The Truth About the "Whoop Killer"

All right, so Whoop is dominant

as a fitness tracker in the world of professional

and enthusiast athletes all around the world.

I have a lot of friends, I play Ultimate Frisbee,

friends and teammates who all wear Whoops.

It's this screenless, lightweight puck in a thin band with all these sensors on

one side that you just wear 24/7.

So when the Fitbit Air came along,

a lot of those same people immediately were interested

and started asking me about it,

"Hey, is it... is it good?

Should I switch?

Are they comparable?"

And the main reason for that... is the Whoop subscription.

You see, you don't just buy the Whoop tracker.

You buy the tracker

and then pay a membership subscription

that starts at $200 a year

and goes up to $350 a year,

forever.

If you ever do stop paying, the Whoop literally doesn't do anything anymore.

It becomes a brick.

It's useless.

The Fitbit, on the other hand, doesn't even require a subscription at all...

And the subscription they do offer for extra features is much cheaper than the

Whoop.

It's $100 a year.

So almost everyone asking me about this basically just wants to know,

is it as good as a Whoop, but cheaper?

Because if so, then I might as well switch.

So, to any of my teammates out there watching this,

or any other athletes who are considering switching,

I have spent the last almost two weeks wearing... both of these things alongside...

an Apple Watch for a ton of stuff... practices,

games, workouts, recoveries, sleeping, and more.

I hated being that guy wearing multiple trackers at the same time, but hey,

someone's gotta do it.

And now I have your answer.

You might not like it, but...

I have your answer.

So to me, it's pretty clear.

Fitbit Air is designed to take direct aim at Whoop,

not just with the matching form factor, which I'll get to in a second,

but with their pricing model.

So, like I said, the Whoop is free,

but it's literally useless without the subscription.

I honestly hope that changes after this.

But as of right now, 200 bucks a year,

baseline every year to get in the door.

The $99 Fitbit Air... is functional with no subscription at all,

and it will do a good amount of basic tracking: heart rate, step tracking,

calories burned, sleep tracking, and more.

But if you want the full suite of everything,

including the AI fitness coach and a big workout library, that's $100 a year.

And there's all kinds of promos right now

as it launches for like three free months of Google Health Premium.

So I would say it definitely wins the price battle.

But also keep in mind, this is still Google we're talking about here,

the... data and ads company.

So of course they would want to sell you a subsidized fitness tracker

and leverage the Fitbit name to get it in

as many hands as possible...

because they want as much data

as possible,

because it's Google.

So just something to keep in mind, this is... still a Google tracker,

so it may be a surprise,

but I also give Google the nod in form factor over the Whoop...

They're both pretty small.

They're both these little plastic pucks with an optical heart-rate sensor.

They're both water-resistant.

But the Fitbit is a little bit more of this longer oval shape,

and it's just a little smaller, a little lighter than the Whoop.

And because it's a narrow oval, it's a little more obscure, too.

It has a thinner band on your wrist.

I also like that it's Velcro

that you can easily adjust versus the Whoop clasp

that is a little more secure

but harder to adjust.

But that also means you can pretty easily just pop the tracker out.

So the tracker you can take out of this band with a little pressure.

So you can switch bands and... super easily, which I really like.

I will say, though,

since the Whoop has existed for many more years than this Air,

it has the advantage of a ton... more accessories for it.

So there's a wristband, there's also a bicep strap and a chest strap.

Hell, they sell Whoop-branded clothing where you can slip in the sensor

and it still captures data

as you're wearing it.

There's literally Whoop underwear.

So these wristbands are the only accessories for the Fitbit Air right now,

which for me is fine.

But I wouldn't also be shocked if in like two weeks,

or like right after I publish this video,

there's a bunch of accessories on Amazon or Temu or whatever.

So, yeah, right now, just the bands.

So there are three wristband materials.

There's the performance... loop band,

then there's the Active band... and the elevated modern band.

I've spent most of my time with this.

This is the Steph Curry Special Edition band,

which is a version of the performance loop.

But it's this knitted fabric

that kind of reminds me of the Apple Watch Trail Loop.

But I did notice I stained it somehow,

like at some point in my first two weeks.

