Buzz
For a few months, I’ve been using an Oura ring to monitor my sleep patterns. In December, I decided to add a Whoop band to compare results. I’ve heard from numerous athletes—both professional and recreational—that they use these types of devices to assess their recovery after intense workouts. Some even rely on the data to shape their future training routines. Naturally, I had to see for myself.
Hello and welcome to the 2021 edition of the Mytour Fitness Challenge. Up until now, we’ve focused on offering you workout ideas for the gym and at home. With so many home workout challenges available and many of us staying close to home, we’re giving this column a fresh twist for the new year. I'll be exploring various fitness hacks and sharing weekly updates on whether they truly transformed our lives—or didn’t!
This month, join me as I dive into my sleep tracking journey. I’ll explain what led me to take on this challenge, and in the coming weeks, I’ll give you the full scoop on what it’s really like living with these devices.
How I began my journey toward better recovery.
I came to realize the hard way just how essential sleep is for athletic recovery. While I always understood its importance, I mistakenly thought that getting seven to nine hours of sleep each night was sufficient to meet my recovery needs.
I also picked up Christie Aschwanden’s book Good to Go
You’d think I would have known better by now.
But this year, lifting barbells in my driveway during the pandemic, I learned a lot about myself. I realized that the stress of living through a pandemic takes a real toll on your ability to focus and give your best during workouts. I also discovered that my need for sleep skyrockets when I’m on a rigorous weightlifting program.
In the context of weightlifting, 'intensity' refers to how heavy the weights are. Instead of doing multiple reps in a set, you might only perform a single lift before taking a rest, but that lift will be extremely challenging. I followed a 6-week program this summer that my coach called 'Bulgarian-ish,' inspired by the renowned Olympic team. The program didn’t feature any prescribed weights or percentages. Instead, it pushed me to continuously test my 'one rep max,' or occasionally my two or three rep max, on each day's featured lift.
Typically, in sports like weightlifting or powerlifting, maxing out is reserved for serious efforts, like during competitions when you aim to push yourself to the limit. Afterward, you can take time to recover. A heavy lift really drains you. However, during this program, I was maxing out four times a week.
By the second week of the program, I found myself constantly hungry, which I expected. I also started feeling more fatigued than usual. That didn’t surprise me either, so I made sure to get to bed early and rest.
But that didn’t solve the issue. By week three, the exhaustion lingered. It wasn’t during the workouts—those were exhilarating and challenging, and I set personal records frequently. But the fatigue during the rest of the day was overwhelming, like I was a child in desperate need of a nap. I ensured I was eating enough and wondered if there was something else wrong with my body—could I be sick? In week four, I even bought a pregnancy test because I had only felt this tired during pregnancy before. It came back negative.
I completed the program and achieved some incredible PRs. Within days of returning to a regular routine, I felt like my old self again. It turns out I just needed far more sleep than I had been getting.
Time to begin tracking.
Afterward, I switched to a more conventional program, which I found somewhat dull. To be honest, maxing out really suits me, so this past fall, I revisited the high-intensity program. From the start, I made sleep my top priority for this round.
Coincidentally, around the same time I began the program, I received an email from a PR representative asking if I’d be interested in trying the Oura sleep tracking ring.
I’ve always been skeptical about technology claiming to offer insights into my body that I should already be aware of. I had heard that the Oura ring provides a 'readiness' score, and that many people who love their Oura rings check this score every morning. I wondered, why would I do that?
If I’m feeling great, would I really want to spoil that by letting an app tell me I should feel tired? And in the opposite case, if I get a good score but feel lousy, why would I trust the app over the signals my own body is giving me?
A 2014 study, which we previously discussed, revealed that we're prone to both the placebo and nocebo effects when it comes to sleep quality. In the study, researchers told participants about the quality of their sleep, sometimes truthfully, sometimes not. Interestingly, the results of a cognitive test aligned more with what the participants were told about their sleep, whether true or not, than with how they actually slept.
I was determined to outsmart myself. During the first week of wearing the Oura ring, I refrained from checking the app at all, instead jotting down how I felt each morning to compare later with the app’s numbers. After a while, I decided to stop being blind to the data, but I still don’t let the app dictate how I should feel. With both the Oura and the Whoop band (which I added later), I check in with myself first, then see what the app suggests.
I thought that approach was pretty clever, but when I asked sleep scientist Amy Bender, she pointed out that even seeing my data could still influence how I perceive my effort during a workout. One of the known ways sleep affects exercise is by altering how hard we *think* we’re working. The same pace on a run will feel more difficult after a poor night's sleep than when we're fully rested. I don’t have a way to fully account for that while using the app, since its whole purpose is to provide feedback for my day-to-day choices.
I wore the Oura ring during the second round of my high-intensity training program in November and December, and continued to wear it when I transitioned back to regular training. I added the Whoop band while I was in that regular training phase, and I’m still wearing both now.
In future posts, I’ll break down how both the Oura ring and Whoop band work, and compare them with each other. (In the meantime, you can check out Gizmodo’s reviews of them here and here.) But to give a brief spoiler: I found them useful, not for deciding whether or how much to exercise, but to provide feedback on whether I’m getting enough sleep to support my recovery.
During the second round of my high-intensity program, I realized that more sleep was exactly what I needed. I shifted my lifting workouts to later in the day so I could sleep in and made sure to get to bed early each night. The constant fatigue disappeared, and my lifts remained strong. While I could have made more time for sleep without a gadget, I appreciated being able to track exactly how much sleep I was getting and whether other metrics, like my resting heart rate, suggested I was recovering adequately. We'll dive deeper into those metrics next time.
