Polar Loop Review: Better Than a Whoop 5.0?

Screenless fitness trackers can sometimes feel like they aren’t doing the job they set out to do. Sure, there’s no constant stream of data to obsess over every time you turn your wrist. But in the absence of that quick peek, I find myself opening a tracker’s companion app—constantly—to check on the data it’s collected. In the end, I find myself spending more time staring at those charts and figures than if I took a look at the tiny screen on my wrist every now and again.

So when I began testing the Polar Loop—a new screen-free wearable health and fitness band—I wasn’t all that excited. After all, the new product from Polar (the company that introduced the first wireless heart rate monitor nearly 50 years ago in 1977), almost exactly resembles the Whoop 5.0. In fact, the device, which came out in early September, has been nicknamed the subscription-free competitor to Whoop. The Polar Loop costs $199 and all its features are free in the accompanying—again, free—app. Whoop on the other hand, includes its band in the membership, but that starts at $199 a year and goes up from there.

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If you anticipate using your device for more than a year, the cost of a Whoop 5.0 really adds up whereas the Loop, literally, does not at all. I spent a few weeks training with the Loop, and in the end, what made me fall in love with it was less about the cost (which, obviously, is still crucial to making a decision about purchasing a wearable) and more about what the Loop does not do: dump tons of health and fitness data at you.

If this sounds counterproductive, that is almost the point. If the goal of creating a screenless fitness tracker is to make you spend less time looking at the thing, and more time living your life, then the accompanying app should match that same tone. And there are almost no screenless wearables on the market today that do just that. Here’s a deep dive into more.

The goldilocks of fitness trackers?

Polar is a company that is no stranger to monitoring our health. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the company introduced the first wireless heart rate monitor, the Sport Tester PE2000, which was initially designed for elite endurance athletes, particularly cross-country skiers. The design—a chest-strap transmitter connected to a wrist receiver watch—allowed for real-time monitoring without wires, which was revolutionary at the time.

But a chest strap worn 24/7 would annoy just about any regular person. These days, almost all heart rate tracking systems on the market use an optical heart rate monitor, which works by shining a light into the skin to detect changes in blood volume with each heartbeat.

There’s so much you can ascertain from your heart rate, and most wearables today use heart rate to track everything from sleep to step count to exercise and recovery. The Polar Loop is no different in this regard. The accompanying app, the Polar Flow, provides a detailed picture of your last night’s sleep and includes other basic metrics like step count and heart rate.

The step count and heart rate lined up with what my Apple Watch was telling me (I often wore both of them at the same time, though not always). The sleep tracking also seemed to match with the Oura 4 Ceramic, which I was also testing at the time. While it’s impossible to know for sure how accurate the sleep trackers are, as I don’t know the exact moment I fall asleep or wake up throughout the night, they seemed fairly in line with when I went to bed and woke up. During a few of the testing nights, my cat woke me up to get fed at around 4 a.m., and the Loop successfully tracked that wake-up and the fact that I fell back asleep as well.

One aspect of the Loop’s sleep tracker that I particularly liked was that it actually asks each morning how restful I thought last night’s sleep was (with a series of emojis ranging from a sad face to a happy face). So much of sleep tracking science is still a black box. Scientists don’t yet know enough about the correlation between time spent in various sleep stages and a good night’s rest. So the basic question of how well rested you feel is still pertinent. While there’s nothing you can actually do with that data right now, I still found it useful to reflect on my night’s rest rather than just rely on the app telling me I got a good night’s rest.

But what stands out for the Loop is what it puts emphasis on and what it leaves out. The bulk of the Polar Flow app focuses on fitness training. When you open it, you’re automatically given a “Cardio Load Status,†which is essentially a measure of how fit you are. It estimates this based on the workouts you’ve done (again, nothing any fitness watch like Polar’s own running watch or the Garmins or Coros’ of the world can’t do).

