3 Months With WHOOP
Reposting this from a Reddit post I made here. I've noticed transitioning from being a lifelong Garmin to user to WHOOP hasn't been as seamless as I thought.
I've been experimenting with WHOOP since the CSR cash back incentive. I really like some aspects of it but other aspects... really confuse me. And I was hoping to get some insight.
For context, I've had the WHOOP for about 3 months. I'm a long-time Garmin fan and have experimented with Bevel because I HATE the Connect app and find it useless.
Things I like about WHOOP:
- Lifespan/Age-perhaps indeed a gimmick but it motivates me to stay well-rounded in my training and focus on healthy habits.
- It tracks my sleep better than Oura or Garmin ever have, determined by comparing it against how I'm really feeling.
- Journaling with habits to try and discover correlations. Although I do find it somewhat tiring.
- The design. Comfortable to sleep in and I have the bicep band for when I want to wear a mechanical watch.
Things that I'm still "confused" on:
- Why do they insist tracking strength gains is a feature they want to improve and develop but then things like cardiovascular efficiency factor or power data (if you're a cyclist) is "irrelevant"/only your heart's workload is of importance? I was excited about the new Strava integration that maybe it would bring this in but so far I haven't seen it. My dream with WHOOP is that it would be an all-in-one fitness app showing me how my fitness, recovery, strength, sleep, whatever health-related metric improves over time.
- I know it's been asked before but what gives with Strength Trainer? Your options are to wear it on left or right wrist but after several tests, it cannot record any semblance of accuracy from the wrist for weightlifting. I understand the limitations of wrist-based HR trackers and am totally fine with a chest strap or bicep band for accuracy but this just confuses me when the app/company insists it must be worn on wrist.
- AI Slop... I'm definitely one of the old men you hear yelling at the clouds over AI slop taking over but I'll try and be as reasonable as possible here. I've asked it's AI what my steps were for they day, what my max HR is, etc and it genuinely couldn't provide an answer. I can find this data in the dashboards so why does it struggle so much? Furthermore, today I asked it to explain my low calorie expenditure despite a pretty intensive day and it's answer was... ugh. AI f(*$ng slop. The profile settings are correct for my height and weight. Multiple sources estimate my BMR closer to 1900 and I don't even care that much about a device inaccurately estimating calories, I just can't comprehend a system which is simply so contradicting.
Please excuse the fact that I haha'd my LLM.
Random thoughts: The Garmin was my daily watch and I was / am quite happy with it. Like I said, I just wished it had WHOOP-like software (maybe I'll give Bevel a better look, I found it after I got the free year of WHOOP). I still haven't convinced myself of the need to wear a device 24/7. To me it seems like it's useful to have it on for sleeping and exercise (and for the sake of argument, let's say 'as much as possible') but I'm not sure how wearing my WHOOP in the shower or while reading in the evening is useful for the algorithm.
In summary: could someone maybe add some clarity on what I'm doing wrong/not getting? I'm not asking for justification of the price, this first year was free and I don't expect you to know my financial situation or whether it's right for me. Maybe I'm missing it and I'm just not the target customer.
