Why I'm falling out of love with Whoop – and the two things it needs ...

You won’t find many people who have talked up Whoop more over the past three years than me. But I'm starting to lose a little bit of love for Whoop.

I started wearing it back in 2021, and have done nearly every day since. I love it – it’s one of my favorite wearables bar none. I wrote about this journey in our revamped Whoop 4.0 review.

Excluding when my charger broke and I had to wait for a replacement, and a week where I forgot to take the charging puck on holiday, I’ve barely missed a recovery.

But recently you’ll see more spots in my data than before. And it might just be that I’m falling out of love with Whoop. And there are two main reasons for that.

Lack of feedback

I do take my training fairly seriously – or at least as seriously as a 39-year-old man who has two kids under three and runs his own business can do.

But the lack of feedback on my training goals has started to grate.

Despite wearing it for every workout, Whoop has no idea how my fitness is evolving. It doesn’t offer cardio fitness estimates, for example. And it’s actually testament to Whoop’s excellent tracking accuracy that I’ve stuck with something that offers almost zero positive affirmation for so long.

It doesn’t present insights on cardio or training load, beyond adding strain to my sleep need, thus creating demoralizing sleep targets that take me weeks to work through.

Whoop has just started to track weight via the Withings integration. If you have a Withings scale you can get weight and lean body mass (weight minus fat) tracked within Whoop.

But it still doesn’t track muscle mass – which is a metric within the Withings app, but not Whoop’s. I feel that’s a huge miss. The Strength Trainer within Whoop is an excellent tool for planning gym workouts. But if your goal is increasing muscle mass (usually the whole point in banging weights in the gym) you’re not able to track your gains.

Likewise, while the Strength Trainer is good, I’d like to see the progression of weight pulled also tracked. This is another element of feedback that seems obvious to include, that Whoop misses out on.

A tough taskmaster Credit: Wareable

I’ve also started to get a little fatigued by Whoop’s sensitive recovery metrics.

Whoop has helped to change and shape my behavior – and it showed me the impact of those late-night glasses of wine. That’s something I’ll rarely partake in these days, entirely down to Whoop.

But if I am out late, perhaps drinking alcohol, there seems very little reason to wear my Whoop. Last week I hosted the Trusted Reviews awards, a big deal here at Candr Media Group. I had a few beers afterwards talking to old friends and colleagues, and I got to bed after midnight.

My Whoop was out of commission having gotten baby poo on the strap and been chucked into the laundry. On a normal night, I’d have made the effort to find my spare strap, somewhere in my desk drawer, to track the night. But what’s the point, just to get a load of low scores, low recovery, and terrible sleep data? In fact, many users tell me they simply won’t wear it. And that undermines the data.

In fact, there’s evidence from studies that getting reports of low sleep or recovery from wearables can affect how you feel. Without my Whoop reporting, I felt fine the next day. I had a productive day at work and worked out gently that afternoon. I’m sure I’d have been rewarded with a single figure score had I worn Whoop.

This is something Oura is good at. If you overdo it one night, it usually offers gentle encouragement to take things easy.

Unlike Whoop, Oura’s recovery score rarely drops below 60.

One day, when I was ill with a tummy bug spread by the children who live in my house, Whoop presented me with, not only a 1% recovery score, but a badge with a skull icon (see above). It’s just an over the top presentation of data, that becomes quite tiresome over the long term.

All stick no carrot

Whoop is a tool that has a single message: go to bed on time, get enough sleep, and you’ll be recovered and rested enough to meet your goals, whatever they are.

But I do think Whoop’s presentation of data could be a little better refined.

Firstly, tone down the skulls, and perhaps hues of green/amber/red recoveries would be more intuitive than a score out of 100.

But also work on how users can see the fruits of their good habits. At the moment Whoop feels all stick and no carrot.

James Stables

James is the co-founder of Wareable, and he has been a technology journalist for 15 years.

He started his career at Future Publishing, and worked on Windows: The Official Magazine until becoming editor of What Laptop Magazine. As an editor of technology media titles, James launched Windows 8: The Official Magazine, and TechRadar's iPad magazine edition .tech.

After these launches, James became the features editor of T3 Magazine and T3.com and was a regular contributor to TechRadar – before leaving Future Publishing to found Wareable in 2014.

James has been at the helm of Wareable since 2014 and has become one of the leading experts in wearable technologies.

He has provided expert comments to a host of sources and has appeared on BBC News and Sky News to talk about smartwatch releases

James also appeared as an expert on Channel News Asia's documentary on wearable tech.

He has also spoken about wearables at a range of events, and hosts a monthly wearable technology event called Wearables London.

And James has also moderated wearable tech panels at Web Summit, IFA, and The Wearable Technology Show.