What I’ve Learned From Four Years of Tracking My Health With the Oura Ring
I’ve used a lot of fitness wearables, but none have been in my life for as long as the Oura ring . I woke up on the first night of data collection on November 3, 2020, and have worn the Oura ring almost every night since. Here’s what I learned from over 1,500 days of data, including my thoughts on the hardware, the app, and whether it was worth it.
How generations compare
Oura is currently on its fourth generation of rings, and I’ve used generations 2, 3, and 4. Here’s my retrospective on each, including what was new in each generation and when and why I upgraded (or didn’t).
generation 2
My first Oura ring in late 2020 was a review unit from the company that I returned after writing about it. It was a second generation ring (“Generation 2”), the exact color, shape and size of which I do not remember. Shortly after I sent it back, I decided I would like to buy one of these, so I ended up getting a silver Balance watch in size 7 to wear on my ring finger.
Gen 2 already had all the important features: it could record my HRV and resting heart rate, guess fairly accurately when I was awake or asleep, and not very accurately guess when I was in each stage of sleep. It’s been widely regarded as the best wearable sleep tracker, although as we’ll see, there are still caveats.
The ring also recorded my breathing rate and the fluctuations in my skin temperature from night to night. Its ability to detect changes in temperature has been touted as a possible early detection mechanism for COVID. As we’ll see below, I wasn’t able to do this either, but it was a highly advertised feature at the time.
Gen 3
When Oura released the third generation, I reviewed it too, and the company recommended wearing it on the index finger if possible. So I wore a third generation silver Heritage on my index finger and hated using that finger as a ring. I must have a habit of absentmindedly rubbing my nose with the side of my index finger, because every time my nose itched, I would, without thinking, raise my hand and scratch myself with the ring. When I finished this review, I happily went back to my old second generation ring on my ring finger.
But one night my favorite second generation ring died, even though I could have sworn I had just charged it. The same thing happened again a night or two later. I realized that the battery must be dying and luckily I was just past the end of my two year warranty period. I’ll go into more detail about battery life below, but the typical lifespan is two years, and the warranty no longer covers you that long. But at that time I got a free replacement and it was a generation 3 (same size and color but Heritage shape since they no longer offered Balance) and they added a lifetime subscription.
New to the third-generation ring is a subscription model: $5.99 per month for the ability to view your data from the ring. (Without a subscription, you get “sleep” and readiness scores, which in my opinion are useless without the underlying data.) Gen 2 ring owners didn’t have to start paying for a subscription if they continued to use their old ring, and around the same time there was a lifetime subscription promotion for anyone who upgraded to Gen 3.
The 3rd generation ring had the same shape and internal shape as the 2nd generation ring, but now it had green lights that glowed at night, which annoyed me when I was putting the kids to bed. It was in the era of the third generation that heart rate measurement for training became available. I never found it very useful, although I was impressed that it automatically detected when I went for a walk or run. He also interpreted brushing my child’s hair as “dancing.” Good guess I guess!
Two years later, in 2024, the battery died again. (A two-year lifespan is unfortunately common.) My ring is not covered by warranty this time because Oura has switched to only offering a one-year warranty. But generation 4 had just launched and apparently the company was trying to get rid of their stock of generation 3. I was sent a replica of the dead one and I still wear that ring to this day.
Gen 4
I ended up receiving the 4th generation Oura ring for review (round, black, size 8 for my middle finger). I wrote a comparison of the 3rd and 4th generation rings , as well as a review of the 4th generation . Gen 4 is good. But when I finished reviewing it, I was happy to return to the third generation. All the basic features remain the same and I preferred the way the third generation fits.
In the fourth generation, the ring lost the sensor ridges, making it smoother on the inside, but also changing the size. The 4th generation model comes in a wider range of sizes and has improved heart rate accuracy. Around this time, the app was also redesigned to better manage all the different features it had acquired over the years: Stress Scores, Resilience, Chronotype and Cardiovascular Age are all things to squeeze in, and the home screen now has a timeline of your day that includes exercise and more.