I have no idea when or how this happened,

but it's got a little stain in this fabric and that's a real bummer,

because this is the comfortable band

that I want to wear most of the day

and sleep in.

I also worked out in it a few times.

It is comfortable, it is secure, it was never an issue.

But it does get a little damp if you sweat a lot in it.

So I would say

that the rubber... active band is probably more ideal for a lot of sweat.

If the whole point of these screenless fitness trackers is to be discreet

and understated,

so you can wear an actual watch on the other wrist

or something like that

and dress it up,

then... these are all pretty good.

But this elevated modern band is probably actually the best one...

So for those of you watching who don't know,

I would consider myself a pretty serious competitive athlete.

I've made a video talking all about the other sports tech that I use,

but to catch up anybody who's missed it,

I play Ultimate Frisbee

and I play at a high level on club

and pro teams.

And so that involves a lot of practices and games,

then also a lot of workouts

and cardio training and recovery

and all that in between...

And I track... everything.

So for years I've done all this stuff wearing an Apple Watch.

You can probably find... tons of footage of me playing in games

and see an Apple Watch on my wrist.

So that's been there for a long time.

That's my baseline.

But honestly, I would say I'm more of a free agent.

I'm open-minded.

I am very much willing to switch

and become... either a Whoop

or Fitbit person if the data

and the experience is

that much better or more personalized for me.

So... yeah, me wearing all three of these things for the past week

and a half and doing all these activities was just

as much an exercise in data collection

as it was in my own personal interest.

So this new Fitbit Air plugs straight into the Google Health app,

which was previously the Fitbit app...

Why they chose to get rid of the Fitbit name for the app,

but keep it for the product—I guess we'll never know.

But the app is pretty good.

When you first jump in, you set this thing up,

and if you're paying the subscription,

you can talk to the AI coach

and tell it what you want to accomplish

and what your goals are,

and it will build something up for you to start following.

From day one. and literally from that point on,

every single day in the app,

there's some new info looping in the sleep you had the night before...

and the weather that day,

if it's going to be really hot or cold for your workout,

and just giving you suggestions on what to focus on.

And also at any point,

you can hit that blue button at the bottom

and talk to the AI coach.

Ask it questions and it gives you personalized answers based on what you were

doing during the setup

and all the data

that it has about you.

And you can use it to keep updating your plan.

I even tried asking it a bunch of kind of tricky questions just to

see if it would falter,

but it generally didn't.

It gives sources when it's like talking about other real-world stuff.

And if you ask crazy questions about like how to lose massive amounts of

weight or totally reshape your life,

it brings the focus back to sustainability, which, I mean, that's good.

That's the type of stuff I hear Dr.

Mike talking about all the time in his videos

when he's talking with his patients...

Drastic lifestyle changes aren't a great idea,

but you gotta focus on what you can actually keep up.

It's good!...

Uh, I also have a human... personal trainer... who is programming my workouts every

day,

all year round.

Like, he knows my goals, he knows the schedule, the teams I play for,

and when I'm able to hit certain lifts

and when I'm feeling good versus bad,

and can adjust programming accordingly.

If I have a lingering injury, we can work around that,

but not everyone has access to that.

So the idea... is you can have this AI trainer

and just tell it everything about you...

and it can replicate

that same experience and be just

as personalized and responsive.

Now the Whoop feature set I would say... is a bit... more advanced

and comprehensive.

For example, here's the display on the phone app during a workout from Google

and from Whoop.

Like, the Fitbit UI is cleaner and prettier, no question.

But Whoop is clustering way more information in here.

The live graph of my heart rate—some of

that stuff you might find useful.

Whoop also has a daily stress monitor, obviously a recovery score...

There's a built-in journal

so you can identify patterns

that might be leading to certain metric changes.

There's even an advanced labs feature where you can literally upload lab blood test

results and explore your different biomarkers

and how they change over time...

It's a lot!

And yes, there's also an AI assistant

that you can talk to about your workouts

and about your metrics.

It's not as prominent, but it is just kind of lurking,

waiting all the time to help you out.

It's just a bunch more ways of interpreting the data coming off of the

tracker...

So if the Apple Watch is like beginner mode of just getting started,

it feels like the Fitbit is kind of like medium proficiency.

