Shake your wrist to influence HR

Go to the HR tab, shake your wrist gently that you wear the Whoop 5/MG on. It will rise 6 to 8 beats but you know your HR hasn’t changed. I checked against my Garmin watch and my HR stayed the same whilst whoop raised significantly. This explains the strange fluctuations I see on my bike rides. Seems shaking or vibration could affect the accuracy of Whoop 5/MG. I often shake my wrist during a ride and I am sure there is a lot of vibration :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

2 Likes

I have found that unless my 5.0 (and previously 4.0 for that matter) was tightly fitted to my bicep via the bicep band it would error in HR readings. When it’s tight (like indentation in my skin tight) it seems to be consistent with my Garmin HR Chest strap.

2 Likes

Understand that Bicep might be better but the Whoop MG is designed for the Wrist for ECG and Blood Pressure. The point really is if shaking or vibrations are causing small changes to HR what are they doing to sleep, HRV, RHR etc.

It’s a bit concerning

2 Likes

I have the 5.0 Peak subscription as the MG features are not yet regulatory approved in Australia so thankfully can use the 5.0 on my wrist or bicep. Thanks for explaining the MG can only be worn on the wrist. Another reason not to get one!

This has been a constant issue with Whoop straps going back to the 2.0 when I first got one. A lot of wrist movement causes the HR to artificially increase on Whoop’s readings.

Whoop 5.0 and MG uses a super-sensitive optical sensor (sampling at around 26 Hz), which is great for sleep and HRV but during wrist-heavy movement (like brushing teeth, or mashing potatoes), the sensor can misread motion as heartbeats, causing artificially high HR spikes.

Other devices like Apple Watch or Garmin use more conservative filtering or slower sampling, so they’re less likely to overreact to movement. Chest straps avoid this entirely since they track electrical signals and not light.

The Whoop MG has actually done a better job at ignoring these artifacts so those artificial spikes have been greatly reduced.

2 Likes

I can’t speak for previous versions but personally not sure Whoop MG is handling spikes well. If I wash my bike whilst wearing my Whoop my HR will get over 170bpm. I am 64 and lucky if I can get over 150 with my Garmin chest strap on hard paced bike rides.

2 Likes

I‘m already really so tired to read and hear that Whoop‘s HR readings and calories calculations are sh*tty and Whoop is nothing saying and doing about that. I‘m about to throw away that device into the trash. Its giving me more bad than good feelings.

2 Likes

Its always the same on wrist, same sensors as 4.0 and too few to accommodate 360 wrist movement, just look at their sensors (helios band, whoop, garmin) and you see whoop only has a vertical sensor placement and sadly they didnt change it to add horizontal ones for whoop 5

That’s why bicep works wellsince you mostly move forward and not up/down

Wish whoop 5 was as accurate as helios because its really accurate on wrist even better than garmin sometimes

1 Like

Will you keep Helios strap with you? I had one for few days to test. It was ok, but I had the feeling my old Venu 3 worked a bit better for weight lifting than the Helios strap. But Helio strap was more comfortable than Venu 3, even 5.0, perhaps of weight. I think, i will get a Helio strap.

If i didnt had a epix gen 2 and still the whoop MG subscription i would definitely keep the helios

but its too many bands and wanted just to check how good it is on release and later how will improve because i also want to test and compare the polar later on September to see how it compares too for a first released device like helios did

Also in my case will return it cause i have low rest bpm of 38 and their app cut all values during sleep below 40 and end up woth 43 avg since ignore all the lower values on that calculation…
reported it but guess it will take time for them to fix, same thing happened with ultrahuman and took months to solve =)

2 Likes

22.06 is when I started to notice issues :slight_smile: