- Morning Trainiacs.
After almost two years, certainly a year-and-a-half,
I have the definitive review
of the Whoop strap versus the Oura ring.
This is one of the things that a lot of athletes
who wanna monitor their progress,
monitor their sleep and assess how ready they are
to train day-to-day have been asking me.
I've been using the Oura ring for over a year-and-a-half,
and I've been using the Whoop strap for over a month now.
I wanted to make sure
that I didn't just give it a cursory glance.
I wanted to give this a full review,
see how the products function
in all different types of training,
all different types of condition, for a long period of time,
how do they hold up?
These are big decisions from new companies
that I don't want you to go
and waste your money on one or another.
So what we're gonna go through here today are six factors
comparing the Oura ring versus the Whoop strap
to help you decide on which one you should buy.
We're gonna award a winner for each of those six factors,
then at the end, we're going to select an overall winner
to help you with your purchase decision
(upbeat music)
So let's start off with ease of use.
How easy are the Whoop strap
and the Oura ring to use day-to-day?
And you might be thinking,
"Well, don't you just put it on?"
Well, yeah, kind of.
But when you're analyzing a bunch of data,
day to day over and over and over,
and you're using this as something that
isn't just part of training,
but it's part of your life constantly,
all these small little nuances that are differences
between this and this add up.
First thing to note, as far as ease of use is charging.
Charging on your Oura ring, tremendously easy.
You just drop it in the charger,
boom, it charges.
It takes a little bit longer to charge
than the Whoop strap in my opinion,
and there's less indication
of how far along it is in charging.
However, the cradle that the Whoop strap
ends up getting plugged into to charge it
is a complete nightmare.
I don't know if it's charging, it's really hard to snap in,
at one point to snap it out I actually broke the latch off,
I actually put it in backwards at one point,
It's not as good as it should be.
Ideally, this would just turn into a micro USB plugin,
but you have to plug it into a cradle.
Syncing them both to the app equally easy,
every single morning you open the app
and then just let it do its thing,
and after a few minutes it ends up syncing.
I will say that the syncing on the Whoop strap
takes a little bit longer than it does on the Oura ring,
but it's marginal.
And once you're in the app and everything is synced up,
I'd say the app is equally user-friendly in both.
It's a little bit more simplified in the Oura ring app,
and there are some things that you've got to find
and just know where they are in the Whoop strap.
So I'm going to give
the ease of use winner to the Oura ring.
Then let's get into activity tracking,
this channel here all about triathletes,
so we're talking swim, bike, run.
And as far as activity tracking can goes,
Whoop is the only one that even tracks activity,
and it does it really, really well.
It will automatically detect running,
it'll automatically detect cycling,
which I don't know how it detects basically non-movement,
it'll automatically detect swimming.
The distance is, it's totally accurate,
but time at a certain heart rate tracks it fairly well,
and then that gets put into the activity load for the day,
which then helps determine what your readiness to train is,
and I think that's a huge part of things.
The Oura ring does not really take activity balance
into account, whereas the Whoop strap does,
so that is a clear win for the Whoop strap.
This is much more focused on the athletes
who want to track their readiness level
whereas I get this, it's more for the biohacker.
This is data and activity tracking, so winner Whoop strap.
Now let's get into sleep tracking
between Oura ring and the whoop strap.
All of the marketing that you'll hear between Oura and Whoop
is that they are tremendously accurate.
They have been tested in labs and they are published
as very accurate sleep tracking devices, and yes and no.
When you start looking at the studies
that will show on the screen here,
yeah, they have been tested
and they're shown to essentially be sufficient
if you don't have accurate sleep testing data.
And the metrics that these studies are showing
is that they're kind of similar to each other.
However, in my experience
and in the experience that I've had with a lot of people,
who've had the Oura ring,
they say that the Oura ring sleep tracking is wildly off.
