Thanks for the review. I’m thinking about months now if I suscribe or not, but I thought the same sleep well and training you can handle by yourself without a app. 300 Euros are a lot of money for another subscription.
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IMHO it trains you on what to look for. Once you know, then you can use any device that tracks O2, HRV, RHR and see what’s going on. Over simplification for sure, but it’s a big chunk of change to drop for the information provided.
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Anyone using the new Stress Monitor feature? Seems compelling and my limited experience thus far is that it is more accurate than not.
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I think it turned on for me yesterday, haven’t clicked through to learn more about it but I do like Huberman.
For whatever reason, I don’t see the new stress monitor feature. Wondering if WHOOP is pushing this update out slowly.
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I have a Whoop. I absolutely love the data from it. I have noticed since using the high volume plan that my HRV has greatly increased and my recovery is often in green now. I use it to measure HR connected to my Tacx trainer.
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Mine just showed up today. I had to update my app.
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I guess it seems pretty wonky to me.
Basically, anything that’s a workout is automatically classified as high-stress. In other words, anytime your HR is high, it’s classified as high-stress time.
There’s good reason why very few companies use HRV data from workout time periods with optical HR sensors, and this is precisely one of them. For example, on Gamrin, they don’t show stress during workout periods or anytime there’s too much movement/activity to detect it.
And while Whoop says it “limits the impact exercise has on our stress score by taking motion into account”, that clearly doesn’t work for cycling - or running. All of which skews the score for the day, as well as the entire baseline.
I mean basically, it’s a dumpster fire of uselessness.
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If you look at training stress as part of your overall stress it makes sense but I’m not sure how this is different from strain. When I have a stressful day at work my strain goes up with or without a workout. I guess I could read and listen to all the info they put out with it.
Per Whoop’s definition of stress that makes sense,
“Stress is the body’s natural response to to a physical or mental challenge. It’s measure of how alert or activated your body is at any given time”
Does it? The numeric score it gives on the homepage is your stress at the current moment, it isn’t an aggregate score of the day, which you can keep track of on the line graph. And do we know if stress data during physical workout skews the baseline? This is conjecture but I assume if you log a workout in the Whoop app that it would process any stress data during that time differently when accounting for the baseline.
I am somewhat a Whoop apologist and that is probably apparent but the data is interesting to say the least. Is it accurate? Maybe based on my experiences. I will admit Whoop’s definition of stress is conveniently broad in that it points out that is doesn’t always correlate with emotional state but I imagine it could be useful if you are just sitting around and it spikes.
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Hmm, if I open the Stress Monitor page, I assume it was showing average (and the home dashboard doesn’t specify average or current moment but I could see that yes, it does make sense it’s showing current moment - but why? Everything else on the entire dashboard is average or cumulative to that point in the day). But yeah, maybe it’s showing this moment. Either way, the workout piece is such a massive miss for a company that’s literally only got to get a single thing right: Workout strain.
Check out this image from today. The first spike in the day was me (literally) running around, thus, high HR according to Whoop.
The second long multi-hour spike was me out riding hard up a climb/etc. Then we see it taper down afterward, due to HR being elevated post-workout as normal.
But if I skip ahead a day or two or whenever, how am i going to remember looking back at this data that’s what I was doing/workout out? Again, this doesn’t show me anything at this moment except a proxy of HR elevation. This pattern matches my data from yesterday: Workout data is high, and everything else is low.
I made the same assumption when I first got the feature. I only began to suspect that it was the “real time” stress score and not an average when I saw that number changed quickly from say 0.5 to 2.5 within two minutes of refreshing and there is no way an average number could be that volatile in a short period of the time. With that being said Whoop could do a better job, in terms of UI, of noting this is “realtime” stress.
I imagine Whoop’s answer to that would be so that you can act upon it: meaning use their guided breathing exercises to address it or do something to relieve stress or heighten awareness.
Will addressed this in the latest episode (released today to coincide with the official rollout of the feature) of the Whoop podcast: next steps are to build more views that show historical stress score beyond a day. Something similar, I believe, to the all day strain side view when you put your device in landscape mode, etc. I agree only being able to see today’s stress is limiting but I imagine this is just a case of releasing the minimal viable product that provides some value and iterating later.
I haven’t done this yet but I would be curious, at least for my own data to see some type ofoverlay between my HR and the stress score recorded by Whoop and see what correlates and what doesn’t. That would be an interesting view to add to the app. I have seen spikes in my stress score where my HR wasn’t necessarily higher but I have only had the feature since Monday so it is early to tell.
Overall I don’t think this feature is inaccurate, but is it useful? I think we need more time to tell. And it will also be important to see how Whoop iterates on this feature so it isn’t just: “My stress score is X, neat. What can I do about it?”. If they add more activities/call to action stuff to the app so you can address it then I think this feature will be worthwhile.
So admittedly browsing the stress score graph is very finicky but I captured my highest stress score today and looked back at the HR during that time. While you do see a correlation you don’t necessarily see it being 1:1.
Albeit the x axis for each graph is not on the same scale so it’s difficult to tell.
Did you have any workouts today?
Also, where the heck did the find the Overview HR chart on the app? I’ve been looking all over for it since the UI change.
About to do a two hour z2 today!
Literally flip your phone into landscape mode with the app home on the home tab. Ensure rotate lock is off on your phone and if it doesn’t work try closing the app, reopening it, then rotating the phone to landscape mode (tilt mode seekers finicky since the big UI revamp).
It’s feature number 2:
https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/10-whoop-features-you-need-to-know/
Edit: Realized you already knew about Tilt Mode but apparently it just wasn’t working for you. Sorry, you’re DCRainMaker, I should have known better. 
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I use a Vivosmart 4 also. The only thing that bothers me is I am pretty sure the sleep tracking isn’t even close. There are days where it says I fell asleep over an hour before I even get in bed. And it never captures when I wake up in the night, even if I physically get out of bed to put a kid back to sleep.
I bought it for daily use and mostly for golf though. So I’ve been generally happy with it.
Thanks. Good ol’ restart of app fixed it.
For me the two align pretty well to HR spikes, almost exactly.
Though, it’s odd that there’s a gap between when I woke up, and when Stress ‘tracking’ started. Oh well…
Did you just get the feature today? I get stress scoring for my entire sleep.
Nope, I got it yesterday at noon my time. But no stress scores during sleep at all last night, it just started this morning an hour two or so after I woke up. Like it needed coffee or something.
Yeah Daily stress tracking needs some work as my daily notification popped up 40 minutes into a 60 minute TR workout. Good job Whoop, it’s no wonder why I’m not going to be renewing this time around.