How to Track Your Recovery With the Oura Ring

In our last article, I started experimenting with sleep tracking in the hopes of recovering better from weightlifting workouts. I used the Oura ring and the Whoop band, but today I’m going to talk mainly about Oura – my favorite of the two – and what metrics I find useful.

As we discussed last time, sleep is important for athletic recovery . After a particularly hard workout, your body needs to recover. Depending on how much you strain your body, this process can take anywhere from a few days to weeks. Any trainer will tell you that getting enough sleep all the time is probably the best thing you can do to help your recovery. (Good nutrition comes second, and everything else – massage, ice baths, nutritional supplements – pales in comparison.)

At this point, I have nearly three months of Oura data, as well as my own training logs and various other tracking data. Oura provides a web interface for graphing your data at cloud.ouraring.com , which I used to test some of the trends I noticed, and I’ll include screenshots from there and from the app in this snippet. So let’s see what I found.

What Oura Measures

The Oura ring slips over your finger – literally a ring and looks like a regular piece of jewelry – and has sensors inside that can measure your heart rate, temperature, and movement. Based on the collected data, the application calculates various scores and metrics. For example, it can measure the lowest heart rate at night, but it also notes what time of night it happened. It combines several different metrics to give you an overall assessment of your sleep each night and your “readiness” each morning. (If you’re interested , the Gizmodo review goes into more detail on the features.)

Oura ring can sort the track exercise, it increases its activity points when I walk, but if you want the data to be really accurate, you can use a different tracker or manually enter your workouts. For example, I can track a strength training session on my Apple Watch, or I can take off all of my trackers and then just tell the app that I trained for two hours.

(While the ring is comfortable enough for everyday use, it’s too short to be comfortable when you pull the barbell. I take off my Oura ring and wedding bands when I raise my hands. Some people don’t mind the feel and keep their rings during exercise; others remove them so as not to scratch the surface. At your discretion.)

While you sleep, Oura sensors measure your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, your body temperature and breathing rate. They can also tell the difference between when you are moving and when you are completely disconnected, and by all accounts, they can make pretty good guesses about when you sleep, and even when you enter each stage of sleep. We switch between deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep several times a night, and in the morning you can see it all on the graph.

Metrics I Look For

Every day, the app shows readiness and sleep scores. (There is also an activity score, although you won’t see it unless you go to the activity tab.) Readiness is the number you see first on the app’s home screen, and it includes everything else. It includes your sleep score and your recent activity.

Of all the charts and metrics in the app, I find the readiness screen chart the most useful. It shows your readiness score as a bar graph overlaid with your heart rate for each resting day.

In the olden days, before sleep trackers or digital fitness trackers were common, I knew about my resting heart rate. A lower RHR is accompanied by an improvement in cardio fitness, so it’s interesting to see how it decreases during exercise. But if your RHR suddenly jumps, it could be a sign that you are working too hard. Overtraining syndrome can cause a higher-than-normal heart rate at rest; there may also be illness or stress.

(A quick note on these numbers: while my resting heart rate on the graph is indeed at a low level – which is considered a positive point – it is also the lowest heart rate the ring detects overnight. Our heart rate drops quite low. When I sit here and write, with some caffeine in my body and bouncing my leg under the table, my heart rate is about 60. If I sat quietly it could be in my 50s. high 40. A few years ago, when I was preparing for the half marathon, it was usually around the 40s.)

In this graph – to be honest, I’m looking more at RHR than readiness – I can clearly see the rhythms of my training week. I usually train on weekdays, the hardest day is on Saturday, and on Sundays I rest. My resting heart rate jumps throughout the week – 53 is now Saturday – and resets as soon as I have a day off.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take myself a break in the middle of the week. On Wednesdays, instead of training, I run lightly. On this night, the resting heart rate sometimes drops slightly. I don’t have enough data to say for sure, but I think this is keeping my RHR from peaking at the end of the week. In other words, I’m pretty sure the midweek break really does the trick, giving me extra time to recover. It also means that I distribute my rest a bit, instead of Sunday being the only time I relax.

How the indicators compare

One question that was always in my head when I wore this $ 300 ring (yes) was this: can I get this information in a different way? In the case of a sleep assessment, the answer is probably yes. While this is influenced by a number of factors, including efficiency (how much night you sleep), calmness (how much you move), latency (how long after you go to bed you fall asleep), and the amount of REM sleep and deep sleep. The biggest factor for me was simply the amount of sleep. Here is a graph from Oura Cloud showing how my sleep compares to my overall sleep:

Of course, there are other ways to find out how much sleep you have. You can keep a notebook by your bed and write down when you go to bed and when you wake up. Or you may have a less specialized device like FitBit to track for you.

I also found it interesting that Oura (like Whoop and others) tracks both resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Both of these factors correlate with how your body responds to stress, including training stress. When you are well rested, you can expect to have a low resting heart rate and high heart rate variability. Here’s how the two compare for me:

Can I get this information from another source? Not so likely. I wore my Apple Watch with Oura for several nights. It can also measure resting heart rate at night, but numbers tended to be higher and this weekly work and rest day rhythm was not easy to determine. I also compared Whoop and Oura for this metric (more on Whoop in the next section) and found that they correlated quite well, although Oura’s readings were usually a few beats lower than Whoop’s:

Looking at all the numbers the application gives you, you might wonder how to optimize each one. The r / ouraring reddit is full of posts in which people ask if their HRV is “good” or not. But the whole idea here is to observe how your metrics change over time, not to rate them as absolute. If your HRV is low, it may indicate that you have not recovered from the stress. If it is low compared to other people in the world, this is not necessarily useful information.

