WHOOP Performance Optimization Reviews

I've been using Whoop for a year and don't think I'll renew my membership. Let's start with the Hits: good software and app that is both intuitive and easy to use. Whoop does a good job of simplifying the concepts of output (strain) and recovery to guide your effort on a day to day basis. It also enables you to determine impact of specific activities, food, supplements etc on your recovery (albeit you are tied to what Whoop deems important vs being able to create your own categories...a big miss to tailoring the experience to what is important to individuals vs what Whoop thinks you should track).

Misses: 1/ the sensor is most effective in static situations (riding a bike) vs dynamic movements that hinder the sensor from accurate readings. The oblong optical shape is suboptimal and is easily disrupted during dynamic (arm movements) exercises. I've tried wrist and arm straps and the arm band and have the same issue. The sensor is finicky and I haven't found optional placement while working out. Ave workout HR is typically 5-10 bpm lower than other sensors. 2/ Also i haven't seen any correlation between recovery and quality sleep. I understand autonomic system but their recovery need to also account for quality sleeping not simoly HRV, resting HR and breathing rate. I've had 95% recovery and been very tired due to poor sleep. 3/ Walled garden... Can't share data with other apps / systems. 4/ no ability to customize categories for tracking impact.

I didn’t give them one because I feel like they’re trying but man,I gotta be honest, I’m a few months into it and I’m kind of over it. I have a few problems with it. First of all, I had to buy a new charger because I lost the original due to its loose fitting design making it easy to slide off. It’s a terrible design and half the time it wasn’t connecting to the strap giving it a charge. I always had to jostle it to get it to connect. Plus the charger barely holds a charge and need to be charged itself immediately. The monitor is big, gawky plastic, uncomfortableness tight fitting, and is impossible to sleep with on tho It was marginally more comfortable when I bought a different style band. but it’s just too big and gawky and can’t be worn slightly loose or else it won’t register your heartbeats. The price for wearing it in a way where it functions properly is to cut off circulation to your hand. As far as WHOOPPer Idk I guess it’s alright, I workout a lot but I find that this really doesn’t benefit my performance at all and gives me information that I don’t really care about. My sleep was the only thing I really took away from it, but other, cheaper, and more comfortable bands do the same thing. Wish I hadn’t bought it. Won’t be continuing the $30/month. Getting something else and so should you.

I’ve been a member since 2018 and over the period of time I’ve noticed company moves at a snails pace when pushing out new features for the application. You still can’t see more than a weeks data on your phone. You can’t export anything. You can’t adjust the scales on the chart to see a longer picture (unless you load up the website). You can’t add moving averages. It’s like the company just cares about releasing it’s next version of the straps so they can lock you for another subscription and don’t really do much for WHOOPPer except these bug fixes and performance optimizations. With the amount of funding they’ve received, I would've expected more features and app updates. But they are more concerned with the social aspect of WHOOPPer which just gets more people to use WHOOPPer until people realize that the HRV monitoring for your recovery is based on a couple minutes before you wake up so it’s not that accurate And the strain score is not able to accurately show the impact of weightlifting on your strain. Switching to the Oura, where I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for no features. ~$400 for 1x cost vs Whoop $30/mo or $360 per year for no new features (except a longer lasting battery LOL). I’m the sucker for paying $1k+ for Whoop when I could have bought another product.

I am 1 yr in to my Whoop experience and am surprised to read all the negative reviews. I have had an overall excellent experience and as an active 56 yr old multi sport recreational athlete (mountaineering, climbing, ice climbing, kitesurfing/skiing, sailing, paddle boarding, cycling, skiing, flying, regular gym +a few) I have found the whole whoop experience extremely useful. A couple of hardware issues at the beginning were addressed quickly by a replacement strap and have not had problems since. Suffering from Sleep Apnea means sleep data is important and whoop is the best I’ve used (and I’ve tried them all) and correlates (unofficially) well to the random sleep clinics I have done. As an ex- world class athlete, I enjoy the extensive data and awareness it brings to my “state” and the quick tips are great food for thought. I have always had answers from customer service through mail within 2-3 days, and the new UI is a great improvement on an already excellent years worth of experience. Thanks

