Whoop vs Garmin
Why I’m swapping one for the other
I’ve been with Whoop for 2 years. It’s been great, and at the time was the only option for someone who wanted something lightweight, that gave a 24*7 view of health, and could be worn for contact sports. It’s got it’s limitations (which I’ll get to in a minute) but in terms of helping me get in halfway decent shape over the last couple of years — it’s been a really worthwhile investment. As you can probably guess from the title, I am in fact ditching the Whoop — so why is that? There’s a few reasons…
The cost. It’s basic monthly price is around £25 a month in the UK, which over the 2 years would be about £600. That’s a pretty high-end Garmin you’re getting for that sort of money. Now in fairness, with a longer contract commitment this comes down. I got 18 months for about £350, but still it’s a significant outlay — assuming you’d even replace a device every 2 years — it’s probably less regular than that for most people.
The functionality is also pretty limited to be honest. There’s no screen. Initially it couldn’t even map a run — they added that a little while ago but it still needs your phone’s GPS — it doesn’t have anything on board.
The approach to strain and recovery is fairly basic. The strain algorithm is proprietary but essentially it just seems to multiply your heart rate by time on some logarithmic scale so that you can never hit the max figure (21). So if you go jogging for an hour you’ll have a very high strain but an hour of intense weight lifting barely registers. Which is fine, I like to mix things up and actually, tracking strength training is hard to do so Whoop aren’t alone here.
Recovery is equally simplistic in that it tracks your heart rate variability according to your baseline. If it’s lower than normal you’re in the red and if it’s higher than normal you’re in the green. For me, HRV and RHR correlated pretty much 100% of the time so RHR is as good an indication if you ask me but maybe other people track differently. Whoop takes this reading during your last period of deep sleep each night, which can sometimes give funky results but on the whole I think it’s a reasonable approach. Also Whoop is very good (for me) at sleep tracking. I had relatively few issues with this side of things and it’s fairly comfortable to wear all night.
For a service with such basic functionality then you’d think Whoop would concentrate on integrating with other services. Pretty much the only integration at this stage is Strava, which feels like an absolute bare minimum. There’s not really a published API — you can (and some people have) figured out how to use their existing API but it just shows to me, that Whoop ain’t really interested in developing or working within an ecosystem. They just want you to buy a Whoop.
Finally, accuracy. For me, Whoop actually got worse over the 2 years. It’s got to the stage now where I have to switch it to the bicep band if I want to trust what it’s measuring even for a simple walk. This certainly wasn’t the case for the first 12 months or so but it’s pretty consistent now. Maybe the Whoop 4.0 will be better, maybe it won’t. I don’t want to commit 6 months to find out though.
So, with all that said, why did I stick with it for 2 years if it’s got so many limitations then? Well, I just didn’t see an alternative that ticked the boxes I needed. Until now at least. I came across the Polar Verity Sense which is the latest version of the Polar arm-based sensor. This seems to be pretty well respected through it’s various incarnations from an accuracy point of view, and most importantly, brought two specific features that make it really useful:
- Onboard recording of an activity without being connected to a smart watch.
- An increased range of (I think) 150 metres, which is incredible.
What this means is that I could use it on the field for contact sports, and either record the activity or even just link to my watch if it’s in a kitbag on the sideline. The bonus is it fits nicely underneath the Whoop impact sleeve which offers a bit of padding so that hasn’t gone to waste either!
I thought I was switching to Garmin, not Polar though? Well yeah, kind of. I looked at the Polar line of watches and in terms of what I needed the Vantage M2 ticked pretty much every box I needed — except for one. It’s too darn big. I dunno the fascination with big watches these days (or big phones for that matter) but I wanted something more compact. The good news though, is the Polar Verity is pretty open and can indeed connect to pretty much any watch so that gave me a lot more options. And Garmin do a line of ‘s’ watches which are, to me, just the right size. At that point it was between the Venu 2 and the Vivoactive 4. The Venu had a nicer screen but I kinda think the transflective approach of the Vivoactive has some advantages for outdoor use and battery. Also it was about 150 quid cheaper.
