- What's up, Trainiacs? You've been asking for it, I've been
testing it for several months:
Today, finally, we are talking about
the Oura Ring
for Triathletes.
(vocalizing)
(energetic music)
So, Trainiacs, today we are talking about the Oura Sleep
Activity Heart Rate Tracker and how it applies
to triathletes. So if you don't know about this ring,
the Aura Ring is the second generation in the Oura Company's
product line. The first generation was huge, it was like
a decoder ring, and they only sold maybe a few thousand
of them to the most die-hard bio-hackers out there.
The second generation ring, when it was announced,
it was over-sold by, like, I wanna say they sold
a few thousand of the first ring, they had 45,000
pre-orders of this, and people like Lance Armstrong
couldn't even get it.
I couldn't even get it until recently. But they're back up
to speed, selling a lot of these and it's good.
So this ring starts at $299 US, the next level is $399
for an upgraded color, and the diamond version is $999.
So it's not a terribly cheap ring but it's very high
quality. I've been using it ever single day in place
of my wedding band for three months now.
It tracks your sleep quality, it tracks your sleep time,
it tracks your heart rate, it tracks heart rate variability,
it tracks your activity levels, all automatically
without you having to do a thing.
It's fully waterproof so I've been wearing this for
every single swim I've done for months and it hasn't
changed the readings whatsoever. And one of the big things
that the original Oura Ring had as a detriment to it
that this doesn't is that it needed constant charging.
This needs charging maybe every seven to ten days
and the charging happens within a matter of
about 30 minutes.
So let's get into how this ring can help triathletes.
When we take a step back from this ring and we look at,
what I think, the most important factors to successful,
healthy training as a triathlete are, are number one,
you gotta be healthy.
Number two, you need to understand what your body needs
and when it needs it. This is recovery, this is rest,
this is giving yourself a little bit of flexibility
in your training.
The third thing that it has to be able to be reasonable,
applicable, it has to work within your timeframe. And then
the final thing is that it has to be fun.
So addressing those first two things, keeping it healthy
and keeping it flexible, the Oura Ring I have found to be
tremendously helpful.
So let's look at sleep.
This tracks your sleep without you having to do anything,
and in my experience, the sleep tracking is really accurate,
with some caveats.
So every single morning, I open up my sleep app
and one of the first things that I do is
I sync this ring to the app.
It takes only about ten seconds or so.
I get a visual depiction of how well my sleep went
throughout the night, and then I get a sleep score.
Now on a micro level, the exact sleep tracking I found
to be a little bit inaccurate, and there were some quirks.
So there were times that it registered that I was awake
perhaps for 20 or 30 minutes when I know I was asleep
at that time.
Also, if you take a nap in the afternoon and then go to bed
later at night, it's going to recognize that time inbetween
that nap and the time that you went to bed
as fully awake time, it's going to register the start
of the nap as the start of your overall sleep cycle,
but then you can always go in and manually just take
that out and instead of you getting a very detrimental
sleep score, you're going to have a more accurate
sleep score.
So there are some quirks to it, but on a macro level,
when you take a step back and say, is it a useful tool
for tracking sleep? It absolutely is because when you start
looking at things over a period of days and weeks
and not just every single minute of every single sleep,
you start pulling out trends.
So two things come about from that.
Number one, what gets measured gets managed.
So if you are starting to all of a sudden start thinking
about tracking your sleep, you're going to all of a sudden
start prioritizing sleep.
Second thing is that when you can start putting a tangible
number on how well you're sleeping, you can do what I did.
For five weeks, I tracked melatonin use versus
valerian tea versus nothing whatsoever,
versus using blue light glasses, versus using the ChiliPad,
and I did seven days' worth of data on each of these
and I was able to see, oh, with nothing my sleep score
was this. With blue light glasses my sleep score
was significantly better, with melatonin,
wasn't consistently better.
With valerian tea, somewhat better but not necessarily,
with the ChiliPad, yes, absolutely better.
So you can start picking away at what are the personal
hygiene sleep aspects for you that really do and don't work.
Next thing, when we start getting into that flexibility
of training we start looking at things like HRV.
Now, Oura has a reading of your readiness level, which takes
into account HRV, your daily activity level,
your sleep from the night before, your resting heart rate
during sleeping, your recovery index.
I liked taking it down to just HRV
because we've seen studies that just using HRV
has allowed elite cyclists to get four-fold more improvement
than a standard block-training group of elite cyclists.
So you take those daily HRV readings,
pair that with the tracking spreadsheet that tracks
your seven-day rolling average
against your 30-day rolling average of HRV,
that you can get at triathalontaren.com/HRVtraining
and all of a sudden, you can start seeing the trends
of how you are accepting the training,
how ready you are to train,
and you start getting indications of,
all right, well, I had a really bad meal for a bunch
of nights in a row during Christmas time
and my HRV went down.
Or, I smashed myself consistently, day after day,
my HRV went down. I didn't get good sleep, my HRV went down.
Or my HRV's nice and high. Even though it's a rest day,
I can continue to push it and maybe, in my case,
I've got travel coming up, it's nice that I know my body
is ready to be able to push harder so that I can
move a harder workout up and rest on that travel day.
So all of a sudden you start getting this tool where you can
start flexibly changing your training to give your body
what it is capable of on every single day and that's
a really powerful thing.
Without this, I don't know if I could do that,
because as much as I like the HRV4Training app,
Science and Sports said that you need about ten minutes
of data to get a really accurate HRV measurement.
The HRV4Training app only takes
about 90 seconds of data.
It's also highly variable on how quickly you stood up
out of bed. Have you peed or not peed
before you took the test? How still are you during the test?
Whereas this, it's just taking it throughout the entire
night that you're asleep, and if you take seven to nine
hours worth of data, there are going to be areas where
it's not quite so accurate, but on a whole, it is proven
to be as accurate as, well, think about it,
where do they put the pulse-ox...
(clicks tongue)
nurses and medical profession- pulse-ox?
Where do they put the heart-rate tracker when you go
into the hospital? They put it on your finger
because that's where they can best detect your heart rate.
So bottom line, do I like it? Yes, I absolutely like it.
This isn't something that I'm going to review
and then go back to my usual wedding ring,
I'm going to use this all the time.
Boom. It's right there.
As far as putting it into context of the new ratings system
of how seriously you should consider this
where one is knock your socks off but I don't really care
if you use it or not, and five is yes,
you absolutely need to use it, I'd put it at a three.
As much as I like it, if you don't care about sleep,
if you don't care about tracking your HRV,
it isn't going to appeal to you.
If you want to dive into those things,
that three-star rating says it's an absolutely great product
but not for everyone.
Now if you do want to get it,
just know that if you're on Team Trainiac,
you can get $50 off. If you're not on Team Trainiac,
go check out the free trial at TeamTrainiac.com.
You can get 14 days, check it out.
And, heck, you could even go buy one of the Oura Rings
in those 14 days and get $50 off.
I just realized that.
So I like it a lot. Sorry, everyone, that it's taken me
a while to get this to you, but this was something
that I really wanted to make sure I had a very strong
feeling about one way or another,
because is it a good product? Yes.
How are triathletes going to use it? Not sure.
Who should consider it? Not sure.
What does it mean, practically speaking,
when I start tracking things?
How does that translate into how you use it as a triathlete?
I had to dive into all of this to make sure that I had
a good opinion on it one way or another.
I hope this helps, go check out all of those resources,
and-
Later, Trainiacs.