Maybe a little off topic but not quite. I’m using a similar device called Oura Ring. It’s a ring instead of a wrist wearable. Lasts up to a week on one charge, has “airplane mode” so you don’t always carry an active radio on your body. Has what claimed to be the most accurate sleep data available outside a lab, night time HR/HRV, body temperature, respiration rate, accelerometers. Personally I just use it as a super convenient way to get my sleep data, night time HR and HRV chart, and actually respiration rate and temperature are kinda handy too. There’s some analysis built into the app but I mostly ignore it, I like to see the data and historical trends myself. They got phone apps but also a web site where you can stack all kinda charts. There’s integration with Google Fit which in turn can be shuttled to Training Peaks for HR/HRV and sleep data.
Personally for me the most eye opening were things that we all kinda know but they don’t really hit me until I saw data. Alcohol consumption wrecks my resting heart rate and HRV, simply eating late does a number on those too, late night screen use turns out isn’t much of an issue for me. Things like that.
They had some teething issues with the new version’s firmware, but it is all resolved now and working really well.
I don’t like wearing it while weightlifting or doing moto or more technical mountain biking. Road biking and just about anything else I can think of is fine.
It’s spendy but a pretty darn cool device. I think 80% can be had with just spending a few min measuring HRV in the morning using cell phone or an HR strap, and I’ve done that for a while, but this thing is just a lot more convenient and it does give some useful data on top of just HRV, like the shape of night time HR chart is pretty telling, you know all is good if it’s a hammock and you can tell what the issues are if it’s not by just looking at the shape of the curve.
These graphs look pretty good nowadays. But there can be problems with dark skin, lots of hair, cold temps and a badly positioned watch on your wrist.
Maybe it’s just a problem with whoop and their product. I keep following this thread because in theory the product is great, but I’m probably not gonna use a watch 24/7 when I can have Sleep as Android and HRV4 Elite much much cheaper. On the other hand a product like the V800 to have all data in one spot (cycling power, running data, sleep data, hrv data - dunno if it can do the later 2) would be nice to have.
I would say that mirrors my experience quite closely although I’ve only been using my whoop for about 6 weeks. To start with I was wearing my Wahoo strap and the Whoop - recording hr on my head unit from one and direct in TrainerRoad with the other. I found the Whoop strap under reported compared to the Wahoo BUT later during workouts levelled up and were very similar. I reported this to Whoop, provided the two .fit files and the agreed and suggested my strap probably wasn’t tight enough and I should also try wearing slightly further away from the wrist. This has improved accuracy and I’m now only wearing the Whoop strap during workouts. The downside is I find the strap affects circulation having it tight enough to provide accurate readings - I notice this mainly in the morning after sleep and have slight swelling around my wrist joint and hand. As I have one wrist smaller than the other I tend to wear on the slimmer wrist when not working out, then swap for workouts so the contact is tighter, but only for a short period of time and doesn’t cause swelling. I think this is inherent with wrist based measurement that need good skin contact and no outside light interference affecting readings.
I’ve also seen similar strange recovery readings - after a day of rest my recovery dropping but I feel good so I still do planned hard workout. The next day recovery score increases when you’d expect it to decrease. Just my opinion and I’m no scientist but HRV has a big bearing on this score and is totally dependant on the straps ability to determine Slow Wave Sleep as HRV is taken from the first 5 minutes of the last phase of SWS a night. I’m sure I’ve seen periods flagged as SWS after I’ve actually woken from sleep and just been lying in bed thinking about getting up - this has possibly been worse over the holiday period as I’m usually up and off as soon as I wake up but have been making the most of the work break. I’m going to try and keep a closer eye on when my last SWS sleep cycle is each night and make sure there aren’t any obvious periods when I feel it misreported.
I bought a 12 month gift card in their Black Friday sale so I’m locked in till late 2020 but right now it’s not giving me the confidence to change my training schedules round and move longer/harder workouts to high recovery days as they don’t seem to fall when I feel the most recovered.
I use Whoop and in combination with the bicep band, I find it to be as reliable as my Wahoo strap… the Whoop is also great for sleep and for “macro” trends. Right now, IMO, I get very little daily help out of it - it doesn’t take a genius to know when they are smashed and I push through at least the first interval on borderline days to decide how smashed I am. With macro trends - like how much sleep I’m getting over the week or how much “strain” I’ve been accumulating - I think it could be helpful in evaluating seasons and training plans in retrospect. I like the “set and forget” aspect of its monitoring.
As mentioned before, the calorie count for cycling is way off. Honestly, they could steal kJ/calorie data through the Trainingpeaks API or something and really improve their product (I’d bet most cyclists that have a Whoop use TP).
