A Whoop-ing amount of data

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I am, by any measure, chronically bad at charging my devices. As an Apple Watch user, this bad habit has produced the same small tragedy multiple times: I’m dressed and ready to go, but my watch is dead. So the Whoop 5.0 wearable, with its 14-day battery life, had my attention before I even put it on.

How we tested it: For two weeks, I wore it everywhere—on flights, at my desk, to sleep, and during workouts—except the shower. (Even though it’s waterproof, the feeling of the wet strap was too much of a sensory overload for me.) I logged my habits every day on the Whoop app (on a Peak subscription), including whether I had an afternoon snack, if I spent time outdoors, and how much caffeine I consumed.

The Good: The battery life is, as promised, one of the best parts of the band. One charge did last about 14 days, and the design of the slide-on battery pack meant that I could just slip it on and charge it without having to take the band off.

The data (warning: there’s a lot of it) became more tailored to my everyday life the more consistently I wore it. The metric I found to be most useful was the recovery score, which gave me a good idea of how much I should exert myself for the day by tracking my sleep performance and combining it with other factors like the previous day’s stress levels.

The Bad: The band is inseparable from the annual membership, and it’s not cheap. The price for its cheapest One tier is $199 per year. Its Peak tier is $239 per year, and its most expensive Life tier is $359 per year. That’s a significant recurring annual cost (for comparison, the one-time cost of the Apple Watch Series 11 starts at $399). If you decide to stop paying for the Whoop membership, your hardware is rendered useless.

Verdict: ✅ Signal—for people who want the data and can justify the subscription. —LC