So, if you’re keeping count, I’ve worn six different individual Oura rings from three different generations (2, 3, and 4) in three different shapes. If you only count the rings I had for personal use, that would be one 2nd generation device and two identical 3rd generation devices, the first two dead due to battery issues and the third a new device that is working well so far.
My favorite generation
From a technological standpoint, the fourth generation ring is the best of the generations, but from a sentimental standpoint, I miss the second generation ring the most. I liked its single-point shape, which made it easier to manipulate and orient it correctly on your finger. And I liked that the LEDs were infrared, not visible. At night there was no green glow under the ring. If they brought back a version of Oura without the green glow, I’d grab it in a heartbeat.
The features Oura has added over the past four years have been nice, but not game-changing. I don’t really care about activity tracking; The ring doesn’t do the job, so I either don’t track my workouts or I track them using another device, like a Garmin .
Everyday Experience
It takes several weeks for any wearable device to learn regular numbers, including the Oura ring. This is important to remember because the numbers reported by the ring make the most sense when compared to your own baseline , not what is a “good” number for others. This is especially true for heart rate variability (HRV), which is one of the most important metrics collected by the ring. An HRV of, say, 52 might be high for one person, signaling that they have recovered well, and unusually low for another, signaling that they may be sick, overworked, or stressed.
Knowing this, people sometimes ask on forums if it’s okay to start wearing a ring during a stressful time or on vacation. After being at it for four years, I say start wearing it whenever you want. In two months, the exact metrics of your vacation will be history. Heck, you might like to look back at them for comparison’s sake. But your baseline is built over time and changes over time. It’s not something that the ring imprints on like a duckling.
These are screenshots of what my Oura app is showing me right now, and if you have a ring that you’ve been wearing for at least a few weeks, you’ll see something similar. All the screenshots you’ve seen so far are from the Today tab, your home screen when you open the app. Most of them are summaries, and you can see more detailed data if you tap on them or navigate to other areas of the app. The ratings at the top of the screen (ready, sleep, etc.) lead to one of these more detailed views.
As I’ve written before, I believe that “recovery” metrics are too imperfect to be useful . Oura tries to be smart by raising or lowering its score based on the various metrics it measures. But they are not always true. For example, when the sleep algorithm didn’t read my REM sleep stages well (more on that below), it always scolded me for supposedly not sleeping well. And sometimes my readiness score would drop if I went for a long walk on a rest day, even though I know from experience that those long walks help me more than they hurt me.
Instead, I look at the raw numbers for my resting heart rate and HRV. If I’m well rested and recovering well from the stresses of training and life, my HRV will be high and my RHR will be low. It’s normal for these numbers to get worse during the week as I work out and accumulate some fatigue, and then I see them improve when I’ve had an easier day or two. Watching this rhythm helps me understand if I’m recovering well or if my stress (from training or anything else) is leading me to burnout.
While HR and HRV generally track the same trends (high HRV and low HRV are “good”), I believe they respond slightly differently. My heart rate skyrockets whenever my body experiences something stressful. It could be a hard workout (my heart rate often goes up after a competition), but it could also be drinking alcohol or even just staying up late. If I have a fever or migraine, my heart rate will skyrocket. Meanwhile, HRV may also decrease in response to these factors, but high HR is not always accompanied by low HRV. HR seems to tell me more about how hard something is hitting me, while HRV tells me how well my body is coping with it. To be clear, this is not a scientist’s understanding of the subject, but simply my own conclusions about my body based on studying this data over many years.
Since I pay more attention to raw numbers than results or little motivational messages, my favorite screen is the one I see when I click on my ready number. Here’s an example. Note that my readiness scores (blue bars in the graph above) have been about the same every day for the past week. But I can say that my resting heart rate increased in the second half of last week, was particularly high (for me) on Friday, and has just returned to the low value after some rest over the weekend. Last week was a hard training week and this week I’m cutting back again for the meet so I’m hoping to see my heart rate under 40 and HRV 95+ as my training slows down this week.