The Polar Loop excels because of its simplicity. There were days when I could go out for a run with nothing but the Loop and forget about pace, time, and distance and just enjoy the run. That’s something that most running watches and fitness trackers don’t really do. Technically, you could just set a running watch or your phone to a 30-minute timer, but the accessibility of seeing your pace, distance, and heart rate with the turn of your wrist is too tempting for me (and most runners I know).

To me, all of this is what sets the Polar Loop apart. Its pared-down app accompanied by its nonexistent screen means that, if you want, you can actually passively track your health and not obsess over it. Perhaps this will soon change as the app seems to be in its infancy and major updates are expected over the next year. But right now, the Polar Loop is an ideal health companion for me: not too much information, but not too little, either—and the ability to zen out during a run knowing you are still tracking it is exactly what I want right now.

This begs the question: Is there a perfect or ideal health or fitness tracker? Absolutely not. That’d be like demanding there be a perfect pizza topping. The perfect one is the one that fits all your wants and needs at any given time, and we all prioritize different things when it comes to fitness and health tracking. One size doesn’t fit all, despite what a certain fruit-named company wants everyone to believe with its smartwatches.

Super comfortable with over a week of battery

The battery life on the Loop is pretty amazing. Polar says that it lasts eight days on one charge and it can store data without syncing for up to four weeks.

While I want to refrain from only comparing the Whoop 5.0 to the Loop, one small quibble I had with the Whoop 5.0 was that for whatever reason it was so uncomfortable on my tiny wrist. The Loop, on the other hand, I found incredibly easy to put on, take off, and wear indefinitely until it was time to charge. To me, a device that’s intended to be worn all day long for days needs to be comfortable—and the Loop delivers. For stat nerds: the tracker itself is 27 x 42 x 9mm and it comes with a fabric band (which comes in two sizes) and weighs 29 grams. The Loop also comes in three colors: Greige Sand, Night Black, and Brown Copper.

Is the Loop just a cheaper version of the Whoop 5.0?

Aesthetically, both the Loop and the Whoop 5.0 look and feel generally the same (though I’d argue the Loop is way more comfortable for people with smaller wrists). At their core, they are each screenless, passive health monitors. The key differences are their price and what they offer in their apps. Because the Whoop requires a subscription, year over year, it will be far more expensive than the Loop, which is a one-time expense with an accompanying free app.

As for what they both offer, they couldn’t be more different. The Whoop is an all-encompassing health tracker that is attempting to cram as much health information into its app as it can and spit out a daily strain and recovery score, which is focused on optimizing your overall health—essentially becoming a health perfectionist. The Loop is almost like its laid-back cousin. It’s going after the same goal of improving health but with a more relaxed, casual approach. To get into the nitty-gritty, they both offer heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep stages, and fitness training status. In addition to these, Whoop also offers body temperature, oxygen saturation, and advanced insights like strain and recovery scores, so you do get more tracked stats.

Taking all of that into account, Whoop is better for users who want to dig deeper into their health and wellness, whereas the Loop, at least in its current iteration, is more geared towards people who want to just wear it and forget it and get a more basic daily update on their health without inundating themselves with extra insights or needing to achieve a perfect strain or recovery score.

While I can’t see someone who is training for a specific fitness goal, like a marathon, using the Polar Loop as their sole device, I can see it being used in two ways: 1) as a sole device for someone who just wants to passively track their everyday health and fitness without a specific goal in mind or 2) someone who does use a fitness watch for workouts and wants something else that just tracks their everyday health that they don’t have to look at or obsess over. Though it’s important to note that the Loop doesn’t have an internal GPS. That means the Loop estimates distance (and pace) based on internal sensors (accelerometer, wrist movement) rather than satellite data. On that note, the Polar Loop does sync with Polar’s fitness watches, which are arguably among the most accurate around for tracking heart rate, pace, and distance, though their tradeoff is that they aren’t as sleek or compact as smartwatches like the Apple Watch Series 11 or Pixel Watch 4.

So whatever way you like to track your health, the Polar Loop could be ideal to add to the mix.