Like there are nights
that I feel like I've had a good eight,
eight-and-a-half hour sleep
and it'll show that I've had six,
'cause maybe it's just a restless kind of night,
but it takes that entire restless time
and says that it's awake time.
As far as naps go,
the Oura ring does not even recognize a nap.
They say that they're updating for map tracking
but more often than not what happens
is it'll start my sleep at the start of the nap,
and then essentially assume that I'm awake
all throughout the night in between the end of the nap
and when I go to sleep at night,
so it gives me a poor, poor, poor sleep score
because it's saying, "Well, hey, you were awake
"for five hours of your 14 hour sleep."
Which just isn't the case obviously.
Where as the Whoop strap, it seems pretty accurate.
It's not as nuanced as the data that you get
with the Oura ring,
but as far as total sleep,
as far as like, generally, are you getting good sleep?
Yeah, it does that, it seems fairly accurate,
it recognizes naps.
So hands down, I would say that the Whoop strap
is far more accurate for sleep tracking.
Then let's get into the readiness to train.
I think this is where a lot of the athletes
that are watching this channel
are very interested in understanding
the differences between Oura and Whoop.
Now, historically I've said that
what I did with the Oura ring was
because the Oura ring gave you a readiness to train factor,
but there were like eight different factors,
mult like body temperature and breathing rate
and resting heart rate and sleep and on and on and on,
and it took all of these
and then it put it into a black box
and then out of the black box came,
are you ready to train or are you not?
It was really just way too complicated
for me to understand what was actually going on.
And what I found was a lot of false positives
and false negatives.
So there were times where it said that
I wasn't ready to train, but I felt great.
And all other metrics that I've been tracking
were showing that I was tracking great,
but the Oura ring said, "No, no, no,
"you're not doing very well."
And conversely, there were a lot of times
that it said that I was doing great,
but I knew that I wasn't doing very well.
So what I did was I actually just
took out the heart rate variability,
the HRV measure that this gave me every single day
and I plugged it into my own spreadsheet
and did my own calculations,
which I knew had been very accurately designed,
and I just used that
and I found that to be more accurate.
So yeah, I wouldn't say that the readiness
to train on this, is very useful.
Whereas Whoop is basically right in line
with what I would expect.
The HRV indications actually
are reading and giving prescriptions
on your readiness to train
based off of the same calculations
that I would use on my spreadsheet.
And the spreadsheet that I'm using
is actually designed in conjunction with Dr. Dan Plews
who did his PhD in using HRV
for performance training situations.
And if after this video, you wanna download that
and start putting in your own HRV data,
there will be a link for that spreadsheet
in the description below.
So I think the recommendations
that are actually in the app with Oura, not super useful.
Recommendations that I was getting from Whoop,
I would actually say are really accurate.
So winner on that Whoop.
The next factor is comfort, day-to-day and in training.
How comfortable is this to wear?
Because you're adding something.
And there's a lot of people like me
that I don't like wearing rings,
I don't like wearing watches.
'Cause I mean, it really wasn't until I was a triathlete
that I ever wore a watch, I was clean as a whistle,
so I'm very, very sensitive to adding things.
Now with this ring, it's bulky,
it's definitely bigger than a normal ring.
It creates a separation between your fingers.
Recently, in a conversation with our channel sponsor,
thefeed.com, which you can get a discount on,
if you use the coupon code Trainiacs at thefeed.com.
They said, "Whatever they did
between Whoop strap 1.0 and 3.0, it's way more comfortable."
And I'd agree with that.
This is a lot more comfortable than the first strap,
but it's still a strap.
Running, totally fine.
Biking, totally fine.
Swimming, it does create a fair bit of drag here
and you end up having to actually tighten it up
so much during swimming that I tighten it only for swimming,
and then I loosen it up immediately after the swimming.
In addition to that,
I've got a little bit of skin abrasions here
because it's supposed to sit tightly on the wrist,
so like just a little bit of irritation coming from that,
whereas this, while it's not ideal,
I definitely notice even still
that my pinky is separated a little bit,
which is a bad habit to end up having
when you start swimming, it's much less intrusive.