Also, yes, resting heart rate at 40 is pretty low. This is partly how I am designed (I have always had a low resting heart rate and a high maximum heart rate). Part of this is due to physical fitness: my heart rate drops slightly as I do more exercise. And part of the reason is that Oura records a lower resting heart rate than other devices. When I compared the Oura ring’s performance to that of four other wearables , the Oura consistently produced the lowest RHR values. When a Fitbit records 43, a Fitbit may record 50. Again: compare the numbers on your Oura ring to each other , not to the numbers of other people or even other devices.
Sleep staging was not helpful (and was often wrong)
While I’ve been writing about wearables, I’ve been telling you—as sleep experts have told me—that you shouldn’t trust an app when it tells you how much light or deep sleep you’ve gotten, or how long you’ve been in REM sleep. Wearables are generally pretty good at telling you how long you’ve slept, but they’re not very good at telling you when you’re in a particular stage, and their sleep “quality” metrics don’t mean anything we can put a scientific value on.
My data over four years confirms this in two important ways. The most important thing is that sleep quality data (“sleep score” in Oura’s case) simply duplicates the information you can get by looking at total sleep time.
Oura has a web-based data viewer with a tool that will show the correlation between any two variables you want to compare. Comparing the sleep score with the total sleep time, I am surprised! There is a “strong” positive correlation with a coefficient of 0.77. The more I slept, the higher my sleep score. You don’t need a ring or a watch to know how long you’ve been asleep; In the old fashioned way, keeping a sleep diary, you could do the same with a notepad and pen .
When it comes to sleep stages, I have an even more dramatic way of showing the pitfalls of trusting an algorithm.
I was always skeptical about the way Oura claimed to divide my sleep into stages. For the first few years, he always reported incredibly low amounts of REM sleep, sometimes just a few minutes when you’d expect to see much more than an hour. I mentioned this when I interviewed a sleep specialist and she confirmed that the numbers I was seeing on my app were unlikely to be correct. In the summer of 2023, Oura introduced a new sleep stage algorithm that they said should improve the accuracy of sleep stages. See if you can spot the day the algorithm changed from this chart:
Suddenly I was getting much more realistic REM sleep estimates (although I’ve never done a sleep lab study, so I can’t confirm if they’re accurate).
We can even see where the “new” REM sleep comes from. Neither from wake time nor from light sleep, which were reported in equal numbers before and after the change. No, the algorithm appears to have taken some of what it previously considered deep sleep and reclassified it (perhaps correctly) as REM sleep. The deep sleep graph looks like the opposite of the one above. I felt justified in my complaints that it must not be regulating my REM sleep properly. I also learned a lesson about how subject we are to the whims of the algorithm.
He never predicted when I would get sick
I don’t think anyone buying an Oura ring right now is looking for an early disease detection system, but it’s been a major talking point for the company (and among users) for a while. In 2020, the company worked with UCSF on the TemPredict study to see if the ring could tell healthcare providers when to test for COVID. On forums where Oura’s ring was discussed, there were occasional posts from people who were able to see signs of poor recovery on the app before they realized they were sick.
But my own experience has not confirmed this. When I had been wearing the ring for about a month, I got sick. It was probably a common cold or flu, but my COVID test came back inconclusive (?!?) so I never knew for sure. Whatever the illness, my Oura didn’t realize I was feeling worse than stellar until three days later when I felt hot, tired and nauseous.
I definitely got COVID in June 2022 and it’s interesting to look at my Oura ring data for the week I tested positive. I remember the symptoms starting on that Thursday or Friday, June 2nd or 3rd. It was on Sunday, June 5th that I felt so terrible that it occurred to me to take a COVID test, which turned out to be positive. In this graph, you can see that my overnight temperature peaked on June 7th, two days after I tested positive. Until that day, all of my readiness scores were excellent, above 80. Every other stat I could test was also normal, including my HRV, average resting heart rate, lowest resting heart rate, and respiratory rate.
