Did Amazfit Just Kill Whoop? - Helio Strap In-Depth Review!

0:00 This is called the Amazefitit Helio Strap and it can track your sleep, your recovery, and your activities in a very low form factor with no screen. And it's pretty affordable. And if all that sounds pretty familiar, it's because this device is challenging one of the big names out there called Whoop, which I'm actually wearing up here, which is a very similar device. And we'll talk about the similarities throughout this video. So, what is the Amazfit Helio Strap? Well, essentially it's a simple band as you can see here, but inside here there's also a little pod with a heart rate sensor inside of it that can track your SPO2 or blood oxygen saturation level and your heart rate throughout the day. The cool thing about the Helio Strap is that this product ties into the Amazefitit ecosystem. If you don't know who Amazefitit is, they've been around for a number of

0:46 years and they've become more and more popular with devices like these. This is the Amazefitit T-Rex 3 and this is the Active 2 here. Both of these smart watches have a ton of features at a really affordable price point. And the really cool thing about Amazefitit is I think they're the only brand out there right now that has several ways to track your health and wellness. For example, they had the Amazefitit Helio Ring, which I have here, and you could wear the ring at night while you're sleeping, put your watch on in the morning, and go for a run, and then put the ring back on later in the day to track your sleep again. And all of that data would get collected in one app on your phone. So there'd be no gaps in your data. And now they've added one more product to their lineup with the Helio Strap. And this works the same way. And in fact, you can use this to track activities as well,

1:31 like going for a run. And we'll talk about that later in this video. Another thing to mention about the Helio Strap is that this device can be used alone. I know I mentioned that you could tie it in with your other devices like your smartwatch or your smart ring, but you don't need to own those. You can pair the Helio strap directly with to the Zep app on your phone and use it standalone. Now, when it comes to purchasing an Amazefitit Helio strap, this is where things get pretty interesting because this device is $99 here in the USA and that is substantially cheaper than a lot of the competition out there. For example, right now on my bicep here, I'm wearing the Whoop Band MG and this device costs $359. And not only that, it's $359 per year because it's a subscription model. Here with the Amisfit Helio Strap, there is

2:18 no subscription required. You simply buy the band for 99 bucks, you wear it, and you never have to pay again. Now, as you've probably noticed, the model I have here is branded Hyrox. Hyrox, if you didn't know, is an upand cominging sport where it's sort of a fitness race. There's running, there's weightlifting, there's throwing weighted balls and things like that. Now, I know this is kind of a loud band here. This is one they produced particularly for Hy Rocks athletes to wear, but at the time of launch, there will be a standard black band available for the Helio strap as well. And like I said, the pod inside actually pops right out. Whoop. So, you can actually buy multiple bands in different colors and just pop the pod in and out as you please, which is kind of cool. Now, at the time of launch, I don't know what accessories will be available for the Helio Strap. I am

3:06 hopeful that they come out with some sort of bicep band like I'm wearing here on my whoop band because I prefer to wear it up here. Flipping the device over here, there's something interesting about this strap and that it actually does have quick release pins here. And these are exactly the same thing that you'll find on a watch like this uh Macefitit Active 2 here. So, I could pop this band off with my fingernail and I could actually put this standard watch band on the Helio strap instead, which is kind of cool and opens up the possibilities for a lot of different color combinations. When it comes to the size of the device itself, it measures in for me at about 28 mm wide and it's about, let's see, 10 1/2 mm thick without the heart rate bump. And on my scale with the included band, it comes in at just 20 g, which is incredibly

3:53 light. Flipping the watch back over here, you're also going to notice that it has a couple of these metal contacts at the top here. And that is for the Amazefitit magnetic charger here. This is actually the exact same charger that you'd find on something like the Amazefitit T-Rex 3 here. I can put it on here. And it also works on the new Helio Strap as well. When it comes to battery life on the Amazfit Helio Strap, this device gets up to 10 days of use on a single charge. And in my experience so far, after testing it for a couple of weeks, I can say that seems accurate. Okay, now that we've talked about the device itself and how it works, let's talk about what data it actually collects. And to do that, I'm showing you my phone here with the Amazefitit Zep app open. Now, because the Helio Strap is part of the Amazefitit ecosystem, like I said before, you can

4:38 see at the top left corner here that I have two devices paired to this app currently. I have a smartwatch, which is the little green icon on the right there, and then I have the Helio strap on the left there. And if I dive into the device settings here, you can see the Helio strap, the state of charge of the Helio strap. It says it was charged 5 days ago, and I have 40% battery left. And then below that, I have a bunch of settings for the strap itself. If I dive into the health monitor settings here, you can see at the top I have high heart rate and low heart rate settings. I also have heart rate push options here. If I enable this, I can use the Helio strap as an external heart rate sensor for any device. Doesn't even have to be a Maze Fit. It could be a treadmill at the gym. It could be a Garmin watch, an Apple Watch. I could transmit the heart rate data from this device to one of those devices as well. Scrolling down, we have