I’ve been using my whoop for 6 months now. I purchased it to track sleep as my Apple Watch doesn’t have the battery life to avoid a charge every night. The ability to charge the bracelet while wearing it is a HUGE advantage. Improvement needed. I do track my workouts, however I often forget to end them as I also use other apps such as strong during my workouts; meaning too many things going on to remember to turn on and turn off selected activities every time. The device should recognize nonactivity and suggest I end an exercise. Would also be nice if it recognized strain and suggest I turn on an exercise. Suggestions would be nice in regard to improving strain and recovery. I still have no idea how to improve recovery and maximize strain. The sole suggestion is bed time, which I have found is not always the solution . . . Remembering to choose sleep in WHOOPPer as an activity would be nice to avoid as well. I bought the year subscription . . . As of now I don’t plan to renew without improvements.

I’m not a high level athlete, but I exercise a lot and more importantly, I work in health care treating a whole range of difficult and complex conditions and health problems. It can be tough identifying the impact that small lifestyle factors can have on different people. I got the strap to see improved data on how my longer term health was being impacted by small daily choices. Turns out meditation does more for me than I thought, while alcohol has a seriously negative impact on my HVR, even in small amounts. I’m using a lot of different tools to identify small nuances in patients that can lead me to optimize their long term health and when I started doing research on HVR it sounded like a great tool. I recommend the whoop strap to my patients who suffer from unusual conditions characterized by unexpected flares. It can be really helpful to identify the subclinical factors straining homeostasis in the system.

I enjoy the metrics and analysis of my workouts. WHOOPPer is complex and takes a bit to get the hang of but is overall user friendly. However, the rate at which the strap looses connection with WHOOPPer is unacceptable. Dropping a connection here and there isn’t a big deal but my strap drops connection multiple times a week, even multiple times a day. Again maybe not a big deal but the fix usually involves me having to cycle the power on my phone for the strap to reconnect. When I have to do this multiple times a day it becomes an issue!
Also on the personal diary for Recovery (which I think is valuable input) there are some screens that I just ignore at this point. For example if I take prescription medication every day it becomes a nuisance to input time and dosage EVERY day when the information never changes. Plus if I take multiple meds at different times at different dosages and there is no option for this. There should be a way to store dosages when the journal is set up.

Their data is inaccurate and they have terrible customer service— don’t waste your money on this gimmick. I used Whoop for 4 months, and after the 1st month I noticed some of the reporting statistics on my sleep were incorrect. I reported the problem to Whoop, and they said they would fix it (however, they never did). At this point I was concerned that much of the sleep data was inaccurate, so I used an EEG device and compared the results to my Whoop — it seems Whoop has trouble distinguishing stages of sleep, especially deep sleep/slow wave sleep. This was concerning because your day score is based on your heart rate variance in the last few minutes of slow wave sleep. Given that Whoop inconsistently measured slow wave sleep, the day score number is nearly meaningless. Since Whoop didn’t provide the accurate data they promised, I offered to return the product and asked to stop my subscription. After a month of asking their customer service to stop my subscription, I finally had to go to my credit card company to stop payment. I would suggest staying away from this company.

I love the idea of whoop but its benefit relies on accurate data to give you usable information and unfortunately WHOOPPer disconnects from the strap on a regular basis since 4.0. Sometimes it takes a few hours to notice or if it happens while you sleep, up to half a day. You have to reboot and have no data for that time. Which means you don’t have a recovery score or maybe you’ve missed a workout. Every time I’ve reached out to customer support, they get back to you in a few days, blame it on firmware, and suggest a reboot or update. This happen to both my and my husband’s whoop so it’s not a “me” thing, and I can see other reviewers also experience it. We have also noticed our full battery charge almost never makes it to five days. We recharge every 3-4 days. We also invested in the clothing which works great, but that investment of over $1k between the clothes and membership and upgrades means the inconsistent data is not worth the price.

