I Tracked My Health With Whoop, and This Is What I Liked (and What I Ignored)

When I reviewed the Whoop 5.0 and MG (and, earlier, the Whoop 4.0 ) , I kept it to the basics-how the strap looks, works, and charges, and what activities it can track. But that's only part of it: Now, I’m going to dive in to all the metrics Whoop reports and offer a reality check on what I've found most useful and what isn’t worth paying attention to. I haven't worn the Whoop band as regularly as I do the Oura ring, for which I was able to give a four-year retrospective . But to research both this article and my reviews, I’ve worn the Whoop for a couple of stints of at least a few weeks each, tracking my workouts and sleep regularly. With that said, here's a deeper dive into what it’s actually like to wear the Whoop strap on a daily basis, using it to judge and guide your habits and performance. (I'll leave out the activity tracking features here, since I covered them in more depth in the review, but the bottom line is this: 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.) A typical day wearing a Whoop band Let me take you through a typical day. I’m wearing the Whoop band on either my wrist or upper arm, and it’s probably been a few days since I last charged it. (I get over two weeks on a charge-more on that in my review. ) I made sure I had it on when I went to bed. If I look at my Whoop app first thing in the morning, it will sometimes tell me that it’s still “processing” my sleep, and there’s a button I can press to “end sleep” and get my recovery results. The 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, on a typical day I might see: My recovery at the top , color coded. Green is good, and you get that if your recovery is 66% or better. Yellow is OK (34% and up), and red is poor. In the screenshots above, I have a yellow recovery, at 48%. (To give a sense of the balance over time: during one month that went pretty well for me, I got 19 green recoveries, 9 yellow, 0 red, and on two nights I forgot to wear the strap to bed.) Some notes about things I should pay attention to . This is where I'll see that my HRV is higher or lower than usual, with a brief explanation of what that may mean in the context of my other results. The health monitor , which tells me whether my respiratory rate, blood oxygen, resting...

Preview: ~500 words