The Whoop 4.0 Is Even Better Now Than When It First Came Out
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The Good
- No screen, no distractions
- Bicep band (for an added cost) keeps your wrists and hands free
- Coaching and analysis features are best-in-class
- Interprets strength training appropriately rather than treating it like a type of cardio
The Bad- Heart rate tracking is only OK
- No onboard GPS for workouts like running
- Expensive subscription
Table of Contents
The Whoop band looks like a smartwatch without a screen, but you use it in fundamentally different ways than a fitness watch. (You also don’t need to wear it on your wrist.) It tracks your sleep and recovery, giving you recommendations for how to live your life—much like the Oura ring. I wrote a comparison of Oura and Whoop, in which Whoop came out on top, mainly because of its activity tracking.
Whoop is marketed to athletes, and will work well alongside whatever training plan you might be following outside the app. It doesn’t give you specific workouts, although it will recommend an “optimal” amount of exercise each day, based on how recovered it thinks you are. It respects that you’re probably making your own decisions; it’s trying to be a helper, not the boss. I like that.
In the four years since I first tried the Whoop device and app, it has improved enormously. Back in 2021, the heart rate tracking was unreliable (on the then-current 3.0 device), the heart rate zones couldn’t be customized, and there was no good way for Whoop to track how hard you were working when you were lifting weights.
Today, those problems have mostly been fixed, and Whoop now has possibly the best approach to strength training that I’ve encountered on any wearable I’ve tested. I’m genuinely impressed by how much it has continued to improve with time. Even Whoop's built-in chatbot is, and I’m shocked to say this, not completely useless.
All that said, I still have mixed feelings about the device. It’s expensive, it’s weird in many ways, and it still has accuracy issues. Let’s dive in, and you’ll see what I mean.
Comfort and appearance
The Whoop device is a little rectangle of black plastic just under an inch long. It has a green light on the back that presses against your skin just like the sensor on the back of a smartwatch. The device ships with a black wristband, so the simplest way to wear it is as a screenless watch. (It can also be worn in a few other ways, which I’ll explain below.)
It’s as comfortable to wear as any watch, and the band has a nice bit of stretch to it. The device is about as thin as a Series 10 Apple Watch, making it fairly low profile, and certainly a lot less chunky than most sports watches. In the photo above, you can see it next to a Garmin Forerunner 255 (the larger, 46-millimeter version). And below, you can see it next to the 42-millimeter Apple Watch Series 10:
The band’s clasp and attachment are specific to the Whoop—no option to swap in a universal watch band here, although there are a few third-party bands available. To take off the band, you unfold the clasp, remove the clasp from the device at its hinge, and slide the other end of the band sideways and off of the device. It sounds complicated, but in practice you’ll quickly get used to taking the strap on and off, and switching bands.
Instead of the wristband, I prefer to wear the Whoop on a bicep band. This leaves my wrists free to wear wrist wraps at the gym, or to snatch kettlebells. (The style-conscious may prefer to keep it out of sight under a sleeve.) Whoop also sells undergarments and compression sleeves that you can slip the device into. Here’s me at the gym, wrist wraps on, tracking my workout from a bicep band. I wouldn't be able to do this with a watch.
Pricing
With some wearables, the cost is all in the hardware. Some have a subscription fee too. But Whoop’s business model is to give you the hardware for free, and only charge for the subscription. Whoop’s current pricing offerings (subject to change) are:
$399 for 24 months, upfront ($16.63/month)
$239 for 12 months, upfront ($19.91/month)
$30/month after your long-term subscription expires, if you don’t want to purchase another long-term subscription. You can also go straight into a monthly subscription by doing a free trial, which gives you one month free with refurbished hardware, followed by your choice of monthly or longer-term subscription.
Whoop also offers a family plan, which gives each person in a family a small discount on an annual membership. Two people can get a membership for $215 each, three people for $209 each, and four or more for $199 each.
One perk of the subscription model: When a new version of the device comes out (say, the Whoop 5.0, eventually), you can upgrade for free. And if you have any hardware issues while you’re a member, Whoop considers the device to be under a lifetime warranty, so they’ll replace it for free. The caveat is that you must have bought the device “directly from Whoop” (not, say, used from a friend) and be an active member.
Probably the easiest way to buy a Whoop is to get it as a package deal with a 12-month subscription, which currently runs $239. It’s good to have at least one spare band, since that thing is going to get sweaty during workouts, and you’ll want to wash it out without having to wear a soggy band for the rest of the day.
