“Sleep is incredibly important for recovery, pain, exercise performance, and overall health, so this can be very useful information, as long as the data doesn’t itself become another source of stress,” says Dr. Van Sickle of an under-tracked metric. If you’re contemplating tracking your sleep, she recommends the Oura Ring 4. “Because it’s a ring rather than a watch, many people find it comfortable to wear overnight, and it provides detailed information about sleep along with resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, temperature trends, stress, and recovery.”
It’s also my own personal favorite fitness tracker, as it helped me vastly improve my sleep and recovery when looking at data from a full year. That’s because it’s an amazing data collector, rather than an aggressive workout partner like some trackers. I really enjoy that Oura is more of a passive observer than a constantly buzzing piece of tech. Yes, it can send you alerts if you want, but I found it to be much more effective in its summaries and helping me understand my health, via soft encouragement (almost life coach-like blurbs) than guilting me every hour to get in my residual steps or make calorie goals. The only downside is that because it tracks so many niche biometrics, I found the app a bit hard to navigate. It took me two Google searches to find how to access my body temperature data; that said, I love that all the data is in there to find if you want it.
Full Oura Ring 4 Review
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