Whoop 5 Review

I’ve been using the Whoop 5 for a little over four months now, and during this time I’ve completely replaced my Apple Watch with it.

One of the main reasons I bought the Whoop was to track my sleep and recovery. The Apple Watch does this too, but it’s bulky to wear while sleeping and, in my experience, not as accurate as Whoop. That was my thinking going in.

Overall, my experience has been good. I really like how well it tracks sleep, recovery, and strain. The numbers are genuinely useful as they help you understand your patterns and clearly show where you need to improve.

One of the biggest changes I’ve made since buying the Whoop is around my sleep. I can now clearly see how sleep affects my recovery. I can also see the impact of late-night meals and snacking on both sleep quality and recovery. Watching these effects show up in numbers is fascinating and surprisingly effective at changing behaviour.

However, after about four months, I started feeling diminishing returns. I now know what consistently impacts my sleep and recovery. In most cases, I can predict my scores based on my sleep timing and eating habits. While Whoop still captures things I can’t always feel, like poor quality sleep, the patterns are now familiar. At this point, it feels like I’ve learned most of what the device can teach me.

I haven’t used it heavily for workouts or training yet, and there may be more insights to uncover there. But that’s also something an Apple Watch can handle reasonably well.

One thing I really dislike is how aggressively Whoop calculates recommended sleep time. On most days, it asks me to go to bed by 8–9 PM, which is completely unrealistic. It also seems to over emphasize sleep consistency and efficiency. While the data clearly reflects how habits influence these metrics, the final recovery score often doesn’t match how I actually feel upon waking.

Another persistent annoyance is not being able to see the time due to lack of a display. Wearing a device without a display means I need my phone just to check the time. I tried wearing a watch on one hand and the Whoop on the other, but I don’t like how it looks. That’s fine for a year, but long term, I don’t see myself giving up a watch entirely. Whoop does offer bicep bands, but they’re not available in India yet and are quite expensive. Also, Whoop itself recommends wrist placement for the best overall tracking.

Overall, I’m glad I bought the Whoop. It taught me a lot about my bed time & eating habits affect my sleep and recovery, and how sleep quality, efficiency, and consistency really matter. These are insights that are genuinely hard to internalise without seeing the data.

It’s an expensive experiment, but a valuable one. I’ll most likely not continue beyond the first year. For non-athletes, Whoop feels like overkill. It makes the most sense for people who train seriously and need continuous, detailed recovery data.

Whoop 5, in my view, is a one-time, must-try experience, even if you don’t renew after the first year.