This post is part ofFind Your Fit Tech, Lifehacker’s fitness wearables buying guide.
Ive been wearing an Oura ring for more than three years.
Ive written before aboutmy early experiences with the Oura ring.
I get whyits a straightforward way of connecting the ideas of working hard and recovering well.
If youve never really thought about recovery or training stress before, this might make sense.
But its actually kind of backwards from how you should be thinking about these factors.
Why shouldnt you listen to the app on this?
Sometimes youre building a base level of fitness, and sometimes youre ramping up toward a competition.
If youre a team sport athlete, youll have your pre-season, in-season, and off-season training.
I’m skeptical of that assumption.
Wouldn’t less training over time result inlessprogress in the long term?
It’s impossible to know, since the study ended after eight weeks.
Your issue should instead be dealt with vialong-term planning.
If youre only thinking in the short term, that probably seems weird.
Wouldnt you want to be at the top of your game all day, every day?
Heres the thing: Exercise is work.
It stresses your body.
Your body responds to that stress by getting stronger.
Without stress, you would never improve.
And as a result of that stress, you get fatigued.
On Sunday youll probably want to take it easy.
That doesnt mean that the long run was bad for you, or that you did anything wrong.
It depends who you are and what your goals are.
In that kind of training program, fatigue isnt a necessary evil, but a valuable training tool.
Your recovery gadget doesnt know what kind of program youre following.
It just sees that your metrics are indicating youre tired.
What todoabout that depends on how youd like to train.
Justlike ChatGPT, fitness wearables are not smart enough to be your coach.
To be fair, the algorithms in these recovery gadgets understand this, at least somewhat.
The recovery data thats actually useful
So far Ive been telling you what to ignore.
So let me tell you what data from my Oura I actually use.
First, I ignore the readiness and sleep scores themselves, and look at the raw data.
Each of those scores is determined by an algorithm that considers many different variables.
Some of those variables I care about, and some I dont.
Heart rate
I find myheart rate variability, or HRV, to be the most useful number.
If my HRV is high most days, Im probably recovering well enough to support my training.
In myfirst review of Oura, I wrote that it under-counts my minutes of REM sleep.
Oura has since released an updated algorithm that seems to be more accurate, at least for me.
I still wouldnt trust any consumer wearable to be truly accurate about sleep stages, though.
But Idoappreciate seeing mytotal time in bed.
I reject the idea that I should use recovery data to make day-to-day decisions about how to train.
So how do I use it?
The time in bed metric is the most useful one here.
But there are blocks of time where I have the freedom to decide how hard Im training.
(Dropping training intensitycouldbe on the table, but usually isnt necessary.)
The first thing Ill do is get more sleep.
Alongside my sleep schedule, I might work on other areas of recovery.
Eating more and doing more low-intensity cardio both tend to help my body handle training stress.
(I swear, cardio is a cheat code for work capacity.)
The little bundle of sensors I slip on my finger isnt my coach or my boss or my mom.
I consider it for what it is: one of many tools that help me in my training.
