Hey guys, it is Michael
Kummer here. And in today's video, I want to give you a quick overview and do a comparison between
the WHOOP Strap 4.0 and the Biostrap Evo. Now I've done another, a comparison video couple of months
ago, or almost a year ago, I think, but that covered the previous generation Biostrap and WHOOP
3.0, and in this video, I'm gonna tell you about some of the updates
and give you a current side-by-side comparison. So you can make the decision
which fitness and sleep tracker might be the better choice for you. Now,
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.
All right. So let's talk about some of the things, both devices have in common and
also some about some of the differences. Now, for those of you who don't know Biostrap or
the WHOOP Strap, these are fitness activity, sleep, and recovery tracks. In other words,
they use optical heart rate sensors to keep tabs on your heart rate, your heart rate variability,
your blood oxygen saturation, and some other biometrics to figure out A, how many calories you
are burning, how active you are during the day, how well you sleep, how long you sleep, what
stages of sleep you are in and spend most time in as well as how your nervous system is doing
overnight to recover from the stressors of the previous day. And that could include,
you know, just regular stress, worrying about kids and financials and all of those things,
stuff that influences your nervous system
as well as physical activity, of course. So the more you work out, the more you run
your body down. The more need to recover you have and both of these devices can
reflect that in a so-called recovery score that you get each morning. As you can see,
both of these devices are wrist-worn devices, even though there are some other wearing methods that
both of these devices support. For example, the WHOOP Strap
I can wear on my biceps, I can even wear the sensor so I can take off the strap and wear
the sensor inside of my clothing. So WHOOP has a special line of clothing called WHOOP Body,
and it allows you to stick the sensor into the seam of your underwear, your workout pants,
or special shirts that you can use. Biostrap, on the other hand, they have a
separate arm sensor. So that moves that not really the sensor, it's a separate,
completely separate device, really that works in combination with the Biostrap that you can wear
on your forearm to move the sensory away from the skin. And the purpose or the reason for that is
because the wrist is a relatively sensitive area if you perform exercises that involve well wrist
movement or arm movement. So if you do kettlebell swings, if you do maybe pull-ups, if you do
anything boxing that involves wrist movement, then the wrist might not be the best location for
these sensors to keep accurate tabs on your heart rate. Because as those sensors shift and move
the signal that they receive gets disturbed and there is noise that gets introduced. And
so they might not get an accurate heart rate reading. So both of these devices,
there are some alternative wearing options and the Biostrap even supports third-party chest strips.
And I really like that about Biostrap because a chest strap is arguably the most
accurate way at least for consumers to keep tabs on heart rate because optical heart rate sensors,
like the ones used for those wrist-worn devices, are prone to interference. Again, maybe because
of movement, maybe because the sensor isn't in close contact with the skin. If there is sweat,
if there are tattoos, there are certain factors that negatively influence the quality
of the signal those sensors might receive. So Biostrap supports an external chest strap
or external chest straps that you can leverage to keep tabs on your heart rate, especially during
workouts. Now, beyond that, there are also differences in the type of sensor either of
those devices use WHOOP 4.0 for the first time uses a combination of green and red LEDs.
Well, it's actually green, red, and infrared. And the reason for that is because these different
types of light have different characteristics. For example, if there is no movement involved,
for example, during sleep, then red and infrared LEDs can capture more accurate
heart rate data, and they can capture certain characteristics of the components in your blood
or the reflection thereof to measure, for example, your blood oxygen saturation.
Green LEDs can't do that because they don't penetrate the tissue deep enough. However,
green LEDs are less prone to motion artifacts, so they are more reliable when there is motion
involved. And so, WHOOP uses a combination of both during the day, WHOOP uses the green LEDs.
You can see them here probably on the screen when I flip this up Biostrap on the other hand
uses red LEDs and infrared LEDs exclusively. And that already separates those two products because
Biostrap is not a, is not very good at capturing activity. So if you workout and you wanna measure
your hardware during workouts, then red LEDs and the type of sensor that Biostrap uses
is not ideal because it's inaccurate. There is too much movement. There is too
much potential for noise and interference. So Biostrap for activity tracking, not ideal. That's
why they support third-party, chest straps, which you can use in combination with the
Biostrap app to capture heart rate data during workouts. So you would basically end up with
two types of sensors, one worn on your wrist for sleep tracking and the other one around
your chest for activity tracking. WHOOP is an all-in-one device, so you can use it for both
activity tracking as well as sleep tracking. So that's one of the major differences between
the sensors. Now I should also mention that WHOOP has a couple of additional sensors that
Biostrap does currently not have. One being, for example, a skin temperature sensor and an
electrodermal activity sensor that can help with making sleep
tracking and sleep stage tracking more accurate. Speaking about sleep tracking,
both devices do sleep tracking. They are fairly advanced in that regard, so they can differentiate
between different stages of sleep that you're in, including light sleep and deep sleep,
and when you are when you wake up during the night, disturbances, et cetera, all of those.
