5 reasons smart rings aren’t helpful tools for athletes

The first smart ring, the Oura Ring, launched in 2015, but remained on its own for many years after that. Recently, however, we’ve seen a considerable increase in the popularity of this little wearable format. In 2023, two new players entered the market: the Ultrahuman Ring Air and the RingConn Smart Ring, and now, in 2024, Samsung has become the first big-name company to develop the technology independently. All of this competition has only driven progress, as the format continues to improve, making smart rings a valuable tool for more people. And yet, there’s still one demographic for which smart rings just don’t make sense: athletes.

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Smart rings aren’t suitable for active lifestyles

I take it off more often than I wear it

While I am far from a professional athlete, I am a very active person and do some kind of physical activity every day: cycling, weightlifting, hiking, running, swimming (or trying to swim), SUP, practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ), walking, etc. Unfortunately, many of these activities are incompatible with wearing a ring.

While it is possible to use rings to perform certain types of strength and resistance training, gripping a bar can be a bit tricky. Smart rings are generally not super thin, and even the slimmest designs are difficult to grip. Not only does this make it harder to get a good grip on the bar, it’s less than ideal when lifting heavy weights. It can also pinch skin or cause the ring to press uncomfortably against your hand. The last thing you want is to have sore hands when lifting heavy weights.

Besides the grip issue, dumbbells and barbells are usually textured to improve grip, and that texture can scratch expensive smart rings. I don’t like to wear any kind of jewelry when I strength train, especially smart rings.

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Like weightlifting, SUP requires you to grip the paddle pretty tightly. The ring is smooth, so you don’t have to worry about scratching your hand when you grip the paddle, but it does have the same problem as weightlifting: the ring presses into your hand, which is uncomfortable and makes it hard to get a good grip. This doesn’t happen while SUPing because I don’t wear the ring for long periods of time, but it seems that if you wear the ring for a long period of time, it gets wet and you get blisters more easily. So I make sure to take my ring off when I go out SUPing.

SUP and swimming also make it difficult to wear the ring because of the water. I used the sizing kit to find the perfect size for all the smart rings I reviewed, but when my hands are wet, they all come loose on my fingers. I’ve had rings almost slip off while washing my hands. I’ve almost lost my ring in the kitchen sink, so wearing a smart ring while swimming in crashing ocean waves is a really dangerous move. I’m not willing to take that risk. So I always take my smart ring off when I go in or around the water for any water activities.

The smart ring is especially important since BJJ is a sport that is not currently compatible with any sensors (though I expect that will change in the future). My hands are constantly moving, gripping my gi and wrists, sweaty, and the ring could easily fall off or hurt my training partners or myself. Naturally, I leave it at home when I train.

Finally, although I don’t need to grip the handlebars extremely tightly, I don’t like riding my bike with rings on. I can get used to the feel on the handlebars, but cycling gloves with rings on them don’t fit very well. They either press against my finger or push up into an uncomfortable position on my finger. I’ve tried wearing them while cycling a few times, but it was an unpleasant experience and I think I’ll avoid them in the future.

I could go into more detail about the various sports for which the ring is not suitable, but I hope you get the gist. Of course, everyone has different preferences and comfort levels, so some of the activities listed above may be perfectly doable while wearing a smart ring. But generally speaking, most types of physical activity are not suitable for wearing a smart ring.

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Limited tracking options

A clunky experience when tracking your workouts

Certain types of activities, like running and walking, are perfectly possible with a ring. But unfortunately, most smart rings make it harder to track those activities than they are with a smartwatch, where all the controls are on your wrist. You can start, pause, and end an activity with a few button presses or taps of the screen.

Smart rings, on the other hand, require more work on your part. Some rings don’t automatically detect workouts, so to track them, you have to take out your phone, open the app, and navigate to where you started the workout. Then to pause and end it, you have to take your phone out. If you’ve been wearing a smartwatch or fitness tracker for a long time, it can be hard to remember to start a workout on your phone, and even harder to forget to end it when you’re done.

There are now some rings with automatic workout detection. Oura Ring has had this for some time, and Ultrahuman introduced automatic workout detection on August 13. Additionally, the new Samsung Galaxy Ring also has workout detection. Unfortunately, the Oura Ring detection didn’t work very well for me. It almost never detected a workout, even when I was doing interval sprints and my heart rate was much higher than when I was inactive. Or, there were many times when it would record my walk around the house as a 5-minute workout, which is completely wrong and unnecessary.

I haven’t tested the Galaxy Ring, but users have said similar things about workout detection: It either doesn’t log anything at all, or doesn’t track what your workouts actually are very well. Plus, all of the smart ring options require you to manually open the app to approve or delete automatically detected workouts, rather than doing it right on your wrist like the Apple Watch does.

The ring also doesn’t have an auto-pause feature like a smartwatch or bike computer. For example, when I’m on my bike and I come to a red light, I’m just standing still, so I don’t need to track that data. It would skew my actual workout numbers, so I’d rather leave that out. The ring, however, will keep recording unless I open the app and manually pause and resume it, which never happens when I’m on my bike.

Lack of display and notifications is a drawback

No equipment is used during training

While it’s nice to be free from displays and notifications sometimes, those features can be very useful. For example, I often run or cycle based on heart rate zones, so I need to be able to know what zone I’m in and get a notification if I’m not in the right zone. Or, when I do interval training, I need a timer on my watch to keep me on track during each section of my workout. The lack of a display or the ability to send notifications on a smart ring limits its usefulness for these types of workouts.

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Missing data results in an incomplete image

While having to take the smart ring on and off can be a bit of a hassle, the bigger problem for athletes is that they lose all their data. Because they can’t wear the ring for many of the activities they participate in, they’re missing out on all the training data they use to guide their future training and recovery plans. As a result, using the smart ring solely for health and fitness insights will give them a very incomplete view of their current fitness state.

Compounding this incomplete data is the fact that most smart rings can’t sync with training platforms to gain more insight. For example, the Oura Ring isn’t compatible with TrainingPeaks, one of the most popular training platforms. So even if you wear the ring for every activity, your data won’t be synced with platforms that could specifically help you reach your fitness goals.

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Separate platforms for each device

No one platform to rule them all

Smart rings can be useful tools for certain types of people. There’s no denying that. There may be times when you don’t want a screen on your wrist, or you don’t want the look of a smartwatch for more fancier events. In those situations, smart rings can certainly be a way to continue to collect data. But unfortunately, that data is most often stored separately from your smartwatch or fitness watch data, so it may not be all that useful after all.

Until the Galaxy Ring, no company made both a smartwatch and a smart ring, requiring a different platform for each wearable. With a smart ring other than the Galaxy Ring, you can collect useful physiological data while wearing the ring, but it doesn’t help with the overall health and fitness tracking that the watch does. It can still provide useful insights, but it’s not as convenient as having one device that tracks everything.

It’s great to see brands like Samsung releasing smart rings, as the option to have both in one ecosystem is appealing. But Samsung Health isn’t as useful a tool for athletes as Garmin’s platform or options like TrainingPeaks or Strava Premium, so the search for a truly useful platform across all wearable devices continues for now.