I’ve had the oura ring for about one year and I would like to break down the benefits of using the oura ring. First off I am an endurance runner that runs about 60 miles per week. When I picked up the oura ring I wanted it to use it mainly for recovery purposes. After about a year of using the oura ring I found the data very valuable. The sleep tracking and the heart rate variability (HRV) data has been useful during my training cycle.
Here’s some of the things I like and don’t like about the oura ring. Here’s our oura ring review.
Oura ring features
The Oura Ring is a wearable device designed to track various aspects of your health and wellness. Here are some of its key features:
- Sleep Tracking: The Oura Ring uses advanced sensors to track the quality and quantity of your sleep, including your sleep stages (REM, light, and deep sleep), sleep score, and sleep trends over time.
- Activity Tracking: The Oura Ring tracks your daily activity levels, including steps taken, calories burned, and active time. It also provides personalized activity recommendations based on your fitness level and goals.
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Monitoring: HRV is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. The Oura Ring tracks your HRV throughout the day, which can provide insights into your stress levels, recovery, and overall health.
- Body Temperature Monitoring: The Oura Ring measures your body temperature continuously throughout the day and night, which can help you identify changes in your health and track your menstrual cycle.
- Respiratory Rate Monitoring: The Oura Ring can also track your respiratory rate, which is the number of breaths you take per minute. This can provide insights into your breathing patterns and overall health.
- Guided Breathing Exercises: The Oura Ring offers guided breathing exercises to help you reduce stress and improve your overall well-being.
- Personalized Insights: The Oura Ring uses advanced algorithms to analyze your data and provide personalized insights and recommendations to help you improve your sleep, activity levels, and overall health.
Recovery data
My favorite thing about the oura ring is the recovery data. This allows me to see if I am training too hard or if I am not getting the sleep I need to train at a high level. The oura ring will also detect stress in my daily life. Heart rate variability measurement is a great tool to see if you’re recovering well and here’s some reasons why it’s important for recovery. The recovery data was a lot of fun to track during my oura ring review.
Heart rate variability and recovery
Heart rate variability (HRV) is the variation in time intervals between successive heartbeats, also known as inter-beat intervals (IBI), and is influenced by both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. HRV can be measured through electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings, and it has been found to be an important indicator of cardiovascular health, stress, and recovery.
In terms of recovery, HRV can be used as a tool to assess an individual’s ability to bounce back from physical or mental stress. After an intense physical activity, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, leading to a decrease in HRV. The parasympathetic nervous system then takes over, leading to an increase in HRV and a return to baseline levels. The time it takes for an individual’s HRV to return to baseline levels is an important measure of their recovery.
Research has shown that athletes with higher HRV tend to have better recovery after intense training or competition. Additionally, individuals with lower HRV may be at a greater risk for developing cardiovascular disease and may have a harder time recovering from physical or mental stress.
There are several methods for improving HRV and promoting recovery, such as regular physical activity, stress management techniques, and adequate sleep. These practices can help to balance the autonomic nervous system and improve overall cardiovascular health.
Recovery data and training
One of the best things about the oura ring is that it can give you some insight on what you should be doing with your training. If your HRV is lower than normal after training or your sleep score is low you might want to back off hard workouts to let your body recover. Every morning when I wake up I take a look at my ring to see if I am fully recovered for a hard workout.
One downside is that you might feel bad about skipping a hard workout due to the data given by the oura ring. I am guilty of not listening to the ring many times because I want to get my key workouts in. If you’re a type A workout monster and don’t want to skip workouts you might adjust the pace a little or give yourself a little more recovery while doing the workout.
Oura sleep data
During my oura ring review, I really enjoyed the sleep data. the oura ring gave me a lot of insight into how well I am sleeping at night which allowed me to adjust my sleep habits to improve my sleep score.
The Oura Ring is designed to track your sleep patterns and provide you with detailed information about your sleep quality. It uses a combination of sensors, including an infrared LED sensor, a 3D accelerometer, and a gyroscope, to monitor your movement, heart rate variability, and temperature throughout the night.
Using this data, the Oura Ring is able to track the following metrics related to your sleep:
- Total sleep time
- Time spent in each sleep stage (deep, REM, and light)
- Sleep efficiency
- Resting heart rate
- Respiratory rate
- Sleep latency (the time it takes you to fall asleep)
- Sleep disruptions (the number of times you wake up during the night)
Based on this information, the Oura Ring generates a “Sleep Score” each night, which gives you an overall picture of the quality of your sleep. This score takes into account factors such as your sleep stages, sleep timing, and sleep disturbances, and is designed to help you understand how well you’re sleeping and identify areas for improvement.
You can view your sleep data and Sleep Score in the Oura app, which provides detailed insights and recommendations based on your sleep patterns. With this information, you can make adjustments to your sleep habits and routines to improve the quality and duration of your sleep.
Oura ring workout tracking
Where the oura ring falls short is workout tracking. The device is not a gps workout device like a garmin, apple watch or fitbit. If you are serious about working out the oura ring will not cut it for workout tracking.
The Oura Ring is primarily designed to track sleep and readiness, but it can also provide some basic insights into your activity levels and workout performance.
The ring uses its built-in sensors, including an accelerometer and gyroscope, to track your movement and activity throughout the day. It can detect when you’re walking, running, or engaging in other physical activities, and it can estimate the number of calories you’ve burned based on your activity level and other factors.
In addition, the Oura Ring has a feature called “Activity Goal” which allows you to set daily targets for your physical activity and monitor your progress towards those goals. The app provides you with feedback on your progress and helps you adjust your goals as needed.
While the Oura Ring can provide some basic insights into your workout performance, it doesn’t offer the same level of detailed tracking as some other fitness wearables on the market. If you’re primarily
interested in tracking your workouts and fitness progress, you may want to consider using a dedicated fitness tracker or smartwatch in addition to the Oura Ring.
Oura ring cost
The cost of the oura can be a little high for some people but I think for the size of the ring and ease of use it’s a good deal. The ring is very easy to wear while sleeping. My biggest issue with sleep trackers is that they are about the size of a watch which can be annoying to use while sleeping.
- Oura Ring (2nd generation) priced at $299
- Oura Ring (Heritage) priced at $399
- Oura Ring (Balance) priced at $299
Monthly cost of oura ring membership is about $5.99 and if you want full access to the data you will need the membership.
With an oura Premium membership, you get access to features such as:
- Personalized insights and recommendations based on your sleep, activity, and readiness data
- Advanced sleep analysis, including detailed breakdowns of your sleep stages, sleep quality, and sleep score
- Customizable goal setting and progress tracking
- Guided meditation exercises and relaxation techniques
- Integration with other health and fitness apps, such as Apple Health, Google Fit, and Strava
You can buy the oura ring at https://ouraring.com/
Final verdict
If you are in the market for a sleep/recovery tracker the oura ring is a great choice. I love the size of the device and find that it has better sleep data than my garmin 935 and apple watch. The HRV data is great for tracking recovery from my workouts. The recovery score does line up with how I feel so I trust the data.
I would recommend giving the oura ring a try if it fits in your budget. Thank you for reading our oura ring review.
Check out our review of the altra paradigm 6
