Transcription
For an entire week, I wore an Apple Watch, a Whoop Band, an Oura Ring, and the new Fitbit Air all at the same time, but I did not expect this. Now, I assumed they would more or less agree with each other, and then I'd tell you which one I recommend, and then we'd all move on with our lives, but that's not what happened.
One morning, one of them told me I got 81 minutes of deep sleep, while the two others said I had 47. This 76% gap is actually part of the story, but to understand why that matters, I have to tell you something first. If you want to skip over that, you can just scroll down to my observations.
Now, I used to obsess about this stuff. For years, I wore an Oura Ring almost every night, and it genuinely changed my life. Sleep is the number one biomarker you have for health, and one of the great things about it is that what you do during the day can actually show up at your sleep at night. Now, tracking told me what wrecked my sleep and what fixed it, and dialing it in was one of the best health decisions I ever made.
But what nobody tells you about having the data is that after a few years, I knew my trends, I knew what good looked like, and I knew what bad looked like, and that's when the data started doing something strange. I would wake up feeling incredible, ready to run through a wall, and then I would check my recovery score, and it would say 67. Suddenly, I'd feel a little bit worse than I did 10 seconds earlier. The number was now arguing with how I felt, and that number was winning.
And this is the part that wearable companies don't put on the box. Once you already know your trends, a constant stream of daily data stops informing you and starts overriding you. You feel great until a screen tells you you shouldn't, and that's before we even get into the fact that these things aren't all that accurate to begin with.
So, in January, I was serving in Vietnam, and my Apple Watch broke, and I talked about it on this video over here. And I had worn some kind of tracker nearly every day for 5 years. Now, I had nothing, and I was halfway around the world, and I didn't feel like buying a replacement just to keep the streak alive. So, I went without one and my life actually got better. I stopped outsourcing how I felt to a device on my wrist. I'd wake up and I'd decide how I perform based on how I actually felt. So, I stayed wearable free for the next 5 months and quite frankly, I didn't miss it.
So, why test the Apple, Whoop, or Fitbit Air all at the same time? Well, the thing about me is is I'm a health nerd and I'm also a curious consumer. I have run my own experiments with glycine that you can check out over here, creatine that you can check out over here, and psyllium husk that you can check out over here and many others. And I do this for the simple fact that I believe we're all unique and the fact is I don't think we actually know that much about the human body yet and I'd rather find out for myself than take someone else's word for it.
So, when the Fitbit Air dropped, I finally had an excuse to do something I had always wanted to do, which is put the major wearables head-to-head and see which one actually gives you the best data. And I was surprised. So, here are the lessons that I learned by wearing these four wearables on my body all at once. And by the way, nobody paid me to do this. I actually bought all of these myself.
When I announced the test, Whoop actually reached out on X and offered to send me their newest model for free. And I did first say yes, but after more thought, I actually declined and don't get me wrong, I love free stuff, but I didn't want that to tilt the results. I want to optimize for truth and truth is always cheaper when you get the gear yourself. And for those wondering, I was actually planning on getting a Garmin. I actually ordered the Garmin Fenix from Amazon. It got lost in transit and I didn't have the patience to order it again. So, maybe I'll do this test all over again at a later date. Probably not.
With that being said, on to the lessons. When it came to total sleep, all four of them landed within an hour of each other, which is cool, but deep sleep is where things fell apart. The four devices split into two camps. The Apple and Oura had near around 47 minutes a night, while the Fitbit and Whoop had near around 70 to 81 minutes. This is a 76% spread on the exact number that a lot of people stress about when they're tracking their sleep.
Now, when it comes to REM, it was a little bit less wild, but no cleaner. Apple read the highest around 2 hours a night, while the other three bunched together around 95 to 100 minutes. The funniest thing was the device that was stingiest on deep sleep turned around and was the most generous on REM. So, make of that what you want.
Now, to be fair, I didn't have a sleep lab wired around my head, so I can't tell you which camp is actually the most accurate. Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal actually ran this exact test through a Stanford Sleep Lab, and Apple's staging came closer to the lab truth. That suggests that the higher numbers from the other devices are actually more flattering than accurate. And I'll leave a link to the article in the description below. And by the way, if sleep is something you're actively trying to fix and not just track, comment the word sleep below and I'll send you the exact protocol we used to 2x our clients' sleep quality. All right, back to it.
So, here's the actual lesson. Trust your sleep duration and also your trends over time. I would largely ignore the stage-by-stage breakdown entirely, and whatever you do, never compare your deep sleep number to a friend who's wearing a different brand. You're not comparing two facts, you're actually comparing two guesses.
So, the next thing I want to know is can they even count our steps accurately? So, steps are supposed to be the one metric that no one can mess up. Right? Now, to track this, I wanted to pit these four wearables against one of the dumbest, most accurate devices on the planet, and that is a pedometer. So, pedometers have been shown to be more accurate than wearables for a couple of reasons. First, it lives on your hip, so it's always riding along your actual center of mass. But, when it comes to a wearable, every time you take a step, or your wrist is busy typing, or gesturing wildly when you're talking or cooking, none of which is actually walking, a wrist wearable can mistake all of that for walking. So, the pedometer doesn't have that problem. It literally just counts your steps.
Now, the wearables that got me closest to the pedometer were the Apple Watch and the Fitbit Air. They got me there within a few hundred steps. Now, when it came to the Whoop, it consistently gave me more steps than I actually took. And to be fair for them, their steps function is in beta right now, so take that with a grain of salt. Now, the Oura was a little bit of a different story. When I kept the ring on all day, it tracked right in line with Apple, but its weekly totals looked low. And this for a very specific reason, I actually had to take this off for a variety of reasons, whether I was lifting, swimming, or even washing the dishes. I put this on my index finger, and I found myself taking off the Oura Ring a little bit more than other wearables because it was just getting in the way of certain things in my life. So, depending on where you're wearing the Oura Ring, it can be a little impractical.
