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Let’s get this out there - I am and forever will be diehard Garmin fan. My watch comes everywhere with me - we’ve been through marathons together, bike races, flights, swims, emotional breakdowns, all of it. In fact, we’re in such a committed relationship that it even came to GQ’s Men of the Year awards with me last year, much to the annoyance of the rest of the team. It's my ride-or-die. But as with many long-term relationships, we've reached a breaking point. Enter Oura, the only third party that could be summoned in such a situation.
Coming off the back of the London Marathon, my main priority recently has been figuring out how on earth I could recover my body from such extreme stress. I’ve been suffering with a few injuries that just weren’t getting better. My sleep was still feeling adrenaline-fuelled and inconsistent, and despite regular physio sessions and swapping out almost all of my running training for lower-impact sports like cycling, swimming and pilates, my recovery just felt at an all-time low. That was, until Oura came into the picture.
Having used an Oura ring now consistently for a month, wearing it day and night, it’s pretty much changed the game in terms of how I understand my body and how it's been feeling. It’s helped me make better decisions, the injuries are slowly improving, and I’ve started to prioritise my sleep more, especially the consistency of it. But how exactly can a ring be responsible for this? We're not in a Tolkien novel, after all. Let’s get into how it works.
So what is Oura?
While by no means a newcomer to the world of health and fitness tracking (the company launched in 2013), Oura takes a substantially more comprehensive look at your overall health and wellbeing than a lot of smartwatches. It's a ring not a watch, first and foremost, and the idea is that by being located at the end of your pulse on your index finger, it can gather more information about your body than something placed on your wrist. Makes sense in theory.
Wear the ring day and night and all of your data is fed back to you through an app, broken down into three key categories; readiness, sleep and activities. For each, you’re given a daily score, with a key summary of how multiple factors contributed to each rating. Personally, it was the sleep and readiness scores that were most useful here, with readiness assessing my key metrics like resting heart rate, HRV balance, body temperature, recovery index, and the differences between my activity and sleep scores to give me a good idea of how I’ve recovered from the day before.
The sleep tracking in particular has been invaluable, assessing not just total sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep, but also highlighting areas for improvement like restfulness, timing and latency, all of which have been key factors I hadn’t realised were impacting the quality of my sleep. Speaking to Harvard Medical School's Assistant Professor Dr. Rebecca Robbins about the benefits of knowing this information, Robbins explained that “tracking your sleep can motivate experiments where you start to understand the things that support a good night's sleep like a relaxing bedtime routine, and things that don't support a good night's sleep like alcohol or drinking caffeine too late in the day."
This is where my Garmin has consistently been letting me down. Firstly, I hate sleeping with a watch on. But even when I could bring myself to put up with it, I've always found the sleep tracking to be unreliable. There's not much so frustrating as to have your waking moments recorded as sleep, and there was just a general lack of insight beyond the very basic assessment of how much deep and REM sleep I got. Figuring out how to improve it was beyond me.
Symptomatic?
Potentially the most interesting part of Oura is how it can alert you to potentially pending illness. During the pandemic this became a way to tell in advance if someone could be coming down with Covid-19, and it’s surprisingly helpful to help you ward off any issues. Last week for example, I had flown home from a short holiday in California. My sleep was all over the place, I’d spent 20 hours on planes in five days, and I was completely run down. Just a day after landing back in the UK, Oura alerted me that my body temperature was raised, something which is often the first sign of illness. With that knowledge in stow, I was able to slow down for a bit, recognise that I needed a bit of extra TLC and focus on my nutrition. Lo and behold, it never manifested into anything more than a day of being extra groggy, but without having realised I needed to slow down, it could potentially have been worse. If you’re someone who lives a busy life, having this kind of insight can be pretty game changing.
Can it replace a fitness watch?
If there’s one area that I think is slightly lacking from Oura, it's the activity tracking, with only your active calorie burn and intensity being tracked. To add your heart rate, you’d need to manually start an activity on your phone when you begin, something which adds far too much complication to the process. For detected activities, Oura also requires you to go in and confirm what kind of exercise it was (a process that can get quite lengthy if you tend to walk around a lot during the day as each walk will be tracked individually). As a moderately bulky ring, it's also worth mentioning that you probably won’t even be able to wear it for a lot of activities in the same way that you can a fitness watch. For cycling, I found it annoying when gripping onto handlebars for multiple hours, and it also gets a bit frustrating when worn in the gym during weight training. Rest assured, my Garmin won't be going anywhere. If you’re trying to improve athletic performance, you’ll need to be using Oura for recovery and something else for your workouts.
If you're familiar with the world of smartwatches and sleep trackers, it's also worth drawing a comparison here with other similar recovery trackers. With some I've tried before, I felt like any form of stress I was putting on my body was deemed as a negative. I would always be told I had overdone it, and found these apps encouraged me to spend more time in bed and to cancel plans. I slowly started to feel guilty about being busy or wanting to spend time with friends. Oura, however, seems to be more understanding of these demands and has allowed me to recognise that even though I might be stressed, you can still healthily approach your day. I prioritise my sleep more and remain informed, but don't say no to things because of it.
So is it worth it?
Ultimately, it's best to think of Oura as in investment in your future health. It is by no means a necessity, but if you want a bit more control and insight into how your lifestyle is impacting you - whether that be your exercise and training, your stress levels, your drinking, nutrition, travel or any number of other habits - it’s a great way to figure out how you’re actually responding, and what can help you feel better. Don’t think of it as another Garmin or another Apple Watch, but something in its own field entirely that can just help you get your life a bit more under control.
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