I like tracking stuff, and fitness isn’t an exception. Over the years I’ve had a Jawbone Up, Fitbit, Microsoft Band (and Band 2. RIP.), a couple Garmins, and most recently an Apple Watch and Oura ring.

I really like the Oura as a tracking device. Many of the other devices out there do a good job throwing numbers at you - “you burned X calories, walked Y steps, and slept Z hours” - but Oura does the best at giving insight into those numbers. Oura keeps track of three main insights:

1. Readiness: How well your body is recovering from workouts, stress, sickness, etc.
2. Sleep: How well you slept based on a bunch of factors.
3. Activity: How much actual workout activity have you done.

Depending on what I’m doing in my life, I find myself paying attention to one or two of those at a time based on what I think I need.

When I said insights before, here’s some examples.

Sick Days

The other day I woke up to this:

which isn’t much lower than most days (having a one year-old can do that), but I did feel a bit off. Sure enough, the next day I came down with a pretty bad cold. Throughout the entire time I was sick, I had my Oura on “rest mode” where it’ll be more gentle about motivating you. Sure enough it stuck through telling me I’m still sick and need to chill:

Meanwhile, my Apple Watch is telling me my heart rate variability is 43 (ok?), that I’m trending up on the number of flights of stairs I’m walking (👍), and that a brisk 24 minute walk will met my activity goal (it’s 34 degrees and raining).

Stress

This is just a cool feature that I’m not sure I’ve found a great use for. Here’s a pretty standard day with a couple meetings, a bit of focus time at work, and a fight with the toddler about bed time. Pretty cool to look back at, but not sure what I can do with this besides maybe look at trends?

Sleep

I’ll have to add a screenshot of my favorite sleep feature later, because it’s not showing right (two hours of sleep will mess with it apparently). Oura tries to identify your “chronotype”, basically early riser, night owl, etc. and tells you every night if you skewed early or late from what you should be doing.

Tags

The final feature that I think I really like (but haven’t used enough) is tagging days. The app tries to get you to tag various potentially interesting factors - think alcohol, caffeine, sick, travel, etc. So that you can later look back and compare how those affect your scores.