It's lighter, it's not another big strap that is in the way.
Most people aren't gonna notice
that this is even a sleep and HRV and readiness
and biohacking tracking device.
The Oura ring in my opinion, much, much more comfortable,
much more practical to wear day-to-day.
It's just more versatile
because it's smaller and a little bit more discreet.
That's in your face.
How many of you have commented over the past month?
Ooh, I see the Whoop strap, what do you think about it?
Lots. So as far as comfort goes,
I'm gonna award that to the Oura ring.
The last factor that I'm going to get into is cost.
And on the surface you might be saying,
"Well, isn't the cost kind of about the same,
"even though it's a little bit different?"
Well, yes and no.
The Whoop strap is free,
but then you have to pay a monthly membership fee,
and that membership fee
is as low as $18 a month,
if you're doing it for 18 months
and it's as high as $30 a month,
if you're paying month-to-month.
Whereas the Oura ring is for most of the models,
$299 with no membership fee.
So you might be saying,
"Well, 18 months at $18 for this is $324
"or as much as $30 a month,
"and think I'm gonna have it for
at least a year-and-a-half, which is $540.
Whereas this is $299, and you think,
"Well, then the Oura ring is way, way cheaper."
You think?
But in my experience, it's been 18 months
and gone through two,
maybe three Oura rings in that time.
And it seems like there's a bit of an expiration date
where the battery just runs down and runs down.
This, I think now is to the point that I have
to charge this just about every day.
Still useful, but if they don't warranty it
and you have to buy it again, yeah,
Then it is going to be much more expensive
if you're constantly buying it.
So with that said,
I'm probably gonna call this one a tie.
I know that's copping out,
but, you know, there's just a lot of uncertainties.
On the surface, the Oura ring is probably cheaper,
but it's just, I don't know,
longterm, I just don't know yet.
So if you've been counting,
it's like two in favor of the Oura ring,
three in favor of the Whoop strap.
But depending on the cost and how you wanna calculate that
it could be three-to-three, which is a tie.
So then people might be sitting here going like,
"Well, which one should I buy?
"This is tremendously unhelpful Taren
because you tally that up and there's not a clear winner."
I agree there, isn't a clear winner between the two.
If you're more performance oriented
and you don't mind wearing something
on your wrist all the time,
then I would say,
use a Whoop strap and just understand that you gonna
to have to tighten it a little bit extra
when you're swimming.
If you hate wearing things on your wrist, get the Oura ring.
People aren't gonna know that it's an activity tracker.
And you're gonna be able to wear it all the time.
But if you do get this,
what I would say is,
go to the link in the description below.
And instead of taking the readiness readings
that you've got from this,
punch it into that spreadsheet,
which you can get at triathlontaren.com/hrvtraining
which gives you that spreadsheet for free.
Just putting your email address,
we'll send it out to you
and we'll even tell you how to use that spreadsheet
because I think the readiness measures in this
aren't as accurate as what you've got in the Whoop strap.
Conversely, if you're somebody who wants to track
mostly sleep and have it be accurate,
I would say, go with the whoop strap over this.
So, it's basically who are you?
Would you rather have a ring or a wrist strap?
Would you rather have good sports activity tracking
and readiness tracking
or would you rather have biohacking data with more measures?
Would you rather pay a bigger fee upfront
or would you pay a smaller fee for a membership
and potentially have it be more expensive longterm?
These are the things that you've got to understand
and I'm sorry, there's no definitive answer
but hopefully this gives you some context
that will help you make a decision.
They're both good devices.
They're both accurate.
They're both useful.
They both helped me train
and I'm gonna to keep using one of them,
probably this one for a long time to come.
So, if you liked this video
and you aren't already subscribed,
hit the Subscribe Button below.
And if you want to see another video
about using HRV for training,
click this video here,
which will give you more insight
and how you can use the data
that you get from these.
Later Trainiacs.