Whoop 5.0: The Premier Fitness Band

I switched to the Whoop earlier this year after my Oura ring died. Given that the Oura died after less than two years of use, there could be an entirely different discussion about smart rings and whether they need to be more robust. For now, I’ll stick to wrist wearables. The Whoop was very easy to set up, with a super-comfortable band — worn on my right wrist — that was lighter than I expected for its size.

The Whoop is different from other fitness trackers in that it’s very focused on recovery and daily stress. Because it lacks a screen, you aren’t meant to look at it in real-time (and you can’t, really) to determine your heart rate, steps, or distance. Instead, you’re meant to use your phone to log the workouts your Whoop tracks and to glance at the feedback the band gives you after you’ve woken up, and to guide your activities throughout the day. The Whoop focuses on making sure you get enough rest for the day and gives you a score for how ready you are to take on the next day, including whether you should take a rest day from your workouts. It also doubles as a very good sleep tracker.

My biggest critique of the Whoop is that it is physically as large as a smartwatch, although it is considerably lighter. In fact, because of the size of the Whoop, I found that I had to switch wrists when I went to bed and put my watch on the nightstand to charge, since I generally sleep on my right side. I used to think that smartwatches were too big to comfortably wear to sleep, but the comfort of the Whoop band made me realize that many wearables could be used as sleep trackers if you make them comfortable enough. For instance, my Pixel Watch 3, which is roughly the same size as the Whoop, was previously not comfortable enough for sleep because of its leather band. When I upgraded the watch to a more comfortable stretchy knitted band, I found sleep tracking considerably easier.

The Whoop does a good job of tracking regular sleep, although it doesn’t detect when I wake up to feed my infant child and then go back to sleep. It lacks the context that I am waking up and going back to sleep because of the baby and offers no way to add that. There’s no good way to tag sleep events, just journaling in the app about consumption of alcohol, caffeine, and the like. I believe that this impacts the suggestions the application’s AI makes when you open the app for the first time every day.

The Whoop comes in three tiers, with the 360 plan being the most expensive at $30 a month — but including the Whoop 5.0 hardware. This was especially easy for me to opt for after paying $350 for an Oura 4 that died so quickly. I think if you’re sensitive about subscriptions, Whoop might not be for you, but the company consistently expands its capabilities, and its sleep and fitness tracking are very granular and feel extremely accurate.

I really liked Whoop’s ability to easily swap bands, though I think the build quality of the default band could be a bit better. Whoop also offers its own stylish leather bands for $50 to $130. The charging solution is also cool because you can charge the device while you wear it, so you technically never have to take the band off. (Speaking of which, the band will notify you if you have it off for more than 20 minutes to ensure you are always capturing data.) That said, the charger is proprietary, so if you lose it, you’ll probably need to spend $30 with Whoop to replace it. I also got 16 days of battery life with the Whoop, which is more than what the company claimed. With a battery life of 14 days or more, you probably don’t need to travel with a charger.

The only downside of the Whoop I found is that it forced me to stop wearing my Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses because wearing two bands on my right wrist isn’t comfortable, and I’d like to wear just one device on that wrist and a watch on my left wrist. To be fair, I am a unique type of power user, but we might find over time that people start to run out of wrist space for the many different wearables the market has to offer. I have already seen people wearing the Whoop on their watch band, and it’s a plus that its flexibility allows you to wear it in alternate locations — in your shirt or pants, for example — if you use it with Whoop-designed clothing.

The Fitbit Air: Compact, Lightweight, and Simple

Google recently launched the Fitbit Air, which is a lower-cost wearable that is extremely lightweight and smaller than most trackers, especially when compared to the Whoop or the Pixel Watch. The launch created a lot of buzz, and it put a lot more attention on the category; it also drew some interesting comparisons of the Google device to the Whoop. The Fitbit Air comes at a lower price of $99, with a $10 per month Google Health subscription for users who don’t already have a Google One plan. If you already have a Google AI Pro or higher plan, you don’t need to pay anything monthly. This also replaces the Fitbit Premium plan, which used to cost $80 per year and was not included in any other plans, so it’s a net positive for me that Google made this change.

I’m still wearing the Fitbit Air and find it much easier to wear with something like the Meta Neural Band, but even so, I still don’t enjoy wearing both. There will likely be a day when we see the functionality of multiple wearables consolidate — like we did with the smart watch. The Fitbit Air’s battery life is stated at 7 days, and that’s exactly how long I get from it. I believe this to be the minimum battery life that all wearables should strive for, with Pebble’s recently released Time 2 showing that nearly 30 days is very possible for fitness and sleep tracking wearables. The Fitbit Air also gave me a warning when the battery hit 20%. With such good battery life, you get that warning when you still have more than a day to charge it back up. Unfortunately, the Fitbit Air’s charger is a proprietary magnetic two-pin unit, though it works quickly and fully charges the band in just over an hour.

A lot has been said about the Google Health app, which is the successor to the Fitbit app. Some people say they don’t like it, but I think the intelligence within the app is quite good. And overall, as an app targeted at the average consumer, I think it is just fine. Yes, there’s plenty of room for improvement in the UI, but I think the main “today” page strikes a nice balance across fitness, readiness score, and sleep. I also really like the AI-generated suggestions based on your activity, sleep, and recovery status, and think that the suggestions are more personalized than anything I got from Whoop, even if the data isn’t as granular. For example, the Fitbit Air can track my broken sleep, and it mentions that my infant is likely the cause of it because it has that context. It also suggests the best time to go outside with the baby, considering daily temperatures. It even notes when you travel long distances and adds that to the context of your current state.

Recently I’ve noticed that the Fitbit Air isn’t getting reliable readings on my sleep. This is likely due to a fit issue, though the device hasn’t reported any problems with the fit based on the data it’s gathering. On one recent night, it underreported my sleep and didn’t track any of my sleep stages. The app definitely should be doing fit checks to ensure that it has a good fit before you go to sleep so it can get good data.

I have also been reminded that if you’re wearing these devices 24/7, they need to be easy to clean because they are going to get sweaty — and you don’t want them to get gross. I found the cleaning process for the Fitbit Air to be extremely easy because the tracker pops out of the band very easily, and you can wash the band with any laundry load. I didn’t do anything special to dry it, but it air-dried very easily and smelled nice and fresh once again.

What Have I Learned About Health Wearables?

My health-wearables journey started when I bought an Oura ring to help me understand my sleep patterns before my wife and I had our first kid. My goal was to understand my sleep baseline so that I could later find out how having kids impacted my sleep and thus my daily readiness. I am extremely aware of poor sleep when it happens, and although I constantly try to go to bed earlier to compensate, that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to. But these wearables have all consistently nudged me to get more sleep and to go to sleep earlier, which is hard for a night owl like me.

Among other things, comparing these devices helped me realize that band comfort is way more important than the physical size of the device when it comes to sleeping with a tracker. I also realized I might prefer a smaller smartwatch with a comfortable band to sleep in, since that frees up my right wrist for something like the Meta Neural Band. But that comes with its own issues: My Pixel Watch 3’s battery life has become wildly inconsistent, and it often doesn’t make it to bedtime, let alone work through the night. This is all to say that so many of these devices offer unique value propositions, and I’m going to keep testing them to find the ideal setup for me.