WHOOP 4.0 long term review!

it's hard to believe that i've been using the woop 4.0 armband for over eight months now so i want to talk about my experience using it so far all of these months later now i did make an initial review after using it for one month which you can watch later if you'd like i'll put the link in the description below but obviously sometimes you can't really get the full picture of something until you've been using it for a while longer sometimes features that you think are great turn out to just be okay long term and other things that maybe don't seem very exciting at all end up actually being a core part of the overall experience so i made a list of nine features of the woop 4.0 armband to discuss how useful i find them now from a more long-term perspective compared to when i was just first testing it out so number one is the alarm one of the upgrades the woot 4.0 made compared to the previous 3.0 was the introduction of a new haptic alarm clock this alarm can be set to wake you up at an exact time like most alarms but also can be set to wake you up after achieving a sleep goal so a set amount of hours and sleep rather than a specific time and it could also be set to wake you up when your recovery hits green now i like the alarm clock mostly because the vibration is fairly quiet so i don't have to worry about it waking up my wife if i happen to be getting up before her but realistically i only just use it for a set specific time i feel like the other options are cool but if i'm going to use an alarm clock i'm probably going to want to wake up at a specific time otherwise i'd rather just wake up naturally now i'm sure there's benefit to be found by using the other options for the alarm clock but it's not something i have a huge amount of interest in dialing in especially having a four-year-old in the house like i'm just not going to be that dialed in with my sleep at this point in my life anyway now in terms of sleep tracking on the 4.0 armband i really like it i feel like it's the most accurate compared to any other sleep tracker that i've used and i've mentioned this in other videos but sleep tracking accuracy is still quite a ways off for pretty much all wearables and they all have readings quite a bit different from one to another so i really just judge the accuracy of the sleep on if it makes sense based on how i feel or if i remember waking up in the middle of the night to see if the sleep tracking shows that and the sleep tracking on whoop is really what i utilize most since i have found it so far to be the most accurate that said i don't really like the sleep coach part of the app so the sleep coach will tell you your sleep performance based on how much sleep whoops says you need and this is based on your recent strain and sleep debt which is basically if you don't get enough sleep one night it says you need to make up that sleep the next night and it falls off down the road at some point but the sleep coach is always based on what it thinks you need to achieve 100 full recovery which i usually feel is a number that is just ridiculously high like it says i need over nine and a half hours of sleep and i don't know i just feel like it's not really taking in account you know individual differences and how much sleep is actually needed like i get really good recovery scores all the time with just six or seven hours of sleep and i wish woop would recognize that but from what i can tell after eight months of use i really don't think it does that said when i go to set the alarm if i tell the group that i want to just get by rather than achieve peak performance it gives me a number much more in line with what i would like to get although i often don't even achieve that but at least it gives me a better goal in terms of when to go to sleep based on when i'd like to wake up let me know in comments how much sleep you get per night are you a big eight hour sleeper or are you like me and tend to sleep six or even less hours per night so when you wake up you get access to your daily health monitor and this includes your respiratory rate your hrv score resting heart rate and new to the woop 4.0 your blood oxygen and your skin temperature so this is one feature that was nice when i saw it and when i first reviewed it but it is something that i have grown to value even more over time as it has really allowed me to get an early sense of when my body is starting to fight something off so i can then adjust my training or my supplementation to help myself not get sick this isn't something that i check every day or anything but when not all five metrics are within my normal range i investigate further and try to get a better sense of what i should do so hrv and recovery score is probably what most people who get the whoop are interested in the most and yes it's extremely valuable to have accurate hrv information and the whoop with its supposed 100 measurements taken per second is likely going to give you the most accurate number and i absolutely take into my account my hrv score when i start to finalize what sort of workouts or training i'm going to be doing for the day like i won't change things too drastically unless it's been like two days in a row of a really low hrv score but i will use my score to make more fine-tuned adjustments like if it's a little low maybe changing what was going to be a hardcore metal ride on the peloton to a lower intensity power zone endurance ride or if i'm doing strength training i'll adjust the volume or load slightly and i can't give all of the credit to whoop since i do a lot of things nowadays to aid my recovery but i will note that i've had no injuries or tweaks since starting to use the whoop over eight months ago and given that i enjoy a pretty high amount of training volume that is something i am super pleased about so talking about the heart rate monitor itself i do find it to be really accurate and i really like how quickly it adjusts compared to other monitors which usually only get a heart rate reading once every second and it's reliable it connects well to all of my connected fitness devices and it's thin enough to work in almost every modality even being small enough to be used when i'm all wrapped up for a boxing session so really happy with that and i know the new woop 4.0 has the ability to be used within specific clothing for it so you don't always have to wear it on your wrist but truthfully i just haven't been that