i never write reviews in WHOOPPer store, but this seemed like an appropriate time because of the money i wasted. this product is absolute garbage and does not work for more than two weeks. i have revived two new whoop devices, and they have all stopped working. i have received 2 new charging units, but they don’t seem to charge my whoop devices. i regret ever spending money on this and now i am paying for a subscription i can’t even use. i have never been more furious with a product until i met whoop. the sad part it i really loved tracking my sleep and running, and sadly i have to now find a product that won’t break on me. the customer service takes days to respond, and they blamed the coronavirus as a reason my package showed up 2 weeks late. absolutely no respect for their customer; this product is a complete rip off, and it’s not a coincidence that Joe Rogan stopped talking about it after a while, he knew the product was garbage. they must have bots writing these reviews because in no way has my experience been a 5 star experience

When it works it’s great, and the way it’s supposed to work is you keep WHOOPPer open on you phone, when you and your strong are out of range the strap’s Bluetooth connection (obviously) disconnects and when you/strap come back in range if your phone, the strap should reconnect (and update WHOOPPer with the data since it’s last connection). Unfortunately too many times the strap does not reconnect to WHOOPPer , leaving for LONG periods of disconnect, where the only way I’ve found to reconnect WHOOPPer is (a) turn Bluetooth off on my phone then back on, then (b) restart WHOOPPer on my phone then (c) wait about an hour for WHOOPPer to catch up some the last connection. Yesterday the strap lost connection around 530p. I wake up and like to check my sleep data.....to the disappointment of the strap being disconnected. So I did the above and now I’ll wait and hour or so for the strap to synchronize data to the phone app since it’s last connection at 530p yesterday. I have all current firmware and updates too.

Whoop is a great app but way too expensive! The worst part is that the longer you use it for, the more you pay for it. This is a great model for making money, but not for consumer satisfaction. This is especially true when there are other wearables on the market that don’t operate on a subscription model. I have had my whoop for 2 years, which has cost me $720 in subscription fees. I can buy a better, more complete wearable with every feature known to man for that price AND it will last a lot longer than 2 years. I have asked them to have a loyalty rate whereby after a certain time of membership, your fees decrease. But since they are only worried about gaining new members and the rate of new membership is outpacing the loss of membership, they don’t care. It’s only a matter of time before all of those new members realize how much this costs them in the long run. It’s just really sad because I really do like the service, but am going to leave for a different product solely based on the business model.

I’ve been a member 2+ years and didn’t experience any problems until I “upgraded” to 4.0 strap. It constantly disconnects from my phone and I can tell my exercise metrics have been down 20% or more. They sent a replacement that didn’t remedy the issue. I have even replaced my phone in this time hoping if would help. I reverted back to my 3.0 while I waited on the arrival of the 4.0 replacement and strain returned to normal levels.

I should have known it was going to be a half baked product when it was delayed 4+ months due to “supply chain issues.” I understand there was a chip shortage but I now believe this was just an excuse. I will say support has been good about adding weeks or months to my membership while they work out the issues, but what’s the point if the product continues to provide faulty measurements for 3 months now. I will be using the 3.0 strap for the remainder of my membership then will be moving on to a different company

Alright I’ll be honest I was skeptical about this product working because I had an Apple Watch that I use basically every day.. well 2 months later I can tell you they work completely differently and this thing is the real deal. This isn’t out to tell you how many calories you burned or miles you walked or how much you can lift. It’s meant to show your RECOVERY and cardiovascular fitness. It is constantly checking your heart rate and matching it up with the activities you do so it knows how hard you’re pushing.

Want some examples on how freaking cool this is?
-for a few weeks I manually went into WHOOPPer and logged my weightlifting workouts (logging isn’t necessary it knows how hard you worked during the workout anyway because it’s always monitoring). Now, I don’t even have to log it. I go lift and then 30 mins later it notifies ME saying that it logged a weightlifting workout.