5:24 assisted sleep monitor settings. Here we have stress monitor settings. Here we have blood oxygen sensor toggles here to turn that on or off. Now, below the health monitor, we have workout detection settings. If I go in here, you can turn on or off automatic workout detection. So, if you go out for a run, the Helio strap will pick that up and mark it as a run in the Zep app here. And you can also change the sensitivity at which it picks up those activities. Scrolling down, we have settings for alarm. Now, this is a vibration feedback on the device itself. So, if you turn on an alarm here, your device will vibrate to wake you up in the morning, which is kind of nice. Jumping back to the home screen here, let's look at some of this data, though, cuz it's pretty interesting. So, at the top here, we have my overview for the day. All the

6:09 way on the left, we have my sleep score, which is very low. Biocharge, we'll talk more on that in a minute. And then we have my exertion score on the right here. Jumping back to a previous day just to give you a better idea of data. Again, we have sleep, biocharge, and exertion score. If I click on the sleep tab here, it'll drop me into my sleep metrics. And this shows uh my wake up time for the past 7 days, my sleep score for that night, a little AI generated blurb to give me an idea on my sleep. It tells me I had a good sleep that particular night. And if I scroll down, I get all the sleep metrics, all the granular sleep data. And if I scroll down further, we get a full graph of the past seven days of my sleep metrics, my sleep regularity and what time I woke up and went to sleep previous days and my sleep heart rate as well. Below that, we

6:55 have a graph for my hypopnia. I'm not even sure what that is, but it probably relates to sleep apnea or something like that. Then we have my respiratory rate. And we have a weekly trend and a monthly trend of my sleep as well. Now, if we jump back to the overview page, I want to dive into biocharge for a second. Now biocharge is a new metric from Amazefitit and this is super interesting. In the past they called this metric readiness and readiness in my experience with Amazefitit products was always a little bit wonky. It always gave me a very high readiness score on a given day and readiness was not dynamic. It didn't adjust throughout the day. And that's where biocharge is different. In my experience with biocharge so far, it's far more sensitive to, you know, life habits and sleep and uh activities

7:41 and things like that. And more importantly, it is now dynamic, which means as you progress throughout the day, your biocharge will go down. You could think of biocharge almost like Garmin's body battery if you're familiar with Garmin. So on this particular day, I woke up with a biocharge of 75 and by the end of the day, I had a biocharge of nine. So if I scroll down, you can see my daily biocharge insight here. That's a little AI generated blurb to explain what happened on this particular day. And it says here, my evening biocharge was low due to a high exercise in expenditure day. But more importantly, if I scroll down, we get this little graph. And this little graph is really useful. It shows my sleep here on the left charging my biocharge back up. I woke up in the morning and then it started going back down slowly. But

8:27 here, I actually went for a pretty hard run. I I did a workout that day and that's where I drained even more biocharge. It went down quicker because of that high expenditure activity. After that run completed, you can see I took a shower and I took the band off for a moment. That's why there's a gap in the data there. And then by the end of the day, I went down to a biocharge of nine, which is pretty low. Now, down below that, we also get a graph for HRV and resting heart rate as well for the past 7 days. Jumping back to the overview page here, I want to dive into the third thing up at the top of the screen called exertion. So this exertion score will give you an idea on how much you exerted yourself on a given day. This exertion score will give you a target to hit on that given day. For example, here you can see today I have a target of 15 and I only have two in terms of my exertion

9:13 today. So I'm only at 13%. I have not gone for my run yet today. If I did go for my run, that exertion score would be much higher. Down below that, again, we get more AI generated blurs to give me information about my exertion score. Scrolling down further, we get my daily suggestions for my exertion score. You can see I have low intensity, uh heart rate zone of 117 to 149, and a duration of 10 minutes, which would be a very short workout. And for exertion, we also get graphs. We get my fatigue level here, my fitness level, and my training status down below here. Now, for whatever reason, my training status is always reading zero. I don't know if that's because I'm on some sort of beta software right now, but hopefully that gets fixed by the time this launched. Now, you might be wondering how all these metrics compare to other devices. While I was wearing the Amazefit Helio

9:59 strap, I also wore my Garmin here and I had the Whoop band on my bicep as well. So, we could get an idea of how all these metrics line up. So, here's one example where the biocharge metric gave me a score of 74. My body battery was at 91, which is higher than the biocharge. The Whoop recovery score was at 64, and my ultraum dynamic recovery score was also at 86. And on that particular day, my perceived energy level I would probably rate around 70 or 80. So that just gives you an idea on how accurate these things are. So those are the daily health metrics on the Amazfit Helio strap with the sleep, recovery, biocharge, and exertion. But the strap actually does a lot more. If we scroll down, we also have more core metrics. You can see here my resting heart rate,