Since then I’ve only had mild colds and runny nose. Although Oura never gave me any hints before I got sick, I have found confirmation that my RHR goes up and my readiness goes down when I don’t feel well. This tells me that something is really going on, even if it doesn’t reach the level of a high fever or coughing fit. But again, I don’t get that confirmation until I start to feel like crap.
Just me? I looked at the results of the TemPredict study. The researchers said they were able to use the algorithm to determine who was sick, and that the day the algorithm detected the disease was at or before the onset of symptoms 65% of the time, and at or before the positive COVID test result in 80% of the cases.
That is, to be honest, not that useful! The idea was to predict illness before these dates, so “on or before” combines cases where it could act as an early warning system with cases where the person already knew they were sick. And obviously the algorithm missed a lot of people.
Oura gave these results a positive spin . The main finding was that when the algorithm worked, it predicted illness 2.75 days before a positive test result. But symptoms appeared 1.98 days before the positive test result, so even the algorithm’s prediction, which was not revealed to users in the app and only verified by scientists, would give you less than a day’s notice before you started to feel sick.
Oura called the results “preliminary” at the time, but the team hasn’t published anything else about disease detection since then, at least that I couldn’t find.
But Oura eventually launched Symptom Radar , a feature that became available to Oura users in December 2024. I haven’t been sick since then, so I can’t comment on whether the algorithm might notice anything I didn’t. Bottom line: I can confidently say that the promise of disease prediction has not been realized. If it works for a few people and if they like to be notified the day before they start feeling sick, cool. But this is not entirely useful in a practical sense.
Durability
When you buy jewelry that costs over $300, you expect it to last a long time. Oura owners (and future owners) always ask on forums how easily the ring scratches, so here’s a photo. This is a third generation ring that I wore for a full two years. You’ll have to look closely at the top surface to see some minor scuffs and scratches, but there are a few. The bottom surface where the ring contacts the items I’m holding is probably more scratched. This doesn’t bother me because I view the Oura ring more as a tool than a polished fashion item. Others may feel differently.
Oura rings are made of titanium on the outside, and interestingly, I have a comparison for this: my wedding and engagement rings are also made of titanium. All three get a lot of daily wear. The scratches on my wedding ring are not noticeable; Oura’s rings are much more obvious in comparison.
Battery life
My biggest disappointment over the years has been battery life. Not the battery life – the ring lasts most of a week on a single charge without any issues. But what I’m talking about is how much use you’ll get from the ring before it stops holding a charge.
My Gen 2 ring had a two year warranty and I remember seeing a post on Reddit reminding people to check the battery before the warranty expired as some users found their battery was dead after about two years. I completely forgot about it, and then it happened to me. Luckily I barely made it past the warranty period and received a replacement. Two years later the same thing happened again, although Oura wised up and stopped giving a two-year guarantee. The warranty is now one year and does not cover battery problems , at least in the US ( in the EU a two year warranty is required by law ).
I got lucky again with the second replacement as Gen 4 had just been released. I remember being given the choice of $50 off the new Gen 4 or a completely free Gen 3. I chose the Gen 3 but had no option to ask for a different shape or color. They just sent me a copy of my old ring in a package (without charger).
I can’t complain about getting three rings for the price of one. However, do I really need three rings in four years ? There are plenty of Apple Watches and Garmin watches from five years ago that originally cost around $400. An Oura ring costing over $300 can be expected to last more than two years. But check the subreddits and forums and ask any longtime Oura Ring user you know. Two years is quite typical for 2nd and 3rd generation rings. (It’s too early to pass a verdict on Gen 4.)
If you’re the type of person who’s willing to upgrade as soon as a new model comes out, it might not be a big deal—Oura releases new rings about every two years. But you should know that you are not buying something that will last for many years. I saw someone on a forum who was considering getting an Oura ring as their actual engagement ring. Not a good option if you’re going to be sentimentally attached to that particular physical ring.
Oura has the lowest running costs of any wearable device I’ve ever seen.
