Hey guys, it's
Michael Kummer here. And in this video, I want to give you a very brief overview of the WHOOP
Strap 4.0. I'll tell you what it is and what it's not some of the pros and some of the cons. Now,
I have a very in-depth video review that I'm going to link up there and down below
in the description, as well as a blog post. So check that out if you want to learn all the
nitty-gritty there is to know about WHOOP. In this video, we're just going to cover the basics, give
you a quick overview. But before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. And
you click on the little alert button, so you get notified when I publish more videos like this.
In a nutshell, WHOOP is trying to help you unlock the secrets your body is trying to tell you. So in
other words, it's a health tracker, it's a fitness tracker, it's a sleep tracker and it's a recovery
tracker, and those are some of the pros that WHOOP has to offer. So let's start with sleep tracking.
WHOOP is incredibly accurate at tracking your sleep and the stages of sleep that you're in.
So it can track your deep sleep, your REM sleep, your light sleep, how often you wake up at night,
how many disturbances you have, et cetera. And it's doing a fairly good job at tracking those
different stages of sleep. WHOOP is also very good at capturing your heart rate, especially during
sleep, as well as your heart rate variability, the indication of how your nervous system is doing.
And that's important because every morning WHOOP gives you a recovery score. So it tells you
how your nervous system was doing overnight with responding to those stressors during the day,
and how prepared you are to take on strain, meaning how hard you
can push it during a workout, how much performance you'll likely have, et cetera. So,
it gives you an indication, a recovery score every morning that tells you how recovered your body is.
And that's a great indication or a great helper for you to plan your day and to maybe even plan
your workouts. So, you know, when you're run down, you know, when you might need some extra
time to recover. WHOOP also is of course is a fitness tracker, so it tracks your activities.
It can automatically detect a laundry list of different activities. So if you go CrossFit
training, if you go running or biking, WHOOP can automatically detect those activities
and calculate your cardiovascular strain. So that's an indication of how hard your
heart was beating during those workouts and it gives you a strain score as well.
And that tells you how hard again your heart was working. And that influences and also
your recovery needs and potentially your sleep needs. Now, one of the cons of WHOOP is that
it only tracks cardiovascular strain, so it only goes by how hard your heart was beating.
It cannot necessarily detect muscular strain. So if you're doing a lot of weightlifting
that makes you sore, that makes you fatigued and exhausted. But during those workouts,
your heart rate never went up significantly. Then it's not going to be reflected in the
strain score that WHOOP shows you. So that's one of the cons. The other thing that I really
like about WHOOP is the WHOOP Journal. It's a questionnaire that you can answer
every morning and you can pick the questions and lifestyle behaviors that you want to track.
For example, you can tell WHOOP in the morning, how many glasses of alcohol you drank and when,
how long you fasted, if you took certain medication, like Ibuprofen, et cetera.
There is a whole laundry list of those lifestyle behaviors that you can track.
And then WHOOP can correlate those behaviors with changes in sleep, quality and recovery. And that's
one of the most beneficial features of WHOOP as far as I'm concerned because it can help you
modify your lifestyle choices to improve your sleep and to improve your recovery.
Most other fitness trackers, including the Oura Ring, the Apple Watch and some of the other
gadgets, Biostrap that I've tested don't have that capability at all, or only very limited. WHOOP is
the only one that has an extensive WHOOP Journal. And it's my favorite feature of WHOOP period.
The other pro of WHOOP is: that I don't have to take it ever off. I can slide on a battery pack.
I can charge it every five days. That's roughly how long the battery lasts
and I don't have to take it off for charging. In comparison, for example, the Oura Ring,
I have to take off to charge it. The Apple Watch, I have to take off to charge it. So it's a pure
benefit that I never have to take off WHOOP. I really like this product. The downside of
WHOOP is, and that really applies to all of the other fitness trackers that use optical
heart rate sensors is that heart rate. Optical heart rate sensors are prone to interference,
especially if there is movement involved. If the sensor may be shifted, if it's not
tight enough, if there is water that gets in between the sensor and the skin, et cetera.
