Don’t miss it at all. I am happy to have the extra $30 a month in my pocket though
Whoop bibs anybody?
This thread is a little quiet - anyone still using Whoop?
My thoughts:
Adds nothing to training really. Recovery score doesn’t really correlate with my workouts, red amber green on TR is a far better gauge however, as someone that drinks regularly but not heavily (work in London and social drinking is a way of life), it’s massively influenced how much alcohol I drink. Made me realise how damaging just 3 pints of beer is and I’ve hugely cut down now…… probably gone from having 15 beers a week on average to less than half that, and more recently I’ve not drunk at all for six weeks.
Anyway, Whoop has also refreshed their sleep settings algorithm this week. Anyone noticed a step change? I must be a restless sleeper as my ratio of awake/light/deep/REM has gone from say an average of 10%/70%/20%/10% to a much better 5/40/30/25. Don’t get enough hours but at least the ratio looks less worrying!
Switched to a Garmin Venue3 and haven’t looked back. I don’t miss Whoop at all.
TR traffic light system is a Training Load Ratio metric which compares acute/chronic load. This metric is useful to prevent injury by monitoring load ramp-up.
Whoop, Garmin Training Readiness try to address daily training readiness to understand how much load you can go after today.
The concept is great. However it doesn’t work well in practice. Just like Garmin’s training status. Both use variation against baseline which has a more rigid ceiling (unlike chronic load, which you can build with more training hours, you can’t increase your HRV. Or sleep for more than 8 hours, or increase your VO2 Max past a certain number)
So apart from seeing your HRV dip after a night of drinks or short sleep, unfortunately the tech is just a pretty app with a bunch of graphs or the silly “unproductive status” with Garmin. This variation vs baseline makes Green or Amber Whoop score as good as almost random. Same with Garmin training status. Best not to use them for actual training planning. Unless you got so drunk that you forgot and need a score to remind you
Long story short, I don’t use the subscription any more as it doesn’t help with any meaningful actions. But use it as HR strap with my head unit.
I thought of joining, but the whole mess of bad reviews and having hundreds of people trying to sell their product. It quickly sounded like a ponzi scheme or people that just don’t have a clear read of the room and realize the huge undertow of massive negative reviews. People, masses of people, marketing a product that sucks so bad at basic functions just boggles the mind. Fake it till you make it? Sure it might do some things okay, but for that kind of money, I wondered how much the hawkers were being paid to sell their stuff. And the number of people that will defend them on the internet. Are they being paid or comped somehow? It’s the main reason I’ve advised my wife to avoid the Oura ring. There seems to be too much marketing and less usability. In my opinion…
Once bitten. - I was a big time user of the Nike Fuelband. It seemed to work well for me, but some of the features were based on wildly unreliable data and Nike wouldn’t divulge what went into their algorithm. (There were days I worked my butt off and didn’t seem to get any recognition for the efforts and others when I didn’t do much, and won the day) Eventually the second version band (warranty replaced twice) died and I gave it a proper funeral and moved on. I primarily used it because it worked with their Foot Pod system, and that part seemed to work really well.