WHOOP opens Advanced Labs to people without the wearable

WHOOP is opening Advanced Labs to people who don’t have a WHOOP membership, removing one of the biggest restrictions around its blood-testing platform. It means you can use the service without buying or wearing a WHOOP, with testing starting at around $150 in the US.

You no longer need the WHOOP band

Until now, Advanced Labs has very much been part of the wider WHOOP package. The feature launched in the US last year, combining blood test results with the health and fitness information collected by WHOOP 5.0 and WHOOP MG.

That restriction has now gone. WHOOP says Advanced Labs is available without a wearable membership, so someone using a Garmin, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Pixel Watch or something completely different can pay for the testing without also maintaining a WHOOP subscription.

Now make no mistake, WHOOP isn’t suddenly pulling Garmin or Apple Watch data into its platform. Instead, it is separating the lab-testing side of WHOOP from the requirement to use its own wearable.

That makes Advanced Labs a much more standalone product than it was when it first rolled out in the US last year. At the time, the attraction was the combination of lab results with WHOOP’s sleep, strain and recovery data. Now WHOOP is effectively saying the laboratory side has value even if you get your everyday wearable data somewhere else.

Testing starts at around $150

Advanced Labs uses Quest Diagnostics in the US and offers blood panels covering areas such as cardiovascular, metabolic, hormonal and inflammatory health. Tests are ordered and reviewed by licensed healthcare providers, while the resulting reports include explanations and recommendations.

Pricing starts at approximately $150. WHOOP hasn’t turned Advanced Labs into a subscription-free replacement for the regular WHOOP experience, but it has removed the annual wearable membership as an entry ticket to the service.

It’s quite a shift from where WHOOP started. The company has spent years building around the idea that the hardware and membership belong together. Even when it introduced support for bringing blood test results into WHOOP, the idea was still centred around enriching the experience of existing members.

Advanced Labs can now bring someone into the WHOOP app before they ever consider wearing the device itself. Whether that eventually becomes another route for converting people into wearable subscribers is an interesting question.

WHOOP is also adding the Galleri cancer test

There is another addition worth mentioning. WHOOP is adding GRAIL’s Galleri multi-cancer early detection test to Advanced Labs, with results delivered through the WHOOP app

Galleri uses a single blood draw to look for signals associated with more than 50 types of cancer. WHOOP says it will be available through nearly 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations in the US, with the actual analysis carried out by GRAIL at its North Carolina laboratory.

That’s a very different proposition from the recovery scores and training guidance WHOOP built its name around. The company has gradually pushed further into broader health with features such as Healthspan, ECG, Blood Pressure Insights and Advanced Labs, and this latest change pushes the platform another step away from being solely about the tracker on your wrist.