Whoop quietly improves day-to-day accuracy with a 'high pressure' update

Wearables get stability and bug fixes all the time, rolled out often without us even noticing.

And Whoop just quietly dropped a firmware update in much of the same way for its Whoop 5.0 and the Whoop MG wearables. However, this one includes a line that made me look twice.

The update claims to "improve data accuracy under high pressure”. And that's not battery pressure nor blood pressure, just “high pressure”, which, at first, struck me as a bit odd-sounding.

So, what’s this new Whoop update actually hinting at? A recent breakdown from the5krunner flags a few possibilities. Atmospheric or underwater pressure seems unlikely since Whoop doesn't sport a barometer. Then blood pressure is also a stretch, as Whoop doesn’t measure it directly. So, the most sensible interpretation is a boring one, and that's strap pressure, for example, how tightly the band is cinched to your wrist.

Smarter handling could help

The update suggests that it addresses the issue of when users wear the Whoop strap too tight and cause the optical sensor to misread.

Compressed skin changes blood flow and you can end up with spiky heart-rate lines or noisy HRV, especially when you’re moving. Whoop’s note suggests the update is better at spotting those “too snug” moments and correcting them.

The most likely method is that if the signal looks wrong for a while, the firmware flags it, switches to a different processing mode tuned for that situation, and checks the result before saving. Because Whoop processes a lot in the cloud, it might be that it also cleans up the data after the fact instead of doing everything on the wrist in real time.

The flashier ideas don’t make sense here as the band can’t “detect” strap pressure (there’s no pressure sensor), and clever LED switching won’t tell you tightness, either. A more realistic reasoning comes down to smarter filtering when the signal turns unstable.

Day-to-day accuracy improvements

If you’re a Whoop 5.0 or MG user and you've experienced spiky heart rate or jittery HRV during steady efforts - especially if you wear the strap quite snug for intervals or strength work - this update could shave off some of that noise.

It’s not a silver bullet, however. The band's fit still matters. Keep it snug, not tight (you should fit one finger under the strap), and if wrist reads are messy during high-impact stuff, try the Any-Wear upper-arm sleeve.

Basically, the update is a small behind-the-scenes tweak that may make day-to-day accuracy a bit more reliable, especially if you tend to overtighten the band. It's not a huge deal, but it's a useful one. So, if your graphs look smoother after updating where they used to be noisy, that’ll be the “high pressure” fix doing its job.