Understanding WHOOP Age & how it differs from Pace of Ageing

With the launch of WHOOP 5.0 yesterday, the company has added two new metrics that look beyond your daily scores. Instead of tracking just how you slept last night or how hard you trained this week, WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging try to answer a bigger question: how is your body doing over time? Here’s how they work.

What WHOOP Age actually means

WHOOP Age isn’t about vanity or hitting some mythical fitness milestone. It’s based on six months of your health data and aims to reflect how your current state compares to what’s typical for someone your age and sex.

If your number comes in younger than your real age, WHOOP says you’re trending in a good direction. If it’s higher, it’s a signal that there might be room to improve your sleep, activity, or recovery habits.

The idea is to focus on consistency. WHOOP Age doesn’t change quickly. It’s meant to be stable, showing slow movement over time as you build healthier routines. That’s the key. It isn’t reactive to one bad night or one lazy week. It takes six months of sleep, strain, and fitness inputs, and boils it all down to a single number.

The Pace of Aging tracks your current direction

WHOOP Age gives you the big picture, but Pace of Aging focuses on the short term. It looks at your habits over the past 30 days and tries to predict where things are headed. If you keep doing what you’re doing, is your WHOOP Age likely to go up or down? It’s a way to spot whether you’re trending in the right direction or drifting off course.

It works by comparing your recent 30-day averages to your longer-term six-month baseline. If your sleep has been off, workouts inconsistent, or recovery poor, that’ll likely push your Pace of Aging higher. If things have been tighter lately, the trend should move the other way.

Just like Whoop Age, Pace of Aging is updated once a week. You’ll find them in the Health section of the Whoop smartphone app, under Healthspan. There you will find suggestions on what you can do to improve your Age and Pace of Aging. That way you can try and push those numbers in the right direction.

It’s built from nine specific inputs

So how is all of this calculated? Well, WHOOP doesn’t make this a black box.

Here’s a breakdown of the specific metrics used to calculate WHOOP Age and Pace of Aging, grouped by category:

Sleep

• Hours of Sleep
• Sleep Consistency

Strain

• Weekly Heart Rate Zone Time (zones 1–3 and 4–5)
• Weekly Strength Training Time
• Daily Steps

Fitness

• Lean Body Mass
• VO2 Max
• Resting Heart Rate

It’s worth noting, new members need to log either 21 sleep or recovery sessions in their first month to unlock Healthspan. So it does take a while. The system finishes calibrating after 90 days. After that, as long as you wear WHOOP for at least 21 days each month, you’ll keep getting your weekly updates.

As far as Lean Body Mass – you will need a scale that works with the WHOOP smartphone app and captures this metric. Withings has a range of such devices.

You’ll need the right tier to access it

Unfortunately, these aging metrics aren’t unlocked for everyone. They’re not included in the entry-level WHOOP One plan, and you won’t see them if you’re using the 4.0 hardware on a Free Trial. That’s despite the fact that 4.0 devices are technically capable of calculating all the required data.

WHOOP’s official language is a little vague, but the feature page suggests that existing 4.0 members on full subscriptions could get access soon. It explicitly says, “Healthspan with WHOOP AGE – not available on 4.0 Trial,” which leaves the door open.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

If you’re on the WHOOP 5.0 Peak or Life tiers, though, you are in. Just note that Healthspan is only available if you’re 18 or older. That’s tied to the way WHOOP calibrates its models, which are built around adult physiology. And unlike the ECG metric, this is available in all regions.

WHOOP 5.0 and the new subscription breakdown

Now, it should be noted that all of this is not entirely new. Garmin has offered a Fitness Age metric for some time now, and a few other brands have dipped into similar territory. What WHOOP has done differently is pull in a broader mix of stats to calculate its numbers. And the way it presents the data feels a bit more polished and easier to digest.

WHOOP 5.0 officially launched yesterday, offering hardware updates like a smaller and lighter device, better sensors, and a water-resistant PowerPack. But the real shift is in how you pay for features.

There are now three subscription levels. WHOOP One is the base plan with core tracking tools like sleep, strain, and recovery. Peak adds extras like WHOOP Age, Healthspan, and VO2 Max estimates. Life includes all of that plus ECG and daily blood pressure insights. Pricing runs from $199 a year for One on the company’s website, to $239 for Peak, and $359 for Life. The hardware itself is still included in the subscription. There are also options for those on 4.0 – to upgrade to 5.0 for a fixed fee or by renewing their subscription.

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter! Check out our YouTube channel.