How can athletes get the best out of their Oura rings?

The Oura Ring is a sleep and HRV tracker that enables its wearer to accurately track their sleep cycles and their HRV throughout the night.

Heart Rate Variability, or HRV, which is a measure of the variability in your resting heart rate. It provides a non-invasive window into your nervous system, and can be used as a measure of your body’s short-term stress and recovery levels, and even point to signs of chronic illness and fatigue.

HRV measurements, in tandem with sleep quality and duration, can provide invaluable insights into an individual’s recovery and well-being. Managing training stress according to these metrics can enable athletes to avoid overtraining and get the most out of their training

Where does Oura fit in?

While you sleep, Oura measures which sleep cycle you are in and gives a breakdown of the time you spent in REM, deep sleep, and light sleep. In addition, the Oura app also gives your your resting heart rate and overnight HRV. This allows Oura to give a Sleep and Readiness Score.

For the average user, these insights provide a fantastic window into an individual’s well-being. However, if you are someone who trains for several hours a week and have specific target events, you’ll gain more by using the Oura ring data alongside an app specifically developed for athletic performance and well-being.

This is where Wattson Blue comes in.

Wattson Blue Readiness Score

Wattson Blue monitors your training and recovery metrics to help you find the right balance between stress and recovery for maximising your long-term performance.

Thanks to Oura cloud, Oura users can sync all their sleep and HRV data to Wattson Blue which, in return, will use the latest sports science to give Oura users a readiness score that they can use to plan their training day.

Subjective and mental well-being

When it comes to athletic performance, Sleep and HRV are not the whole picture, and mental toughness and readiness plays a huge part! With Wattson Blue you can, also track your subjective well-being, including stress and muscle soreness. Completing these metrics will give you an even more complete view of your readiness to train.

Is it all about recovery?

Definitely not! Although recovery is the most important part of any training programme, you need to stress your body sufficiently to create an opportunity for progress and improvement.

This is why in Wattson Blue you see your recovery metrics right alongside your training stress metrics including your training load (TSS), form (TSB), and time spent in different training zones.

You can dive deep into your data and analyse all aspects of your training and well-being, or you can use the simple high level feedback to quickly plan your day.

Final words

Oura ring alongside Wattson Blue can provide an extremely powerful tool for athletes of any level to monitor their training and recovery holistically. By putting your mental and physical well-being right alongside your training metrics, Wattson Blue helps individuals prevent making the mistakes many athletes make at all levels (yes, even professionals are guilty of this). This reduces the chance of overtraining and burnout, while maximising your long-term performance potential.