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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.
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.
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 also choose whether you’d like to see this goal in calories or in steps.
If you want to avoid seeing calories anywhere in the app, there’s a toggle for that. On the same screen, select Calorie opt out. This sets your target to steps and ensures that calorie mentions anywhere else in the app will be hidden. You can also access the calorie opt out from Settings and then Activity.
Use Rest Mode for travel, menstrual cycles, and more
Oura has a Rest Mode setting that is intended for when you’re sick or recovering from an injury. (Oura may even prompt you to turn it on if your data indicates you may not be feeling well.)
But it’s useful for more than just that. Rest Mode pauses your goals, and stops giving you readiness scores. It’s great for any time you don’t want the app to bother you about what you should be doing. I’ve seen Oura users say they use it for days of their menstrual cycle when they aren’t feeling up to their usual activity; it’s also useful for travel when you know you’ll be stuck in a car or airplane all day, or when your sleep will suffer due to jet lag.
Use Labs to participate in studies (and get a sneak peek at new features)
If you like to beta test new features, check out the Labs item in the hamburger menu. The offerings will change from time to time, but often they are new features in the making. Right now, the only offering I see is a blood pressure profile study, in which Oura is collecting data to hopefully offer blood pressure estimates in the app in the future.
When I signed up for this, I had to fill out a questionnaire and sign a research consent. (Not all Oura Labs items are studies, but they can be.) I can see that Oura thinks I probably don’t have hypertension (correct) and that it’s basing that in part on my good resting heart rate and activity level. Other Oura features like meal tracking and Symptom Radar first made their appearances in Labs.
Download your data from the cloud
This is one of Oura’s lesser-known features: a web dashboard where you can view long-term trends, and a “membership hub” where you can download all your data. This spreadsheet download is available even if you don’t have an active subscription, but you do need a subscription for the trend viewer and for all of the software features I mentioned above.
For the web viewer, go to cloud.ouraring.com. Here, if you click on Trends, you can see all your data—five years’ worth, for me. You can even compare two variables and see a calculation that shows if they’re correlated. My sleep score and total sleep time are highly correlated; my HRV and sleep time are not.
To download CSV spreadsheets of your data (with or without a subscription), go to the membership hub and sign in. Select Export data and then Request your data. You’ll get a zip file filled with spreadsheets you can analyze to your heart’s content.
