I got early access to the Whoopstrap MG. And today I'll be showing you my first testing results. We'll test the heart rate tracking performance, the sleep stage tracking, and we'll be looking at a bunch of other functionalities. Now, this is an initial test, and my full review is to come, but let's quickly move to my workbench right there, and look at some of the added features that are now part of the Woopstrap MG because some of them just got activated on my account, and I want to take a look at how they work. And actually, the reason I'm not going to look at the sleep stage tracking our heart rate performance first is because my computer is still churning away and doing the calculations we need to actually finish those tests. So, that's going to take another hour or so to finish all the calculations. We'll be able to look at all the new functionalities first and then we'll get to my test results. We're going to use this top down view right here to look at the new functionalities of the Whoopstrap. But just for those of you who aren't aware, there are now three different subscriptions with the Whoopstrap. So, there's the Whoopstrap 5.0, 0 which comes with the one or peak subscriptions. And then there's the Whoopstrap MG or medical grade which is this one right here that I have which comes with the life subscription which is the most expensive and the most extensive. It might be a bit too extensive for some of you. But I did want to show all the functionalities and all the test results so you can judge if you need these. I put my Whoop Strap back on and I'm actually wearing it on my left wrist which is also where they did all the testing with. So let's take a look. Now you're mostly familiar with this type of overview that the app did change recently. So we have my sleep, the exercises I did today, but what I'm particularly interested in is the things that were added. So for instance, my health span. So I actually aged a bit according to the Whoop strap. So my Whoop age is 26.3, making me 10.4 years younger than I actually am and have a slightly increased pace of aging. So your pace of aging, you want to get below one. Basically, this is sort of an indicator of how fast Whoop thinks you're aging biologically according to their estimates. So they give you the different factors that contribute to this. So your sleep consistency, hours of sleep, how in different heart rate zones, your fitness level, and one reason I have a relatively low Whoop age is because my V2 max is quite high. So your V2 max is sort of a fitness estimate. It basically tells me how efficiently or how much oxygen you can consume during exercise. And here you can also see my age trend. So of course my chronological age slowly increases, which is this thing on the top right here. But then in addition, this green line right here is my Whoop age. This has actually been slowly increasing over time and I should try to decrease this even further though it is already quite low. And then my pace of aging increased a bit and is now decreasing again. So I was actually traveling a lot in kind of a stressful period right here which sort of increased my pace of aging and we want to decrease that more. So here I can see what I need to work on. So my resting heart rate is quite good. My lean body mass I actually need to put in right here. But for instance, my steps could be higher. My strength activity was good. Time and heart rate zones could be improved. So this is what the fitness age is. So the health span functionality of the Whoop strap. So here we have that in a very small overview. But then there's two other things I want to look at. My blood pressure insights and my heart screener. And I haven't actually looked at these yet. So let's take a look at those together. So this is still in beta, the blood pressure insight. So let's get started. So you only get this with Whoop live. And it gives me early access to these kind of things. So what is blood pressure? Most of us will probably know what blood pressure is and why it matters. So let's see how does it work. So normally a blood pressure monitor is actually a cuff that inflates and can measure the actual pressure and the Whoop strap has to sort of infer this from other measurements. I tried to ask the people at Whoop how this is done. They couldn't give me the details because it's proprietary. But let's set it up. So first it has some questions for me. I've not been diagnosed with high blood pressure. I'm not taking medication. I haven't been pregnant. So none of the above. And I think I mostly have normal blood pressure. Though in my family there's actually quite a lot of high blood pressure. And I'm also trending towards somewhat higher blood pressures at least for somebody with my fitness level. And this is all fine. So now I need to get one of my cuffs and actually take a blood pressure measurement. So you need to do a single calibration. I think you need to take three measurements initially and after that you get daily updates of your blood pressure. So I'm actually going to set a timer for 5 minutes and sit quietly. I haven't had any caffeine recently and I haven't eaten in at least an hour or two. No alcohol. I'm not sick. I emptied my bladder recently. I'm going to sit and I put my arm at heart level. That's all fine. I'm going to take 5 minutes now, stop this video, set a timer, and then we'll get started. So, 5 minutes are up. I don't want to speak too much or too loud to mess up the measurements. So, I'll mostly be quiet now. And I have my blood