i've been using this swoop band every single day for over three months and this video is my final
verdict and final thoughts on whether i choose to daily drive the whoop or go back to my apple
watch hi i'm Jaden Feddock and this channel is dedicated to sports fitness and technology over
the next 10 minutes or so i'll be talking about this whoop strap 3.0 and five of the things that
i think make it an excellent wearable along with five things that i think need dramatic improvement
for it to meet its full potential but first it's time for a giveaway and i'm so excited
to announce this this channel is so close to its 1 000 subscriber goal and i think this giveaway
will be an excellent way to get us over the hump now this is how it's going to work my
whoop referral link in my last video that you probably have seen was used over 25 times which
equates to over two years of free whoop membership now i want to share some of that benefit with you
so i will put your referral link into this video so that you can get some of those benefits as well
all you have to do to enter is subscribe to this channel make sure to like this video and share
it on any social media that you choose twitter facebook instagram insta-story whatever you choose
to use just don't forget to leave a comment in this video letting me know that you participated
in the giveaway and your username on that social media so that we can verify the share also in that
comment make sure to share one of the reasons that you think whoop is an excellent device for you and
why you enjoy it okay so enough of that let's talk about the whoop and the five things that i
think make it an excellent wearable number one is activity recognition now i think the whoop does an
excellent job of automatically recognizing the sports that you play the activities that you do
and after the first time that you do a specific sport like tennis pickleball or anything like that
it will start to automatically recognize that sport based on your movements and i think it
does a great job of starting and stopping that workout at the right time i've only ever had to
make a few tweaks to starting and stopping time but i've never had to change the activity that
it logged that may not be the case for everyone but in my experience it did a very good job along
this line as well whoop is continuously adding new sports to make it even easier for you to recognize
the sports that you want to play so pickleball was added and crossfit was added even just in
the last few months that i've been testing the whoop that means to me that the team is really
focused on making the whoop as useful as possible to everyone and including even more sports also
in this one i want to give a huge shout out to some of the commenters on my previous video who
really helped me understand how the strain coach worked specifically adding a certain amount of
strain and not necessarily adding the exact same linear value into your overall strain for the day
now if you want to learn more about that i would read some of these comments from the last video
i don't know everything about it but i really appreciate their insights to help me understand
why those numbers don't always add up one of the reasons for that is that the strain that you need
to add to get from a 14 to a 16 is not going to be the same as the strain that you have to
add to get from a 10 to a 12 just because that overall strain is logarithmic as i was told so
there you go the second thing that i love about the whoop and that makes it an excellent wearable
is the sleep tracking now i talked about in my last video and i'll probably talk about in this
one as well the comfort and the lightness of the band are excellent now when you're
trying to track your sleep having a band that's incredibly comfortable makes a big difference so
i never had to worry about being uncomfortable i was sleeping with the whoop band on one of my
favorite benefits of tracking your sleep in general is understanding patterns over time
so i can go to the whoop online website to see what those patterns look like over a longer period
of time and not just congested to the little app so i tried to look at those patterns see if there
was maybe a place that i could go to bed earlier wake up at a different time to improve my recovery
over different nights and i think it's been really helpful to see those patterns over time and it
has really helped me to improve when i go to bed improve that consistency and i definitely credit
whoop for helping with that now the third thing on this list is hr broadcast the reason i put
this on the list is because doing activities and sports and other things is the reason you have a
whoop wearable in the first place so being able to send your hr to zwift when you're riding your bike
or send it to strava when you're out for a run is an excellent feature and i think it's awesome to
avoid that extra step of having to put on a chest strap and pair that chest strap when you're doing
a different workout so being able to do all of that here on your wrist is an awesome benefit
that i think whoop does very well so the fourth thing on this list is a little bit interesting and
i recognize that it's not going to be a benefit for everyone but for me not having notifications
pinging me on my wrist all throughout the day was actually a benefit so the difference from
the apple watch to the whoop where the whoop just sits there on your wrist immobile all day long
that's kind of nice and it's nice to be able to focus on work still keep this on
but not have to worry about those notifications or the temptation now i know i can just turn off
notifications on my apple watch that's not what i'm saying the point is that without the ability
i lose a lot of the temptation to get lost in notifications while i'm supposed to be working
so that was a benefit for me you don't necessarily have to agree with it but it made it to the list
so the last thing on the list for the benefits of the whoop wearable is lightness and comfort the
strap itself is incredibly comfortable and i think vaults the whoop into some of the top echelons of
a comfortable wearable because of that fact strap being comfortable overall the strap being light
makes a big difference as well it's less than half the weight of my old apple watch and it
makes a big difference when i'm trying to track sleep when i'm trying to track running workouts
and i think that's a huge plus that deserves to be on the list of some of the best features that
the whoop has to offer so since this video is not sponsored i am free to talk about anything that i
want including all of the negatives and the cons that i think bring the whoop down a little bit
from being the perfect or even the best wearable on the market now the first thing on that list
is very common as a critique of the whoop and i saw it in comments and DMs and things but
essentially not having a display not having anywhere that you can even see the time or the
battery status just at a quick glance is kind of unfortunate you can check the battery by double
tapping the watch itself but it's just a couple of lights so it's not ideal it's not perfect
but i guess they're saving a lot of battery by not including a display so they're trying to
balance that a little bit but i would say that's the number one drawback to having the
band itself is it's just a wearable it's just a band that's tracking your heart rate over time
