which one is better the Garmin or the whoop for marathon training so my name is Caroline I run 855 plus miles every single week and in this video I'm going to share with you my honest opinion about which one is better the Garin or the whoop so I always get this question as I am a coach and the first thing I want to say is that the Garin and the whoop are two completely different devices so the Garmin is a smartwatch meaning it is perfect to track your workouts it it's perfect to create specific workouts that you'll do so it'll tell you you're running 1 kilometer you have a minute break and you're doing that 10 times you don't even need to bring your phone because it's literally just showing you exactly that workout but that you cannot do with the whoop the woop does not even have a screen so the whoop is more a fitness tracker and what I specifically use the whoop for is my recovery if you take away one thing from this video it is that the Garmin the Smartwatch is what you need for your training and the whoop is what you want for the recovery so if you can only pick one for marathon training there is no doubt that the Garmin is what you need to choose because the whoop is really I would say a nice to have not a neat to have so I use the Garmin like I said to track my workouts so not only to actually calculate how many kilometers I run and at what pace and what my heart rate is but specifically to create specific workouts to make sure that I'm executing those workouts exactly how I need to and then I also use the Garmin to track my heart rate and as a coach and as a runner I train on heart rate meaning I have very specific heart rates that I'm targeting so I need a device that's very accurate with heart rate so I use the Garmin and a heart rate strap and that's what gives me the most accurate heart rate data so I have the Garmin 4Runner 245 with music I know it's an old model but honestly it works it does everything that I needed to do I love that it has a music feature so when I'm racing and I'm allowed to have music I'll just import my favorite playlist and I don't even need to bring my phone so that's incredible I've had the whoop for about a year and I've had my Garin for 5 years and I got the whooop because I wanted to track my sleep better and it's been really fascinating to see how the sleep is different on the Garment and the whoop so I'd say on average I've noticed that the whoop says that I sleep an hour shorter than the Garin so the Garin is a lot more polite with my sleep sleep which I love so honestly it's a little bit scary when you first get the whoop my coaching clients have told me this too that the whoop is just really strict tells you that you're not sleeping as much it often tells you that your recovery score isn't as good as what's referred to as body battery on the Garmin on the whoop I pay attention to my recovery score that use as a combination of the heart rate variability and your resting heart rate as well as The Strain from your workouts and your sleep and in general I have found that the recovery score is pretty correlated to how I feel so I think that just how you feel waking up is also very good indication of how recovered you are so don't be afraid to just go off how you feel I do think it's really cool to look at the resting heart rate because I have for sure noticed that my resting heart rate is a good indicator of where my fitness is at after a hard Training Day my resting heart rate will often be higher after recovery week or a taper period then I'll notice that my resting heart rate is lower and I'm my recovery score is also higher and I am in Peak Fitness if I had to give whoop an edge it is the design and the material so I love how just like Sleek it looks is that a word okay I love how Sleek it looks I feel like it fits with anything especially this black band and I can wear it with a regular watch and I've just noticed in general it's a lot easier for me to wear this 247 versus my Garmin I very easily will just kind of want to take off so especially for a fitness tracker that's for Recovery you do want to wear it 24/7 to get all that accurate data so that's when I would recommend the whoop thank you so much for watching so if you want to learn more about what I'm doing to run my fastest and hopefully get to the 2028 Olympics check out my comeback series And subscribe to this channel I also have a series called my story where I talk about how I won my first marathon I improve with 19 minutes for my second marathon where I ran a 246 minute marathon and I also just made a video about the HRM strap so if you want to check out that video to learn all about if you really need it [Music] oh