Oura Ring Review

This post isn’t sponsored by Eating Evolved or Oura Ring, so just know that all of the opinions here are my own and that I don’t have any cool discount codes or anything to give you guys.

Back in early February, I entered an Oura Ring giveaway hosted by Eating Evolved (my favorite chocolate company EVER). I never thought that I would actually win it, but alas, here we are!

I’ve been using my ring for the month or so, and I’ve been loving most of the features despite a few qualms! That being said, here’s a little bit about my experience with the Oura Ring!

When I Wear It

You can wear the Oura ring 24/7. It’s waterproof, sweatproof, and pretty lifeproof — I’ve dropped it on the bathroom floor a few times with no issues. I wash the dishes while wearing it and wash my hands with it. And I can use hand sanitizer with it on, too.

However, just because I can wear it all the time doesn’t mean that I do. I never wear any of my hand jewelry when showering or while at the gym. I kept that same practice up with Oura. The website does say that it can be worn at the gym, but I would advise against it. You can scratch up the ring with barbells and dumbbells, just like any other ring.

I probably wear my ring (on my right ring finger) between 20 and 22 hours a day on average. It all depends on how long my workout and morning routine may take me. I’m always sure to wear it overnight so that it can track my sleep properly. For that, I ensure that the three little LED sensors are lined up on the inside of my hand. I made sure that the ring was the right size by using Oura’s (free!) sizing kit before ordering my actual ring. When you order, they send a kit of plastic rings in every size to help you choose which is right for you. I sized up a bit since my fingers tend to swell while I sleep or when I’m walking a lot. (It was a good decision.)

Since I wear my ring so often, it captures a ton of data about my day. Here’s a little bit more about how you can access it through the Android version of the Oura app. (It’s also available for iOS.)

Readiness

The home page of the Oura app features something called your Readiness Score at the very top. The score ranges from 0-100% and helps you decide which days are best for challenging yourself through more activity and which are better for taking it easy.

My average Readiness Score seems to be hovering around 86, which the app tells me is pretty dang good. When you click into that tab, Oura gives you a breakdown of your previous night’s sleep score, sleep balance, previous day’s activity, activity balance, body temperature, resting heart rate (RHR), and your recovery index, as well as your heart rate variability and RHR broken down hourly during the previous night’s sleep.

Wow that was a lot. So what are the major takeaways for me?

I usually ignore the activity balance bar because I use Oura to track my sleep, not my activity. Body temperature takes a pass as well for me since I use a hormonal birth control pill. If I weren’t, paying attention to this statistic should be able to help me track my ovulation cycle. I hope to explore this in the future, but for now, it’s just not necessary.

Resting Heart Rate (RHR) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) are the key metrics that I check every day with my Oura ring, so let’s get a little more into those.

RHR is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you’re at rest. Mine tends to average around 46 BPM, but if yours is nowhere near this, don’t freak out! For a normal adult, this number can vary from 40-100 BPM.

In general, a RHR that is slightly below your average is a sign that you have good readiness. But if you wake up to find that your RHR is significantly higher or lower than usual, you may find that you should take it a little easier throughout the day. If you have an intense day of training, train later than usual, or have a heavy meal right before you go to sleep, you may find that your RHR is outside the norm.

Those factors can also play into your HRV. HRV is a measure of the time between your heart’s beats. In general, a healthy person’s heart rate should be pretty varied during sleep. It can range from anywhere below 20 to over 100 milliseconds, but I’ve found that my average is about 112ms.

When your HRV is high, it’s typically a sign that you have pretty good health and fitness. When it’s low, it could be a sign that you’re overtraining and not getting enough recovery time.

What does this mean for me?

I’ve only been using the ring for a few weeks, but I do have to say that the Readiness Scores seem to match up with how I wake up actually feeling. I wake up feeling groggy and tired on lower scored days and ready to take on the world on higher scored days. On rest days, I sync my ring as soon as I wake up. However, on the days I train, I don’t actually look at my Readiness Score or Sleep data until after I get back from the gym.

Why? Because knowledge isn’t always power.

If I were to wake up feeling good but then see that my Readiness Score is lower than average, I know that it would mess with my head and that I wouldn’t push myself as hard during my workout. Conversely, if I woke up feeling kind of off but then saw that my Readiness Score was still high, I may push myself too hard and end up injuring or straining myself.

At the end of the day, it’s important to trust your own body first. After all, you’re the only you you’ve got.

Sleep

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Oura gives your sleep a different score (from 1-100%) that’s supposed to be a metric of your overall sleep efficiency. It’s measured by looking at your total sleep time, restfulness, deep sleep time, REM sleep time, sleep latency, and overall timing. My average score seems to hover around 83%.