HR: In my case the bicep band has been flawless and in complete agreement with both Polar H10 and upper forearm Wahoo TICKR FIT.
Sickness: I have had a cold for three days now and while I agree that recovery scores may still be positive (with misleading recommendations), the measured HR (resting included) is higher than my normal, and to me that was a sign that something was off since a few days before the cold broke out.
Calories: I interpret the Whoop’s calories as a combination of metabolic and exercise calories, since the calculation is pretty much purely based on heart work. In my case on rest days the total day’s calories track pretty well my BMR, going up on exercise days. It’s not a number I would trust to the letter (since it ignores actual muscular exertion) but it surely gives me an upper bound to gauge my nutrition needs.
I started with a Whoop 3.0 on Christmas Eve 2019. All I really care about is having it help me track and improve my sleep amounts/consistency/quality and my overall recovery/health. So far, the simple stats are keeping me from obsessing over metrics like other devices did (good thing), and the information provided is both useful and accurate enough to constructively push me to sleep more/better.
At least during these first two weeks, it’s definitely providing the value I wanted from it. Note that I couldn’t care less about accurate HR or anything else during workouts… I have Wahoo stuff for that and I’ll continue to use my chest strap, power meter, etc for workout data. My Whoop is for recovery and sleep.
I’ll report back in a month or two how things are going. Feel free to DM me with any questions.
But how does one know if their recovery and sleep is of quality without knowing what you need to recover/sleep from (by ignoring whether the HR tracks accurately or not)?
Polar Ignite and both the Polar Vantage M and Vantage V, do HRV from wrist, sleep tracking and training load metrics. They are really far more economical than a subscription based product.
I think Whoop calculates recovery purely from its perception of HRV and RHR every night, regardless of what you did the day before. It’s talking about cardiovascular strain/recovery, not muscular recovery.
For someone whose intention is to use this (rather expensive) device/service to track the strenuousness of workouts AND sleep/recovery, it may or may not be good enough to justify the price: I’ve seen lots of “it’s great” and “it’s terrible” posts so I really have no idea whether overall the device is accurate.
For my personal purposes, all I care about is that using it is effectively driving behavioral change in ME: it’s pushing me to sleep more and to make better decisions about sleep and related subjects. That, to me, is worth $18/month. But that’s a very personal value judgment, not a ringing endorsement that it’d be great for everyone.
“WHOOP calculates how recovered your body is during your Sleep each night and reports your Recovery when your sleep is complete each morning. There are three key metrics that make up your Recovery: Heart Rate Varaibility (HRV), Resting Heart Rate (RHR), and Hours of Sleep.”
I have yet to determine how Whoop is effective for weight lifters. I don’t think that it effectively records strain from a gym session. Personally, whenever I’ve gone to the gym and done a warm-up for 5-10 minutes, stretched, then started lifting weights… my HR never gets high enough for long enough for Whoop to ever auto-detect an activity. So I have to manually enter the workout. And the strain is never very high. But I’m always more sore from my gym sessions than I ever am from a cycling workout.
The eccentric contractions are what really cause a lot of muscle soreness, and the act of riding a bike does not include any eccentric muscle contractions (the “negative” phase as many people call it… which is the lengthening of the muscle). Essentially, doing strength training is fairly traumatic on the muscles and causes lots of micro tears, whereas the body gets stronger when it repairs those microscopic tears in the muscles. Muscles gets stronger, and usually bigger (hypertrophy).
But Whoop can’t measure this “trauma” to the muscles based on HR, RHR, or HRV alone. Maybe HRV comes down after a hard gym session. Due to a rotator cuff injury, I haven’t been able to go to the gym as much since I started using Whoop again in September to test this theory.
I totally agree with you and personally use the Whoop for the same reasons. As someone who used to sleep for only a few hours and feel tired every day, its really pushed me to think about the amount of sleep and the effects that it has on my recovery (Especially during a high volume plan). I had looked through the forum before ordering one, ultimatley deciding to just try it out and for me using it only for sleep/recovery monitoring its been a worth wile purchase.
I agree that Whoop doesn’t work well in terms of calculating a “strain” score for some activities like lifting. Unless you are trying to really elevate you heart rate the Whoop doesn’t really take notice.
However if these activities ultimately impact your HRV and resting HR, which I think they would, then your Recovery Score will be impacted. Following the Recovery Score is how I tend to track things over time.
