty challenging multi month block of training, and it changed my HRV/RHR trend accordingly during the block and is now getting back to normal after a couple easier weeks.
Point being in all of this, don’t overthink it. Let it collect a month of data and then go from there. I’ve been using mine since last December and have found it very helpful in maintaining a consistently high training load while balancing recovery well. I buried myself a couple of times but looking back I now have a good handle of what to look for between WHOOP and my power data trends to keep on the right track.
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Well said!
Using whoop was a little frustrating at first but now that I’ve had it for about 2 months, the metrics are making sense and almost perfectly coincide with how I’m feeling.
To me, the sleep tracking is incredible. Multiple times I’ve woken up at say… 6am, fallen back asleep until 7am, had a dream between 6 and 7am and whoop will pick up REM sleep in that period. Maybe it’s just me but I find that very fascinating.
Now that I’ve been able to correlate sleep/recovery with what whoop tracks, I know whether or not I’ve slept well and how I “feel” when I wake up. Now, I can pretty closely (usually within 5-10%) estimate my recovery score with what whoop projects. I find the data fascinating
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I’ve been reading about the placement of the Whoop and it looks like in most cases, it’s better to be placed on the upper arm via the bicep band. Then I read the Whoop tracks sleep much better at the wrist.
Anyone who use the Bicep band care to comment? Do you use that purely for activities and resort back to the wrist for day to day and sleep?
Cheers 
I find the wrist works well for workouts 99% of the time, bicep band is definitely slightly better. The bicep band is a lot more elastic though, so if you use it to sleep it can kinda flip around on you and then it won’t track anything. I tend to only use the bicep band if I’m going to be doing a big workout, and I always switch back to the wrist strap to sleep
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Nice one, mate
I use it on the bicep at all times, and even if I mostly sleep on the side I tend to forget I have it on, while on the wrist it was actually hurting (I have very thin and bony wrists), apart from the fact that it was giving me awful drops during workouts. I am perfectly happy with the bicep band, then, with the plus that it hides even under t-shirts, and so it’s not in your face like wearing two watches.
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Cheers fella
Hi guys! Can anyone tell if the whoop actually made the performance increase following the proper recovery insights?