I tested the Whoop MG for a month and it completely changed how I see my health metrics

Introduction

The Whoop 4 was a fantastic wearable that I rarely took off during my year of use, so Whoop had its work cut out for it to improve on that experience.

With the Whoop MG, that’s exactly what the company has done. Revealed alongside the more affordable Whoop 5, the MG – short for Medical Grade – is the company’s new all-singing, all-dancing fitness-focused wearable with longer battery life, ECG and blood pressure monitoring and a whole lot of new software smarts to make better sense of your data. 

The catch? It’s an expensive subscription-based wearable, costing £349/$359 per year, a significant increase from the already premium £229/$239 per year for the Whoop 4.

The question is, then, is the Whoop MG worth the financial commitment? I’ve spent the past month using the Whoop MG, and here’s what I’ve found.

Design

• No screen
• Discreet and comfortable to wear
• Wide range of (pricy) accessories

The Whoop MG, like pretty much every Whoop before it, has a distinctly different focus from most wearable devices on the market. 

The Whoop MG isn’t designed to provide a portal to your digital life, like smartwatches do, and as such, doesn’t offer a screen, notifications, or any similar features. The Whoop MG has one job, and one job only: to track your health data as consistently and discreetly as possible.

It might be a hyper-focused approach that immediately puts off casual users, but if it does appeal to you, the Whoop MG is a resounding success. 

While I didn’t necessarily feel that the Whoop 4 was a chunky wearable, the MG is 7% smaller at 10.6mm thick. That doesn’t sound like much, but it does have a slightly slimmer profile and doesn’t catch on things like shirt sleeves as often. 

It’s a very discreet device as a result, and one that I often forget I’m wearing altogether. That’s mainly due to the fantastic material straps that ship with the Whoop MG; these are much more breathable than the fluoroelastomer straps often used with wearables, and with a slight flex, they never feel tight on the wrist.

It does mean that the strap will get damp when going for a shower or a dip in the pool – this is a wearable that’s never meant to be taken off, after all – but it dries fairly quickly. It also means that the material strap is constantly cleaned, which can only be a good thing from a hygiene perspective. 

And, if for whatever reason, you don’t want the Whoop on your wrist, you can opt for a bicep band or even clothing that you can slot the core Whoop module into for more discreet tracking. That’s not necessarily new – it has been a feature of Whoop wearables for years – but it’s nice to see it continue with the latest generation. 

I think the only big complaint is that, with the slight change in dimensions, all straps and accessories designed for the Whoop 4 don’t work with the 5 or MG. These aren’t cheap accessories either; some straps cost as much as £99/$99, and you can expect similarly premium prices for the bicep bands and clothing. 

When it comes to durability, the wearable’s IP68 dust and water resistance means it can survive in up to 10 meters (32 feet) of water for up to 2 hours – ideal for tracking swims and the like. 

Smart Features

• New Whoop Age functionality
• ECG & blood pressure monitoring
• Whoop app is one of the best around

With the Whoop MG lacking a screen like practically every other wearable on the market, there’s a much bigger emphasis on the Whoop companion app. It’s the only way to interpret your data and access most of its features and functionality, so there’s a lot riding on the experience on offer.

Thankfully, the Whoop app for iOS and Android is an absolute treat to use; it’s not only packed with health-focused features, but a wealth of data that’s both visually impressive and accessible. 

The Home tab displays an overview of all your data. It’s broken down into your Sleep, Recovery and Strain scores at the top of the page, with the ability to tap on each to get a more in-depth breakdown of your scores. 

There’s also a wealth of other metrics that you can add to the Home tab for quick viewing, ranging from basic metrics like steps taken to highly specific data, such as sleep consistency and weekly HR zone breakdowns, depending on what you’d like to track. 

However, what I like most about the Whoop experience is how personal it is to you and your data; all suggestions, whether it’s to get to bed at a specific time, are based on your data and habits. That means that, unlike most wearables that tell me I need to go to bed at a rather generic 11pm, my Whoop tells me to aim for 1:10 am as that’s when I actually tend to fall asleep. 

It goes a step further with a ChatGPT-powered health assistant. It’ll provide a breakdown of your day each morning, with suggested workouts to help you reach your strain goal based on your previous activities, but it does much more than that. 

It’s effectively a health-focused ChatGPT, allowing for natural back-and-forth conversations about your data, as well as explaining how various elements can affect your health and even suggesting long-term health changes to help you achieve your goals. It’s a game-changer, especially for the non-athletes among us who might find terms like HRV a little confusing at first glance. 

However, as amazing as they are, those features aren’t new; they were all available on the Whoop 4.0. 

New features for the new generation of Whoop wearables include a new Whoop Age feature that provides your body’s age based on recent metrics, along with your pace of ageing. These are updated once a week, so it’s more about larger sustained changes than minor daily tweaks to try and game the system. 

It’s smart, and Whoop says it has worked with Dr. Eric Verdin of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging to get accurate results, but if like me, it tells you that your Whoop Age is eight years older than you are, it can be very humbling and actually a little demotivating. I’m not bitter, I swear…

Exclusive to the Whoop MG is the ability to take ECGs – simply place your thumb and index finger on the sides of the wearable and activate the features in-app to begin. You’ll then get a summary of your reading, as well as a report that can be exported and shared with health professionals. 

There’s also the ability to take blood pressure readings – though unlike wearables like the Huawei Watch D2 that offer an inflatable band to accurately measure blood pressure, Whoop’s wearable infers its readings based on heart rate data and other inputs. 

As a result, it’s not quite as accurate, displaying a range of readings and an average, and you’ll need to calibrate it once a month with a certified blood pressure monitor to ensure accuracy. 

