Great points, especially on the discretion. I wore one for a bit over a year, and have only just recently tried going without it.
Its best at sleep tracking simply because its really comfortable, I’m running an Apple Watch now and sleeping with it is just that bit less comfortable that half the time I leave it off.
Found the whoop similar in its silliness, but it was insanely accurate sometimes on upcoming illness, or if I’d had even one beer at dinner it really impacted it, but they were more interesting touchpoint than anything immediately actionable.
Do you find its actually had an impact on your strain or exercise in general (motivated or assisted)? I found it never swayed me one way or another.
When I was an Apple Watch wearer I could never really find a sleeping app I really liked. I think that’s the problem with Apple Watch in general, yeah it’s great there are all these apps, but often times it is difficult to find a good one. On top of that you start running into subscriptions. Garmin is getting better at sleep, but is still not great. Whoop is really good at it though. I am tempted to try Oura, since it’s supposedly really good at sleep, but an upfront cost and a subscription is scaring me away.
I have found the Whoops suggestions pretty much worthless for training. I just do what I feel up to. I think it puts far too much importance into HRV. I do think HRV is great though, just not for training readiness. As you said, you can definitely see an impact from illness and alcohol. There have been several times where I have work up and just not felt great, look at the Whoop app and my HRV cratered overnight. But Garmin measure it’s too…
I just returned the AWU2 after 10-ish days. I was quite enjoying it but having to add extra apps to get the data I want wasn’t worth the subscription prices (Athlytic etc). And I found I wasn’t using the notifications and other features unique to the watch.
So, back to the Garmin 955 Solar. The interface isn’t as intuitive but I prefer the all-in-one data capture analysis.