interested in going that route i think it's fine where it is on my wrist and yes because i test a lot of wearables i would like to not have to wear so many things on my arm but unless i was to invest say in a ton of specific whoop compression shorts it just doesn't seem worth it to me compared with the convenience of just leaving it here maybe if i was doing some sort of sport where i wouldn't want it on my arm during that activity being able to move it would be super useful but since all i do is lift weights and run and bike and row for the most part it's fine just being on the wrist at all times so there's also an activity tracker with whoop that keeps track of your daily workout and how much strain you are taking on with each session and ideally i think you're supposed to start your workouts manually on the app itself but i never do because it does a great job of automatically knowing when i'm working out and what type of workout i'm doing and if it's ever off i can always edit the start and stop times manually now by itself the app doesn't do a really great job of tracking your training over time or allowing you to easily get an overview of all of your workouts or the details of everyone it doesn't really seem designed for that but it does send all of the data if you'd like over to platforms like strava which does do all that so it's not really a big deal at least for me and it uses this activity tracking as well as your general movement throughout the day to determine your strain score and it can be useful to have give me suggestions on how much strain i should be taking on based on my recovery score and i do like to see the two sort of grouped up together to get an overall sense if i'm doing too much or too little i guess the only problem i still have i guess with the strain score is i just don't think it's a hugely valuable metric if you do a lot of strength training i just don't really think it can appreciate the difference between a really heavy training workout and a lighter one so i don't think your strain score really takes in account the effect workouts might have on your nervous system so i don't really trust it all the way at least not as much as i do the recovery score which does take into account all of that because it's easier to see how your body reacts to something rather than strain which is trying to predict the effect of how what you just did will affect your recovery so another big upgrade to the woop 4.0 is the brand new battery charger which is now waterproof and i've definitely gotten this battery wet numerous times by accident by going into the shower while it was on and it definitely still works so a good upgrade and i really do like this design of the woop that you don't have to take it off in order to charge it it's a really nice feature and it's something that to me is a big plus when comparing it to other wearables as far as the battery itself for me it tends to last between three and four days of use i know some people were having issues with charging the battery when it was first released but i never had any problems like that and it seems like they did make some firmware upgrades to the battery to eliminate that problem for others now after eight months of using the battery charger it does no longer give my loop a full charge i tested it just the other week and it took my loop from zero percent all the way up to 93 so it has lost a bit of capacity so i sort of wish they had made this charger with over 100 capacity so that when it degrades over time it can still charge the whoop band to 100 but like i said the battery life still lasts over three days for me so it's not really the end of the world and finally i want to discuss the daily journal so when you wake up you're suggested to fill out a daily journal which is basically a quick survey about your previous day with areas that you would like to track and see how it affects you and i think when it comes down to it this may be the best part about whoop and why it is still my number one preferred wearable because it just makes it so easy to track everything that you'd like to and even if you just want to track one thing like seeing if using blue light blocking glasses before bed will help you recover better it's extremely useful because small tweaks like that for example can have a really big effect sometimes but you can't really be sure unless you track it and cross compare it to your sleep and your recovery which doing yourself would require a ton of work and so this makes it so you literally only have to spend a few seconds in the morning to fill out your daily survey and then at the end of the month you start to get really useful data on how that behavior or that medicine or that supplement or whatever actually affects you it has been incredibly useful in helping me evaluate which behaviors are most important and which ones may not have as big of an effect and so shouldn't maybe be as big a priority for me and i also like that allows you to be as granular as you'd wish like i can record that i spent time outside and that's enough but if i want to try and dial in how much time i need to spend outside to improve my recovery i can also track and dial that in the journal is probably the most undervalued and yet useful aspect of the whoop for sure and those are my thoughts so far based on eight months using the whoop but if you've been using the whoop i would love to know in the comments below what sort of features you've been using and liking the most or which ones you haven't been using or maybe don't like so much and if you haven't checked out my interview with an hrv expert where we talk about how the whoop can be used with workout programs like peloton for better results make sure to check that video out here as always thanks so much for watching i always appreciate you being here train hard and i'll see you next time

Channel: Connect The Watts

Views: 31,349

Keywords: Connect The Watts, whoop, whoop 4.0, whoop 4, whoop 4 features, whoop battery, whoop 4 battery, whoop 4 band, whoop 4.0 band, whoop 4 review, whoop 4.0 review, whoop update, whoop fitness band, whoop band features, whoop 4.0 features, whoop review, review whoop 4.0, whoop strain, whoop sleep, whoop recovery, whoop 4.0 report, whoop band, whoop body, whoop clothing, Whoop 4.0 review, Whoop 4.0 unboxing, Whoop 4.0 worth it, WHOOP Long Term Review

Id: 1H-ULwiP2hw

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2022