Extra wristbands start at $49, and that bicep band I recommend is $54 if you buy it from Whoop. You can get a Zeeflufun band for $17, though. (I haven’t tried it.)
How does the cost of Whoop compare to other wearables?
Whoop is a little cheaper than an Oura ring, on a two-year basis. A $349 Oura ring with two years of a $5.99/month subscription is $537 total, more than a $339 two-year Whoop subscription. Each additional year of the Oura ring will only cost you $72 in subscription fees, assuming the battery on your ring lasts that long. (Sadly, they often don't—so you might be in the market for a new Oura ring after your first two years.)
Whoop is more expensive than the lower-end Garmins. Quite a few nice Garmin watches cost less than two years of a Whoop subscription, and they'll last a lot longer than two years. Those include the Forerunner 165 ($249), the new Vivoactive 6 ($299), and the older, on-sale watches the Vivoactive 5 ($229) and the Forerunner 255 (also $229). Even a Forerunner 265, my favorite, is $449 at full price—just $50 more than two years of Whoop. On the other hand, if you go for something fancy like a Fenix 8 ($1,099) it would take five years to become cheaper than a Whoop subscription. None of these Garmin watches require a subscription (yes, there is a Garmin Connect+ plan, but it's not necessary to use any of the watch's features) and all of them will last many years.
An Apple Watch Series 10 costs as much as a two-year Whoop subscription for the cheapest base model ($399), although upgrades and optional subscription apps can quickly raise that number. Fitbits are less, with the Charge 6 going for $159 (but offering a $9.99/month subscription to access some features).
Bottom line, you'll need to do the math and consider how long you'd like to use the device. But the Whoop tends to be more expensive than many of its competitors.
Can you use a Whoop without a subscription?
No. Which brings me to an important point, if you’re shopping on a budget and think you've found a deal: there is no such thing as buying a secondhand Whoop. The device is useless without a subscription, and the subscription is what costs money. If somebody sells or gives you a Whoop, they’re not doing you a favor. You’ll still need to pay for a subscription, and the subscription would come with a free device anyway.
Battery life and charging
Here, again, Whoop does something different and weird compared to other wearables. You don’t put your device on the charger: you put your the charger on your device.
I kind of love the charger, but not for the intended reason. What Whoop wants you to do is never take the thing off. There’s even a red notification dot in the app when your Whoop is “off-body.” So you can click the charging brick onto your Whoop while you’re wearing it, and not miss a millisecond of data.
I’ve almost never used this feature. Instead, I charge it like a normal device, on the nightstand while I take a shower. I see two problems with the wear-it-while-you-charge expectation: first, it's got a fabric band, so I'm going to take it off while I shower. Second, the charging pack is bulky enough that it's going to be catching on sleeves, knocking into doorknobs, and so on. I'd rather enjoy my Whoop when it's clean, dry, and low-profile. Getting to wear a soggy band with a bulky pack is just not an improvement in my opinion.
But I do love what this charging setup means for the charger itself. The charger is a little brick that charges up by USB-C, and then you can detach it from the cable and click it onto your Whoop to charge. Which means you can:
Bring it on a trip without needing to pack an extra cable
Keep the brick on your nightstand (or in your bathroom, for shower charging!) without having to run another cable
Just use it like a normal charger, plugged into a cable
Charge it "on-body" for those rare cases when you forgot to charge it and need to do a workout now. I haven't been in this situation, but I appreciate that it might occur.
The Whoop lasts four to five days on a charge, according to the company. In my tests I could get six days out of it as a stretch—but you'll want to make sure it's well-charged before bedtime, so that brings us back to five days to be safe. This will depend on what features you use, though: Whoop says Strain Target and Whoop Live tend to use more battery. (I’ve also heard users say on forums that broadcasting heart rate to gym equipment also drains battery, but haven’t confirmed this myself.)
According to Whoop, the device takes 60-90 minutes to charge from the battery pack, and the battery pack takes 2.5 hours to charge when you plug it in. The pack holds enough power for one full charge of the device, and can hold that charge for about a week if you don’t use it right away. And, sigh, extra chargers are $49.
The Whoop app and what it does
Alright, so why are we paying this subscription fee and dealing with a strange charger, just to wear a watch with no screen? It’s all so that we can get feedback and recommendations from the Whoop app. The app is a gold mine of data for anyone seeking to optimize their training and recovery, or at least look at a lot of cool numbers and pretty graphs about it.