And then it does feel like the Whoop is made for someone more advanced.

It's like the more you use it,

the more you know what you're looking for,

the more you can get out of it.

But none of this matters if it's not accurate, right?

One thing that's important to note about these fitness trackers is they have a

bit of a calibration period

when you first get them.

So the Apple Watch, which is not really personalized to you, doesn't have one.

It just sort of—you set it up,

you set your rings and you just start going and it does its best.

The Fitbit Air has basically a seven-day period where you wear it every day

and then by the end of

that week,

it knows you and then it can do everything.

The Whoop is even a little bit more complicated.

It takes different amounts of time to calibrate different features. 4 days for your

personalized recovery score,

7 days for health monitor, 21 days for health span,

and a whole 30 days until it's fully calibrated for you.

But I did immediately start wearing all three of these at the same time

as I go through my normal week of practices,

workouts, recoveries, and sleeps, just to see if the numbers were all the same.

And honestly, at the end of the day,

we know that these aren't like incredibly accurate, but it's more just about like,

as long as they're consistent, right?

Like if it's a little high

and then a little low

and then a little high again,

that's not very useful.

But if it's a little bit high every single time, then okay,

I can calibrate myself to that, and that's useful.

So here's a zone 2 steady-state indoor bike workout from the Apple Watch Series

11,

the Whoop 5.0 and the Fitbit Air.

The watch doesn't have any sort of scoring system like the other two.

It's just counting calories.

But then they are all reading heart rates the entire time.

Now here's the data from a HIIT workout.

Tempo runs again from the Apple Watch, then from the Whoop,

and finally from the Fitbit Air.

Nearly a 45% difference here in calories burned between the Whoop

and the other two,

which is crazy.

And then here is a four-hour Ultimate Frisbee practice

that I actually left up to automatic tracking for the Fitbit since I thought

it'd be pretty obvious.

But since it was still during the calibration period,

it actually accidentally split it into two separate workouts.

Maybe because my heart rate was dropping in the middle with some rest

that we took.

So I combined the numbers and these are what those numbers are.

Hilarious calorie difference between the watch and the Fitbit.

And so just in these workout summary pages,

you can see the Apple Watch is the super simplistic version of this, right?

It even includes miles because it has GPS where the fitness trackers don't.

But that's not really necessary for most of my workouts.

But yeah, I like how the Fitbit puts the summary from the AI right

at the top instead of having to click into it like the Whoop.

And then in these more heart rate-sensitive workouts, like the HIIT workout,

you get a very clear idea of what your heart rate was and when.

Honestly, the Fitbit is my favorite workout summary page among the three of these.

It's excellent.

So overall, basically two things became clear with my little experiment here.

One is that the Apple Watch clearly overcounts calories burned every time.

That's just the way it is.

But then two is

that the Fitbit Air is pretty in line with the Whoop

as far as heart rate numbers across the board,

and it's just a little bit higher normally in total calories burned.

The real difference is just in how they choose to summarize

and present that data for you.

So like every Whoop user is used to looking at strain and recovery percentage.

The Fitbit doesn't have that.

Instead, it has cardio load.

That's just like the headline number.

So Whoop's strain is on a scale from 0 to 21,

and it's personalized based on your history and your health.

Fitbit's cardio load, it doesn't really seem to have a cap,

but it's basically measuring how elevated your heart rate gets from normal

and for how long.

So once the AI coach like gets to know you well enough,

it knows what that normal is.

And then it can set a goal for cardio load for each week.

It's funny, the first week it didn't really know me very well,

so it assigned the Frisbee practice

as like a 327 cardio load

when my goal for the whole week was 150,

but it figured itself out later.

But yeah, once you're calibrated, just like Whoop strain,

that is the glanceable number

that you can check out just to generally see how much work you're doing.

So neither of these fitness trackers has a clock

or a screen or any way of showing you notifications,

but they both do have a haptic motor for an alarm clock.

So you can set an alarm

and this will buzz you on the wrist just by tapping you lightly.

The Whoop's is a little more rattly

and the Fitbit's feels a little more clean.

Both can be dismissed by just double tapping.

The more you know.

The Whoop does also have a bit of a longer battery life.

