Whoop chest Strap – Valuable ecosystem boost or would it be a commercial distraction?

Whoop chest Strap – Valuable ecosystem boost or commercial distraction?

More: Detailed Whoop Review

Whoop has prospered as a sporting and fitness platform that uniquely guides its customers towards better fitness and health outcomes through novel approaches using HRV, AI Coaching and other personal biometrics, all gathered from a good-looking band that doubles as a convenient way to wear and collect the data.

However, nothing is perfect, and times change.

Every brand that uses an optical sensor on the wrist to gather sports-grade information will never get always-good data. It’s just not possible with today’s tech, although many of us get lucky occasionally, and some of us get lucky more often.

Then there are new entrants to Whoop’s space. Where once the company offered a unique outlook on fitness and recovery, the competitive landscape is changing with low-cost wannabees like Amatfit Helios; industry behemoths like Garmin and their Index Sleep Monitor and an upcoming Polar looped band that promises to be a direct competitor.

Whoop can do little to stop the progressive encroachment by its competitors, but it can develop and further its ecosystem in the never-ending race to stay ahead and be different.

• Whoop has recently launched 5.0 and MG, a revamped wrist-based sensor platform that signals a distinct move towards specific medical-like insights and wellness in general.
• Its app continually evolves, and only this month, the CEO, Will Ahmed, outlined new plans for 2025 and hinted at others to come soon. Might the more secret aspects of these plans include a chest strap?

Why Does Whoop Need a Chest Strap?

A: Improved accuracy during sports

Whilst Whoop and other optical sensors can improve accuracy when worn on the biceps, a chest strap will always be more accurate.

Whoop 5.0 – upcoming features for 2025

The Commercial Imperative

Whoop will never open its app to generic 3rd party Bluetooth chest straps. It just isn’t going to happen. Similarly, it will never permit the general importing of heart rate from 3rd party sources like Strava. Whoop’s app specifically excludes HR from imported data.

Why?

A: Once Whoop accepts 3rd party HR data, it fundamentally accepts that other, more accurate sources exist. There’s then less need for the band. Sure, someone could keep using the app with imported HR data, but ultimately, those people will be MUCH more likely to move away.

You can nuance the pros and cons anyway you like, but it just isn’t going to happen.

Even if Whoop were to sell its own branded strap, that would still denegrate the existing wristband to some degree in some people’s eyes (not mine). However, that would keep existing customers within the ecosystem and provide additional revenue opportunities from purchasing a strap. Such a purchase also further vests customers’ interests in the ecosystem, making them more likely to stay in the long term.

Possible Chest Strap Solutions – overcoming techy hurdles

A Whoop chest strap would need two key features from day one. First, obviously, the ability to record heart rate and second, the ability to cache and later transmit that data back to the app.

Whilst heart rate straps are very common, Bluetooth ones that cache data back to an app are rare – the main example I can think of is the Polar H10 strap, which links to the Polar Beat app. Suunto’s smart belt. Garmin uses ANT+.

Another example is the Movesense HR+, initially built by Suunto, which was spun off as a separate company to support 3rd party OEM solutions. It’s a very highly rated sensor, even if most people have never heard of it.

The Suunto/Movesense straps/pods are also quite good-looking!

Thus Whoop has perhaps 3 ways forward with chest straps

1. Build its solution from scratch. This is probably the most likely, and Whoop has the resources to do this. This approach would mitigate the need to license 3rd party tech.
2. Build an OEM solution with Movesense. A quick route to market but a more costly one.
3. Allow an existing 3rd party to be compatible, adding a layer of software coding that stops other straps from working similarly. Whoop then resells this strap. This is perhaps the least likely, despite being the easiest. Money talks, this avenue would add cost and increase the risk of Whoop customers moving elsewhere over time.

Take Out

I’m pretty sure I’d previously read indirect comments from Whoop or its representatives that the company was considering or planning a chest strap. In prep for this article, I did a lot of searching and found nothing to back up my memories. So this article perhaps falls from being an extrapolation to speculation.

As a well-resourced company, Whoop certainly has the means to produce a chest strap. It would provide notable additional revenues and not be technically too hard to realise. A chest strap would have significant customer benefits to some sections of the community and would perhaps nail the accuracy criticisms once and for all (hmmm).

Furthermore, whilst the company is clearly moving toward wellness and medical capabilities, a chest strap with an accelerometer gives the company a significant future avenue to develop further features like running mechanics and continuous ECG analytics, the latter clearly meshing with its existing push towards all things medical.

Other than as outlined above, I can’t really see any reason for Whoop not to do this, except perhaps that it just doesn’t gel with the company’s current strategy. If so…fair enough.

Would you buy a WHOOP-compatible chest strap? Let us know in the comments.