When I wrote my review of the Whoop 4.0, I kept it to the basics—how the strap looks, works, and charges, and what activities it can track. Today, I’m going to dive in to all the metrics Whoop reports, and give a reality check on what’s most useful and what isn’t worth paying attention to. I'll leave out the activity tracking features here, since I covered them in more depth in the review. (Bottom line: I love the way it tracks how hard your workouts are—strength workouts included—but it's not going to replace a true fitness watch for most people.)
WHOOP 4.0 with 12 Month Subscription – Wearable Health, Fitness & Activity Tracker $239.00 at Amazon Get Deal Get Deal $239.00 at AmazonSo here’s a deeper dive into what it’s actually like to wear the Whoop strap long-term, using it to judge and guide your habits and performance.
A typical day with Whoop
Credit: Beth SkwareckiThe Whoop app will show you a survey called your “journal” the first time you open the app each day. I’ll talk more about the journal in a section below. Let’s say you’ve already filled out your journal, and you’re looking at the main app. From the home screen, I can see:
Some notes about things I should pay attention to. Today it says that my HRV is lower than usual, which might be because of my hard workout yesterday.
The stress monitor, which I guess tells me how stressed I am. I don’t find this useful.
Today’s timeline, showing when I slept. As I do other activities, like workouts, they’ll show up here.
After this, there is a scorecard for my current “plan” (more about that below), and a dashboard with the individual metrics I might care about, like heart rate variability (HRV) and a count of my steps so far today, a feature that’s still in beta.
The Whoop Coach can help you plan your day—but don’t ask it to get too specific.
Let’s return to that Daily Outlook button. Tap that, and you’ll be launched into a conversation with Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot. This is probably the only AI bot I converse with on the regular, because it does a decent job of explaining the app’s metrics and recommends workouts for the day.
Then comes the fun part. It makes recommendations for workouts to do today, and habits to focus on. It tells me to aim for three liters of water today (that’s a little bit more than my usual) with plenty of fruits and vegetables. And for a workout, I can meet my recommended Strain score with something that is low impact to “support recovery,” since my heart rate and HRV suggested I may need a bit of a rest.
Credit: Beth SkwareckiI love that it can recommend these workouts for me, since otherwise “get 8.9 Strain” is an inscrutable instruction. Unfortunately, the little graphic showing time in heart rate zones is all you get. I’ve asked the Whoop Coach if it could time me through those intervals, perhaps beeping when it’s time to switch from one zone to another, but it doesn’t have that functionality.
Sometimes, after enough back-and-forth, the AI can provide something useful. But it’s just not good enough to rely on for workout ideas. I found that the best way to use it is to see what it recommends, then use that as a sort of vague guidance if I have flexibility in my training program or my real-life plans for the day. For example, I have a hard 45-minute running workout planned today, but based on Whoop’s feedback I might see if I can swap that with an easy run that is scheduled for later in the week.
How to use Whoop’s sleep metrics and features
Credit: Beth SkwareckiOn your Sleep tab, you’ll get a score for your sleep “performance,” comparing the amount of sleep you got to the amount it calculates you needed. Today I slept more than I needed, which doesn’t match with how I felt groggily dragging myself out of bed. The timing seems right, though—I was extra tired yesterday so I both got to bed early and slept a little late.
Light sleep: 5:02 (Oura: 5:22)
REM sleep: 1:46 (Oura: 1:37)
Total sleep matters more than the other numbers, in my book. Increase your total sleep and you’re likely to sleep better. (I have data backing this up from my long-term Oura trends—total sleep correlates closely with other metrics and scores of sleep quality.)
Sleep coach and smart alarms
One of Whoop’s most intriguing features is the sleep coach, which can advise you when to go to bed, and even help you decide when your alarm should go off. (It’s also one of the most hidden features. Tap on the “tonight’s sleep” card on your overview screen.)
And then, there’s a second set of preferences. When you try to set an alarm, the app will ask if you’d like to wake up at an exact time, or when you’ve met your sleep goal for the night, or as soon as you’re “in the green.” That last one refers to a 66% or better recovery, which may not be ideal, but should ensure you’re not going to be dead on your feet.
Realistically, I don’t use these features too often. I do have a sleep goal set in my weekly plan, but I’m not fiddling with an app every night to decide when to wake up. On the other hand, if I had a chaotic schedule, like that of a student or a pro sports player, I could definitely see making more use of this feature.
Tracking your habits with the Journal
Left: the journal screen you'll see each day. Right: the screen where you can choose your journal questions. Credit: Beth SkwareckiThis is where the Journal comes in. You can fill it out at any time during the day, but it will also pop up first thing in the morning and ask you what happened yesterday. Did you eat a late meal? Did you have any alcohol? Did you hydrate well? If you don’t like these questions, you can set it up to ask you different ones. It can also pull in data from other parts of the app or from connected apps—for example, if you log your menstrual cycle in Apple Health, that can show up here as well.
One important caveat: leaving the question blank doesn’t count as a yes or a no. At first I only answered a question if I could say “yes,” and otherwise I’d leave it blank—for example, answering “yes” if I’d had alcohol that day. But when I looked at my results later, I found that with seven yeses and zero noes for alcohol, Whoop couldn’t give me any reports that used that information. I was able to backfill the last few days’ worth of journal entries, but you can’t go back more than about a week.
Correlation, not causation—but interesting to see. Credit: Beth SkwareckiThe two things that do help my recovery, according to Whoop’s insights (which you can access from the top of the Journal screen), are sticking to a consistent bedtime—8% improvement—and being well-hydrated, a 4% improvement. The consistent bedtime was automatically filled out from Whoop data, while the hydration was just me answering a yes/no question each day.
Weekly plans are a nice way to work on a small set of habits for a short time. Rather than trying to monitor everything for every outcome, you pick, say, three things you want to work on. Here are some examples that the app provides, and the habits or factors that each one tracks:
Feel better: increase daily steps, meet hydration goal four days per week, do “any recovery activity” three days per week
After experimenting with some of these, I ended up creating a custom plan for myself. I chose:
Avoid using my phone in bed four days per week
Throughout the week I can check in on how I’m doing, and at the end of the week Whoop gives me a little report and asks if I’d like to do the same plan next week, or change it up. I find this a useful way to work on a mini goal, and it’s a lot less overwhelming than poring over huge dashboards full of all the data Whoop can collect.
Viewing weekly and monthly reports
Credit: Beth SkwareckiFor example, my monthly report for April shows how my Strain and recovery compare with previous weeks throughout the year. I don’t wear my Whoop often enough to get any big insights from this—as I said, I only really wear it when I’m testing features or writing a review—but man, I would love this if it were available on one of the devices I do wear month in and month out. (As much as I admire the Whoop, I can only wear so many devices in addition to the ones I test for work.)
What isn’t worth paying attention to
The Whoop app gives you a wealth of data, and honestly I would say most of it isn’t worth paying attention to. The app has so many data points and fractal little rabbit holes you can get lost in. You could spend hours perusing reports and tweaking settings. You could spend an unlimited amount of time chatting with the Whoop Coach AI. And you don’t need to do that.
As for the things I (almost) never pay attention to:
Don’t read too much into the recovery scores; you are resilient enough to be able to handle your scheduled workout even if your sleep wasn’t perfect. The exception would be if you’re feeling truly awful—you’re sick or something—in which case, you would know because of how you feel, not because of a number on an app.
I have found that paying too much attention to a recovery app can drive me a little crazy. Instead of waking up and not really thinking about how I feel—I’m fine, probably—I find myself wondering if the app agrees that I feel tired and sore. Or I’ll think I’m OK, but the app says my HRV is down, and now I have to think about what may have caused that. I wouldn’t recommend intensive tracking like this for a person who finds they can easily get sucked in to obsessing over numbers. But if numbers bring you joy, the Whoop app can certainly give you plenty of them.
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