Why have I worn this ring almost every night for the past four-plus years? Because it’s damn easy . I don’t have to start or stop anything on the ring itself or in the app. I don’t have to wear it to workouts. They don’t take up valuable wrist space, so even when I wear a Whoop, Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Garmin watch at the same time and complain about them when I put them all on before bed, I’m not at all bothered by the presence of the Oura ring.
Even when I was paying more attention to other wearables, I kept the Oura ring on. About once a week I might get a notification on my phone asking me to charge it before going to bed. And as long as I open the app once or twice a week to make sure it’s syncing, I know my data is safely stored in a place where I can look at it later.
Charging also requires little maintenance. I keep my Oura ring charger on my nightstand. I charge the ring when I go to the gym, and even if I immediately forget to put it back on, I can see it on my nightstand when I go to bed. The only thing I find inconvenient about charging is the lack of a reliable charging case or even a cheap spare charger on my nightstand that I can take with me on trips. However, the ring holds enough charge that I could get through a weekend trip without needing to recharge, as long as the battery was charged when I left.
My Oura ring data did not reveal any deep recovery secrets.
As for the overall benefit of wearing the ring, first I need to say what it didn’t do for me. My initial interest in tracking sleep and recovery (using Oura or other means) was to see if there was a way to predict my performance in the gym. Cardio exercises are easy enough to master, but weightlifting is a different story.
I compete in Olympic style weightlifting (snatch and clean and jerk). The kettlebells are heavy, but the lifts also require precise technique and coordination. Some days you may gain 60 kilos, some days you will be lucky to gain 53. My trainer has patiently explained on many occasions that if I am in the middle of a heavy training block, fatigue will mask some of my abilities. This manifests itself in unexpected ways: if I had just delivered a great performance on Saturday, maybe setting a new PR (personal best), I might be in trouble on Monday because I have a “PR hangover.” Trainers and lifters have known this for decades, if not centuries. But it’s still difficult to predict exactly when you’ll feel uncoordinated and when you’ll perform well.
I was hoping that metrics like heart rate variability and resting heart rate would give me an idea of what’s going on under the hood. But it didn’t turn out quite like that. Although I usually had better days when my HRV was high and my heart rate was low, I couldn’t count on it.
Many times I have had a great day in the gym or on the floor despite mediocre recovery rates. The opposite also happened. Ultimately, you don’t know how you’ll actually perform in the gym until you get there and do a few exercises—the results can only be judged after the fact. I said from the beginning that I would never trust a device more than my own body, and I’m glad I kept that promise. If I skipped or rescheduled workouts based on my “readiness” or other metrics, I would have missed out on a good workout.
Recovery rates are a good reality check on the big picture of training and life.
So, if the metrics from the Oura app didn’t reveal any deep secrets or make me change my workouts, why am I still tracking them, four years later? Because they give me subtle clues about what’s going on in my body and provide an overall picture of my workouts and life stresses.
I have an idea of what HRV and HR I see when I’m recovering well and training is going well. I even know how much my resting heart rate drops when I’m used to doing a lot of cardio (only about 3-4 beats, but enough to be noticeable).
I know what it looks like when my training stress increases, but I handle it well: HR is a little elevated, but HRV is usually still quite high. I know what it looks like when I’m stressed and burnt out: high heart rate, low HRV. I know that if I manage my fatigue well enough during the week, the numbers will reset to zero on the weekend as my rest days or easy days allow my body to catch up. And I learned these numbers by comparing them to how I feel, rather than trusting the estimates, graphs, or explanations on the app. You must take responsibility for your new self-discovery and learn, not just listen.
Would I get as good an understanding of my body and training without the ring? Perhaps, but I would expect a lot more mental ups and downs. I have a tendency to act too hard and not realize how hard I’m pushing myself, and then beat myself up when things don’t go to plan. The data I get from my ring helps me get a reality check on what my body is going through, whether it’s an unnoticed cold or a tough training block that’s combined with other stress I’m getting from life. I think the ring taught me a little bit of self-compassion. This has helped me immeasurably, although it’s not the lesson I expected to learn from tracking all this data.