and it's useful for a lot of the analysis and the features that you get with that hr
but not having anything that's a convenience feature for when you're running or when you're
doing anything like that makes it not as useful as some things like the apple watch for specific
workouts or even for day-to-day work when i first started wearing my whoop compared to the
apple watch i checked it probably a dozen times a day just thinking that i was going to see the
time or notification or something like that so it took some getting used to and i would say i
would really love to see on Whoop Strap 4 at least something that can tell me the time or when i'm
doing a specific workout my average pace anything that would be useful in the moment and talking
about running that brings me to the second thing that i dislike about the whoop is that it doesn't
have GPS included which means if i want to go for a run and i want to just get out the door i used
to be able to grab my apple watch and my shoes my air pods and i was out the door but with the whoop
you need to make sure to bring your phone with you because that's what's going to tether any of the
GPS tracking so if you want to see the awesome map on strava after you're done with your run which i
do i love checking out the map and adding that to my workout logs so not having the GPS included in
the wearable makes it so that i have to take that extra step and bring my phone bring my armband
and it's not as comfortable when i'm running maybe it's something small and maybe it's not a big deal
to a lot of people but it was a big deal to me not having the ability to go out with just my watch
running shoes and AirPods so number three on this list is also interesting because it was on my list
of positives when i did my initial review three months ago and that is charging so the innovation
of having a charging battery pack you can just slide onto the whoop and continue with your work
or do whatever you need to do is awesome and i use it a lot because i can kind of charge it
up while i'm working or just sitting at my desk and it doesn't make much of a difference but the
battery pack itself only contains about enough for one single 100 charge and sometimes if it sits out
for a while it will start to lose that charge over time so whenever i put the band battery pack on
i had to leave it for a considerable amount of time i would say sometimes it felt like hours
that i was sitting there just waiting for it to charge up so if you're ever in a bind not having a
convenient way to charge it up quickly is kind of a downer but the innovation and the convenience is
good it takes way too long to charge and it only holds 100 charge so if you're using your watch
while you're trying to charge it up it will never all get all the way to 100 so that's what i found
let me know in the comments if that was different for you but that was one of my major complaints
so i got a comment after my initial review about swimming with the whoop band and how if you swim
with it and you swim any kind of workout or you're doing more intense sets that the whoop band itself
would flip over while you were trying to swim and i had to investigate so thank you to B Rochelle
for giving that comment and putting me in the right direction it does do that if you're if this
strap is comfortable right not too tight it will often flip over while you're trying to do a swim
workout and this can definitely be unfortunate and uncomfortable while you're trying to get a
workout set in there is a solution for this and whoops sells a hydro band for 12 for a pack of two
that you can put over the whoop itself and it will cover it with a little silicone that will make it
so it will stay in place while you're trying to swim but having additional things like that and
having to pay for a band and put it on before a swim it's again an inconvenience that i think is
a detriment to the overall whoop experience okay the final thing on the list of negatives is 100
the membership cost of having a whoop now the band itself you buy with a membership
and usually they'll give it to you free in fact if you use the link in any of my videos for the whoop
you can get your first free month as well as the strap for free but every month after that
you'll have to pay almost thirty dollars for the membership to the data itself you can keep the
band if you don't keep up the membership but everything that's beneficial about the whoop
the strain the recovery and all the numbers come with that membership now i understand that they
use the membership mining so they can pay for their storage and their algorithms that are
calculating all these important details from your workouts and from your health information but if
i had to choose i think that i would rather pay up front so more similar to like an apple watch or a
garmin or a fitbit and be able to use it as long as i want maybe it's just a psychological thing
but having a membership that you know you're going to continue to have to pay over time is just
difficult to justify with something like this but hey if you want to not pay your membership fee and
you want to get that for free because of referral links don't forget to submit to the giveaway and
you could potentially have your referral link in the description of this video and get the
benefits from that so take a look okay so all of that said the ten things five that i like five
that i didn't like it comes down to my verdict of whether i want to continue using the whoop
as my daily driver fitness wearable and the answer for me is no i personally think that there are a
lot of benefits to an apple watch that i don't get on the whoop while if i was an elite athlete which
i wish i was if i was an elite pro athlete that was really dedicated to getting that last little
one or two percent in each day to make sure that i was performing at peak physical fitness the whoop
would probably have more advantages there because of what it does with algorithms and analysis of
your workouts however as more of a casual fitness enthusiast which i myself am and apple watch gives
you more information in the workout it lets you pick a workout go do it and see your average pace
see things like when you're swimming your laps and your distance my swim pro is an excellent way
to do that having those features having those apps takes the experience to the next level and i think
having a fitness wearable that i can use for not only tracking my fitness over time but also in the
moment usefulness is something that i would choose the apple watch over the whoop now i should say
as a caveat if you're still watching this video that keep in mind there's a different use case
for every single person my use case of a fitness enthusiast may be different than someone who's an
elite pro athlete who may need different features and different functionality to do what they do so
everyone's going to be subjective in how that works but for me i think i will continue to use
the apple watch and if i do ever get to that pro level maybe i'll come back to the whoop so
thank you for watching the video if you want to watch more videos about the whoop itself
my thoughts i created this playlist that i think you might like you can check it out by clicking
right here if you love sports fitness and technology and want to see more of my content
click right over here and i hope you enjoyed the video have a great rest your day
thanks!