These two devices can detect. However, Biostrap does not differentiate between deep sleep and REM
sleep because differentiating between these two stages is incredibly difficult and challenging.
And so Biostrap said, you know what, if we can't do it accurately,
we don't do it at all. So what Biostrap does instead it lumps together REM and deep sleep
because these two stages are very different as far as your heart rate is concerned from
light sleep. And so they just lump it together and call it deep sleep, but it's really a combination
of deep and REM sleep. WHOOP on the other hand makes the distinction between deep and
REM sleep. And based on the studies that I've seen, it's fairly accurate, but it's certainly not
a hundred percent, but you get the distinction. I think the reason why WHOOP might be slightly
more accurate or be able to distinguish between these stages of sleep is because they have a
couple of extra sensors that might be able to help with that. So that's, as far as sleep tracking is
concerned about both apps, give you a fairly good overview of how you slept the quality of
your sleep, how long it took you to fall asleep, how often you woke up in the middle of the night,
how much time you spend in restorative stages of sleep. That's deep and REM sleep combined
as well as how much time you spent in deep sleep. Besides the activity tracking and sleep tracking,
both devices also keep tabs on your heart rate variability during the night.
And HRV or heart rate variability is the difference in timing between heartbeats
and that's an indirect indication of how your nervous is system is doing
so more technically speaking. It reflects the competition between your sympathetic
and parasympathetic nervous system. Those are the two branches of your central nervous system that
are in constant competition with each other, and the sympathetic branch is responsible for
your fight and flight response. So whenever you get revved up, whenever you work out,
whenever you get scared, whenever, you know, those kind of, when you, when you're stressed, then your
sympathetic branch is an overdrive. It takes over and is more active than your parasympathetic one,
which is responsible for resting and digesting. And so the greater the difference
in timing between heartbeats is. The more, your parasympathetic nervous system
is in control, and that's an indication of how well your body
is handling the stressors from the previous day and how well it's recovered. So every morning,
both the mobile apps of these respective devices give you a recovery score,
indication of how ready you are to, you know, work out to push it,
to stress yourself, to add more stress to your system. Basically, they both do it based on
a couple of different factors. The HRV is arguably the most important factor
your resting heart rate because typically when your HRV goes down, so when you are stressed,
then your resting heart rate goes up slightly. The quality of your sleep and some of the other
factors, maybe activities from the previous day, et cetera. And both give you a very good
indication of how you are doing. Now, what I like about WHOOP, in particular,
is that in addition to giving you that score, it also allows you to correlate certain lifestyle
choices and behaviors with your recovery. So, for example, every morning, when I wake up,
I get a list of predefined questions that the app asks me that I can reply to. For example,
WHOOP asks me in the morning, Did you consume any alcohol? If so, how many glasses? And if so,
when was the last drink? Did you have a late meal? Did you supplement with magnesium?
Did you have a high-carb day or a high-fat day? Cetera. So there are a laundry list of questions
that you can choose from, and I've just selected maybe a handful or so of questions that I
answer every single morning because then WHOOP correlates those answers and behaviors
with changes in my sleep quality and my recovery score. So WHOOP at the end
of the month can tell me, Hey, anytime you drink alcohol, after 5:00 PM, your recovery goes down,
your deep sleep goes down, and your overall sleep quality decreases. And
I really like that because it helps me make lifestyle choices, better lifestyle choices
to improve my recovery, to give my body more opportunity to recover from the stressors of the
previous day and to improve my sleep. Biostrap, on the other hand, doesn't really do that to the
extent it has a couple of tags that you can use, but it's, it's nowhere near the sophistication of
the WHOOP Journal implementation. So I think Biostrap goes in the same direction,
but there is a lot more work to have to do to make it as usable as user-friendly,
and as useful at the end of the day. On the other hand, what I really like
about Biostrap and I'm currently doing that. They offer studies that you can participate in,
so there are Biostrap labs that allows you to sign up for certain studies
that correlate maybe a supplement supplementation of a, of a certain kind
with changes in sleep, quality, and recovery, so I'm currently enrolled in one of those studies.
So I'm wearing my Biostrap every night before going to bed and throughout the night, of course,
so I can correlate the changes to my supplement intake, for example, or certain lifestyle
behaviors with changes in sleep quality and recovery. The good news is that I'm not the
only one doing, participating in it study, so there's gonna be many, many members of
that study. And I can then look at the data and see, how maybe a certain supplement or a certain
lifestyle choice not only impacts me but the broader population. And it's a more controlled way
of, of doing it. The problem is those studies are like one-off, so there's only maybe one supplement
that is currently being tested. So you don't get the laundry list
that WHOOP offers, but it's a more, I guess, scientific approach, if you will
to finding out how certain lifestyle choices impact your sleep and recovery. So that's why
a Biostrap labs I really like that idea and I wish WHOOP would be doing that as well. The other thing
I should point out is that there are a couple of features that Biostrap has that WHOOP doesn't.
