Can You Wear Oura Ring While Lifting Weights?
Fitness trackers like the Oura Ring are becoming more and more popular as more people are concerned about their daily health. These different fitness trackers have different strengths and weaknesses. Most trackers are watches, but the Oura is unique because it comes in the form of a small and inconspicuous ring.
Oura Rings can be used to track physical activity, sleep patterns, and temperature trends, but it is not recommended to wear the ring while doing strength training like lifting weights or carrying heavy objects. Doing so can damage or scratch the ring and could potentially injure the wearer.
With that being said, what can you do while wearing an Oura Ring? Going forward, we will not only answer that question but dive deeper into the topic of Oura Rings and weightlifting. Keep reading to find out more!
Oura Rings and Weightlifting
While being a fairly new fitness tracker, Oura Rings are unique because of their small size, and the variety of aspects it measures. An Oura Ring not only tracks your heart rate, but your activity level, stress, temperature trends, and sleep activity.
The goal of the company behind Oura is to help people understand that the key to improving health is through small daily habits. An Oura Ring will notify you if you need more sleep and gives you a “Readiness Score”. The Readiness Score gives you a score based on a holistic view of your health, which notifies users if they are ready for high activity or should take it easy.
Some things an Oura Ring doesn’t track include load or pace, which are important metrics for weightlifters. Although the Oura Ring will give other indicators concerning the effectiveness of your weightlifting workout, it cannot track the specific metrics that were noted earlier.
Another worry with wearing an Oura Ring while weightlifting is the possibility of injury. One Oura Ring user stated,
“Besides the reasons why it’s pointless to wear an Oura ring while weight lifting… you shouldn’t wear any ring while weight lifting because of both the risk of injury and risk of damaging the ring.”
– Oura Ring User
Rings can be dangerous to wear while lifting weights as they can lead to ring avulsion. Ring avulsion is an injury that happens when you wear a ring and it gets caught in between your finger and an object with a tension force. This could lead to an injury as minor as redness or swelling or as severe as degloving.
Taking the risk of injury into account, Oura Ring wearers should take their ring off while lifting heavy objects and while doing weight lifting.
What Exercises Can I Do While Wearing an Oura Ring?
While an Oura Ring may not be the best option for tracking your weight-lifting workouts, it can be a useful tool for tracking activities such as yoga, pilates, running, swimming, biking, and hiking.
Since the Oura Ring tracks your heart rate and stress level, it can easily notify its user about how intense of a workout they are doing and how many calories they are burning in their daily exercise. Oura Rings can also track steps based on your movements.
In fact, all of the tracking that the Oura Ring does is through measuring activity and movement. The rings use a type of tracker called a 3D accelerometer which measures the ring’s movement. The ring has special sensor bumps that prove to be most effective when they are on the palm side of your finger.
Oura Rings also measure activity by keeping track of your body’s Metabolic Equivalents or METs. These show the activity of your metabolism to measure the number of calories that you are burning during a particular workout or exercise.
The Oura Ring is also water resistant, so you can use it while swimming, diving recreationally, in the shower, and in the sauna. However, the Oura Ring Company does suggest that you do not leave the ring submerged in the water for over 12 hours at a time. Another aspect to consider is that the Oura Ring can only be submerged up to 100 meters.
A feature that is unique to the Oura Ring is that in addition to monitoring your heart rate during exercise, it also gives you post-exercise insights. These insights can then tell you how your body is responding to the exercise and even goes as far as to show how your workout impacts your sleep.
Should I Wear my Oura Ring All Day?
In order to get the best insight into how you can improve your health, you should wear your Oura Ring not just all day, but all night as well.
Since the rings take into account so many different metrics for how your body is functioning you get an insight into your overall health, but if you aren’t wearing the device all of the time, there will be some gaps in the information. Luckily, you only have to charge your Oura Ring periodically.
The goal of Oura Rings is to help users understand their bodies and take their health into their own hands by implementing daily healthy practices. Oura Rings Company claims that,
“Oura Ring fits seamlessly into your life, all night and all day.”
– Oura ring company
One of the features of the Oura Ring that most users rave about is sleep tracking. It is not possible to get all the data for sleep tracking if you are not constantly wearing the fitness tracking ring.
Oura Ring boasts one of the most complete and accurate Sleep Scores available through fitness trackers. The score that the Oura Ring gives you is similar to standard sleep lab testing done by doctors.
The ring can tell you how much time you spend in each stage of sleep in addition to body temperature and heart rate fluctuations. It can tell you if your sleep was affected by a prior activity such as a late workout or cup of coffee.
This means that through the mobile app, you can learn when you should start getting ready for bed and winding down in order to get the best sleep possible.