pressure monitor right here as well. All right, so the three measurements were done and they varied actually a little bit. I can actually feel a bit nervous during these things, but this is still relatively good for me. I tend to have somewhat higher side blood pressures, but let's take a look what happens now. Okay, so today's reading is 122 over 73, which I think is sort of the average of all the measurements we had so far. So this is sort of set up I hope to get in the green at some point. But of course this is also somewhat familiar. So I cannot change too much about it. I can just try to live a healthy life. But now every day I should get a measurement by the whoop strap. And I'll actually check this by each morning also taking some measurements with my cuff and seeing if the cuff and the whoop strap match. But this is the kind of feature you will get from the whoop strap. Next let's take a look at also the heart screener. So heart screener has to do with the ECG functionality. So measuring your heart rate with ECG and basically it can detect AIB which is sort of a problem with the way your heart beats. It's a very specific kind and more smart watches can do this. So this is a more common feature of many smart watches and smart devices. So let's take a look and see if the Whoopstrap MG actually detects for me that I have a or not. As far as I know and all the tests I've done, I don't have AIB. I recently got a whole checkup and nothing was found. So let's see. So you actually need to be 22 years or older. You cannot have a pacemaker, ICD or other implanted electronic device. And you cannot already be aware you have Aphib. What they actually explained to us is that if you know you have API, you will get continuous warnings and you already know you have it. So it doesn't make sense to set this up. This is more to discover it when you don't know you have it. So ECG basically measures the electrical activity of your heart. And the way you do this is by completing a circuit. In this case, one part of the circuit is you touching this electrode with your finger. Then on the bottom of the device is another electrode and then the circuit is completed by going through your arm through your heart through the other arm and back to the device. So in this way it can actually measure the electrical activity of your heart. So like I mentioned before, you actually touch this side here. So this electrode right here and the other one is on the bottom. And here you can actually see the completed circuit. So it goes from the watch through your heart through the other arm and back. And the circuit is completed. So it can attack normal sinus rhythm, AIB, low and high heart rate. At night, I sometimes actually have a heart rate under 40 BPM. So this doesn't mean everything, but maybe when you're sitting down and awake, you don't expect a heart rate below 51 BBM. I don't know why they set this limit right here. And inconclusive. So I guess if your heart rate is below 51, it won't work. Let's see. So this is just one way to pre-diagnose you and then you go to the doctor to actually get a diagnosis because this isn't an actual diagnosis you get. And they actually state this here. It's not a medical diagnosis. It's sort of an indicator that you might want to get checked out. So, let's take my first ECG. I'm wearing it on my left wrist. So, you cannot actually use it when you wear it on your biceps. It needs to be on one of your wrist. I prefer wearing my Whoop Strap longterm on my biceps. I find it more comfortable. And I also need my wrist free for, for instance, a smartwatch. But let's actually start right now. Let's take a reading. According to this estimation, I don't have AIB. I didn't have high or low heart rate and I had a normal sinus rhythm. So, that's good. So, this is a start. And there's supposed to be an ECG report. We'll check that out in a second. Apparently, it needs to send some data into the cloud and get back with some calculations. So, here's the actual sharable ECG report that you can actually share with your doctor, apparently. So right here you can see it selected a segment with clean signal to send to the doctor. And if I say share my ECG report, you get this nice overview. Let's actually send the ECG report to myself on WhatsApp to see what it looks like. So here we have that ECG report. It basically says normal sinus rhythm and then some of the signals that were detected. So this you could directly send to your doctor I guess if you wanted to. I wouldn't do this kind of test too often. At some point, you know you have a normal rhythm. Unless you feel at some point something is wrong. Then in that moment, you can test yourself as well. But let's now take a look at the thing most of you have probably been waiting for. How good is the sleep stage tracking of the new Whoop Strap? So, how good can it check if you're in RAM sleep, deep sleep, or light sleep? And we're going to test that by comparing it against an EEG device, which actually measured my brain waves during the night. I only have two nights of data, so it's very preliminary, but I do want to share the results. And in addition, we're going to check how good it is at tracking my heart rate during activities. So today, for instance, I went for a run and did some weightlifting. And I also did some indoor cycling. So let's take a look. My computer right here is actually still quite busy with all the calculations for the heart rate tracking. So we're going to start with the sleep stage tracking