Thanks. You are very lucky. I hope that you will be able to maintain this gift throughout your adult years.
I know others with sleep apnea as well. Perhaps an unfair generalization, but athletes tend to have higher expectations of themselves in all aspects of life and therefore dialing things in seems to be more important.
As for Oura, similar to our performance training, cause-effect is long term (from measurement to changing patterns to results). In the case of sleep, as you know, wearables donāt calculate it directly. But if the current Oura product can help me even marginally gain a better understanding with subsequent improvement, I will be pleased. But, as implied above, I am really looking forward to their 2022 algorithm update for even greater gains.
Iāve been trying to hack my sleep since I got my ring a little over a year ago. It helps to some degree tell you what works and what doesnāt. Does the weighted blanket work? Does the sleep mask work? Does the Ooler work? What temperature? How does alcohol work? How does my last meal work? For me itās more of a cause and effect type of measurement rather than something I care about long term.
The main long term benefit is keeping you accountable to taking those measures seriously.
My wife and I have had our Oura rings for about 2 years. Iāve learned a few things, and I have confirmed a few things that I already knew. I love red wine, and I love milk chocolate. Those do not help my sleep (color me surprised!). My deep sleep, RHR and HRV values are the suck compared to my wife, but I blame work stress and just work on improving my own relative scores.
Being in Canada, Iāve dabbled in some āgovernment-issuedā 1:1 CBD/TCH capsules in small doses (2.5mg-10mg) to see how they impact sleep/recovery in high-stress or high fatigue times, but my non-scientific studies have been, not surprisingly, inconclusive.
If anything, the ring has helped us improve our sleep habits, and has reduced the amount of red wine we consume. I have now become accustomed to minimum 8-9 hours in bed, I now eat chocolate in the evenings maybe once a week or once every two weeks, where as before it was probably at least twice as much or more. My chocolate habit means eating 150-300g of Lindt milk chocolate between 7:30PM and 9:30PM. I probably didnāt need the ring to tell me that will play havoc on my sleep, much like the red wine, but having the data in front of me has helped cut back. I know if we stopped drinking wine, the numbers would improve, but that isnāt going to happen.
I wish the āreadinessā at Oura was more athlete-focused, but I donāt get too fussed about it, there are so many other platforms where I can track the CTL/TSS type stuff that I donāt worry about Ouraās lack thereof.
Finally, yes, we did order the new 3rd gen rings and look forward to more data in 2022!
Iāve had the gen 2 for a year and am deciding NOT to upgrade to the gen 3. The switch to a subscription and a forced upgrade to get the lifetime subscription is just too jarring and disappointing for me to feel good about paying $250 for something I already have for a lifetime membership that I currently donāt need. I think Whoop provides some better indicators for athletes related to readiness, but Oura really isnāt currently designed for athletes. The metrics really donāt evaluate a person doing daily training at the basic levels we do. It counts my recovery rides against me and not a day of rest. I donāt think the daily scores are very useful past understanding what causes the ups and downs and helping you dial in some new behaviors. Once you figure out the behaviors that make your sleep higher quality, then the ring is kind of useless to me.
Iāve used the ring since 2019 and just wanted to get an idea of other peopleās HRV values.
I know this data is only relevant to each individual, but Ive generally bounced between 20 and 30 for over two years. Only breaking high 30s/low 40s when Iāve had a week+ off work on leave.
On the face of it my HRV trend is telling me my body is constantly under stress. Does anyone else have the same?
My HRV values are 20-30 when Ill or with training fatigue, 40-50 mid way through a training block and 55-70 when rested or on a very good day. I use both RHR and HRV together with respiratory rate. Dont take too much notice of the readiness score as Oura often thinks I am doing too much activity but after 5 years of training I gave a good idea of what my body can and canāt handle.
I see the same. Iām 41, only had the ring about two weeks. My HRV trend is roughly 22. However, my high was 31. This came right before thanksgiving(Wednesday). I took the week off, so I had been home resting since Saturday. Thanksgiving day the numbers were a disaster. Too much food, wine, staying up later, cooking everythingā¦
So my numbers are consistently low as well, but they do seem to match my daily stress. I donāt know enough about HRV to know how personal it is.
I got one this summer but returned it. It gave me a lot of information, but I wasnāt sure what do to with it. It says I didnāt sleep well last night. I knew that already. It tells me I woke up at 3am. Does that help me not wake up at 3am anymore? I know it does other things but It wasnāt for me.
You donāt say how old you are and HRV declines with age. However, generally speaking 20-30 seems very low to me. Iām only in this range when Iāve drank too much the night before, but not generally when exercising and getting a good night sleep. Iām 42 and train 10-11 hours per week and my average HRV was around 60, which I felt was too low and thus Iāve spent considerable effort to improve sleep quality etc to try to get it up. Iāve managed some occasional 80-90 scores, which I felt better about, but 20-30 would seem to me something with a lot of room for improvement. Iād look at behaviors other than exercise first, like when you eat relative to bed, when your last caffeine was consumed, did you have a drink of alcohol or more, screen time, temperature in the room when sleeping, time you exercised relative to sleeping, etc. The goal with the training is to do as much as you can sustainably, so ideally youād be able to change one of the other factors and keep training.