There are a few things I need to figure out about connecting all these things together. The Verity uploads stored activities to Polar Flow so if I use it in that mode there could be a bit more effort to get that activity with my others in Garmin Connect. They both seem to play nice with Strava though and I think Apple Health also which is another option I’m becoming intrigued by. But that’s for another day I think. For now though I thought it would be fun just to compare between the 3 devices — is the Garmin more accurate than the Whoop, or does it need to be linked to the Polar to get a decent level of accuracy? So I decided to wear all 3 and find out! Note that this is a very personal, relatively unscientific comparison, for my own benefit as much as anyone else. If you want to see someone who knows what they’re doing and compares these things properly, go check out dcrainmaker.
Test 1: Short walk
The Garmin and Whoop (via the iPhone) tracked the distance fairly similarly. Heart rate measurements were a different story though. Whoop had a higher max and average heart rate, though it also figured I burned half as many calories. My experience is Whoop significantly underestimates calories at low (< 80% max) heart rates.
Obviously these graphs are pulled from the respective platforms so have a slightly different look but there just doesn’t seem to be much commonality there. So what did the Polar look like?
First thing to notice is that both the Garmin and Whoop seemed to overestimate heart rate at times. Polar had a peak of 105bpm. Garmin had 117bpm and Whoop had 136bpm. But at least Garmin and Polar had the same ‘shape’. The Whoop just honestly seemed to pick random numbers…
One other observation here, I really like the way you can zoom in on a section in Polar flow and get averages and peaks within that period. Garmin Connect doesn’t seem to offer that.
Test 2: Run
About 7 miles, bit gassed about 2/3 through so walked a little before hitting a big hill to finish.
There’s definitely a bit more consistency between all 3 here, in fact I’d even say the Whoop seems to track the Polar a little better at times than the Garmin does but they’re both fine. In terms of peak HR, Whoop had 176bpm, Garmin had 172bpm and Polar had 166bpm. Overall though I think they all tracked the run fairly well. It will be interesting to see how they all handle less steady-state activity though.
Test 3: Strength Training
This was a fairly light upper body workout — dumbbell press, flys, rows and pull-ups. Nothing very heavy as I’m a bit broken at the minute.
Honestly, these were all fairly close to each other. Clearly no-ones struggling here. I guess it would be interesting to see what some truly heavy squats or deadlifts look like. Only real difference was in the calorie estimation — Whoop had me for 97 calories, Garmin 216 and Polar 321. My money is on the Garmin here.
Only other thing of interest was this being the first time I’d used Garmin’s strength app. You basically just tap to start a set and it tries to figure out how many reps you do, but also attempts to guess which exercise you’re doing. It actually guessed right more than it was wrong so not too bad. You can tidy it all up in the app after but the biggest benefit is it keeps you from picking up the phone to enter weight and reps — stopping you getting distracted by Twitter notifications or whatever. I like it so far.
Test 3: HIIT
Specifically a spin bike session (Les Mills Sprint #4 if you’re interested). There was plenty of sweat on the floor after this so lets see how things compare.
Max heart rate was similar between the three but estimated calories varied quite a bit (270, 357, 377 for the Whoop, Garmin, Polar respectively). In terms of tracking heart rate the Polar shows a gradually increasing series of peaks over each interval, which is what I would expect. The Garmin trends in a similar way but there’s a lot of noise around each peak. The Whoop just stumbles around a bit, occasionally bumping into the other two at random, like your drunk friend.
Conclusion
Clearly, the Garmin is more accurate than the Whoop and paired with the Polar arm band, much more so. The added functionality of being able to see your pace or hear rate zone mid-workout is nice too. The Garmin Connect app has a lot of good stuff in there, and the Body Battery approach is nice — taking your HRV continuously to give you a level at any time of the day.
There are things I’ll miss about the Whoop — the red / green when you wake up in the morning is just a nice snapshot to look at. Sleep detection is I think, still superior on the Whoop as well — Garmin is kinda ‘good enough’ though.
Overall, I think the Whoop was a great concept at launch, but others have caught up and even without the accuracy issues, it just doesn’t have enough capability for the price they’re charging
