Love it
Meh
- About two weeks per charge
- Charges while you wear it
- Excellent app
- Precise sleep tracking
- Comfortable and quick-drying band
- Struggles with strength workouts
- ECG can take a few tries
- Clasp can detach
- Stops working without a membership
- ECG and HRV don't reach Apple Health
Verdict
If you want long battery life, excellent sleep tracking and an app you'll actually enjoy, the MG gets those right. If you lift a lot or don't want an ongoing membership, it's a hard sell.
Buy it if
- Sleep and recovery tracking matter most to you.
- You hate charging.
- You'll keep paying for a membership.
Skip it if
- Strength training is your main workout.
- You want a device you own outright.
- You need dependable ECG readings.
Clip the WHOOP MG on and you can forget about the charger for about two weeks. WHOOP rates it at 14 days or more, and it regularly gets there. When it does run low, you snap the battery pack on and keep wearing it while it charges, so your sleep data never has a gap.
What keeps you opening the app is how good it is. The recovery and performance insights are clear and easy to act on, and if you love poring over charts and scores, you'll spend a lot of time there.
Sleep
The WHOOP MG reliably catches when you wake up in the night, though its breakdown of deep and REM sleep can disagree with other trackers. You get time in light, REM and deep sleep each morning, along with heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen.
Workouts
Strength training is hard for it to detect, and it can underreport your heart rate during lifts, which drags down your strain score. Heart rate readings aren't consistent either: one session runs low, the next runs high. Walks it misses have to be logged by hand, which is a chore.
Health features
The MG adds ECG through a conductive clasp, plus blood pressure insights, which estimate trends after you calibrate with a cuff rather than measuring directly. In practice, the ECG reading often fails, and you may need a few tries. The clasp can also come completely loose when you unbuckle the strap. At about 27.3 grams (1 oz), it's slightly heavier than the WHOOP 5.0 because of that clasp, and it sits flush and comfortably on your wrist. The SuperKnit Luxe band dries quickly after a workout or shower. It's IP68 to 10 meters (33 feet).
The membership
You don't buy the MG outright. It comes only with Life, WHOOP's most expensive membership, and you pay for it every year you wear the band. If you stop paying, the band stops tracking.
Sharing data
The app works on iPhone with iOS 16 or later and Android 11 or later. ECG, blood pressure insights and HRV don't export to Apple Health, and WHOOP-only scores like VO2 Max don't sync to Health Connect. Only cardio workouts go to Strava.