WHOOP 4.0 Fitness Tracker Review
3.5/5
£27 per month | Buy from Whoop
TL:DR
WHOOP 4.0 offers a very polished experience for those looking to delve deeper into their training and performance but the lack of screen will put some off. It provides great insights into training but isn’t the complete fitness tracker that is offered elsewhere. If money is less of a concern it’s a great device but really cannot compete with the traditional GPS trackers out there already.
Positives
Unobtrusive
App experience is great
Provides deep insigh
Options to wear not on the wrist.
Negatives
Offers very few ‘fitness tracker’ features
expensive monthly subscription
The Lowdown
6 Day battery life
Samples 100 times a second
Detachable bands
Waterproof to 10 metres
IP68 rated
Bluetooth connectivity
33% smaller than WHOOP 3.0
There’s a sea of options available when it comes to fitness trackers; from Garmin to Suunto and Coros to Apple it’s a huge market and all of these devices too reasonably similar, taking the form of a watch packed with sensors and a screen to help you track activities and navigate through tricky terrain alongside more mundane features like deliver notifications directly to your wrist.
Unbox the WHOOP 4.0 fitness tracker and you’ll be in for a surprise: there’s no screen here, just a svelte fabric band with a small sensor bump instead into it. No screen, no buttons, no obvious way of charging it either.
It begs the question then, how does a device with no screen aim to ‘unlock human performance’ if it can’t tell you anything?
One of the co-founders of WHOOP said ‘I can predict the weather next week, I know detailed health and performance metrics of my computer, but I don’t know when I’m going to get sick or how hard I should workout today’ and this led to the development of WHOOP, a fitness tracker designed to unlock human potential by ‘uncovering secrets your body is trying to tell you.’ It sounds all very impressive if not a little terrifying, but does it bring anything new to an already crowded sector?
Fitness trackers have become mightily complicated things nowadays, they all track your heart rate and require a computer science degree to fully understand so it was very refreshing to wear a device that was so simple. Slip the band on, fasten the clip, and forget about it. Our device came in stealthy all black but there’s plenty of different coloured straps available on the WHOOP store. WHOOP also offer a range of clothing that has a small pocket to slip the WHOOP 4.0 into, simply detach the strap and slot it into place to free up your wrist.
And forget about it you will, the WHOOP 4.0 does not deliver any notifications or even tell the time, it just sits silently on your wrist measuring your heart rate 100 times a second, 24/7. This data is captured using 5 LED’s and 4 photodiodes to offer claimed best in class accuracy. Wearing it alongside our Garmin EPIX, the heart rate figure between the two was rarely a few BPM away from each other so while it’s difficult to verify its accuracy, we can say it was reliable.
Aside from heart rate, WHOOP doesn’t track steps, active minutes, stairs climbed or really anything beyond heart rate so how does it manage to tell us anything useful?
It’s in the companion app that the WHOOP 4.0 really comes to life offering a wealth of information but we’ll get into that shortly.
The WHOOP 4.0 is designed to be worn 24/7 to capture as much data as possible and offer insights into sleep and recovery. The battery life of the device is claimed to be 6 days and we’ve found that to be consistent with our testing. The app will deliver a notification to say when the device has 20%, 10% and 5% charge remaining which was handy, and we felt compelled to actually charge it rather than get distracted and do something else.
When it is time to charge the device up, WHOOP does things a little differently. As it’s designed to be worn 24/7, the charger is in fact a small battery that clips onto the band and wirelessly charges with the WHOOP still on your wrist so you can still wear the device yet recharge it on the go. The battery pack itself is charged via USB C and is good for a single recharge of the WHOOP. It’s also possible to remove the band and recharge it from the wall like you would any other device.
In the app is where the WHOOP band really comes to life, offering a wealth of information yet presented in an easy-to-understand format. The ‘home’ screen provides an overview of your strain, sleep, recovery, and heart rate variability (HRV) which are the metrics that WHOOP uses to determine a whole host of information.
Strain is WHOOP’s metric of how strenuous your day has been, have an easy day and the figure will be low but do a workout and it’ll be higher; WHOOP provides a target strain to maintain or improve your fitness as well as offering insights as to whether you’re in danger of overtraining from too many days of consecutive high strain scores. We’ve found it to be fairly spot on in terms of quantifying busy days and workouts and have noticed that through more intense training periods it takes note and changes the target strain.
Sleep is fairly self-explanatory, WHOOP tracks your heart rate and movement throughout the night to track different stages of sleep; a better night sleep combined with a lower strain score will improve your recovery and allow you to achieve a higher strain score if you exercise without risking burnout or overtraining. The app will also suggest bedtimes and wakes time to fully optimise your recovery which is a handy feature for those that have the flexibility.
HRV is a metric used to track recovery in more detail; it’s a time between your heartbeats and a higher HRV indicates how your body is responding to training and its environment. Trends in HRV can highlight changes in your fitness over time and it’s an interesting metric to track as it tended to tie in closely with how fresh we felt.
WHOOP does not track activities in the same way as a GPS tracker might, there’s no distance or map recording, instead the device senses when your heart rate is elevated alongside using data from the accelerometer to match your motion to one of the 60+ activities.
There’s no GPS no board the device but the ‘system’ can track your course using your phones GPS and when activities are manually started in the app, there’s an option to ‘track route’ to provide a trace.
The app on the whole is very slick, we experienced no lagging, crashing, or freezing throughout our month wearing the device and navigating through the different information screens was intuitive, with the data presented in an easy to understand to allows us to make more informed training choices.
It’s worth commenting on pricing too, as you don’t purchase the device for a one-off fee, instead it adopts the very 2023 trend of being a subscription. It’s £27 a month on a rolling basis or pay for a year at £229 and the monthly fee drops to around £19. There’s no denying it’s an expensive device and one that’s made worse as we think few people will use it as a primary device, instead many will use it in tandem with a GPS watch.
The WHOOP 4.0 won’t be for everyone, many will want a more feature rich experience offered by a device with a screen that can display notifications or offer navigation however we found ourselves wearing it in tandem with our Garmin as the two offered slightly different experiences. For those looking to train more efficiently and understand how their body responds to certain inputs, we think WHOOP 4.0 is a class leading option but the subscription might put some off.