Also: did my third ever cycling workout wirh WHOOP today and it notified me a few minutes after saying that it logged a cycling workout.
It also knows when I do abs because those aren’t logged as lifting/cycling/etc. it logs them correctly.

And the sleep analysis is second to none. Freaking love this thing.

I really wanted to like Whoop. I’ve listened to several of their podcasts and have no doubt they work hard and mean well. But this device has failed to be consistently useful. Not only does it focus very heavily on extremely short term information, but it also showed extreme fluctuations in my HR - sometimes hitting 160bpm just doing dishes. The daily strain would often be totally overstated. The latest update seems to tamp down the HR spikes but they still happen. More importantly, the HRV and therefore the recovery scores can fluctuate like crazy. And if you suffer from any anxiety about sleep this thing can make it worse. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when Whoop told me my recovery was GREEN (114pt HRV) at 1am, then YELLOW at 6am (70pt HRV). This happened the night before my goal race for the year and really messed with my mental game. I have no confidence in Whoop and do not intend to continue as a month to month subscriber after my 6-month commitment (insult to injury) expires. They have a super slick app, and super slick CEO, but the support is non existent and living with the Whoop can make you go nuts.

The WHOOP is a very useful tool. I've used it for almost two years -- the sleep numbers have helped me become healthier and fitter. I've also enjoyed tracking my strain of various types of workouts. This has helped me understand the workout's effect on my body.

The frustrating part is WHOOPPer . Occasionally an update will happen, causing parts of WHOOPPer to break. For example, my app is somehow a day behind -- I live in Singapore, so we are 12 hours ahead, but my WHOOP shows the data from yesterday.

It seems like the company is going through growing pains with the release of the 4.0 and the injection of a bunch of money through the latest fundraising round. I hope Will and the rest of the team can get it sorted -- keeping the core functionality of the WHOOP while adding more and better integrations.

I love running marathons feelng light and strong - pushing my limits! I do not like couching an over-training injury. Since Dec 2016, the data from my Whoop allowed me to make better decisions on when and how hard I push it when running. Getting the right information on my strain, HRV and Respiratory Rate as well as feedback on how my lifestyle choices affect my performance I believe is the main reason I am making the right decisions for my fitness so I can run faster, harder, and longer than I did 15 years ago. Plus stay injury free! Since 2016, I really like finishing races in the top 25% of the total runner field regardless of age or gender. Thanks Whoop for helping me view age as just a number and not a limit!! 62 and running strong!

Whoop has definitely contributed to a healthier, more insightful self. WHOOPPer & device are excellent, but there are a few tweaks that could be made.

-Addition of Apple Watch complications for battery remaining, strain, and recovery would be appreciated.

-Setting a default “activity” & “location” so that you don’t have to edit activity every time. Set the activity detected survey to appear after editing the activity & location vs before. Right now you have to complete it twice.

-Allow the alarm to be set on a recurring schedule.

-Allow the recovery goal to be set on a recurring schedule. Allow for the alarm to wake you “while in light sleep, if in the green, no later than ____ this time”.

-Keep menus in consistent places: they move throughout the day which is confusing.

-Include health monitor readings in weekly/monthly reports

-allow for on-demand O2 readings & skin temp readings.

-make a “today” button, but don’t default to “today” if phone locks.

-more consistency with turning phone sideways to see overview. Sometimes it does not work.

I bought this band hoping to track my sleep and workouts. I can’t speak about the accuracy of the sleep but It seems ok. What is not ok is recovery tracking. It’s absolutely awful. They use an algorithm with multiple inputs to calculate your recovery aka your body’s readiness to take on strain. Their algorithm however is horribly flawed. I and several of my friends have experienced the same issue where the band will sometimes think you are awake when you wake to use the bathroom after a couple hours of sleep. When you correct your wake time the band will recalculate and add the several additional hours of sleep. The problem is usually your score drops significantly. So the band says I’m very recovered after 2-3 hours but if I fall back to sleep and end up with 7 or 8 hours I’m much worse off. It’s clearly wrong and they know it is. They are trying to work on a software fix but until they have it I would avoid this flawed product.