It’s still good for at-a-glance checks, but if you’re genuinely worried about your blood pressure, there are better options out there. It also means that if you’re not interested in ECGs or blood pressure monitoring, you can opt for the cheaper Whoop 5 without feeling like you’re missing out on anything.

That said, one of the best things about Whoop’s wearables has traditionally been how much they improve over their lifespan. During the Whoop 4’s lifetime, it saw not only multiple improvements to its core tracking tech but new features like step tracking and the ChatGPT-powered Health Coach – and I fully expect the same with the MG over the next few years. 

This is the starter experience, and it should only improve as Whoop continues to utilise the data its wearable collects more effectively. 

Health and Fitness Tracking

• In-depth health and lifestyle tracking
• Fairly accurate sleep tracking
• Exercise metrics are surprisingly basic

Just as Whoop does things differently with its design and app, it also takes a different approach to general health and fitness tracking. Instead of tracking rings focused on elements like calories burnt and standing hours, Whoop focuses on three tenets: sleep, recovery and strain. 

Say, you’ve got a low recovery; you can tap the Recovery icon and see exactly what has contributed to your score, including elements like HRV and body temperature, as well as your daily habits if you opt to record them every evening. 

I would highly recommend that, by the way; it’s one of the unique (but optional) features that Whoop offers, allowing you to see how factors like alcohol consumption or sleeping with a face mask can affect your health and recovery over time. 

With drinking alcohol being particularly detrimental to my recovery score, reducing it by 14% on average, it makes me stop and think before I order a pint at the pub. I still do, of course, but now I know exactly what effect it has on my body. That’s great for real, actionable results, rather than generic tips that might not impact your recovery in the same way they do for someone else. 

The Strain score is unique to Whoop’s wearables, and rather than focusing on the actual activities you’re doing throughout the day, like most others, it focuses on your heart strain. Activities with a higher strain indicate a bigger push, and for people like me who ignore individual metrics when exercising, it’s a great way to judge my effort between exercises. 

Plus, seeing a higher daily strain score provides a level of satisfaction I never really felt when closing my rings on the Apple Watch Series 10 or hitting my goals on the OnePlus Watch – probably because it’s much tougher to achieve. With an Apple Watch, you can hit your 30-minute exercise goal just by going for a 30-minute walk. You can’t game things the same way with Whoop. 

You can technically get a maximum score of 21, but Whoop says this is practically impossible; you can only reach 20.9 at most. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’ll motivate even the most determined athletes to push past their limits and achieve the coveted score. 

Whoop’s sleep tracking algorithm, at least anecdotally, feels the most accurate compared to how I feel the following morning. On nights when I felt I was tossing and turning, the Whoop generally detects this and adjusts my sleep score accordingly. It’s also very good at automatically tracking when I’m actually asleep, rather than just lying down in bed. 

Even if it is slightly inaccurate, you can manually adjust the timings of your sleep, and because Whoop constantly collects all your data, it’ll reassess without issue. 

Speaking of, you’ll get all the usual sleep metrics here – sleep stages, heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen levels, HRV – along with more focused metrics like sleep consistency, efficiency and stress, all broken down into various graphs. And, as with any other metric Whoop captures, you can use the Whoop Coach to delve a little deeper and get personalised insights in return.  

Exercise tracking is, rather ironically, where most fitness fans might struggle with the Whoop. The wearable’s lack of a screen means you can’t easily get real-time data without looking at your phone, and even then, it’s limited to strain and heart rate with no exercise-specific metrics or GPS capabilities.

As I mentioned earlier, Whoop focuses on your heart strain more than anything else. That’s great for general health and wellbeing, but not if you want to slowly beat your 5K best time. It does offer automatic exercise tracking, but I find this feature rather hit-and-miss, as it often misses periods of low- to mid-effort exercise. 

It’s part of the reason why I, and many other Whoop members, use both a smartwatch and Whoop simultaneously. Smartwatches like the OnePlus Watch 3 offer way more exercise functionality, with advanced metric tracking on a per-exercise basis, making it much easier to track incremental improvements in specific forms of exercise. 

Once it’s synced with your phone, it’s automatically pulled into Whoop for analysis via Health Connect on Android and Apple Health on iPhone.  

So, as good as the Whoop is for fitness and health, I’d recommend keeping hold of your old wearable for exercise-specific tracking.

Battery Life

• Up to 14 days of battery life
• Charges on-wrist via wireless power pack
• Full charge in around two hours

Battery life was solid with the Whoop 4, managing around five days of battery life, depending on usage – but considering it doesn’t have a screen like most smartwatches, some of which can last for weeks on end, it wasn’t the best it could be.

Well, Whoop has rectified that with the latest generation of wearables, with the Whoop MG able to offer a whopping two weeks of battery life from a single charge. That’s more than double its predecessor, and while I didn’t quite hit the quoted 14 days, I got pretty close at just over 13 days with 2% remaining. 

Now, with a device that’s designed to be always on your person, you might be wondering how to charge the wearable. Unlike most of the competition that requires you to take the wearable off to charge it, that’s not the case with the Whoop MG. 

Instead, the Whoop MG comes with a wireless power pack – essentially a tiny wireless power bank that attaches itself to the wearable directly. The idea is simple yet effective; it allows you to keep your wearable topped up without missing out on hours of data collection, with no need to worry about wires – aside from charging the power pack via USB-C, that is.

It does add a bit of heft and bulk to the wearable for the couple of hours it takes to fully recharge as a result, but it’s slimmer than the Whoop 4 equivalent – and with much longer battery life this time around, it’s not something you’ll find yourself doing that often.

Should you buy it?

FAQs