Is the Oura Ring finally getting a feature that Garmin and Fitbit have had for years?

The Oura Ring is an excellent holistic health and wellness tracker, similar to the other best smart rings, but it lacks features for workout tracking. Without built-in GPS or a screen to provide updates during workouts, it’s challenging to recommend them as workout devices compared to the best fitness trackers.

However, it appears that the Oura Ring is set to receive a feature that the best Garmin watches and Fitbit have long utilized: heart rate zones.

Heart rate zones categorize your heart rate measurements into numbers or colors. During exercise, a low heart rate may be indicated by a cool blue, while a very high heart rate could show a red “warning” sign, indicating that your body is nearing its limit.

This is a valuable indicator of your exertion level during cardiovascular exercise, providing a more intuitive understanding of your effort beyond just a number on a screen.

Although Oura cannot alert you to a high heart rate mid-workout due to the absence of a screen, a teardown of the latest Oura app for Android has revealed numerous references to heart rate zones in currently unused lines of code. Android Authority has published findings from an APK teardown that suggests the presence of six heart rate zones designed to assess activity intensity.

We anticipate that when the Oura Ring logs a workout or you manually tag a workout, you’ll be able to see which heart rate zones you spent the most time in. Additionally, as hinted by the teardown, other features likely coming to the Oura app include AI-assisted meal tracking, allowing you to input your meals for Oura’s AI to analyze and provide insights on how your meals may affect your sleep.

Heart rate zones and retroactive analysis

When using one of the best running watches, such as a Garmin or an Apple Watch, I utilize heart rate zones alongside my speed and pace to manage my energy expenditure. I know to slow down if my heart rate is in the red during a long run, and I can push harder if I’m in the green while aiming for a personal best in a 5K.

Incorporating heart rate zones into the Oura Ring could significantly enhance the ability to retroactively analyze improvements in exercise performance over time or understand how more intense workouts influence sleep and recovery, an area where Oura excels.

However, the absence of a screen limits the utility of the heart rate zone feature, as it is most beneficial during workouts. It’s encouraging to see Oura exploring new features through software updates rather than hardware changes, setting it apart from competitors like the Samsung Galaxy Ring. Only time will tell if this feature comes to fruition and how effective it will be.

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Matt is TechRadar’s expert on all things fitness, wellness, and wearable tech. A former staffer at Men’s Health, he holds a Master’s Degree in journalism from Cardiff and has written for brands like Runner’s World, Women’s Health, Men’s Fitness, LiveScience, and Fit&Well on everything fitness tech, exercise, nutrition, and mental wellbeing.

Matt’s a keen runner, ex-kickboxer, enjoys yoga, and believes everyone should stretch every morning. When he’s not training or writing about health and fitness, he can be found reading thick fantasy novels filled with fictional maps.