performance. Now, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Rob and I'm a post-doal scientist specializing in biological data analysis. Also, if you want to support the channel and you are anyway going to buy a Whoop strap, if you use my affiliate link down below or up here, you get the best discount possible and at the same time support the channel. That would really be appreciated, but only do it if you can afford it and if you want to support the channel. But let's now take a look at the sleep stage tracking test results. As I mentioned before, we'll use an EEG device called the Zmax as a reference, which can actually measure my brain waves, and I wore that during two nights at the same time that I was also wearing the Whoopstrap MG. So on top we have the sleep stages as measured by the EEG device and on the bottom the sleep stages as measured by the Whoopstrap with the different sleep stages along the vertical axis and the clock time along the horizontal axis. Let's first take a look at deep sleep. So here we have deep sleep for the first night as measured by the EEG device marked in blue purple. And as you can see this mostly matches with the whoopstrap's deep sleep though the whoop strap detected some extra deep sleep. And for this second night we more or less see the same thing. Most of the deep sleep agrees between the Zmax and the Whoop strap. But the Whoop strap detected a bit of extra deep sleep. So also here later in the night. But what about the RAM sleep which is marked in red for both nights. But let's now mark it fully in red for the EG device. And that is done right here. So this is the first night. And we see again mostly a good match between the RAM sleep detected by the EG device and the Whoop strap. Though it is far from perfect. Some extra RAM sleep was detected here in the beginning of the night. And I know that typically in my first sleep cycle, I have no or very little RAM sleep. This is just what I typically have. And the Whoopstrap did detect some RAM sleep here at the end of my cycle. So it sort of expected that and found it even though it probably wasn't really there. This second one was actually quite correctly detected. The third one more or less. But then here for this fourth and fifth segment, a lot of extra RAM sleep was also detected by the Whoopstrap. So again, a bit more RAM sleep than expected. Similar to what we saw for deep sleep. And for this second night, we see more or less the same thing. The position of the RAM sleep mostly matches, but again, some extra RAM sleep was detected, especially here earlier in the night. This is not bad, but also not amazing. But let's take these qualitative agreements, so sort of visual agreements, and translate them into percentages. So, how well does the Whoopstrap MG actually agree with the Zmax if we put it into percentage agreement? And you can see that in this overview right here. Now, this is not as visually appealing as my normal overviews, which I make much nicer in Illustrator. But this is the raw result as I get it from my code and I just wanted to get you the results quickly and I don't have a lot of time today. So, I'll just use this Excel sheet for now. So, on top we have the sleep stages as measured by the Zmax and on the left the sleep stages as measured by the Whoopstrap. And each column here sums to 100%. Meaning that we can see what percentage of each of the sleep stages according to the Zmax was detected as a sleep stage by the Whoopstrap MG. And if they perfectly agree, all values along this diagonal should be 100%. And first of all, we see that about 90% of what was deep sleep according to the Zmax was also measured as deep sleep by the whoop strap. But as we saw, a lot of extra deep sleep is detected. And that's what we can see in this column right here. So the light sleep agreement is sort of the worst and that is because a lot of what was light sleep according to the reference device was detected as either deep sleep or REM sleep by the whoop strap. So light sleep agreement is the worst out of these three sleep stages at about 56%. Then again RAM sleep agreement is again pretty good at about 79% and most of it was confused with light sleep instead. So basically most of what the EEG device said was RAM sleep or deep sleep was correctly detected by the whoopstrap but a lot of extra deep sleep and RAM sleep was also detected. Now as always we won't be focusing on awake time because the Zmax detect a lot of awake moments that weren't really awake moments. So this is the sleep stage tracking. But as I can see the heart rate tracking is almost done calculating. So let's move to that. Okay, I finally have the heart rate results. I made a small mistake which cost a lot of time. But here we can see the results for spinning so indoor cycling for the first session that I did. And as a reference I used the Polar H10 ECG chest strap which is plotted here in blue green and the Whoopstrap MG is plotted in red. So I have the clock time along the horizontal axis and my heart rate along the vertical axis. And we see a nice overlap between the Whoopstrap MG and the Polar H10. It's not perfect. So right here we have a moment where the Whoopstrap MG had a delay in picking up that increase in my heart rate. And right here detected a slightly too high heart rate, but otherwise for this first session, it looks really good. Let's now take a look at the second session that I did. This looks more or less the same. though. Here we have two delays in picking up on an increase in heart rate. But