Oura today introduced Cardio Effort, which tracks cardiovascular strain across workouts and the week, alongside automatic VO2 Max, which estimates aerobic fitness from regular exercise. Available through Oura Labs, automatic VO2 Max supports Oura Ring Gen3 and later and requires five qualifying activities recorded with GPS before it activates. Oura says the automatic estimates remove the requirement to complete a separate walking test lasting six minutes.
Cardio Effort uses workout intensity and length to assess the demand placed on your cardiovascular system, with heart-rate response included when available. It creates an individual reference range from your baseline and resting heart rate, rather than applying heart-rate formulas drawn from the general population. Sessions started live, entered manually or detected automatically can contribute, and a manually entered workout completed without your Oura Ring can receive an Estimated Cardio Effort.
Your weekly total resets to zero when your week begins, then accumulates as you record activity. Oura places that total into five bands relative to your baseline, with Maintaining representing effort consistent with recent levels and Reaching indicating an unusually demanding week. The company says members need not aim for Building every week, and a Reaching result alone does not establish overtraining.
The number beside an individual workout shows its contribution to the weekly total; Cardio Effort has neither a 100-point scale nor a set ceiling. A brief interval workout and a longer gentle walk can produce comparable results, depending on duration and heart-rate response. A demanding strength session can also score below another activity because the metric measures cardiovascular demand rather than muscular load or how difficult the exercise feels.
For automatic VO2 Max, qualifying GPS activities include hiking, walking and running. After calibration, the My Health Heart Hub displays an estimate in ml/kg/min, a fitness category and a history showing changes and the latest update. Oura also provides personalized notifications when the estimate changes meaningfully or remains steady.
Members can save VO2 Max measurements obtained from another device or a clinical laboratory in the Oura App. Those entries stay separate from the automatic calculation and cannot replace Oura’s estimate. Oura previously used the name Cardio Capacity for the aerobic-capacity feature now called automatic VO2 Max.