Here’s a typical day with the Whoop app. You wake up, open the app, and it greets you with a “journal” asking about what you did the previous day and night. You can customize this, so it only includes questions that will be relevant for you. Perhaps it asks if you drank any alcohol last night, if you ate a meal close to bedtime, if you made sure to hydrate well during the day, and whether you took a melatonin supplement to get to sleep. These answers are saved for your end-of-week and end-of-month analysis.
Then you see a screen telling you how recovered you are. Anything in green is good, yellow is OK, red is poor. Today I have an 88% recovery, which is green. I can also see that all five of my health metrics (respiratory rate, blood oxygen, resting heart rate, HRV, and skin temperature) are within my normal range.
I can tap on “Daily Outlook,” which opens up a conversation with the surprisingly non-shitty Whoop Coach bot. It points out how good my metrics are looking today, congratulates me on the amount of exercise I’ve done so far this week, and suggests hitting my Strain target with a 40-minute running workout in heart rate zones 2 and 3. It can recommend a specific interval workout to hit that target, with so many minutes in each zone, repeated so many times—but when I ask it if it can guide me through that workout in real time, it tells me to go download an interval timer app.
Strain is, to Whoop, the flip side of recovery. It’s on a logarithmic scale, so don’t expect to understand the math. Six short runs that were each between 5 and 7 Strain added up to a total day strain of 14.7 for me yesterday. I don’t know, man. Whoop attempts to explain it here. The important thing to know is that more Strain means you’ve worked harder. Since I’m so well-recovered today, the app thinks I should consider a workout of at least 12.8 Strain, and could go up to 17.9 and still be in good shape.
Whoop also tracks and coaches sleep. It grades my “sleep performance” (90% today), saying that I got 7 hours and 43 minutes of sleep, but needed about 8:33. Tonight, it suggests getting to bed by 11:14 pm so that I can fully catch up on sleep by my desired wake-up time of 7:45.
This “sleep planner” feature can give me a variety of recommendations depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. If getting into a consistent schedule is what matters most, it will recommend appropriate bedtimes and wake times to get me on track. Or if I want to figure out what’s the minimum sleep I can get away with and not be dead on my feet tomorrow, there’s an option for that, as well.
At the end of each week and month, Whoop gives you a report analyzing how things went. You can even print out your health data to share with a doctor. Those questions you answered every morning? If you were able to track at least five yeses and five nos, you can get statistics on whether they affected your sleep. Something that you always do, or never do, doesn't provide enough data to tell whether it makes a difference—which makes sense. Ironically, this means the more consistent you are in your habits, the less information you'll get about what to change.
Activity tracking
Whoop tracks activities mainly by tracking heart rate. It uses heart rate to calculate Strain, after all, so this is pretty much the main feature of the device outside of sleep tracking.
To track an activity, you need to start the activity on the Whoop app. You don’t need to keep your phone with you during the activity, though—I was able to leave my phone in one room of the gym and go do my warmup in another room without any gaps in the data. The Whoop device can store up to two weeks of data, Whoop says, syncing as needed. You can even log an activity after the fact, if you remember the exact times it started and stopped. Whoop will then take the activity it tracked during that time period, and analyze it as a workout.
During the activity, there’s nothing displayed on the strap, of course. The app will show you your heart rate zone and your Strain for the workout so far. Strain is a bit inscrutable, but you can ask the app to let you know when you’ve hit your optimal Strain level for the day, if (say) you wanted to run around a track until you got that notification. I can’t say I’ve ever felt motivated to exercise that way.
Viewing your heart rate zones during an activity is useful enough, though, especially if you’re on a treadmill or bike where you can have the phone within view. That said, runners and cyclists usually want a little more information, like pace or power data, which you’ll have to get from another device—like the treadmill or bike itself, or a Garmin watch while you’re running, or maybe you’re following a Crossfit workout led by a coach. I like that Whoop doesn’t try to interfere with whatever you’re actually doing to train. But to only track heart rate and Strain, without any other metrics, feels like this expensive device is cheaping out. It’s not unusual to see people wearing a Whoop and another device like a Garmin, to cover all those bases.
Strength training
Whoop has one activity-tracking feature that I haven’t seen in any other wearable: an understanding that strength training is different from cardio. It has an entire Strength Trainer feature, which I hated when it first came out. You had to constantly fiddle with your phone, and I was forever making mistakes that I couldn’t fix.