Separately, I’ve continued to use the Whoop as a HR strap during indoor TR workouts synced to an iPad and my outdoor rides sync’d to my Garmin. I had a few glitches with this when I first got the 3.0 strap, but things seem to be working really smoothly and reliably lately. I tend to just leave the strap in Broadcast mode and battery life still seem fine. I do use a biceps strap, which I think helps with reliability.
Did you try and record the workout with Strain Coach by selecting weightlifting?
It might calculate strain better, maybe give that a try after you have recovered from your injury.
I tested Whoop about two months and canceld the contract in mutual agreement with Whoop at that point.
Reason where unsolvable Bluetooth connection problems. It started at day one with an SW update request that was not possible to do. The connection broke after seconds or minutes. Surely I tried all (Adroid) devices I have access to (and there are several) without any different outcome. My service request led to a delivery of a replacement, and I got told that there is an issue with a range of builds. Unfortunately the replacement acted exactely like the first one: updated required but never executed successful. I found several comments in the Internet describing the same problem.
You could say that I should have just skipped the patching as the divice did it’s work. But there where always issues in replicating the recordings via the Smartphone. The link was never stable and if the replication worked, it took hours. Nothing I can live with in daily use.
The measurement quality however was impressive. Artefacts where rare and corrected, the measurements and analytics understandable and credible.
However … what use do they make? My main intention to use Whoop was to better understand the response of my body to the training stimulus and maybe optimize my training schedule.
Maybe I’m so briliant ( or the analytics of Whoop is just too simple; it told me nothing I did not know by listening to my body. The Strain score verry much correlates with TSS and I’m lacking interesting/enlighting details. The HRV is an interesting parameter, but it’s just a number. A system that only monitors the HR without knowing the context (like the watt based training effort) can not tell you a lot, in my humble opinion.
And all this sleeping analysis … Does anyone need a device to know if they slept good or bad? That you need as much sleep as you can get?
Finally I found it a good try to see what I assume is the state of the art; understanding that this state is pretty useless; and having this technical issue that allowed me to quit the contract.
Apprently I do. I’m much more motivated to address a need or goal when I can measure the current situation and then measure improvement. Also, I know whether I slept well or poorly last night… but how well or poorly did I sleep, on average, over the last month? Am I improving? Or not?
I find the reminders useful, and I also find the daily metrics stimulate my competitive instinct so that, upon seeing that I scored X, I experience a visceral desire to “beat” X by a little bit next time. Hey… whatever works for each person.
I completely agree that the “state of the art” in sleep and health tracking is very primitive indeed, like only being able to track effort through “perceived exertion” and once-per-minute rough HR stats. Still, while we wait for someone to invent an accurate “sleep meter”, I’ll take whatever help I can get, knowing its limitations but trying to get as much value out of it as I can.
Within my work environment I just had a chat with a sports scientist. He compared the whoop and a polar ignite with actual medical sleep monitoring equipment. He told me the whoop was way of and the ignite came closer to his medical equipment.
I was close to pull the trigger for a whoop. But now I’m in doubt again…
I’ve heard some criticism of Whoop regarding this, in that they don’t have studies that show how it correlates to medical standard sleep monitoring equipment. Some other trackers (such as Oura), apparently do have studies showing their accuracy available. Whoop does have is a very large marketing budget, which isn’t necessarily bad, but they clearly can afford to do this type of study but haven’t.
(Or they have, and didn’t publish because the results where bad.)
I don’t have a Whoop but I’ve been using HRV4Training ($10 iphone app) to measure HRV every morning. It’s been instructive but I’m not sure where it all leads.
Now that I’ve measured my HRV for a while I can predict when my HRV will take a hit:
drank alcohol
stayed up too late and short changed my sleep
got a nasty cold
did some training that resulted in fatigue
I guess the feedback has been good. I do think twice about drinking at all before a big weekend ride and I’ve been better about not staying up late. Armed with this knowledge I’m not sure if it’s worth continuing to test.
Same here, I also use HRV4Training. I think the major benefit is identifying approaching illness, which is yet to make itself known by having you run to the bathroom.
On a few occasions now, I’ve had depressed HRV scores in advance of illness. This has allowed me to back off in advance of any physical symptoms and (hopefully) limit the length/severity of the illness.
or the analytics of Whoop is just too simple; it told me nothing I did not know by listening to my body. The Strain score verry much correlates with TSS and I’m lacking interesting/enlighting details. The HRV is an interesting parameter, but it’s just a number. A system that only monitors the HR without knowing the context (like the watt based training effort) can not tell you a lot, in my humble opinion.
I’m much more motivated to address a need or goal when I can measure the current situation and then measure improvement. Also, I know whether I slept well or poorly last night… but how well or poorly did I sleep, on average, over the last month? Am I improving? Or not?