So there are certain issues with all of those optical heart rate sensors that WHOOP is also
affected by. The good news is at least as far as the motion is concerned, you can take WHOOP and
wear it on your body. WHOOP has a special set of clothing or a clothing line, including underwear,
workout pants, shirts that have little pockets that allow you to put the sensor on other parts
of your body so that it doesn't get in the way, first of all, if you may be a boxer or something.
But it also makes sure that your sensor remains in close contact with the skin.
If you're doing movements involving, you know, kettlebell swings or barbell movements, something
that might interfere with how close in contact the sensory remains with the skin. And another thing I
really like about WHOOP and that's a fairly new feature is the integration with Apple Health,
so now I can start a workout on my Apple Watch for example, and WHOOP automatically picks it up
through the integration with Apple's Health Kit. So I don't have to add an activity that might,
that may be WHOOP hasn't detected because it wasn't long enough or something else
that's really convenient. So all of my health data WHOOP, can read it and can make part of its
calculations as well as I can see all of those stuff in the WHOOP app as well. One thing that I
would like WHOOP to do in the future, that's one of the cons, as far as I'm concerned right now
is the lack of third-party chest strap support. So I cannot wear a chest strap that is arguably
the most accurate way of measuring heart rate data and integrated with WHOOP that's unfortunately
impossible right now. I wish they will add it in the future. But there are certain workouts,
especially CrossFit, or maybe shorter workouts that WHOOP doesn't reliably detect.
So it might impact your strain score to a degree. If I had a chest strap, some of those issues I
could mitigate, but unfortunately, that's not the case. The other thing about WHOOP, I should point
out that it's could be a pro, could be a con depending on how you'll see it is the pricing
model. So with WHOOP, you don't buy the strap you sign up for a membership. You can sign up
for six months, 12 months, 18 months, et cetera, based on that you pay a monthly fee.
Some people like that. Some people don't. I personally like that because WHOOP continuously
or continuously improves the platform, so you constantly get new features that work
with the current generation of hardware. If WHOOP releases a new strap, like they
recently did with the WHOOP 4.0 you might get it free of charge if you have more than six
months left on your membership. So there are pros and cons to that model. I really like it. Some
people prefer buying it outright without paying a monthly fee, but that's a personal choice.
The other downside of WHOOP is that I cannot add custom Journal entries. So, if I, for example,
try out a new supplement that WHOOP might not have in its database or in a WHOOP app and I want to
track so I can correlate taking that supplement with changes in sleep quality or recovery,
then WHOOP doesn't allow me to do that. I can only pick from the existing behaviors.
I mean, they are fairly extensive. I think there are over 80 or so right now. Pick and choose from,
but still, if there is something that WHOOP doesn't have, I would love if I had the ability
to simply add a custom tag and then correlate that with my recovery and sleep scores, to see how all
of that changes. But that wraps it up, those are the pros and cons of WHOOP.
I've been wearing WHOOP since 2019. I love it. I've been wearing other devices as well. Like
the Apple Watch, like the Oura Ring, but if there is one device or one type of data that
I always default back to as my single source of truth so to say is WHOOP. That's the, you know,
my sleep data in the morning, my recovery data in the morning, I always go to WHOOP and see how,
how that is, how I slept, how my recovery is. I look at the other stuff as well, but this
is the one I trust most because I've seen it's one of the more accurate devices on the market
in a really like how WHOOP correlates all of the data. And that allows me to make changes
to my lifestyle and improve my sleep and improve my recovery. So really like it.
If you're interested in what we should want to give it a try, make sure you use the link down
below that gives you a discount that helps me as well as they can record more videos like this.
If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't like it,
let me know any comments what I could have done better. Until next time.