I wear both WHOOP and Garmin to bed every night — WHOOP is the one I actually use for recovery decisions. The daily strain score and recovery percentage feed directly into how hard I train that day. Until recently, my Speediance workouts weren't writing to Apple Health, which meant WHOOP was dramatically undercounting my strain. Once that integration got fixed, my strain scores jumped from near-zero to 10+ for strength sessions. My values were "majorly off" for months.

The WHOOP web app has gotten "worse and worse and worse." It used to be a meaningful data analysis tool — now it's not. I built my own OpenClaw-based fitness reporting system partly because WHOOP's own platform couldn't give me what I needed.

On the WHOOP 5 specifically: I'm staying on WHOOP 5.0 for now. WHOOP markets the 5 as "smaller" — it's not. They made it narrower (doesn't matter) and shorter (doesn't matter), while making it thicker (the only dimension that actually affects comfort). It is now the same height off the wrist as my Garmin Forerunner with a screen. None of the old WHOOP 4 bands fit it, which "feels intentional." I taped a spacer into the old band housing to make it work. That's not a user experience I'm rewarding with an upgrade.

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I chose the 265S specifically because it's the lightest Garmin I could get away with, and I sleep with it every night for the daily suggested workouts feature. The reasoning was simple: if I'm wearing this to bed, it needs to be as small and light as possible — which meant passing on the bigger Fenix and 945 I already own. Both of those still work, by the way. Garmin device longevity is unmatched.

I have all smartwatch features turned off. No notifications. No stand reminders. No app integrations. I use it for running and to catch any situation where the body battery reads near zero before a suggested workout — that's the one data point I actually check before deciding to skip. I don't use Garmin's sleep tracking either; that job belongs to WHOOP and 8Sleep.

I've had Apple Watch (gen 1 and 2 — "absolutely despised it," crashed regularly, notifications reset after every update). Garmin is the opposite: reliable, durable, and stays out of the way unless you need it.

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I have WHOOP, Garmin, and 8Sleep all tracking my sleep simultaneously — and they "don't say the same thing every night." That's not a knock on any individual device; that's exactly why I built the OpenClaw correlation system. All three give me different readings, and the point is to triangulate reality, not trust any single source.

I don't talk about 8Sleep much because I'm not actively using it the way it's marketed. I don't obsess over its tracking interface. What I'm focused on is getting its data into the same correlation graph as WHOOP and Garmin — which required me to write a custom OpenClaw connector, since 8Sleep doesn't have an official API (though others have reverse-engineered one). When I came back from vacation, the 8Sleep data was just missing from my fitness report. "It's just broken and that's because I was away." That's an accurate description of how it behaves.

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Cronometer has been my primary calorie and nutrition tracking app. It feeds into my OpenClaw connector stack alongside Garmin, WHOOP, Speediance, and 8Sleep — so the nutrition data shows up in the same morning fitness report that tells me how hard to train.

I briefly tested Snap (camera-based food logging) and liked the concept, but their API doesn't expose your own data for export. Cronometer does. Data portability is non-negotiable for me — I'm not going to spend months logging food into an app I can't get the data out of. That's the same reason I built my own connectors instead of relying on walled garden dashboards.

I'm still deciding long-term whether Cronometer, Snap, or a custom app wins. As of early 2026, Cronometer is the daily driver.

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I first ran OpenClaw on an AMD Windows PC inside a virtual machine. "Hot garbage" is how I described it on stream. "An abysmal waste of time." Then I moved it to my M1 Mac Mini — the same machine that was sitting there collecting dust — and it worked right out of the gate. I was blown away. The Mac Mini is the hardware call, not a preference.

The use case is specific: I have Garmin, WHOOP, 8Sleep, Speediance, and Cronometer all generating data independently, with no native way to correlate any of it. The Speediance has no web app. WHOOP's web app has degraded. These devices are walled gardens. I gave OpenClaw what I wanted — six custom connectors — and it built them. Every morning it runs a sync, generates a fitness report, and tells me how hard to train. That's the actual use case.

"I think OpenClaw is as revolutionary as the internet was." That's a big claim. I made it after a week of use. I stand by it. When it's running on Claude Opus it can do anything — including patching its own bugs in the core software. The token cost on Opus is brutal though. My daily driver now uses Minimax M2.5 at $10/month with free LLM providers for parallel tasks.

No commercial relationship with Anthropic or OpenClaw. This is how I actually use it.