10 Hacks Every Oura Ring User Should Know

I’ve been tracking my sleep and recovery with the Oura ring for nearly five years now , and today I’ll share with you several of my favorite and most-overlooked features—including one feature you should turn off, and one feature you can use even if your subscription is expired.  Oura Ring 4 $499.00 at Amazon Get Deal Get Deal $499.00 at Amazon Turn off blood oxygen sensing to save battery The Oura ring uses significantly more battery with blood oxygen sensing turned on. It may make sense to use this feature if you have a specific health concern, but most of us don’t need it on a daily basis.  You’ll find Blood Oxygen Sensing under the hamburger menu, and can turn it off from there. You’ll lose the “average blood oxygen” and “breathing regularity” metrics, but you’ll gain an extra day or so of battery life.  You May Also Like Sync workouts so you don’t have to log them all with your ring I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Oura ring is not a great workout tracker. Wearing the ring interferes with weightlifting workouts and it doesn’t have enough precision to seriously track other workouts like running.  Oura is a great companion to other workout apps, though. If you track workouts with another device or even with a phone app like Apple’s Fitness app , you can make sure those workouts get synced properly so they show up in your Oura timeline. Go to Settings , and then to Apple Health (iPhone) or Health Connect (Android). Turn on those integrations from there.  Tag auto-detected workouts (and laugh, if appropriate) Aside from synced workouts, Oura will automatically detect workouts it thinks you’re doing. You’ll then see a card asking you to label the workout. Don’t just ignore those cards—Oura learns from your tags.  So if you went for a walk, make sure that activity is tagged as a walk. But sometimes it will tag another activity as a workout when it actually wasn’t. I’ve seen hair brushing and yarn winding tagged as various forms of exercise. Take a look at the time the activity was logged, and think back to what you were actually doing at the time. (You can dismiss the activity if it wasn’t a workout or isn’t something you care to track.)  Consider the charging case The Oura ring only needs to be charged once or twice a week, but that means it’s hard to get into a routine of charging it regularly. I found that the perfect balance was charging it while I’m at the gym; some people prefer to charge while they’re in the shower.  Short top-ups every few days are ideal for battery health. (Daily charging is arguably too much; only charging when the battery is dead is probably too little.) Oura recommends keeping the battery between 25% and 80% most of the time, if you can.  So figure out where and when is most convenient to charge, and keep a charger there. That’s why the charging case is convenient—you can carry it in your gym bag, for example. Unfortunately it costs an extra $99 to buy the charging case , but nobody ever said owning an Oura ring is cheap.  Check the ring's tags and trends The Trends item in the hamburger menu is one of Oura’s best hidden features. Tap it and you’ll be able to see things that have changed over the past several weeks. For example, as I’m writing this, I can see that my resting heart rate has improved over the past 8 weeks, getting back to my “baseline” after some time in which it was higher than normal. If you’ve been diligent about tagging behaviors and lifestyle factors, you can see their effects on your readiness, sleep, activity, or stress. For example, I’m curious whether my mood is better when I take a vitamin D supplement in the winter. Mood isn’t one of the items that Oura tracks, but I can tap Trends and then choose from Stress or Sleep or even Activity (all things that suffer when I’m feeling down) and see whether the days I tagged “vitamins” tend to correlate with higher or lower levels.  Log meals without tracking calories Meal tracking was introduced as a companion to glucose tracking, but you don’t need to track your glucose to use the meals feature. Log your meals (you can even snap a picture of your plate) and Oura will give you feedback on how healthy the meal is , and keep track of whether you’re eating on a regular schedule or not. Calorie tracking is not involved. In fact, if you’d rather keep calories out of your Oura app entirely, check out the next item.  Adjust your activity goal Oura will give you an activity goal each day, usually a certain number of calories. If you feel your goals are too ambitious (or not ambitious enough), go to the Activity screen and select Edit activity goal . You can choose a different goal, and you can als