We may earn a commission from links on this page.
If you love the idea of tracking your health and fitness with a screenless band but don’t want to pony up for a Whoop subscription, you’ll soon have more options. Maybe. Probably: Three different Whoop-likes have popped up in the past few weeks, but I’m still murky on the details of what they’ll offer, and none of them are (yet) available for sale to the general public. In order from most to least likely to be real products you can buy, they’re coming from Polar, Amazfit, and Garmin.
There’s a lot of buzz around these devices because plenty of folks would love a fitness tracker that isn’t a watch. Maybe you already have a mechanical watch and don’t need another thing on your wrist; or maybe you don’t want anything on your wrist at all and would love a nice comfy armband instead (it really is easy to forget you’re wearing the Whoop band, and it’s my favorite placement when I’m in the gym since a watch can get in the way of some exercises).
So far, the only fitness band on the market is Whoop, which uses a subscription model. You pay for the service and get the device at no charge, sort of—a polite fiction that falls apart whenever the company announces a new hardware version and there turn out to be a cost to upgrade.
If an established fitness watch maker came out with a screenless band, it wouldn’t immediately be a Whoop killer, because it’d be missing out on Whoop’s app, which is honestly the best thing about it and which clearly took a ton of development effort to create. I wouldn’t expect any of these devices to be true competitors to Whoop as a service, but the device alone would give people another option, and that’s pretty cool.
You would think it’s easy to make a fitness band—just design a watch but leave off the screen. For whatever reason, this isn’t a product that other brands have managed to launch, despite the potential demand. Until now, maybe! Here’s what we know about the three bands that may be coming to market this year.
Polar’s band: officially announced, but without a photo or name
Polar announced today that it’s coming out with a “brand-new product category” and you’ll be able to buy the item, whatever it is, in September 2025. Polar describes it as a “screen-free wrist device” and specifies that it will be “subscription-free.”
It’s possible that this device will be a consumer version of Polar 360, a screenless band that it has marketed toward businesses. The use cases on the Polar 360 website include corporate wellness, sports teams, and some frankly dystopian-sounding employee monitoring for truck drivers. Device reviewer DC Rainmaker said in a video that he heard from a viewer who had bought some of these devices through a business, and they cost 90 euros each.
Amazfit’s Helio Strap: exclusive to Hyrox athletes (for now?)
Amazfit, by contrast, has photos and a name for its device. It’s called the Helio Strap, and is currently only available for the 15 top athletes in Hyrox, a Crossfit-like sport. (Note that they don’t call it a “band” because Amazfit already sells several products in a Fitbit-like wristband shape that have names like “Amazfit Band 7.”)
What do you think so far?
The company is clearly planning to sell these to the general public at some point, since their website boasts about its battery life (11 days), number of sport modes (27), and other things that matter to potential customers and not just Hyrox spectators. Amazfit also specifies that there are no subscription fees.
Even more promising, a product listing for an all-black (not Hyrox branded) version of the Amazfit Helio strap was reportedly live on Walmart’s website for a brief moment, with a price tag of $79.99. So far there is no word on when that product might launch for real.
Garmin’s band: one tiny alleged leak
Garmin users have long been voicing hopes for a ring or band so that they can keep feeding data into the Garmin ecosystem without having to wear a sports watch every time they go out for a formal event. (This is a surprisingly common complaint/request/dilemma on the Garmin user subreddits.)
The idea of a Garmin band was leaked, maybe, to the website The 5K Runner, which has a history of publishing Garmin leaks that sometimes come true. The post on this potential device was accompanied by an AI image, thus making it look real at first glance—but nope, it was created by an algorithm that can’t even make a sleeping woman’s head look like it’s attached to her body, and certainly doesn’t have any insight into what Garmin may or may not be planning for a sleep band.
The writer of The 5K Runner is “100%” certain that this is a real product, and predicts the launch date as “soon, with August at the latest, and more likely by the end of July.” But without more information, it’s hard to know whether we should be as certain. I asked a Garmin rep about this rumor, and they declined to comment.
