Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority
TL;DR
WHOOP is finally bringing step counting to its fitness tracker with this week’s update. The company’s trackers don’t offer their own screens, so you access your fitness metrics on your smartphone.
What’s the big problem with step counting? After all, not all steps are the same. A leisurely shuffle around your bedroom in the morning is far less harmful to your health than a full-speed walk uphill. But for many of us, counting steps is still a useful metric, an at-a-glance representation of our day’s activity, and the best fitness trackers all report it. That’s why we’re a little surprised to hear that a fitness tracker brand is now offering step counting.
In case you didn’t catch the little pun, we’re talking about WHOOP, a company that makes very discreet screenless trackers, including the latest WHOOP 4.0, which we checked out a few years ago. This unusual tracker was a bit pricey and required an ongoing subscription, but it provided great overall feedback, tracking my heart rate around the clock and estimating my body’s strain. And while it was good at features like sleep tracking, it wasn’t overloaded with real-time stats and was clearly not a replacement for your average tracker.
The streamlined approach to product design also came with some compromises, and step counting was among them. That’s finally about to change, as 9to5Google shares that WHOOP will roll out an update that will be released today or tomorrow and will start providing step count data to users. Unsurprisingly, this is a highly requested feature, but WHOOP also cited research showing a link between access to this type of data and lower rates of heart disease, obesity, and depression. This justifies the inclusion of this feature now.
Are there any WHOOP users who have been waiting for this for years? In the meantime, have you found yourself using another fitness tracker to get step data? Share your experience in the comments .
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