I have an ageing smartwatch and I hate wearing it in bed, so I take it off most nights and then have no sleep data, which is the only data I care about. Rings look appealing until I see the subscription. I lift three times a week and walk, no running, so workout tracking is close to irrelevant for me. Anyone who has worn both for a decent stretch, which one did you keep?
Third option, unpopular: neither. I wore trackers for years and my sleep improved when I stopped, because I stopped starting the day being told by an app whether I had slept well before I had formed my own opinion. There is a documented pattern of people getting anxious about their sleep scores and sleeping worse for it. A fixed wake time, a notebook and two weeks of honest notes gave me every actionable thing the ring gave me and none of the score anxiety.
This deserves more agreement than it will get. The useful sleep interventions are all things you already know, and none of them require a sensor. The tracker is useful for about a month while you connect behaviour to outcome, and then it is a subscription to being judged.
Wore a ring and a watch simultaneously for about four months, which is as ridiculous as it sounds and did produce an answer.
Ring: I forget it is there, which is the entire point for sleep. Battery in days rather than hours so it charges while I shower. Sleep and overnight metrics were close enough to the watch that I would not choose between them on accuracy.
Watch: better at everything that happens while awake, and it is a watch, so it tells the time and buzzes.
For your use case, which is sleep plus lifting, the ring is the obvious answer and the watch is the thing you already do not want to wear.
Worth saying that rings and barbells are not friends. Mine picked up knurling marks in the first month. Some people put it on the other hand for training, some just accept it looks used.
Forgetting it is there is exactly the criterion. The watch is comfortable enough and I still resent it at 11pm.
Practical ring things nobody mentions until you own one. Sizing changes with temperature and time of day, so use the sizing kit for a few days including overnight rather than picking from a chart. Charging is a small dock that will end up in a drawer if you do not give it a home. And you will bang it on things, so accept a scratched finish or take it off for anything with a barbell.
Ring for sleep, watch for training, both only if you enjoy data as a hobby. You lift and walk, so you are not training by heart rate. Get the ring.
Before committing to any ecosystem, check what you can export and what happens when you leave. Some of these let you pull your own history as a file, some show it to you in an app and nowhere else, and one I used deleted my history when I closed the account rather than handing it over. If you intend to keep years of data, that is a purchasing criterion, not a footnote.
@signup_bonus_sy · 2mo ago
Do the three year sum before you buy, because the subscription changes the ranking entirely. A ring with a monthly fee over three years costs the hardware price plus roughly thirty six months of the fee, which for most of them roughly doubles or more than doubles the sticker price. A mid-range watch with no subscription costs the sticker price and nothing else.
That is not an argument against rings, it is an argument for deciding whether you will still care in year two. I subscribed for eleven months, stopped looking at the app, and kept paying for four more months out of pure inattention.
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