For the past 30ish days, I’ve been wearing an Oura Smart Ring. I wore it during the day, wore it to bed, and wore it on certain gym sessions — a ring and weightlifting don’t match, so this was the only time I took it off.
It’s a second-generation and a hand-me-down by my father, who upgraded to the third-generation Oura. It comes in a matte black finish and I usually wear it on either index or middle finger.
And after 30 days with the ring, I can safely say... I don’t know why I would need this.
The big reason I asked my father to give me his was for sleep tracking. It was a big theme in the last few weeks. As I suffer from something called social jet lag, I tried whatever fix I could find to optimize my sleep quality. The ring was what I hoped would help me analyze my data and see any differences depending on what method I tried for improving sleep.
But the more I wore the ring and the more I looked at the data, the more I realized it’s all kind of redundant.
- The ring tells me that I should take it easy for the day because my recovery score is low. Which I know, I feel exhausted.
- The ring tells me that my sleep was great tonight. Which I know, I woke up feeling refreshed.
- The ring tells me that my heart rate is elevated during this gym sesh. Which I know, I’m rope-jumping, I can feel my heart pumping in my chest.
But the problem is not the ring. I also wear an Apple Watch Ultra, and to be honest, I’d choose the Oura every day over the Watch. It gets less in your way, it’s a cleaner look, battery life holds about three times as long, and it allows you to wear a proper watch again.
If Apple ever makes one of these (they better be matte black!!!), I might sidestep to a ring.
But all of that depends if I ever see the need for a health tracker again. My new exercise routine asks for much more cardio (including Zone 2 and Zone 5 training). Maybe here I can find a use case to know if I am staying in the zone. But even that feels like over-optimizing for something that I don’t need in the end: after all, my goal is general fitness, not to beat any records. Who cares if I pass to Zone 3 for 4 minutes during my 30-minute session? I don’t even know what that means.
Because in the end, I will see a difference in fitness levels after a while, no need for a ring to tell me how I am supposed to feel.
So I stopped wearing the ring as often. I now take it off while sleeping because no matter how lightweight it is I can still sense it. And in the AMs I sometimes forget to put it back on.
Funnily enough, I still wear it whenever I go out because I like the look of a black ring on my right hand. Fits nicely with the tattoos.
So maybe I should just get one of these.