Fitbit Air vs WHOOP 5.0: el “WHOOP killer” de 100 dòlars té sentit?

Alright, so, whoop is dominant as a fitness tracker in the world of professional and enthusiathathletes 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 good? Should I- 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. If it did 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 hoop. It's $100 a year. So almost everyone asking me about this basically just wants to know, is it as good as a hoop but cheaper? Because if so, then I might as well switch. So, until 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 got to 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 Woop. Not just with the matching form factor, which I'll get to in a second, but with the pricing model. So like I said, the Woop 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.

that $99 fit bit 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 here. And this all comes up from us right now as it launches for like three, three 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 fit bit 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 loop. 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 hoop. And because it's a narrow oval, it's a little more of a skewer, too. It has a thinner band on your wrist. I also like that it's velcro that you can easily adjust versus the hoop 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 as band with a little pressure so you can switch bands super easily, which I really like. I will say that since the hoop has existed for many more years than this air, It has the advantage of a ton more accessories for it. So there's the wristband. There's also a biceps strap and a chest strap. Hell, they sell a hoop branded clothing where you can slip in the sensor and it still captures data as you're wearing it. There's literally a hoop underwear. So these wristbands are the only accessories for the Fitbit Air right now, which for me is fine. But I would also be shocked if in like two weeks or like right after I published this video, there's a bunch of accessories on Amazon or T-Move 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 there'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 like active band is probably more ideal for a lot of sweat. If the whole point of these screenless finest 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 unclubbed and pro teams. And so that involves a lot of practices and games, but 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 seeing 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 fit bit 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 is just as much an exercise and 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 a 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. Jurassic lifestyle changes aren't a great idea, but you gotta focus on what you can actually keep up. It's good. 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 Woop. Like the Fitbit UI is cleaner and prettier. No question. But Woop is clustering way more information in here. The live graph of my heart rate. Some of that stuff you might find useful. Woop also has a daily stress monitor. Obviously, you're recovery score. There's a built-in journal so you can identify patterns that might be leading with certain metric changes. There's even an advanced lab 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, feels like the Fitbit is kind of like medium proficiency, and then it does feel like the loop 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 doesn't's 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 Woop is even a little bit more complicated. It takes different amounts of time to calibrate different features. Four days for your personalized recovery score, seven 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 sleep's 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 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 two steady state indoor bike workout from the Apple Watch series 11, the WOOP 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're all reading heart rates the entire time. Now here's the data from a hit workout, tempo runs. Again, from the Apple Watch and from the WOOP and finally from the Fitbit Air. Nearly a 45% difference here in calories burned between the hoop and the other two, which is crazy. And then here is a four hour ultimate frisbee practice that 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 of the rest that we took. So I combine the numbers and these are what those numbers are. Holarious calorie difference between the watch.

and the Fitbit. And so just in these workouts 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 hoop. And then in these more heart rate sensitive workouts like the hit 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 over counts 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 Woop 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 WooBuser 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, WooBus strain is on a scale from zero 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 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 been 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 figured itself out later. But yeah, once you're calibrated, just like woops, strain,

That is the glancable 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 wop says a little more rattly and the FitBits feels a little more clean. Both can be dismissed by just double tapping. The more you know the hoop 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 hoop is closer to seven or eight days But when it comes to charging them So the Fitbit comes with this little three-foot cable USB-C on one side and little magnetic pins on the other So you got to take it off your wrist and you pop it on and this will charge Pretty fast, like zero to 190 minutes, but also five minutes of charge will get you about a day of use if you just, you gotta work out to go do or you're about to go somewhere, you can just plug it in for five minutes. The hoop on the other hand has this little puck here. Turns out, hoop people are so obsessed with never taking this off and having 24, seven data that the idea of missing two 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 hoop and then it'll inductively charge the hoop 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 hoop 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 hoop and fit bit air are a 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 they're 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 media advanced. The Apple Watch sorta accidentally became a fitness device after its primary task of showing you the time and the notification is from your phone. Where it all day, close your rings, get some steps in the end. Super simple. The woop 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 womb. It's the same screenless form factor. It does 90% of what the womb does without any subscription. And you actually own the thing. So the natural reaction is that this does feel like a hoop killer. But I'll add some nuance to it. This is a hoop killer.

for people who just want more of the basics of health tracking, fitness tracking, your heart rate, your sleep tracking, your step count, 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 fit bit 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'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. I get subscribed to see which one stays on my wrist longer in future videos and that's how you know which one I pick. Thanks for watching. Get your guys the next one. Peace.