I have been using the Ultrahuman Ring Air for over 6 months now, and I feel very confident sharing the good, the bad, and the latest on my Blood Flow Smoothness and Ultra Age metrics.
Revisiting My Expectations for the Ultrahuman Ring Air
To begin, I want to take you back to my first review of the Ultrahuman brand, where I outlined my 4 expectations for the Ring Air. These came from doing research on the brand, reading reviews online, and tuning the expected experience to my own personal needs and what I hope a wearable would deliver:
The Ring Air will not track my weight-lifting workouts
I can confirm that I have not worn my ring during my weight training sessions, but it does come on every walk, run, or night out dancing. The Ultrahuman app connects to Apple Health, so when I sync my workouts from the Hevy app, it sends that data to the Ultrahuman app so that information can be included in my daily performance analysis.
I personally find apps that “track” weight training sessions incorrectly estimate calories burned, so not wearing the ring during my weight training sessions is fine. I use the Hevy app to capture all of my workouts, and that is sufficient for me.
The Insight
With Ultrahuman’s latest Jade app update, they’ve added a new feature called “next best action”, which has been really interesting to look at every day and measure against how I actually feel in my body.
For example, on the day of writing this, the app is telling me to “Bank a good day”. My sleep and recovery metrics are within a healthy range, so they recommend getting outside for an easy walk.
When I think about how I actually feel in my body – which is always more important – I do feel like I’ve had great sleep this past week, and I’ve approached my exercise in a balanced way. So I actually did exactly what the app told me to do before reading today’s suggestion. I went to the gym this morning and just walked at 3mph for 45 minutes, did a bit of stretching, and then walked home in the morning sunshine.
The real insight here is that Ultrahuman is really starting to learn how different actions impact my sleep and recovery, and how sleep and recovery impact my health metrics, which ultimately impact my performance. I can confidently say that the majority of the time, how I feel aligns with the advice the app is giving me.
In fact, I pushed a tough, heavy workout the other day when it told me to take it easy and the next 2 days I was so unbelievably tired that it impacted my ability to work as efficiently as I typically do.
Ring Air vs. Garmin for Training Tracking and Insights
In this scenario, the Ring Air has really shown to be the clear winner in terms of how they process your activity data, interpret that data and provide you with actionable insights based on your unique data.
My Garmin is great because it is on during all kinds of activities, but the level of insights it provides me with is limited. I think if I wanted to get deeper insights, I’d have to upgrade to Garmin+.
As a reminder, Ultrahuman Ring Air gives you all of this information when you buy the ring. No subscriptions to access to the truly useful information. I just feel like in a world where everything seems to come with a subscription in order to get what you originally paid for, I am so grateful that the Ultrahuman Ring Air was designed to be useful from the moment you buy it.
Speaking of the ring knowing me well – I have also been able to test the Ring Air while traveling across timezones and came across something really interesting when I landed in London.
The Ring Air Will Provide Better Support for Travel and Jet Lag
While doing my research on the Ring Air, I came across content that led me to believe that the Ring Air would provide me with specific guidance on how to recover from jet lag.
I think a magical cure to jet lag is not possible, but I needed something that was reading my internal signals, knew I was traveling, and could provide suggestions on how to best manage caffeine intake, napping, and physical activity so I wouldn’t lose so many days adjusting to the new time zone.
In May of this year, I traveled to Lisbon and had a stopover in London. When I arrived, I opened the Ultrahuman app and was really impressed. They added a custom tile to my homescreen acknowledging that I was in London and they had some advice for me!
Unfortunately, the advice they gave me wasn’t really what I was looking for. The app acknowledged that my sleep was off for the next few days but didn’t give me a full picture of the day and how to adapt to the new timezone.
The London tile was just to suggest some cool places to see in London to help me get my steps and be active around the city. This is definitely helpful to someone like me who likes to be active in new cities as a way to explore them – but it didn’t achieve the thing I was hoping for.
The Insight
Although the jet lag advice was lacking on that trip to Lisbon, I did like that the app acknowledged I had changed timezones and was in a new city. Based on the overall improvements to the app since the Jade update, I have a feeling the app offers better support for jet lag now than it did back then.