WHOOPPer and band are sweet. I like being reminded when I need to go to bed, I like seeing how strained I am, as sometimes I just am strained from work! Whoop helps me make more notice of my body.

My only complaint is how unintuitive the period cycle tracking is. I am 26 and like to keep track of my period in an app as well as a traditional calendar at home.

The way to track your period is in the “journal”. It’s unintuitive as it is unclear whether you need to select “period” each day, and it is unclear how to edit the dates later on.

The period function is important as it suggests your needed recovery depending on where you are at in your cycle. So not being able to edit period dates later on is frustrating. I am actually on day 28 but WHOOPPer thinks I’m on day14, and I can’t figure out how to change it.

I know this is a whole book lol, BUT! If this function of period tracking was easier, WHOOPPer would be perfect.
There are tons of period tracking apps out there that are simple and easy to use, I just prefer all my health stats in one streamlined app.

Hopefully the team can see this and help other women who want to be more aware of their cycles too

Alright I’ll be honest I was skeptical about this product working because I had an Apple Watch that I use basically every day.. well 2 months later I can tell you they work completely differently and this thing is the real deal. This isn’t out to tell you how many calories you burned or miles you walked or how much you can lift. It’s meant to show your RECOVERY and cardiovascular fitness. It is constantly checking your heart rate and matching it up with the activities you do so it knows how hard you’re pushing.

Want some examples on how freaking cool this is?
-for a few weeks I manually went into WHOOPPer and logged my weightlifting workouts (logging isn’t necessary it knows how hard you worked during the workout anyway because it’s always monitoring). Now, I don’t even have to log it. I go lift and then 30 mins later it notifies ME saying that it logged a weightlifting workout.

Also: did my third ever cycling workout wirh WHOOP today and it notified me a few minutes after saying that it logged a cycling workout.
It also knows when I do abs because those aren’t logged as lifting/cycling/etc. it logs them correctly.

And the sleep analysis is second to none. Freaking love this thing.

I’ve used many wearables - and am a current Apple Watch user. The metrics provided by Whoop are second to none. The level of detail provided is incredibly helpful at tracking your sleep, recovery and strain. You can log journal entries and better understand how different things affect your sleep and performance. While the subscription cost isn’t for everyone (yes, it’s a bit high), you have to look at what’s provided and the fact that you aren’t paying for the device (upgrades are free as well when new ones come out). I’ve not had this thing for too long, but I can tell already that this will be valuable to my running and cycling performance.

Best you can get when it comes to health / fitness. I have tried several different wearables and the whoop strap differentiates on battery life / ease of charging, recovery and strain data that you can actually use to change workout behavior (vs. meaningless metrics), and helpful sleep tracking. I feel healthier and more in touch with my body...and so far it has helped me avoid sickness and injury. Plus, the strap is sleek and stylish - after a few months, I barely realize it’s on my wrist and I get compliments on it all the time.

This has been a great app in the seven months I’ve used it, but something has changed recently, perhaps in the last 1-2 updates. It now takes a VERY long time for the data to show up/catch up in WHOOPPer . I have the background refresh on, yet when WHOOPPer is open and running in the background while I use another app it makes no noticeable progress. Even when I’m actively in WHOOPPer it updates extremely slowly. For example, I’ve had WHOOPPer open at various times throughout the day today, and at 5pm it still has only updated from noon yesterday (when I last updated) up to about 7:30 last night, so I still have no idea how I slept last night or what my data is for today. It never used to take anywhere near this long. Makes WHOOPPer and strap much less worthwhile.

With the amount of data and ways to display it, I’d say WHOOPPer is as close to as simple and straight forward as it can get. While I’ve seen some smaller bugs (still haven’t been able to repro), it overall performs quite well.

My only gripe at this time is that there is no Apple Watch companion app. I in no way expect to be able to read all this data on my watch. However, it would be great if I could start/stop activities on my Apple Watch, especially now that Whoop is integrated with Strava. Carrying my phone with me on runs is not something I enjoy doing and I’d much rather leverage the GPS capability of my watch instead of only my phone for that integration.

