Review: Whoop Strap 3.0

Everyone has that one friend who got really ripped in quarantine. Alone in their kitchen, they painstakingly prepared bowls of pan-fried salmon salads with shallots, chickpeas, and arugula; snuggled into bed every night for a restful, eight-hours-plus of sleep; and spent the long, lonely weekends covering hundreds of miles by foot or by bike.

This person is probably wearing or has thought about wearing a Whoop Strap. The screenless, unobtrusive band was developed at Harvard University, where founder Will Ahmed was captain of the varsity squash team. Since then it has been used by everyone from the NFL and Steph Curry to the Navy SEALs. It has two LEDs and an accelerometer that tracks biometrics like sleep data, respiratory rate, and heart rate variability to derive proprietary measurements on strain and recovery for optimal athletic performance.

But more so than any other fitness tracker I’ve tested, the Whoop Strap draws a bright line between those who like to work out and those who live to work out. It only makes sense if you’re already a very experienced athlete or have a robust supplementary training system. Most of us—especially in the middle of a global pandemic, ecological disaster, and economic catastrophe—will probably not benefit from this strap, and that’s OK.

Even Whoop’s business model differs from that of every other fitness tracker I’ve tried. Rather than releasing incrementally different versions of the same tracker every year, Whoop only updates its simple hardware as necessary. The current iteration, the Strap 3.0, has better battery life (up to 5 days), Bluetooth to connect to bikes and other devices, and new ProKnit bands that are incredibly comfortable.

Photograph: Whoop

The Strap itself is free, but you need a Whoop membership to see the benefits. It starts at $30 per month, or $18 per month with an 18-month commitment. In addition to the Strap 3.0, you also get access to the company's advanced analytics and Whoop “teams”, which are organized based on your interests (I joined the Road Runners and Women 30-40).

The build quality of the sensor and Strap is nice. The ProKnit bands are especially soft, come in a variety of colors, and are easy to thread through the clip and swap out. You’re supposed to wear the Strap about an inch above your wrist and tight enough that it’s difficult to slip a finger under it; it's also optimized to work anywhere from your wrist to your bicep. What was uncomfortably tight the first day soon became unnoticeable.

The cleverest feature is a detachable battery pack that slips right over the top of the sensor. There's no need to take the Strap off your wrist to recharge it, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll remember to pop the battery back in. Thankfully, you can just buy extra batteries ($30) to pop in so you never lose a minute of data tracking.  

With at least one hour’s worth of tracked activity per day—usually running, hiking, biking, and yoga—I found that the Strap’s battery lasted around 5 days.

Whoop’s proprietary algorithms are pretty opaque. Every day you open the companion app to check your strain, recovery, and sleep. Each day’s strain is the summary of the cardiovascular load per day, with a measurement of 14 to 18 being strenuous, and everything under 10 being a light day.

Photograph: Whoop

The recovery metric measures how well your body adapted to the previous day's stress and how far you deviated off your baseline, which is evaluated at 4, 7, 14, and 30 days. Then it tells you how ready you are to take on more strain for the day. Your sleep is, well, how long and how well you sleep. Combined, these three factors tell you in your daily overview how prepared you are to take on exercise that day, and how far to push yourself to promote fitness gains.

The app also has a daily journal, where you can manually note other factors that might affect your sleep or recovery, such as how much caffeine or alcohol you drank, whether you’re intermittent fasting, or whether you used your hyperbaric chamber (!).

Steps can be a pretty inaccurate way to judge how fit you are or how much activity you’re getting. But I don’t know if cardiovascular load is necessarily that much better. While the Whoop team notes that anaerobic activity, like my nightly Pilates and yoga, do affect my resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory rate, it's oddly discouraging to see how little effect these activities have on my daily strain. An easy 3-mile run skyrocketed my strain for the day, while a two-hour hike with a 1,000-foot elevation that made my butt sore for days didn't even get tracked automatically.

On another note, the lack of a screen here is annoying. It means you can't start activities from the Strap itself, just hope that it auto-detects or use the app. And I had to use a second GPS-based fitness tracker to monitor my pace, mileage, and heart rate on my runs. One fitness tracker is expensive enough without buying a second one that needs an additional monthly subscription.

The Whoop Strap targets a very specific demographic: athletes who are strong and experienced enough that basic metrics like step counting are no longer useful. It's also for those who don’t monitor their performance goals themselves.

Tracking factors like rest and recovery, rather than more conventional ones like pace, is an interesting concept. It might’ve been more intriguing a year or two ago. But today, Whoop is no longer the only fitness company offering recommendations based on personalized data. If you want an unobtrusive, screenless tracker that will designate your baseline metrics, I find the Oura ring to be much more motivational. It had no trouble tracking my anaerobic exercises and my hikes.

If you’re attempting to combine your personalized recovery data to improve your race times or nutrition for weightlifting, you should probably stick to your Garmin. And if an in-person coach or trainer is out of your price range, virtual 1:1 services through Fitbit or Future will probably be much more helpful, convenient, and only slightly more expensive than a subscription to your second, supplementary wearable.

Unless, of course, you're the extremely ripped friend who likes to send screenshots showing how well you recovered after each deep, dreamless, peaceful night's rest. I love you, but I also hate you. We all do.