I am considering a wearable mainly for recovery and sleep trends, not for replacing a bike computer or structured training data.
For people who have used both WHOOP and Oura, which one gave you more useful day-to-day decisions? I am especially interested in whether the recovery/readiness scores actually changed your training behavior, or if they became background numbers after a few weeks.
I have used neither of these devices. I get my sleep and HRV from my garmin watch. There are learnings to be had on travel, drinks, sickness coming on as far as impact on metrics. That may encourage you to make some lifestyle changes. But I would not recommend using the readiness score to change your training. Maybe as a piece of evidence if you aren’t feeling well, or ready to train, but certainly wouldn’t bag a workout just cause my watch gives me some score.
If you only care about sleep/recovery tracking, I would also look at the Garmin index sleep monitor and the new Fitbit. Both track similar metrics to Whoop and Oura, but don’t require a subscription. I have had an Oura for many years (we got grandfathered in so we don’t pay the subscription), and it has been good. However, if/when my Oura dies, I don’t think I would pay for a new version with a subscription. I would be looking at the Garmin or Fitbit.
I haven’t used Oura, but I have a Garmin Forerunner 970 and a Whoop 5.0, and the sleep tracking on the Whoop is above and beyond Garmin’s. Garmin literally cannot detect when I’m awake or asleep in the middle of the night, and the only way it detects when I “wake up” in the morning is by going through the morning report, which turns off sleep mode. Whoop is far more accurate in tracking periods of sleeplessness through the night, as well as my sleep start and end times. I have many complaints about Whoop, but the sleep tracking is top notch, if that’s important to you.
My wife likes her Oura. The two considerations i’d suggest are the logistics of sleeping with something on your wrist/arm vs finger and the payment structure. Oura is all up front and less monthly, WHOOP is the opposite.
I believe they both have completely free trial/return periods. It could be interesting to take advantage of both those trials and wear them both to compare the data?
I’ve been wearing an Oura for years and like it. I’m not a fan of wearing a watch/band for sleeping, so the Oura works well for me. I don’t pay any subscription (I bought mine before they did that), so I guess I don’t get all the available functionality, but the basics work for me. They were requiring a subscription for new rings for a while, but it looks like there is now an option for limited functionality without the monthly fee. I’m not sure if that gives you the limited feature set that I see or if it’s even less. I’m not a fan of the monthly model, but Oura is inly $70/yr where whoop is like $25+ a month.
Would be a crazy time to buy any of these for that. Wait to the end of the month to get the reviews of Google Fitbit Air when it release. It’s only 100 EUR and no subscription. It have to be really bad to justify the price of WHOOP compared to it.
In my experience using Garmin watches and now their index sleep monitor is that the data for me is not actionable and usually lags behind compared to my “feel”. I’m referring to RHR and HRV specifically - sleep is not something I have much control over because we have a theeting 1.5yr old right now. I still think it’s useful to track long term trends but I wouldn’t pay a montly subscription for just the data - especially what whoop is charging. I stopped wearing my garmin watch during the day because the body battery metric as well as the stress level is useless to me.
If you want to do #restmaxxing™ you need to eat healthy, mostly non-processed foods, enough protein (1.5-2g kg of body mass) and rest/sleep well - whatever that means. If you get this right, you’re 95% there.
I would agree - paying a subscription for this data might be one of the worst values I can think of in performance training.
Yeah. IDK. I’ve had a Garmin Venu3 for nearly a year and the health/sleep metrics haven’t been of any value to me. It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know by what I’ve experienced and how I feel. Even then, it only vaguely correlates. It was amusing to look at for a while, but now I don’t bother to check it any more.
I’ve never used a Oura even though I have a credit card that covers the cost because I don’t like wearing rings. I’ve used Whoop, including the current 5.0 MG, but generally prefer my Apple Watch Ultra 3 these days. They don’t do as good of a job packaging up the results, but I can see my HRV when I wake up and my resting heart rate/sleep/breathing/temp. It just doesn’t give me a score, which at this point, I don’t really need. But for the actual sleep tracking, the apple watch is far better for me than either whoop or garmin. With those, it will often track times in the night or early morning when I’m awake but keeping still/resting as sleep. The apple watch seems to be much more accurate in detecting whether or not I’m awake. YMMV.