10:45 my heart rate variability. It's got my sleep details here, my skin temperature, my exertion load, and my training status. Scrolling down further, we have a graph for my heart rate throughout the day, and we also get my step count here as well. Below that, we also get calories burned throughout the day, stress tracking. We also get my pi score, which is always on the these Amazfit products, my weight, which is a manual entry thing, and they kept the readiness score, but they sort of buried it down at the bottom of the list here. Now, when it comes to using the Amisfit Helio Strap as a standalone device, you might be wondering, how would I track my workouts? Well, you can still do that, too, which is kind of cool. If we jump over to the workout tab here, you can see I've got my run from yesterday at 10 miles, another run before that there as well. But if I want to go on a new run and use the Helio Strap only with no

11:32 other watch, I can simply scroll down, go to start a workout, choose what workout I want to do. For example, if I want to do outdoor running and now I can simply hit start. The heart rate data will get transmitted from the Helio strap and the app on my phone will utilize the GPS from my phone to get a complete view of this activity. So, I'll get a GPS map. I can sync it with Strava. It'll have heart rate data, position data, everything just like I was using a watch just with the Helio strap alone and my phone. Now, when you do start a workout, it looks like this. You can see it counts down and then you get this data screen here which gives you some information. You get your time, your pace, and your heart rate. But it would be cool if this was customizable or maybe you could add or remove metrics to this. Right now, it's pretty basic.

12:17 If you do want to see a map view, you can click this little button up in the top right corner and that will bring up a map as well. And you can also lock and unlock this page so you don't accidentally pause your workout when your phone's in your pocket. When you stop that workout, it'll be saved to the Zep app on your phone, and it'll be synced over to any third-party services you have connected here, including Strava. And the cool thing about tracking workouts with the Helio Strap and the Zep app, is that they still roll up into your exercise status. So, you got your estimated V2 max here, your training load, and your recovery time. And all of these are still affected by the Helio Strap data even though it's not a smartwatch. Now, unfortunately, the estimated V2 max is still very low. I've had this issue with other Amazefitit products in the past. For example, I've been lab tested at a V2

13:02 max of 57 where this has me at 49 and it doesn't really line up with my other test devices all that favorably. Now that we've talked about activity tracking with the Amisfit Helio strap, you might be wondering how accurate is the data from that optical heart rate sensor on the back of the device. Well, the good news is this sensor is the exact same sensor they use on a lot of their watches, including something like the Amazefitit T-Rex 3 here. As you can see here, we've got a graph comparing it to the HRM600, which is ECG, and my Garmin watch as well. And by and large, the graphs look very similar. There's really no outliers here. Everything's lining up pretty favorably. Yes, there are a couple of speed bumps here or there, couple of spikes up or down, but nothing major. And generally, in most of my runs so far, I'm getting pretty accurate results. I think this is

13:49 because of two things. First of all, that updated heart rate sensor they've been using in their watches has been much better in my testing so far. But the other thing helping out the Helio strap is the fact that it's just so small and light. Its lightweight nature with this Velcro band means it's not moving around on my wrist at all. And because of that, it has the best opportunity for accurate data. Okay, that sort of brings us to the end of this video where I want to talk about the Amazefitit Helio Strap, what I think about it so far, and my recommendations. I think if you're an Amazefitit user and maybe you have a smartwatch like the T-Rex 3 here. If you don't like wearing this to bed or sleeping with it, this is a really cool thing to have. It's 99 bucks. It's low profile. You can get a lot of different colored straps. It's very comfortable. I'd rather sleep with this on than a watch. Yeah, things could

14:35 be a little bit better in some regards. For example, the V2 Max. I'm still waiting for that to be updated, but Amazefitit continues to push the envelope. I've complained in the past about their sleep score being a little bit wonky, their readiness score being a little bit wonky, and with this latest release, with the new Zep app, the new metrics, that biocharge feature, things are looking a lot better. Is it a Whoop killer? Probably not. There's still some advantages to the Whoop platform, and I put a little bit more weight in the results I get from Whooped to the Helio Strap. But still, for 99 bucks, you are getting a lot here, and there is no subscription. I think if you are in the market for something like this or you've been eyeing something like the Whoop band, this is worth taking a look at. But that's just my opinion and I'm just some guy here on YouTube talking to

15:21 myself in a room with no one else in it. It's kind of weird. But now I want to hear from you in the comments down below. Are you interested in the Amazefit Helio Strap? Is this something you were hoping they were going to make? And if you are excited about it, are you going to run out and buy one or are you going to wait and see what other options become available? because it seems like these screenless devices are sort of all the rage these days. Okay, that's the end of this video. Hopefully you find it helpful. And if you did find it helpful, I would really appreciate it if you drop down and give me a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel down below so you don't miss more videos from me in the future. And then after you do that, as always, make sure to check out the links in the description down below where you can head over to Amazefitit and pick up one of your own Helio straps or a smartwatch or all the other things I talked about in this video. I also have links to my other social media profiles down there. My Instagram, my

16:08 threads, my podcast, and my merch store where you can pick up a sweet Chase the Summit hat or a t-shirt. Check that out, too. With that, I got to go now. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. I get ready. Get it cracking like a [Music] release. The party starting and rest and it ain't fair. I've been waiting on this moment my whole life. Yeah. Give me my crown to fix just right. Make it look good. [Music]