Oura adds new fitness metrics to show how workouts impact your body
- ID
- 37352
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 8:00 PM
- Fetched
- 20 Oct 2026, 8:29 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/20/oura-is-launching-two-new-ways-to-track-and-understand-activity/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 2.0
- Created
- 20 Oct 2026, 8:29 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_startup_founders
What happened
Oura announced on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, two new workout metrics: Cardio Effort and VO₂ max. Cardio Effort scores how much a session taxes the cardiovascular system using elevated heart rate measured against each member's long-term resting heart rate rather than max-heart-rate estimates, and it aggregates into a weekly total bucketed as Light, Fair, Maintaining, Building, or Reaching. Cardio Effort rolls out to Oura Ring Gen3 and later models; the excerpt does not give pricing, a VO₂ max device list, or a full rollout date.
Why it matters
There is no concrete action here for developers, AI/ML learners, or founders — this is a consumer wearable feature launch from a single vendor, and the excerpt contains no API, pricing, or platform details. The one buildable detail: Cardio Effort is gated to Ring Gen3 and later, so anyone integrating Oura data likely cannot assume it across the whole install base.
Discussion angle
Oura's pitch is a personalized baseline (resting heart rate) over the standard max-HR formula — worth a short debate on whether baseline-relative scoring is a better pattern than population formulas for any health or fitness metric you build.