The Oura Ring is an excellent holistic health and wellness tracker, just like the rest of our best smart rings list, but these minimalist health trackers are a little light on features when it comes to tracking workouts. Without built-in GPS or a screen to regularly update you on your progress during a workout, it’s hard to recommend them as pure exercise devices compared to the best fitness trackers.
However, it sounds like the Oura ring at least gets a function that the best garmin watches and Fitbit are making grateful use of this, which will improve the possibilities for tracking workouts: heart rate zones.
Heart rate zones take your possible range of heart rate measurements and break them down into numbers or colors. During exercise, a low heart rate might appear as a cool blue on your fitness tracker, while a super-high heart rate might appear as a red “warning” signal that your body can’t handle much more.
It is a good indicator of how hard you are working during cardiovascular exercise. It communicates your effort more easily through a language that goes beyond just a number on a screen.
While Oura obviously can’t warn you about high heart rates during a workout (it doesn’t have a screen, after all), a teardown of the latest version of the Oura app for Android users reveals numerous references to heart rate zones in currently unused lines of code. Android Authority published the results of an APK (Android Package Kit) teardown it was conducted on the Oura app, finding references to six heart rate zones designed to “assess the intensity of an activity.”
We imagine that when the Oura Ring records a workout, or when you manually tag a workout to review later, you’ll be able to see which heart rate zones you spent the most time in. As the teardown hinted at, other features are likely coming to the Oura app Includes AI-supported meal trackingwhere you enter your meals. Oura’s AI can then scan the database and provide information about how your meals and eating times may be affecting your sleep.
Heart rate zones and retroactive analysis
If I am one of the best running watchesLike a Garmin or my Apple Watch, I use heart rate zones in conjunction with my speed and pace to adjust how much energy I’m expending. I know to slow down if I’m going for a long run and my heart rate is in the red, and I know I can push it further if I’m in the green and I’m trying to get a 5K personal best.
Heart rate zones on the Oura Ring can be a useful addition to retrospectively analyzing how someone improves over time during exercise or how more intense exercise affects sleep and recovery – the area where Oura excels.
Without a screen, the heart rate zone feature’s usefulness is limited, however, as this simple way of indicating effort is most useful during the workout itself. I like that Oura seems to be trying new things and relying on software updates rather than hardware, as it’s a great way to differentiate it from rivals like the Samsung Galaxy RingTime will tell whether this feature actually becomes a reality and how useful we find it.