The Saturday Standard — Vol. 17

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Coffee first boys. About to take a mini-sledgehammer to your Whoop.

The Research

Wearable tech: is it actually useful?

There's a ring on your finger or a band on your wrist, and every morning it hands you a number.

Recovery: 42%. Readiness: low. Strain: you overdid it. Sleep score: 71.

Let's break down what those numbers actually mean, and what you need versus what you can throw away.

Short version: some of what your device measures is quite good. Most of what it tells you is a stretch. And the gap between those two things is where men get into trouble.

Let's start with where these devices are getting it right.

An Ohio State group ran 536 nights of simultaneous data — thirteen adults wearing five different devices against a proper ECG reference. On resting heart rate, the good devices were very close to the ECG. Oura's fourth-generation ring hit a concordance of 0.99. Gen 3 came in at 0.97.

But in the same study, HRV accuracy was noticeably worse across the board, and it varied significantly between devices.

(Dial MB, et al. Physiol Rep. 2025 Aug;13(16):e70527. PMID: 40834291)

So yes, some of this data holds up. Resting heart rate is genuinely good. But once you get into the weeds with HRV, it starts falling apart — and that's the number your device leans on hardest.

Worth noting: thirteen people isn't a big group. It's a lot of nights, which counts for something, but they were generally healthy adults, so take it for what it is.

Now sleep.

Seven consumer sleep trackers were tested against polysomnography — the gold standard, the actual lab setup with electrodes on your scalp reading brain activity — across 34 adults and three consecutive nights.

Most devices did a decent job of telling asleep from awake, several performing as well as or better than research-grade actigraphy.

But at sleep staging — light, deep, REM, the numbers your app displays in those pretty colored bars — performance dropped off. The devices are inferring your brain state from wrist movement and a light shining at your blood vessels. They aren't reading your brain, because they can't.

(Chinoy ED, et al. Sleep. 2021 May 14;44(5):zsaa291. PMID: 33378539)

A living umbrella review out of University College Dublin, pulling together the systematic reviews across the whole field, lands in the same place: accuracy varies widely by metric and by device, and it's considerably better for the simple stuff than the derived stuff.

(Doherty C, et al. Sports Med. 2024 Nov;54(11):2907-2926. PMID: 39080098)

And then there's the score.

This is the part most men are concerned about, but it's also the part that's going to be least accurate.

The same Dublin group went looking at what actually goes into those composite numbers — Readiness, Recovery, Body Battery, Energy Score, Strain, all of them. Nobody outside the company can tell you what a Recovery score of 42% means, because the methodology is proprietary. You're being handed a verdict with no way to audit it.

(Doherty C, Baldwin M, Lambe R, Burke D, Altini M. Transl Exerc Biomed. 2025;2(2):128-144. doi:10.1515/teb-2025-0001 — not PubMed-indexed)

Now the part that actually matters.

People were told how well they'd supposedly slept, based on made-up REM figures. The ones told they'd slept badly performed worse on cognitive testing. A fabricated number changed how their brains actually worked.

(Draganich C, Erdal K. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014;40(3):857-864. doi:10.1037/a0035546)

And it isn't symmetrical. Nocebo effects are stronger and more persistent than placebo effects. A false you're wrecked costs you more than a false you're recovered ever gains you.

(Kunkel A, et al. eLife. 2025;14:RP105753. doi:10.7554/eLife.105753)

Which is the practical reason I'd rather you not check the app before your feet hit the floor. If the number is wrong, and the wrong number makes you worse, then reading it first thing is a coin flip on your whole day. That's also why the alarm goes across the room this week — the first thing your hand finds shouldn't be a verdict on how you feel.

There's a name for where this ends up. Orthosomnia — patients showing up with insomnia because the tracker told them they slept badly. Chasing the score creates the problem it claims to measure.

(Baron KG, et al. J Clin Sleep Med. 2017;13(2):351-354. doi:10.5664/jcsm.6472)

None of which means sleep doesn't matter. It matters enormously. Sustained wakefulness produces impairment on par with legal intoxication — that's not a metaphor, it's a measured comparison.

(Dawson D, Reid K. Nature. 1997;388(6639):235. doi:10.1038/40775; Williamson AM, Feyer AM. Occup Environ Med. 2000;57(10):649-655. doi:10.1136/oem.57.10.649)

The sleep is king. It's the scoring of it that's shaky.

So here's what I'd do.

Watch:

• Your resting heart rate, and the HRV trend alongside it — not any single morning's number, but whether things are drifting up or down when they shouldn't be.
• When you go to bed, when you wake up, and how much actual sleep you're getting in between.

Ignore:

• Strain scores
• Recovery scores
• Sleep performance scores

Those are proprietary. We have no way of knowing whether they're actually any good.

Sleep hygiene is the whole game, and no ring is going to do that part for you.

Now, if these devices are helping you improve your sleep and keeping you on track with training, then that is a great plus. But just remember that they are not the be-all and end-all. If you are dictating how your day is going based on a proprietary score, then you are missing the forest for the trees.

*There will be a full, in-depth article coming out on the blog about this very topic in the next couple of weeks.*

Worth Remembering

Most marriages sit on one end or the other of what Keller describes. Loved, but never really known. Or known, and quietly less loved for it. Very few of us are actually giving ourselves fully to our spouse and looking to serve them, rather than running a quiet ledger of what we're getting back.

Try This Week

Make yourself get out of bed to turn off your alarm.

Move your alarm across the room. Put your phone on the dresser or the window sill — anywhere you can't reach from the bed. When it goes off in the morning, you have to stand up to shut it off.

That's it.

You'll notice two things. You stop hitting snooze, because standing up is most of the battle. And you stop starting your day inside a screen, because the first thing your hands find isn't your phone.

Ideally the phone wouldn't be in the room at all. But for most men that's not the first step they're willing to take, so I'll meet you in the middle — just get it out of arm's reach.

From the Bookshelf

Digital Minimalism — Cal Newport

Newport's argument is that willpower isn't the problem — you're up against an industry engineered to beat willpower, and it will. So instead of fighting every notification, you decide up front what you actually value, and let technology in only where it clearly serves that. Most of it doesn't survive the test.

Newport's Deep Work is one of my favorite books ever written — we'll talk about that another time. This one is another beauty from him. And it pairs with what I asked you to do this week: the alarm across the room is the small version. This book is the reasoning behind it.

Closing Thought

A younger colleague asked me last week, completely out of nowhere, how you know you've found the right person to marry. I had nothing prepared. What came out was three things.

You both have to accept there's something above you. It doesn't have to be identical — same church, same depth of conviction, all of that can differ. But if one of you is a committed atheist and the other is a practicing Christian, you're starting at a real disadvantage. It can work. I've seen it. It's just much harder, because the thing you're building the marriage on isn't the same thing.

Start with a clear sense that you are not the most important thing in the world, and a foundation built on good moral principle — which, for most of us, comes from believing in a higher power.

You have to be willing to give yourself entirely, expecting nothing back. Not fifty and fifty. All of it. And she has to feel the same. Anyone can be good company on a date. The question is whether you're her safe harbor when things fall apart, and whether that holds when life stops being fun.

And you have to actually say out loud whether you want children or not. Not assume — say it out loud, and more importantly, believe it. If one of you wants nothing to do with children and that isn't changing over time, it's probably not going to work.

Those are certainly not the be-all and end-all of how to find a spouse. But it's what came off the top of my head.

Have a great weekend fellas.