ŌURA Ring Review 2017: Strategize Your Way to a Better Sleep

We talked a bit about the importance of sleep last week and ways to help ensure that you get enough.  But, other than the very important ‘listening to your body’,  how do you really know if the strategies that you’re implementing are helping? There are quite a few new tech tools available these days to help measure your sleep and one that we’ve been testing the last couple of months is called the ŌURA ring.

how do you really know if the strategies that you’re implementing are helping?

RATING (out of 5):

The ŌURA ring was on my radar from the get-go due to the excellent reviews on the sleep analysis compared to phone apps or even wrist wearable trackers. The highly rated accuracy of the technology and simplicity of wearing a ring to sleep with, extremely little EMF signalling, and running constantly were a huge attraction for me. As was the ability to use a program that ‘learns’ about me and blends data of my activity and my sleep to give me a snapshot of how well recovered I was. I don’t wed myself to the data but I like immediate feedback when I try and make positive changes as to whether this correlates to improved readings (for example, sleep supplements [passionflower and magnesium] or pre sleep meditation made HUGE differences when I added them).

As a big fan of using HRV, those readings are familiar to me but the leverage of ALL of the other contributing factors makes a great difference to understanding HRV or reading rest and recovery. Metrics like resting heart rate (RHR), body temperature during sleep, and sleep balance can be highly insightful when you start to educate yourself on what they mean. ŌURA have a great site to help with this and so do bloggers like Ben Greenfield and Alex Fergus.

Training with it on was a huge surprise in that it could even be worn when strength training with kettlebells and barbells without any issues (to the ring or me!).

The ring offers a unique chance to effectively look at your physiological state and I think its’ greatest potential is in tracking positive and negative changes. Well worth looking into for anyone who wants to be involved and in charge of increasing their health and potential!  

RATING (out of 5):

As highly as I value the ability to listen to our own bodies, using some of the current tech tools can really help to give some valuable insight.  Like any wearable tech on the market these days, it’s imperative to know what to do with the data that you’re collecting.  I’ve really been enjoying my ŌURA ring as it allows me to try different sleep strategies and know a bit more definitely whether they are helping or not.  A few things that I learned from the ring;

• I need to be in bed for more time than I thought to get 7-8hrs per night (my ‘awake’ time is usually about 1hr).  
• Late night meals/snacks consistently disrupt my sleep.  Other things that I thought might effect my sleep (blue light, late night exercise) don’t seem to have as much of an effect on me.
• Even though I make a concerted effort to spend less time sitting, I still sit much more than I thought.

For those looking to implement some strategies to try to improve their sleep, I find the ŌURA ring to be a great tool to help guide these strategies.  We’re looking forward to getting our hands on generation 2 of these rings!