Michael got me the oura ring for valentine’s day this year and anytime you guys see it on stories, i’ve gotten SO many questions about it – if I like it, how it works etc! So today I wanted to share a full review of the oura ring – what it is, how I use it, why I like it, all the features etc!
first, what is the oura ring?
The oura ring is the thicker gold ring you’ll see me wearing on my right pointer finger. In a nutshell: it’s a fitness tracker haha but what I love about it is it tracks SO MUCH more than ‘fitness’. It really tracks your overall health and wellness, sleep, workouts, stress, HR, body temperature, cycles and more.
When you order an oura ring, oura will ship you a ring sizing kit so you can pick the exact size you want and decide which finger to wear it on. You can wear it on any finger but I like having it on my pointer finger best.
what does the oura ring do?
Like I mentioned above, the oura ring tracks so much more than your steps or your fitness. Probably my favorite feature about it is tracking your sleep, analyzing your sleep data, giving you sleep insights and more. Every morning I wake up and look at my “sleep score” from the night before. The oura ring uses elements like the amount of sleep you got, your resting heart rate, your body temperature, deep sleep, etc to calculate your sleep score. One AMAZING example I have from this: one night i had a margarita or two before i went to bed that night. the next day i had a low sleep score and my oura app told me “something caused your heart rate and body temperature to stay elevated last night, so you didn’t get great sleep. try taking it easy today since you didn’t fully recover overnight.” WILD to see actual data of how alcohol affects our sleep!
It also analyzes your sleep data and gives you sleep insights. So after analyzing my sleep my oura ring app tells me my idea bedtime is between 8:45-9:45pm. The nights I go to bed in that window are the nights I’ve gotten my best sleep!
The oura ring uses data from your sleep the night before to also calculate a “readiness” score for you. Your readiness score is based on how you slept, the level of activity you did the day before, resting heart rate and a few other things. So sometimes my oura app will tell me my readiness score is at an all time high because i slept great and had a rest day the day before. Othertimes it will say ‘you were really active yesterday and it looks like your body could use some recovery time today’. Obviously, we don’t need an app to tell us those things but it is cool to see how our daily activity and sleep can affect our “readiness” for the day!
You can’t necessarily ‘start a workout’ on the oura ring like you can on the apple watch, but you can manually add in a workout and it will factor that into your daily activity goal! Or if I’m going for a walk or a run, it automatically picks that up and at the end of my workout it will say “workout detected” and I can confirm it or cancel it. But, it won’t automatically pick up like yoga or a peloton ride. You would just manually put in “cycling”, the length of time, the intensity (light, moderate, hard) and then it calculates the caloric burn based off that (and I have found it to be very accurate).
The oura ring can also help track your cycles and predict ovulation! I haven’t used this aspect of it since we are still going through IVF and my doctor is regulating all of that. But I LOVE that feature b because when I was tracking ovulation…I would have to wake up at the exact same time every single morning and take my temp before getting out of bed. The oura ring will automatically do that for you since you wear the ring overnight and help track your cycles + predict ovulation for you!
The oura ring also has guided meditations in the app which I LOVE. What’s really cool about it is if you do one of the guided meditations in the app…your ring will actually track how meditating affects your body. It tracks if your heart rate and body temperature lowered which in turn helps to lower your stress and boost your readiness score.
The ring also detects naps! So if I lay down for an hour nap after church, when I wake up and check my app it will say ‘nap detected’ and you can confirm or cancel. When you confirm, the nap will boost your readiness score for the day!
Unlike the apple watch which just has 3 rings you need to close everyday lol the oura ring has a ‘rest mode’. It can detect when you are tired or stressed by reading the changes in your key body signals associated with stress. It then automatically adjusts your daily goals to put your rest and recovery first instead of keeping the same ‘move goal’ you have every single day.
I’m sure there are tons of other features the oura ring has that i haven’t ventured into yet haha but the ones I shared above are some of my favorites and why I love the ring.
why I love the oura ring
- I love that it’s not this big bulky ugly thing that i have to take off when I’m wearing a cute outfit haha. I feel like my apple watch always clashed with my outfits but I never wanted to take it off, put it back on etc. The oura ring just looks like a normal gold ring and I love it
- I shared in this blog post a few reasons why I’m taking a break from my apple watch. I love that the oura ring doesn’t have ‘rings’ you have to close. It’s not about how active I can be in a day but more about your overall wellness – how you’re sleeping, moving your body, meditating, resting. It’s really encouraged me to go to bed earlier, take more rest days, meditate. I know that sounds silly because it’s a ring ha but it’s a great motivator if you’re needing help just improving your wellness overall
- You only have to charge the ring once or twice a week! With the apple watch you have to charge it every day. I love that this holds a charge for a week
The only thing the ring doesn’t do that I actually care about is track distance (to my knowledge). So if I go for a run I will use an app on my phone to track the distance or I might wear my watch then.
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I’ve only had the ring for like 6 weeks now but it’s been such a great purchase for me and honestly I’ve LOVED not wearing my apple watch! I think I covered about everything I know haha but comment below if there’s anything else you want to know! Thanks for reading!
xo Lauren
