[squiggs96]

I had a Whoop strap, but I returned it after the 30 day trial was up. It was good at tracking sleep, but that's about it. The heart rate monitor is nowhere near as accurate as it should be. I wear chest strap HRMs at Orangetheory and while I ride my bike. I spend a lot of time in both places and the output is different. When I was riding on Zwift I would have the Zwift app attached to my chest HRM and I had my iPhone open with the Whoop data. There are many times during a ride that the HR is the same, but Whoop spikes and drops way more. If I am in the normal riding position both HRMs will show 140 bpm. If I sit up on my saddle my Whoop would drop to around 105 bpm. If I put my hands over my head to stretch it would go under 100 bpm. My chest strap would still show me around 140 bpm and might even be a touch higher. The calories from activities are not close. I have hundreds of rides on my bike. Garmin, Zwift, and Strava both have different formulas for calories, but they are usually close. A 90 Zwift ride will normally be in the 720-800 calories range, depending on exertion and sleep levels. Whoop had all of these rides over 1,000 calories. It's just not true.

The data it gives you on your phone isn't the easiest to read. It's okay, but not great. The data on your computer is better, but it doesn't have everything it does in the app, which is frustrating. I don't think it does anything really useful. It shows my HRV while sleeping. My HRV was higher when I drank a bottle of wine in the evening before going to bed. It was lower when I worked out and didn't drink alcohol. That seems pretty intuitive to me. I don't need to wear a strap to tell me that alcohol negatively affects my sleep quality. Whoop also tells me to get 10-11 hours of sleep each day, even if I have done nothing but sit in front of a computer for two days straight.

The biggest thing for me is the HRM isn't accurate. Given that the whole point of Whoop is to track, record, monitor, and project based on your HR, it needs to be better. If all the projections for the future and graphs from the past are from inaccurate data, then they don't mean anything. This is the biggest reason I returned the Whoop strap. If they improved the sensor and allowed me to pair the Whoop with a chest HRM during workouts or partnered with Strava/Garmin/TrainingPeaks to allow their data to overwrite the Whoop data for workouts, I'd like use it again. I don't see any of those three things happening, so this is likely the last I'll use a Whoop.

Whoop focuses only on recovery and strain to generate a target to try and achieve every day, but it doesn't know what you are training for. It just posts data and tells you what condition you are in based on your HRV. It doesn't tell you if you should be lowering or increasing your training based on a competition/goal that you have in mind. My cycling training plans are built to peak during certain races and have increased loads during parts and recovery in other parts. The Whoop has none of this. Whoop will tell you how much strain you should be doing today, with no idea what your schedule is today or tomorrow. If I have a fondo race tomorrow, I'm not going to do a 15 strain day today because Whoop tells me to. It also doesn't give me an idea on what activities I should do in order to get to a 15 strain day. Is it one exercise or three?