For example, Biostrap offers a Shoe Pad. They call it, I think, and it's like this little device here
that you can attach to your well shoe or clip to your sock and it's useful for activity tracking.
So if you wanna find out, you know, if you wanna improve the calorie burn maybe, or improve the way
Biostrap captures calories burned. Then you can use the Shoe Pod because it takes
your leg movement into account, but what's more important to me is I can use it during sleep,
combine it with sleep tracking, to get an idea of how much my legs move while I'm sleeping. And,
and you can use it maybe to figure out if you maybe suffer from restless
leg syndrome or something like that. I mean, Biostrap is not a medical device,
but you can kind of use it for self-diagnosis to find out, are, are your legs moving a lot
while you're sleeping? So I think that that is really useful. I really like that. And the
other feature that I really appreciate about Biostrap is in combination with the app
it detects if you're snoring, so you can have the phone next to on your nightstand, maybe
even if it's an airplane mode and the microphone stays on and Biostrap records any sounds it hears
basically. And so you can use that. And then in the morning you get an indication of how much,
if at all you snored. And because of that feature, I found out that if I consumed too much dairy.
I have too much mucus being produced and I tend to snore, and so now I know that and I try to
avoid dairy before going to bed. So that's a really useful feature that I appreciate about
Biostrap that WHOOP doesn't have, unfortunately. Then let's talk real quick about battery life. So,
one thing about, I like about WHOOP is, that I never have to take the device of my wrist.
I can slide on a battery pack to charge it. The battery lasts approximately five days.
You know, then I would slide on the battery pack, which is waterproof and it recharges
in about one and a half hours or so then I take the battery pack off, plug it into a USBC cable
and charge it separately. I never have to take WHOOP off my wrist Biostrap on the other hand
lasts approximately five days or so as well. However, In regular mode, I wanna say where it
only captures biometrics once every five or 10 minutes, depending on the setting
that you can choose in the application if you want to do max biometrics, which is, which is
typically what I enable for sleep tracking. It captures biometrics every two minutes.
And if I have that enabled, then the battery lasts approximately two nights. So every morning when I
wake up and I look at the battery status of the capturing my sleep, I have. Between 50 and 60%
battery left so that when I wake up, I recharge the strap. I can use it in the even again, again,
so battery life much, much better in the WHOOP and I don't have to take it off. Biostrap,
on the other hand, slightly less battery life, especially with max biometrics enabled. Then you
have to really charge it every day if you wanna do sleep tracking every night. In terms of pricing,
different pricing models with the Biostrap, you can buy sets, you buy it front, it's a
one-time fee, and then you own the device. You own the hardware, you can get it with
different types of accessories, depending on if, if you want to use it for recovery,
for activity tracking, or for some other things for sleep tracking, maybe.
So it's a one-time payment. I'm gonna have all the pricing down in the description. You can
check that out. WHOOP on the other hand is based on a subscription model, meaning that you don't
pay for the device upfront, you sign up for a subscription that costs you either between
somewhere between $18 and $30 a month, depending on how long you want to commit.
But then you don't have an upfront payment and there are pros and cons to both of these
pricing strategies. I don't mind the subscription because WHOOP keeps adding a lot of features
every couple of months you get a lot of value out of your subscription. Whenever they've released
a new hardware, like they recently did with WHOOP 4.0, as long as you have six months left
on your membership, you get the new hardware free of charge. So again, pros and cons. I
have a discount link down on the description if you use that to sign up for WHOOP you get a
month free, basically. I also have an affiliate link for Biostrap. I'm gonna have that down below
in the description as well. Check it out if we want to use that. But with that, we're gonna wrap
it up. Overall, I like both devices. I've worn WHOOP since 2019, I've worn Biostrap on and off
for two years now started out with the previous generation, now a Biostrap Evo.
I like both approaches. I find WHOOP to be slightly more powerful more accurate,
and more useful in terms of how it correlates the information, my biometrics, and so it allows me to
make lifestyle choices. Biostrap, on the other hand, I really like
that I can sign up for studies and be part of a study that is more scientific, I guess, and more
than the WHOOP Journal doing it by myself. So I really like that about Biostrap. I also like that
it supports third-party chest straps. So if you're into that, if you do certain types of workouts
that might not work with wrist-worn devices, the chest strap might be a good choice for you.
I like the snoring detection. That's also something I really like about Biostrap
and yeah. Both are good devices, really. This is the one that I wear every day,
so I have a slight favor the WHOOP I really like that. I've been wearing it for a couple
of years now, but I also appreciate Biostrap. So, you know, depending on your requirement,
you know, either of those two devices do a good job, especially with sleep tracking.
Fitness tracking is probably this one is better in terms of recovery tracking,
I also lean towards WHOOP but regardless. Let me know what you
think. What is your favorite device? Have you used either of those? If so,
let me know any comments and if you have any questions, as well. If you like this video, give
it a thumbs up. If you didn't like it, let me know what it could have done better. Until next time.