WHOOP is finally brining step counting to its fitness trackers through an update this week.
The company’s trackers don’t offer their own screen, so you access fitness metrics on your phone.
What’s the big whoop about step counting? After all, not all steps are created equal, and lazily shuffling our feet around the bedroom in the morning is going to be a lot less impactful on our health than trekking uphill at full pace. For a lot of us, though, counting steps is still a handy metric — an at-a-glance representation of our activity that day — and all the best fitness trackers report it. That’s why we’re a little surprised to hear about one fitness tracker brand that’s only now getting around to offering step counting.
If you didn’t catch our little pun, we’re talking about WHOOP, the company that makes some very low-profile screenless trackers, including the most recent WHOOP 4.0 we checked out a couple years back. While the unusual tracker was a bit expensive and required an ongoing subscription, it offered some great holistic feedback, tracking heartrate round the clock to estimate body strain. And while it exceled at things like sleep tracking, it also clearly wasn’t a replacement for your average tracker, not overloading you with real-time stats.