Oura adds new fitness metrics to show how workouts impact your body
While Oura has largely dominated the smart ring market for years, rivals like RingConn and Ultrahuman are emerging to dethrone it, putting pressure on the company to keep innovating. By launching more advanced workout metrics, Oura is looking to differentiate itself from competitors as the smart ring market gets more crowded.
Key points
- Oura is adding Cardio Effort and VO₂ max metrics to its smart rings.
- Cardio Effort scores workouts by intensity and duration against a personal baseline.
- VO₂ Max launches in Oura Labs and estimates fitness from GPS-enabled workouts.
Oura announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out two new workout metrics, Cardio Effort and VO₂ max, for its smart rings. The company said the features give users more insight into their workouts and how those workouts affect their bodies, going beyond exercise duration and heart rate zones.
The launch comes as competition in the smart ring market grows, with rivals such as RingConn and Ultrahuman challenging Oura's long-standing lead. Oura is using the more advanced metrics to set itself apart from those competitors.
How Cardio Effort works
Cardio Effort shows how much a workout taxes the cardiovascular system, aggregated over the week against each user's individual baseline. Because it accounts for both intensity and duration, a short, intense session can score similarly to a longer, less intense one, according to the company.
The metric has two parts: Workout Cardio Effort, which rates a single session, and Weekly Cardio Effort, which totals effort into categories labeled Light, Fair, Maintaining, Building or Reaching. Oura measures elevated heart rate against each member's long-term resting heart rate rather than maximum-heart-rate estimates, and sets weekly ranges from recent activity patterns. Cardio Effort is rolling out to Oura Ring Gen3 and later models.
Am I maintaining my fitness, building it, or overdoing it?
— Oura
VO₂ max and availability
VO₂ max measures how effectively the heart, lungs and muscles deliver and use oxygen during exercise. Oura said the metric was previously measured through a lab test or a six-minute walking test, and can now be estimated passively from GPS-enabled workouts.
After five qualifying activities, users get an initial estimate and can view it in the My Health Heart Hub in ml/kg/min, along with a fitness category of Low, Fair, High or Peak and how the estimate has changed over time. VO₂ Max is launching in Oura Labs, the company's hub for experimental features, for members with Gen3 and newer devices.