I’ll actually be traveling to Bali, which flips my days and nights upside down, so I am looking forward to seeing if the app will notice and will offer better advice so I can fully enjoy my time there.
Garmin vs. Ring Air For Jet Lag Support
I am able to tell my Garmin when I’ve been traveling, but again, it doesn’t really offer much insights besides telling me that my sleep schedule is off… which is very “duh” to me. I would say even before the Jade update, the Ring Air was providing slightly more insights into how to adapt to a new timezone than my Garmin.
I really do love my Garmin, but if this Ring Air test has taught me anything, it is that my Garmin is truly an activity and sleep tracker. The Ring Air is both of those things + recovery technology, taking into account micro-signals from the heart to get a better idea of what’s happening inside in response to my outside environment.
The Ring Air Will Give Me Better Insights into the Impact of Nutrition
Prior to the Jade app update, whenever I tried to add food to the Ultrahuman app, it would just redirect me to MyFitnessPal, which is fine but not entirely helpful.
Truthfully, this expectation was a bit unfair to begin with. I come from the generation where MyFitnessPal told all of us to eat 1,200 calories and at the same time made us all feel anxious about tracking every thing we ate in a day.
So to protect my sanity, I typically don’t track my food.
With that said, since the Jade update to the Ultrahuman app, I have dabbled with the nutrition feature and it is no longer redirecting you to MyFitnessPal, and actually gives you a little bit of insight based on what you ate.
For example, this morning it told me that the food I had this morning gave 91% of people a poor glucose response, based on 600M+ data points. Not exactly what I want to see, but it is interesting, especially since I ate a balanced breakfast.
So I think if you wanted to use the food tracker in the Ultrahuman app, just be prepared to take it with a grain of salt. I logged sourdough toast for this example, which likely triggered the glucose response insight it shared. However, I know that making my own sourdough is beneficial for my body and is typically the only “bread-y” food item in the day that could impact glucose levels in my body.
The Insight
The takeaway from this is that I need to track my food more often for the Ultrahuman app to really be able to provide me with strong insights. They also have the other Ultrahuman products that give you more visibility into your body’s response to your environment and what you eat, but Blood Vision and the Ultrahuman M1 are not available in Canada, where I live, so for now I am working with AI insights and manually tracking my own food.
Garmin vs. Ultrahuman Ring Air for Food Tracking
Once again, Ring Air beats our the Garmin here simply because Garmin will connect me to MyFitnessPal if I try to track my food in the app. Garmin+ was advertising food tracking as part of the subscription, but I believe it just pays for a premium MyFitnessPal subscription when you buy into the Garmin+ subscription.
So again, kind of annoying to only be able to access those insights behind a paywall.
The Ring Air will Be Something I Can Wear All the Time – and Still Look Nice
This was a personal one, but to keep it short and sweet – I can confirm that I have worn the ring everywhere. When I go to events that are a little more formal and I don’t want to have my rose gold and pink Garmin watch on, I can keep my ring on and not lose any data.
I did not wear it to my sister’s wedding because that just felt like a day where there were more important things to pay attention to than my health data, but rest assured I was very active on that dance floor!
No insight or comparison to Garmin here. Just a moment of appreciation for a wearable that offers deep insights and does it in style.
An Update on my Ultra Age and Blood Flow Smoothness
One of the most talked-about details from my first month review of the Ultrahuman Ring Air was the custom metric, Ultra Age and my Blood Flow Smoothness rating.
In that review I mentioned that I thought my age was quite high at 36, an age that was calculated using blood flow signals and brain signals (mostly sleep related). Within the set of blood flow signals, or my “Pulse Age” was a metric called Blood Flow Smoothness.
After a month with the ring on, my blood flow smoothness was not looking good and was really driving up my pulse age. At that time, it gave me a rating of 30, which is high for the blood flow smoothness rating in the app.
I am very pleased to say that I have improved this from 30 to 49! That still gives me a moderate rating, but I am officially out of the red and getting better every day.
What did I do to improve this metric? I’m happy to tell you what I think helped, based on the advice the app gives you.