overall for indoor cycling, this is definitely good enough for me. But let's now take a look at a harder exercise, running. And here we have the results for the one running session that I did outdoors. And as you can see, this is far from perfect. Near the end, so sort of the last four fifths of the session was almost perfect. So it detected my heart rate accurately. But in the beginning here, it detected a too high heart rate. So maybe it detected my cadence instead of my heart rate. So the frequency at which I was running, but I'm not sure what exactly was going on here, but this definitely isn't perfect. Unfortunately, I only did one running session, so I cannot tell you much more than this. These are really the initial results. A much more extensive review will come in a week or so. But before doing that, I do want to look at the next exercise type, which is weightlifting. And here we have the results for weightlifting, the session that I just did today. And each time I did a set of exercises, my heart rate peaked. As you can see based on the reference in blue green and the Whoop strap definitely wasn't able to pick up on this. So for weightlifting the Whoopstrap MG as worn on the wrist for me didn't do good enough. So each time I do a set of exercises there's a lot of tension on my arms and because of that tension the Whoopstrap MG isn't able to pick up on my heart rate. This is true for basically all devices out there. I haven't found a device that tracks my heart rate accurately at all times for weightlifting unless you're doing legs of course. So, if you want to track your heart during weightlifting, I recommend an ECG device. Now, before closing this section off, let's take a look at the correlation values for these tests that I did. And here's that overview for indoor cycling. So, we plot the heart rate according to the chest strap along the horizontal axis versus my heart rate according to the Whoopstrap MG along the vertical axis. And if they perfectly agree, the point should be very close or on the blue line. And as you can see, for indoor cycling, in most cases, the points are on or close to the blue line. So that's really good. There's a few points here below the blue line. So those were the moments where it had a delay in picking up on that increase in heart rate. But otherwise at 0.93 the correlation is good enough and I would say for indoor cycling I can mostly trust the whoop strap. However, as we saw before for running there was a small issue. So here there are some points above the blue line for running and that was this moment where I detected a two high heart rate. So we had it in the beginning. Later on again it was really good. But this here is that moment at the beginning of the session where I detected a two high heart rate. Also meaning that the correlation is quite a bit lower now at 0.86. And as you might expect for weightlifting, the results just aren't good enough. The correlation is now 0.76. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with correlation, the best correlation value is one. And you want that value to be at least above 0.9. And that definitely isn't the case for weightlifting. And you can see that in the higher heart rate range right here, it always detected the two low heart rate, which are those moments where I did the set of exercises and had an increase and a peak in heart rate, but also an increase and a peak in the tension on my arm. So, those are the results for weightlifting. Let's now draw our conclusions. So, we've done a bunch of initial testing and what's my conclusion? Well, I have to say I don't think there are major changes in the performance of the sleep stage tracking or the heart rate tracking moving from the Whoopstrap 4.0 to the Whoopstrap MG. I have to do much more testing, but my initial feeling is you get about the same performance. I think where the Whoopstrap MG sets itself apart from the Whoopstrap 4.0 is first of all battery life. That's just a lot better. So that's actually quite important to me, the battery life. I had some issues with the Whoopstrap 4.0. I just like it to be a bit longer in terms of battery life, and that's now definitely the case. I'm still at 85% battery after a few days, so that's pretty good. Now, the main thing that the Whoopstrap MG does better than the Whoopstrap 4.0 is just having more functionalities and better software. So there's just more metrics that you can use and actually actively use to improve things at least as Whoop defines them. I still have to dig into it a bit deeper if they make any sense. There's now blood pressure, ECG, a lot more functionalities. Actually described them in my recent video on the Whoop strap and you can find that up here. So in the end I'm just really curious if I do more testing on these new features if they are valuable and also if you guys find them valuable. Do you have the Whoop strap? And are you planning on using all these functionalities to actually more actively try to improve your life based on all the information that the Whoopstrap provides? Do you think it's valuable for you or for others? Let us know in the comments below. Now again, if you're planning on buying the Whoopstrap and you want the best discount possible and support the channel, use my affiliate link up here or down here. And given that you watch this whole video on the Whoopstrap, I think you will like this video describing all the features of the Whoopstrap 5.0 O and Whoop strap MG and this video on the new Whoopstrap sleep stage tracking algorithm.