What I am not doing with this information

I still stick with the thought that I had when I started this experiment, namely that I will never trust a gadget, and not what my own body tells me.

In fact, I don’t even adjust my workouts based on how I feel unless I have a really good reason. This is because what I feel on a given day is not as important as what I do in general. My coach likes to remind me that sometimes you get tired or do hard exercises because the program challenges you. My guidelines for what to do on a given day are my goals and my body; sleep score is not included.

So if Monday is squat day, I’m going to come and squat, no matter how tired or lethargic I am. My in-app rating won’t change that. Experience has taught me that the way you feel at the start of a workout doesn’t guarantee anything. I’m more likely to do a good workout or break my personal best on the day I was well rested, but I also got a lot of PR on the days I woke up feeling shitty.

Sleep specialist Amy Bender says she often advises athletes to remove sleep trackers in the days leading up to a competition. One less thing to think about.

What i actually do

Long-term trends are most helpful in my opinion. I keep track of how my results change over time, especially watching that day of rest. If my heart rate remains high and my readiness remains low even after a day of rest, this is a sign that my schedule may not be recovering enough. I won’t miss a workout just because of a bad grade; rather, I look forward to and ask myself how best to plan my coming week or month.

Likewise, I use these ratings as feedback on how well I am recovering. During the first few weeks of my high-intensity training program, I went to bed early and went to bed late. My sleep and readiness scores have always been good. But a little later I started going to bed. (I’m a night owl at heart.) And I learned a useful thing: my sleep scores were still good. I could wait a week to see if less time in bed means more fatigue over time; instead, my grades gave me faster feedback.

I also noticed two things that caused my sleep rate to not be too high. One thing I think is completely wrong; more on this at the end of the article. The other, calmness, measures how much I move at night. I sleep in bed, so this suggested to me that sleeping alone can help me sleep better. I tested this theory, of course, and I really sleep better at night if I’m the only one in my bed. I cannot use this information on a daily basis – we do not have many beds in our house – but I retain this fact for future reference.

The Oura app, to its great credit, sets the right tone, allowing me to learn from my data without commanding me. I’ve tried many different health-promoting apps in my life, and almost every one of them has been assertive and judgmental. You’re doing it wrong – that’s the implication of every interaction. Or, if you did something right, you will momentarily fall into his favor. Seems like it’s best not to screw it up .

But Oura’s messages are supportive. After wearing it for a while, the app will recommend a bedtime window in a neutral phrase. (“Your ideal bedtime is 10:45 pm to 11:45 pm. You went to bed at 11:42 pm last night.”) I appreciate the recommendation, but I also appreciate that this is an hour window and not a strict restriction. … If I’m curious, I can click on the card to see a graph showing my bedtime over the past few weeks. Most of the time I went to bed by the window, and this is good to know.

The messages that accompany your alertness and sleep each morning all have the same helpful tone. “We like to think of it like we’re Alfred and the user is Batman,” Oura CEO Harpreet Rye told me in an interview. “We are confident that users know their body. We’re just trying to find out something. “

Here are some examples of what the app was telling me, as well as the bill for each day:

• “Lately you have had many easy days in training. How do you feel, is it time to pick up some steam? “(Readiness assessment 85 / optimal)
• “Your resting heart rate indicates that you may not be fully recovered. Relax today to recharge. ” (readiness assessment 64 / please note)
• “It looks like you trained well in the last 7 days. A healthy balance between workout and rest days helps improve your fitness and endurance, so keep up the good work! “(Readiness assessment 87 / optimal)
• “It looks like you didn’t sleep well last night, and this is affecting your preparedness. To get back to normal, try doing something relaxing today and make sleep a priority tonight. ” (readiness score 74 / good)

I asked Rai how professional athletes use Oura rings and he gave a few examples. First, some teams have changed their schedules – for example, staying overnight after the away match, instead of requiring players to skip sleep for travel. He also heard that coaches are more likely to check how their athletes are feeling, or consider how tired they are, when they can discuss it in terms of the metrics they get from the app.

After all, do you need Oura or any tracker for these things at all? I would say that you will not. You can be just as smart about your sleep and exercise, whether you have an app that gives you daily estimates or not. However, I appreciate the level of detail I get from wearing the Oura ring. This is optional, but required.

One caveat

We told you years ago that sleep tracking gadgets are usually pretty good at detecting when you’re sleeping, but they’re not very good at distinguishing different stages of sleep from each other. Technology has improved in 2021, and I’ve heard from many experts that the Oura is considered the most accurate consumer sleep tracking device. But that doesn’t mean he’s perfect.

A good example of this is in my REM sleep scores. I would say I sleep well as I usually feel well rested during the day and my sleep in the Oura app is usually pretty good. But one part of that score is how much REM sleep the app thinks I had, and my REM is always in the red. A normal amount of REM is 20-25% of your total sleep, which for me should last between an hour and a half to two hours. I have an average of about half an hour a day, and some nights are much less. I saw 13 minutes, 11 minutes, even three minutes.

When I mentioned this, I was reassured by Amy Bender, the sleep specialist. “I guarantee that if we hooked you up to an EEG [electroencephalography] machine, you would get more REM than that. I’ve done probably a thousand EEG studies of sleep, and I’ve never seen a person with 3% REM. “

Ironically, when I added the group whoop to my experiment, he told me that I was getting unusually high amounts of REM sleep. Up to this point, I wondered if I was a very strange and special person who can survive with very little REM, but now I’m pretty sure the two apps are just using different algorithms to guess when you are in a certain sleep stage. I will never worry about my specific REM sleep again.