Sections: Sleep, HRV(Stress), Readiness
Sleep:
This category continues to grow across the big health watch tracking players like Garmin, FitBit and soon Apple who’s acquisition of Beddit will no doubt lead to integration into the Apple Watch. But this post is about Oura and measuring sleep. How well does it perform?
It divides it into TOTAL SLEEP TIME, SLEEP SCORE WAKE UP TIME
You can see a SUB-7hr performance on 3 days. However, SLEEP SCORE was only impacted on 2 out 3 of days. Due to quality of the night’s sleep.
Quality vs. Quantity is key debatable point in many aspects of life. It seems Oura weights quality higher than volume. This makes sense mostly from a Fitness perspective unless you are in a BUILDING phase. Volume tends to be a more encouraged metric.
WakeUp times should be consistent along with your morning routine. As you can see, I try to get out of bed by 630AM. In this period I’ve been very inconsistent.
This inconsistency shows my lack of discipline. The line should be relatively flat and slight changes if you are experimenting with something new.
HRV(Stress)
HRV research has exploded as measurement of nervous system health. I’ve been looking into HRV since owning Polar Watch and measuring R-R. HRV score meaning is very elusive as it often is masked from YOUR PERCEPTION of READINESS. A highly trained Introception skills can help.
As you can see, the HRV score doesn’t correlate well with Sleep Score unless you view it as a LAGGING indicator. Friday appears to be day that HRV took a real hit which makes sense. The ability improve HRV scores continues to VERY difficult and your nervous system seems wired to be at a MIN and MAX and establish a HOMEOSTATIC number.
Vagal Tonal/Reset has been an interesting area of therapy and research. Should investigate.
Readiness:
What is Readiness and how do you use it in your training?
Let’s backup. Like other metrics and signals. They report PHYSIOLOGICAL STATES or METRICS that often differ of PSYCHOLOGICAL states. Below is weekly summary of the readiness calculation. How does Oura calculate Readiness?
OURA : https://help.ouraring.com/en/articles/448771-readiness-the-new-measure-of-health
They calculate this score based on what I believe it STRICTLY Physiological metrics like Activity, Sleep, HRV (Stress). They indicated the score is a measurement of mental and physical but I would argue has little to do with mental and mental score measurements today are CRUDE at best. I’ll leave that to a post about :
Mediation – Biofeedback – Neurofeedback – RPE – Self-Assessment
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