One thing I love about Oura is that they use data from you across time to calculate these scores instead of using the “generally recommended” amounts of sleep. For example, I tend to sleep between 6.5 to 8 hours a night on average, and that works for me. If the ring made it so that I had to reach 8 hours of sleep to get a good score, I would never make it!

I love seeing my sleep stages broken down into time Awake, REM, Light, and Deep. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is definitely the most fun to track because the ring shows me when I’m dreaming. There have been a few nights where I wake up to go to the bathroom and realize I’m waking out of a dream state, and when I check in the morning, the ring confirms it! Cool, huh?

What does this mean for me?

I know I need to work on my Restfulness score the most. I tend to wake up at least once a night to pee (if not more), and I don’t think it’s because I’m drinking too much water before bed. Disturbances in sleep can be caused for a ton of different reasons, including hormone and blood sugar imbalances. Since getting my ring, I’ve been having an extra snack before bed if I want it and have noticed that my nightly wake-ups have reduced.

Tracking my RHR has been super beneficial for me as well. Oura recommends that you look for certain shapes in the arc of the RHR graph to find out how your body is faring during sleep. The Hammock is the most beneficial curve; it signifies that your body was relaxed during the night and ready to rise after a good night’s rest. Here, your RHR starts out higher, has its lowest point at the midpoint of sleep, and then gradually rises along with your cortisol spike to wake you in the morning.

If you find your RHR looking more like a downward slope, that could mean that your metabolism is working overtime during sleep. Having your lowest HR right before waking usually means you feel pretty groggy in the morning. If you worked out or ate something right before bed, this could be the reason. Try and finish up any activity or eating a little while before getting some Zzz’s!

Some nights, I wake up with missing RHR data in the middle of the night. Oura guesses that that could happen for a few reasons: the ring could be spinning around my finger in my sleep (plausible), my resting heart rate could be going too low for the sensors if it’s under 33 BPM (still plausible based on my stats), or I may be falling asleep on my arm and cutting off circulation to my hand (probably the most plausible). I haven’t noticed that this happens frequently enough to really mess with my overall data tracking, but wanted to let you guys know that it doesn’t always work as intended.

Another quick issue that’s specific to Android users only: we can’t edit our sleep time. In the iOS version of the app, users are able to shorten the length of their sleep time if the ring measured a low heart rate during reading or watching TV as “light” sleep. This has happened to me quite a few times. The most ridiculous one was when it thought I was sleeping while seeing a movie at the theater. I’m hoping that the Android version of the app gets updated soon so I can remedy those instances myself!

Activity

Although I didn’t plan on using my Oura ring as a fitness tracker, I’ve found myself checking and using these tools daily. Oura gives you an Activity Score each day out of 100%. They calculate it as a measure of your activity over the last 7 days. The other metrics are Goal Progress, Total Burn, Walking Equivalency, and Steps. There’s also an option to enable notifications so that Oura reminds you to move every hour, but I don’t use that feature.

While I do like being able to see my daily step count, I’m personally a little irked that Oura gives you an estimated Total Calorie Burn. Oura calculates it by logging an estimated BMR based on your gender, height, weight, & activity data throughout the day.

Overall, I try not to put too much weight into the numbers. It is an estimation, after all. But that’s just me!

What does this mean for me?

I love using Oura’s step count feature to see how far I’ve walked or hiked each day, but it’s more for curiosity’s sake than anything else. It’s also really fun to see how Oura measures my activity levels while I’m cooking or cleaning or doing laundry. Most of the time, my activity levels skyrocket!

The Oura app also comes with an option for you to manually input activities that you do without wearing the ring, which I use to log my gym sessions. The app estimates the amount of calories burned during that time by using the type of exercise you tell it you’ve done along with your RPE: high, moderate, or low intensity. If you’re looking for a super accurate way to calculate calories burned during a workout, this isn’t it. But if you’re just looking for a way to measure consistency, Oura can do it for you.

Final Thoughts

I’m super grateful to Eating Evolved and Oura for hosting this giveaway. This ring is something I had been contemplating buying for awhile, and I’m definitely glad I have one in my possession! I’m sure I’ll be wearing it every day for the foreseeable future.

That being said, would I pay full price for it? Personally, no. However, that’s because I don’t currently have any overwhelming health challenges that I’m trying to overcome. I’m also not trying to train for a marathon, or a weight lifting competition, or anything else that would involve being super strict about my Sleep or Activity. For the average fit person, these statistics are cool and are definitely useful. But the high price point would have swayed me away.

Ultimately, you should decide for yourself whether or not a fitness tracker like Oura is right for you! If you have any questions about it that I haven’t answered, leave them as a comment and I’ll be sure to answer you if I can!