So the Fitbit Air is rated for seven days.

With my usage, I feel like it's closer to five to six days.

The Whoop is closer to seven

or eight days. but

when it comes to charging them...

So the Fitbit comes with this little 3-foot cable,

USB-C on one side and little magnetic pins on the other.

So you gotta take it off your wrist and you pop it on.

And this will charge pretty fast, like 0 to 100 in 90 minutes.

But also 5 minutes of charge will get you about a day of use.

If you just, you got a workout to go do

or you're about to go somewhere,

you can just plug it in for five minutes.

The Whoop, on the other hand, has this little puck here.

Turns out Whoop people are

so obsessed with never taking this off

and having 24/7 data

that the idea of missing 2 hours of it just to charge is unacceptable.

So you get this little puck, you charge this with USB Type-C,

and then you slide this puck on the rails onto the Whoop,

and then it'll inductively charge the Whoop while you're wearing them both.

So now you've got this little wireless charger heating up on your wrist.

It's much slower.

But you don't have to take the Whoop off.

I just will.

I'll just keep charging them while I'm in the shower.

I don't wear them in the shower.

Why do you have to-- Anyway. both Whoop

and Fitbit Air are multi-platform compatible,

so that's nice.

You can pair them to an Android phone or an iPhone, whichever you have.

Whoop also happens to have an iPad app, though, which Google Health does not.

It's not a very good app, but it's better than no app at all.

And then if you have other trackers, like an Eight Sleep or a Garmin,

for example, Fitbit will actually defer to those more specialized fitness trackers for those

certain activities for contributing to Google Health.

So your sleep, if you have an Eight Sleep,

will take from the Eight Sleep instead of the Fitbit.

And if you go for a run with the Garmin

and it has GPS

and all these better metrics,

it will take that instead of whatever would come from the Fitbit.

And then you can always view sources for whatever data you're looking at

when you're in the Google Health app,

which is nice.

It's the little things.

Also, the Fitbit can read from Apple Health right now,

but it cannot write to Apple Health yet.

Allegedly, that's coming with a software update.

Allegedly.

Wearing... all three of these has taught me

that there is room for all three of them in the fitness world...

There's like a slider for beginner, medium, advanced.

The Apple Watch sort of accidentally became a fitness device after its primary task

of showing you the time

and the notifications from your phone.

Wear it all day, close your rings, get some steps in... the end.

Super simple.

The Whoop is the super dense...

"I really care" version for people who are tracking every little thing

and trying to optimize their recovery.

And a lot of them, I would guess,

are probably training for something they want to maximize their performance in.

All bundled into a borderline predatory subscription model that we all universally hate.

So then here comes a Fitbit Air... aimed directly at the Whoop.

It's the same screenless form factor

and it does 90% of what the Whoop does without any subscription.

And you actually own the thing.

So the natural reaction is that this does feel like a Whoop killer.

But I'll add some nuance to it...

This is a Whoop killer for people who just want more of the basics

of health:

tracking fitness, tracking... your heart rate, your sleep, tracking your step counter, your calories,

your workouts, all that stuff, because that's all included.

You get that when you buy the thing and you own it.

But with the subscription, it is a Whoop... alternative from Google,

and we know Google.

This is a company

that famously wants all of your data

because they're literally a data

and ads company... and the more they know about people,

the more money they can make.

So of course it's Google that's willing to buy Fitbit

and then sell a subsidized fitness tracker to get it in

as many people's hands

as possible... to get

as much data from those people

as they possibly can.

It's just something to keep in mind because it's Google.

So I think people getting the most out of Whoop

and all of its personalization... are going to continue using Whoop.

And also for people who are just getting started,

I think you can just use something that's cheap.

That's why you should probably just go with the one built into your smartwatch.

It's easy.

And then for everyone else, there's Fitbit.

Me personally, I...

You know, I've gone through this experiment.

I've worn them all.

I haven't actually really made up my mind yet on

which one I want to be.

I kind of...

I want having notifications on my wrist, but I also... want the extra data.

So we'll see.

Get subscribed to see which one stays on my wrist longer in future videos.

And that's...

That's how you know which one I pick.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys... the next one...

Peace.