Was so excited to get this and so disappointed two weeks later.

The packaging was nice, but hard to open without ripping. The clasp was so tight I spent 10 minutes opening it carefully with a screwdriver to make sure I didn’t break something. The explanation for how to get started was worthless, I just did my best with the assumption it would work out once it was trained.

WHOOPPer itself is one of the worst user designs I have ever experienced for something this expensive. After two weeks I still can’t find any pattern or plan to the layout and the purpose of the tool is muddled through fancy charts. The menus are distributed, I can’t find my journal entries, etc. It feels like the didn’t do any testing with users who were new to the product.

I might believe this could all go somewhere with a good redesign, except the device almost never detects activity for me and the sleep tracker is not accurate. This might be redeemed if the HRV function was available for use, but by now I can’t find a menu item for it and I don’t trust the device anymore.

Maybe they’ll get their game together in the 4.0 version?

I started wearing a whoop 2 years ago. I’m on my 4th strap. They replace them free when they stop working. When it does work, the information isn’t accurate. It does work well as a sleep monitor. I don’t know if the information about the amount of the different types of sleep is accurate or not. A couple of months ago they sent me a new strap and now it doesn’t detect activity. When I enter it manually the stress score is not close to reality. HRV is an interesting subject. But if you deep dive into research or ask a cardiologist you find that “they” think that it is meaningful but they don’t know enough to come to any conclusions or make recommendations based on the number. I have worn because it was a gift and it was expensive. Not anymore. I’m actually sleeping better without it. Sometimes I would wake up with pain from it squeezing too tight.

First of all a quick bio to add credibility - super active, competitor who loves data. So there should be perfect right? Not so fast...
1) Operating System is bulky. You must leave WHOOPPer running for your data to upload and then sync. So if you do not leave it running, your data will be stale and will take hours to pull up to date.
2) I learned but then... no need for the serve - The algorithm does a nice job of teaching you to listen to your body. It acted as a governor so I would not overtrain. Soon I understood my body and wearing the extra band was annoying, I was not picking up or using any thing new or useful and paying the very expensive subscription felt wasteful
3) Customer service is bad -The only way to contact them is email. OK. But then send them an email and responses take a few days. And then I found them to be ill equipped to answer, go unresolved and lack follow up
4) To expensive and BS 6 month contract - I used it for a month and a half or two months and then... now I am just lighting money on fire. I asked to review my contact or get out of it but... see it 3, customer service is poor.

Net net totally not worth it. Get one of the other systems

Until a few days ago Whoop had a 3.4 rating on here with a whole lot of recent 1 star reviews. For a few months there were no problems when got my strap, then the iPhone changed and WHOOPPer updated. I started complaining regularly to customer service because WHOOPPer basically stopped working. Customer service was very slow to respond. After about a month of poor service and problems they have finally said they will send a replacement. No offer to prorate me for the month of problems. It takes about 4 Days get a response from a real person at Whoop. Im going to give the new strap a try when it gets here but based on all of the negative reviews that have been deleted I don’t have any faith. I’ll update if things improve.

I’ve had my whoop for about a year. I got it as a gift. I’ve never had any technical issues. The device itself is great. It’s fine for what it is. Customer service however..

Every support email I send is met with vague answers at least 24 hours after I sent the question.

I’ve asked about when products will be restocked and a day later I get “oh I wanted that too”

Once I emailed about noting my HR spiking when I’m not actually doing anything and it was like talking to a brick wall.

I recently bought a new strap and clasp and pain for express shipping because I was going on vacation in 5 days. Tracking the package, I was never notified it had actually shipped so when I contacted them the day before I left I was told the order was received but they haven’t shipped it. - no delay in taking my money though!
I’ve emailed about cancelling the order but haven’t heard from anyone in three days as of today.

The terrible customer service kills the experience for me. I won’t be renewing my membership.