How to Improve Your Blood Flow Smoothness
When you click on the Blood Flow Smoothness detail in the Ultrahuman app, it tells you that regular cardiovascular exercise and reducing saturated fat intake improve blood flow.
So when I think about how my training changed between that first review at the end of March to today, there are a few things that stand out:
More regular physical activity:
I was quite sick in March and wasn’t able to get outside for regular walks or even get to the gym as often as I like. So I was living a sedentary livestyle where I was only averaging a couple thousand steps a day if that.
Since then, I’ve picked up running, I go for regular walks, and I am slowly getting back into a consistent gym schedule.
Re-introducing high intensity cardio to my training
I used to love adding sprinting sessions and high intensity cardio to the ends of my workouts. I called them finishers and the whole point was to drain my body of every last drop of energy it had at the end of a workout.
For whatever reason, I stopped doing these. Recently I started to add in sprinting intervals to my training, and even added a session on the Air Bike to a recent training.
Getting my heart rate up into the higher intensity training zones every couple of days during the week is a really great way to improve heart health.
Making adjustments to my diet
I have been working really hard to get my nutrition back on track. The first half of the year was incredibly high stress between traveling, work demands, financial stress, supporting the planning of my sister’s wedding, and dealing with the loss of family pets.
I know you can probably relate to this feeling of trying to keep all the balls in the air, and one wrong move could mean everything comes crashing down – but you feel the pressure to keep everything going despite feeling overwhelmed because you identify as a hard worker, who stays true to her word and her commitments.
To cope with that stress, I found myself consuming a lot of energy drinks, ordering fast food, and eating a lot of processed foods because they were quick, easy, and didn’t demand a lot of brain power to give me energy.
I had to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that this couldn’t keep going and didn’t really align with how I know I like to feed myself and the types of foods that I know make me feel my best.
I always find September still feels like the beginning of a new year after summer, so I used that natural transition time to re-evaluate my eating habits and recommit to eating whole foods, drinking more water, and clearing out my fridge and pantry of highly processed foods. And it’s having a positive effect already, as we can see from my blood flow smoothness number improving.
I love when the advice you get (more cardio and less processed foods) actually works!
The Ultrahuman Ring Air Review after 6+ Months
When I look back at the last 7 months with the Ultrahuman Ring Air, I feel like it has been a net positive addition to my life.
As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews and when I’ve spoken about wearables, you have to look at these things like supplements. I am not making decisions about my life purely based off of what I see in the tracking app, but by having the ring, I have gained further insight into feelings I’ve had in my body.
I’ll wake up knowing I had a bad sleep and my Garmin will confirm that, but then the Ultrahuman Ring Air will also confirm that and give me a little more information about what may have caused that, how it is impacting my recovery, and what I can do to get myself back on track.
It’s that additional layer of insights and data interpretation that I really appreciate.
I also cannot stress enough how nice it is to have a wearable that blends in seamlessly with everyday outfits and even serves as a nice piece of jewelry. I really do love my Garmin watch and will continue to wear it, but it is an eyesore when I get dressed up. It also gets caught on my hair and other people’s hair, as well as fine clothing materials.
All of those things make me really appreciate the Ring Air.
As someone who hasn’t worn a lot of rings up to this point, I still find I am getting used to having to constantly take off the ring to wash my hands, wash my face, and if I am cleaning the house without gloves.
It isn’t a major issue, but something I do want to mention in case you’re like me and will need the time to adjust to the new habit of taking off your ring(s) to do certain things.
The battery life is great. It takes longer than the Garmin to charge, but 2x a week, I’ll plug them both in when I am sitting at my desk working and by the time I break for lunch they’re both fully recharged. It was a small inconvenience when I first got the ring, but now I’ve just updated my recharging schedules so that it doesn’t feel so inconvenient.
The ring now feels like part of my healthy lifestyle toolkit and I’m really pleased to have it. I’m especially excited to see if there were improvements made to it’s jet lag coaching and insights when I go to Bali in a couple of weeks – and I’ll be sure to keep all you updated on that as well!
Until then, if you’d like to get your hands on the Ultrahuman Ring Air – or get a Ring Air on your hands – you can save 10% on your purchase with code RileyPearce10.