But these days, it’s great. You can still track a workout in real time, but I prefer to just start my workout on the app, lift my weights, and stop the workout when it’s done. The app will give me a Strain score based on heart rate, basically treating it like cardio—seemingly what I don’t want. My heavy squat triples were a “recovery” workout because I spent a lot of time resting between sets? Lol, sure.
But then, when I view my workout data, it prompts me to link it to a specific strength training workout. I can either choose one from your library of previous workouts, or create a new one, which only takes a minute or two. Link it, let the app re-process the data, and voilà! The app now credits me for doing a lot of fucking work, because I was.
A weightlifter who hoists heavy weights three times a week will now get a high Strain score on workout days, just like a runner who does three long-distance or high-intensity runs each week. This way both athletes, not just the runner, will get appropriate rest and recovery recommendations that take their workload into account.
Accuracy
The Whoop device doesn’t have GPS built in, so if you select “track route” when doing an exercise like an outdoor run, it just uses your phone’s location to track where you are. So there’s not much to say about its location accuracy; it is however accurate your phone is (for most phones, that's OK but not great). Here’s a comparison of the Whoop with an iPhone 12 mini (blue line) compared to two different Garmin watches (both black lines). I was running on the shoulder of the road the whole time, I swear.
Heart rate accuracy is more important, since the Whoop uses heart rate to determine Strain, and Strain to determine so many of its recommendations. So how good is it? Not bad at all, I’ve found (a big improvement over the Whoop 3.0 device, which rarely worked well for me—but that one is ancient history now). I took the Whoop 4.0 to a gym and did several repeats of my standard 12-minute device-testing workout, recording some on the wrist and some on the bicep. The workout was two minutes of warmup, then five intervals of one minute fast (here, 8 mph) and one minute walking. I chose representative examples of the wrist and bicep readings from the middle or end of the workout (devices sometimes have trouble getting good readings at the very beginning).
Worn on the wrist, it’s not quite as good as my trusty Forerunner 265S (which is rarely more than a beat or two different from a chest strap measurement), but it’s not bad at all. The Whoop is susceptible to occasional spikes. The graph below shows a pretty typical pattern for wrist and bicep heart rate readings.
The Whoop is the blue line, with a chest strap for comparison in black. I did both tests on a treadmill in a gym, and I’ll note that I have light skin and no arm tattoos, so optical sensors tend to have an easy time reading my pulse. Running can introduce issues for some devices, since movement can let ambient light in, confusing the sensor.
Note that the bicep band does an excellent job at tracking my heart rate during the same type of workout where the wristband struggled. The upper arm tends to give the sensors a better contact point than the wrists, which is why optical heart rate arm bands are now a thing—it’s the same type of sensor as a watch, but worn on a body part that’s more fat and muscle, less bone and sinew. So that’s another vote for springing for the bicep band if you’re going to use a Whoop to track your workouts.
The Whoop device is hard to compare directly to any other wearables. Things that others focus on—measuring your running pace like a Garmin, displaying metrics in-workout like an Apple Watch—are not even considerations. It also has a more expensive subscription than any other fitness wearable I can think of. The Whoop is definitely not for everybody, and anyone who expects it to provide the same features as a smartwatch will find it sorely lacking.
But if you want the things it does provide, you're going to love it. The sleep planner! The strength trainer! The chatbot that can recommend workouts that are appropriate for how recovered you are, and even negotiate about them if you'd like something a little shorter, please.
I first reviewed a Whoop device over four years ago, and I tested the Whoop 4.0—the current model—about three and a half years ago. In the time since it has continued to get better, to a truly impressive degree. The subscription model is surely a cash cow for the company, but it also means that you don't have to wait for new hardware to get new features, and you don't even have to pay for new hardware to get new hardware.
For everything it does well, I'm awarding the Whoop 4.0 a solid four stars. But I also find myself using the Whoop alongside a Garmin watch to make up for its shortcomings (to give me interval workouts, and to track my pace), and I really shouldn't need a second watch just to follow the recommendations of the first. So I'm withholding my fifth star both for the pricey subscription, and the fact that it left me feeling like features were missing. I wouldn't recommend a $239/year device to everybody, but if you can afford it, it does a great job of guiding you through appropriate sleep, recovery, and exercise workloads.
Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, has written two books, and is a certified personal trainer. She’s been writing about health, fitness, and science for over a decade, and can front squat 225 pounds.
