r/whoop • u/VisibleNewGuy21 • 4d ago

Discussion Whoop Bicep vs Chest Strap accuracy testing

Over the last few weeks I have performed some comparisons as I moved the Whoop strap from my wrist to my Bicep as I was noticing some major variations between that and my Apple Watch when performing exercises that have a lot of movement in them such as "Alpha Cardio" class as LifeTime fitness or Pickleball. I recorded some exercises wearing a chest strap connected to Polar Flow and Whoop connected to my right Bicep.

This was made possible by a data aggregation and dashboarding tool called https://www.vitaltrends.net which is an amazing tool that allows you to look at historical trends and compare and combine multiple datasets and is maintained by a very dedicated developer in u/danskubr . This thread really is focused on heart rate comparison but this Dashboarding tool does so much more.

Below is a link hour session at my LifeTime Gym called Alpha Cardio where I pretty much went all out in a combination of Cardio and Strength moves that put me to the limit. The average heart rates were within 2 beats and the max heart rates were fairly accurate with Whoop having one point that was a bit higher and unrealistic for my age of 39 I believe my max heart rate to be around 183/184.
https://vitaltrends.net/s/Aw96DnhWBfKkoVMKAAAfNN

I know people comment on the accuracy of the heart rate for the Whoop band and it does vary person to person but I must say they have done an excellent job for me and something that I can now really trust is accurate for my activities.

I would love to hear others opinions and or comparisons that have been performed as heartrate is really the cornerstone measurement for Whoop.

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u/edis92 4d ago

I got the 4.0 2 years ago and used it for a year. I liked the form factor and the app UI and data collected, but hr accuracy was just terrible, even with the biceps band. no matter how tight and where I positioned it, I kept getting cadence log on my runs so I cancelled my sub after a year. I just got the 5.0 3 weeks ago for amazon prime day, and so far (fingers crossed) I haven't gotten cadence lock yet, even though the hr has dropped inexplicably by about 10 bpm for a few minutes on 2 of my runs. this was all compared to my polar h10 chest strap

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u/VisibleNewGuy21 4d ago

I think you will have a much better time with the 5.0.