The big lesson around this is to trust the device that you wear all day and treat the exact number of steps as a rough guide rather than gospel. And when it comes to steps and many other things, you don't need to be hyper accurate. You just want to be directionally correct.
Now, let's get into the one metric that I completely ignored and did not give a about, and that was recovery. Now, before I get into recovery, I want to set the framework. I don't trust a lot of the numbers I get from the recovery, especially when it comes from my wearable. So, I'd rather go based on how I feel rather than looking at a wearable telling me how I should feel or how I should perform. The one time I actually look at recovery is for trends, and I actually look for more serious adverse events where you see your body's temperature rise or your resting heart rate is elevated way higher than it should be.
So, on this test, I watched two different devices score the exact same body's recovery over the exact same week. One swung wildly saying I was completely wrecked one day and a machine the next. The other barely moved and just told me I was fine for an entire week. Unfortunately, they couldn't even agree on what my resting heart rate was, which should be the single simplest thing any of these devices measure. And I didn't act on any of it.
After 20 years into coaching my own body, wearing wearables, coaching other people, I've learned that in general, wrist and finger recovery and HRV are not accurate enough to make decisions off of. One of the best sources of truth when it comes to HRV and recovery is a chest strap. And the only time I'll take a recovery score seriously is when it throws me an extreme reading. For everything else in between, I ignore it. I decide I feel great. I just move on with my day. It works out way more often than it doesn't.
Now, here's a few short lessons from living with these four pieces of tech strapped to my body. So, number one is that the Apple Watch is great, but it has to be charged every day. That's probably the biggest strike against it. The other three have fantastic battery life. The Fitbit Air is so thin and light that sometimes I forgot it was on in the first place. It also matches well with some of my watches, which is nice. The Whoop is a bit bulkier than the Fitbit Air, but still solid. You can still pull it off. Now, the Aura, it's a little too bulky to wear when you're lifting, when you're washing dishes, when you're doing cardio, it's fine, but in other areas, it kind of gets in the way. Now, to their credit, they're actually coming out with a thinner version, and I might actually get it to see how that feels.
In terms of app experience, Whoop wins hands-down. I love the fact that they give you a wall of data the second that you open it up. Recovery, strain, sleep, and they also give you an AI daily written summary. I also like the daily journal function, even though I found it a little annoying because it gives you a deeper understanding of which habits lead to better sleep and better recovery. It can be overwhelming the first few times you open it, but once it clicks, it's the app that actually changes what I do that day because of that journal.
Now, Aura is a close second, and it goes in the exact opposite direction. It's a little bit more calm, quiet, and almost boring, which is pretty cool for an app. The Apple Health comes in third, and honestly, it's not really Apple's fault. The watch itself, it's the product. So, the app is just where the numbers go to sit quietly afterwards. A little bit boring, but whatever, it works. Now, as for for Fitbit Air, you're actually using the app Google Health, and I found their app left a lot to be desired. It's a simple UX design, but overall, it doesn't really go as deep into the data as Oura or Whoop. And as a side note, Oura and Whoop were my entry-level drugs into this whole sleep tracking space. If it weren't for them and all the data I gathered using these sleep trackers, I wouldn't have the sleep that I have right now. And I have to tell you, my sleep is fantastic.
Now, in terms of membership, Apple and Fitbit Air give you everything you need with zero subscription. Now, Oura and Whoop make you pay monthly. They have a membership with it, and that's totally cool, fine. We all got to make money. But when it came to trying to cancel the Whoop, it literally took me 10 minutes. You can't do it in the app. You have to go hunt down the desktop site, figure out how to get in there, and then when you try to cancel, it makes you sit through a 5-minute exit survey. Now, is Uncle Dan being a boomer by just wanting a button on the app to click that says cancel? Now, I know everybody's got to eat, but that's just annoying. You guys let me know in the comments. Do you agree or disagree?
So, it comes down to the big question, which one should you buy? And it really depends on who you are. If you want a device that does everything in real time, and you don't mind charging it daily, then it's the Apple Watch. If you hate subscriptions and you just want clean, honest data with all the basics, then it'll be the Apple Watch and the Fitbit Air. If you want a great user experience and also a wider set of health metrics, and you're fine paying for that, then the Whoop is the one to go for. Just know what you're getting into when you're going through these cancellation hoops. And if you like the ring aesthetic, and you don't care about wearing it 24/7, especially if you're a lifter like me, then it's going to be the Oura.
Now, one thing I will mention is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And what I mean by that is that these devices have the power to transform your life. I have used sleep trackers for many years, and they have informed my decisions. Just having the awareness keeps me accountable for making the right ones. As with all things, there going to be trade-offs, and no wearable is going to be perfect. So, keep that in mind.
As for me, I'm going to go back to a plain old dumb watch whose only job is to tell me the time. As a secondary, I will be going back to using the Apple Watch. And the only reason, aside from the stuff that we talked about today, is the fact that it lets me be without my phone when I'm in the gym. I can track my workouts on it, and it is a great break from the distraction device known as our smartphone. And in general, I don't need my data to be perfect. I just want it to be directionally correct. I'm not going to be anti-wearable. I still believe in checking in with the trends, making sure everything is lined up the way it's supposed to be. Super important. And I will be using wearables from time to time just to monitor the situation. And I want to hear from you. What's your favorite wearable? And why do you like it? Leave a comment down below, and maybe I'll change my mind to go get a Garmin. Thanks for watching. I'll see you on the next video. Now, I got to put this stuff in storage.