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{{DISPLAYTITLE: WHOOP Review: a good idea fatally flawed?}}
The current iteration of WHOOP is deeply flawed, possibly fatally , flawed. There may be some usefulness for some athletes, as long as if you understand the problems.
=What is WHOOP, and why might you want one?=
This is not a full review of WHOOP, and I'd recommend checking out something like the [https://the5krunner.com/2024/11/23/whoop-4-0-strap-review-best-discount/ 5K runner review] as background. For our purposes, we going to assume that you are an athlete, and you are looking to optimise your training and recovery. Knowing how hard to push your training, and how much to recover is one of the objectives of good training. and this is the primary purpose of WHOOP, so you'd hope they do a better job than alternatives like Garmin. (I've found little to no value in Garmin's training advice. It's not quite bad enough that you can simply do the opposite, but it's sometimes close.)
The principle of WHOOP is to measure things about your body and use that to understand your training stress and recovery. WHOOP primarily uses heart rate, combined with movement. It also seems to use skin temperature and blood oxygen. The details of how it uses this data is a black box, proprietary model. Anyone who has used to heart rate monitor for any length of time will know that bad readings are inevitable. even a good quality chest strap will sometimes give bad data. Optical heart rate monitors, like WHOOP are especially vulnerable to bad data. The latest generation of optical heart rate monitors, like the polar Verity sense, have become good enough for most non-critical usage. Unfortunately, WHOOP has a number of compounding problems.
* '''Band Design'''. The design of the band and its locking mechanism seems quite clever at first glance. However, I found it made it quite tricky to get the tension right, and the mechanism tended to pinch my skin and it was hard to open and close. The band needs to be taken off to change the length, making it tedious to get right and impractical to move it around as each new position requires readjustments. The band isn't stretchy, so arm movements change the pressure, which makes it both uncomfortable and unreliable. If you compare this with the Polar Verity Sense, the best in class, you can see how it should be done. The polar has a stretchy band so it works with arm flexing, and it has an attachment that means you can just close it with the right level of tension.
* '''Sensor Design'''. The focus of the sensors appears to be long battery life, rather than data quality. The internal components talk about "Ultra Low-Power" rather than quality. The device only has three green HR LEDs in a line, close together. Modern optical HRMs use more LEDs and have them in a circle around the sensor. If you look at the firmware updates, there are several updates that mention "Improved strap stability", and one "Improved heart rate estimation algorithm", suggesting that WHOOP are fully aware of the problems and trying to fix them in software.
* '''Quality'''. My overall sense of quality with WHOOP is poor. While the bands are expensive, they feel cheaply made to me. I don't get the sense that WHOOP has put the effort into creating a premium product. For instance, I have several bands, and some fit easily onto the sensor, well another requires inordinate force to remove it. This suggests variable tolerances and poor quality-control.
* '''Placement'''. WHOOP seems to have been created to be worn on the wrist, which is the worst place on the arm for heart rate sensing. The company does recommend you wear the band high up on your bicep, just below the deltoid muscle. This is a strange recommendation as the flexing of your bicep tends to increase and decrease the tension and make accurate readings even harder. Positioning an optical heart rate monitor on the inside of the upper arm just above the elbow seems to be the optimum position, as it is for most optical HRMs.
Lots of reviewers seem to respect WHOOP and think it's worthwhile. Are they able to get much better data than I am? Are they getting "reviewer special" devices that perform much better than retail units? Is WHOOP providing incentives that bias reviews? I'm not sure, and I read enough reviews from people I believe are credible to pay for WHOOP. There are some contrary views, such as this analysis [https://youtu.be/wYx85gnsyvQ?si=wsHb1gzP06WrJhRo Data Scientist Breaks Down why WHOOP doesn't Work], but they are few and far between. I should have listened to the many individuals that don't write reviews, but found WHOOP to be unhelpful at best, rather than the bigger reviewers. Caveat Emptor, Your Milage May Vary, etc.
=Is there any value in WHOOP?=
Maybe. It seems like the sleep tracker is reasonable, and maybe if you're a cyclist the data quality issues won't be so bad. The sleep score and recovery metric seems plausible, though given all the issues, it's hard to trust WHOOP. Personally, I'm finding WHOOP like a sick cat that I need to look after rather than a valuable training tool.