Re: HRV Values - It seems its individual and/or based on age and not a general value that one needs to target much like a personās max HR.
I always average mid 30ās on moderate training days, mid 40ās on well rested days and mid-high 20ās HRV when over trained or binged-drank/heavy meal b4 bed. Iām 52YO, 10-14 hours a week training.
Has anyone tried both the gen 2 and 3? would be interested in seeing what the differences were. I personally thought it was kind of cheap for Oura to put such a short deadline to get gen 2 people to buy into the gen 3 ring ( i think it was like 3 weeks?). If youāve been a loyal user for years and then given that short of a time period to make a decent sized purchase attaching a monthly fee to it give people time to digest the reviews on the new version. Cāmon Oura
The company is in shambles at the moment. CEO stepped down. Rings are not shipping. Folks are complaining all over the world. Japanese orders are currently blocked because they failed to disclose a particular part that needed to be. Customer Service non-existent. I loved my ring for a full year until they started down this dark path. Glad to be off the ship as this thing sinks into the depths.
Got my ring in the US yesterday, ordered on Nov 11th, and finalized sizing about a week after that. I canāt speak to other problems, but my order was processed quickly and other than a few hiccups with the initial firmware update the process of moving to the new ring was smooth. Donāt have much time using it yet obviously, so I canāt comment on functionality. It does seem to connect to the phone quicker and sync quicker.
I hope the company does not go away, as I think they have some really interesting technology.
I received by Gen 3 ring a few weeks ago. I upgraded pretty early and had no delay at all in shipping. Set up was easy and had no issues. My wife ordered just before the deadline and had to wait about an extra week after mine arrived, but again no issues once it shipped. Weāve both been Gen 2 users for ~18 months. With the Gen 2 I had zero issues with mine running in Apple iOS. My wife has had some slow syncing/connecting issues on Android, but otherwise worked well. On the Gen 3 the only new feature live right from the start is the daytime HR tracking and live HR. New features like o2 sensing etc are due to roll out with updates in the future. The Gen 3 seems solid so far and I feel like I am getting better battery life.
On HRV values, our experience is that values are very personal. For me (male, 43), my average HRV is around 45ms, average resting HR around 48bpm. HRV will fluctuate down into the 30s when I am tired or sick, and up into the low 50s when well rested. My wifeās (female, 38) values are very different (she has a big heart! ). Her average HRV is around 110ms, and has a low resting HR around 40bpm. Iād say we are both pretty well trained athletes.
My Oura syncs to HRV4Training, and I find that combination of metrics gives me a pretty good idea on fatigue and readiness, but I donāt really let it dictate my training that much unless I see a really low value - and usually in that case I can feel that I am not ready for intensity. The HRV4Training blog has some good athlete focused articles about this stuff.
Just as no wearable can match the accuracy of a head-based device that measures sleep (polysomnograph), neither can a wearable match an EKG-type device, including HRMs.
Daytime HR and Live HR are O.K., but the Oura 3 currently* does not track elevated HRās during workout. DCRainmaker covers this in his review. The feature is probably more useful to health-fitness oriented people rather than athletes.
Resting HR is probably reasonably accurate because it is looking at your lowest HR over the course of your sleep. You can even see a plot of your RHR over the night to get a sense if the the # looks reasonable.
Oura just announced an [unfortunate] delay in the availability of Workout HR from late 2021 to early 2022. However, even once available, I would not expect it to match the accuracy of our Garminās. It will be interesting to see DCRainmakerās test of this feature once available.
For me re: sleep, itās all about cause-effect. I know that Rem and Deep sleep are the 2 restorative stages. And even though I have only had my Oura 3 for a week now, I can already begin to see the effects of things like alcohol (or not) and bed time on these 2 metrics. So like with any wearable, you gotta know what it is specifically you are looking for and whether the particular device is the best for what you are trying to measure. Regarding the O3, Iām really looking forward to their updated sleep algorithm planned for 2022 which should be industry leading for a wearable.
Looks like @bobmac has given some good insight. I would say that resting HR seems pretty accurate and consistent, which is what I mainly am interested in overnight. I do wear mine during the day and it tracks if I got walking etc, but I donāt really wear it working out.
The Gen 3 now has this daytime HR tracking which summarizes the ups and downs. Iām sure if you wear it 24/7 this would get better. I wear mine almost 24/7, but take it off when running/biking etc, mainly because I am tracking that anyway.
Question to the group - did your HR data automatically pick up? I received my gen 3 yesterday and activity, total sleep, etc all recorded, but Iāve got nothing for HR. I have placed a ticket with Oura, but to say Iām annoyed understates my irritation - hahaha.
). Her average HRV is around 110ms, and has a low resting HR around 40bpm. Iād say we are both pretty well trained athletes.