My Oura ring thinks I’m having sex when I’m on a horse.

Oura CEO Tom Hale revealed in a Wall Street Journal video interview published 5 June 2026 that the ring’s automatic activity detection has a recurring and specific problem: it misidentifies sex. The ring doesn’t have a dedicated sex category in its activity library, and its motion and biometric sensors are left to make their best guess. It guessed wrong.

The guess is usually confused in the same two ways. The Oura management team discovered through Reddit that wrestling and horseback riding are the two activities most commonly misidentified as sex. Hale disclosed this with a straight face and declined to elaborate further, saying only: “You can draw your own conclusions.”

This article is about drawing those conclusions and delving deeper into the world of unintended double entendre.

If you had to guess which workout other than horse riding was incorrectly recorded, you might guess wrestling, and you’d be right. But come on, be honest, you’d have been looking to add the word mud somewhere in there as well, wouldn’t you?

Oura’s app does permit manual sex logging (slogging?), so ring owners who want a true and complete logging of their activities can do so; these people exist. The problem, however, is the automatic detection side of things, which presumably is swelling the ranks of the American Wrestling Federation and the British Equestrian Society as we speak, as their statisticians frantically try to understand why their membership numbers are not increasing as much as the stats they get from Oura suggest they should.

If you want to see how the Ring 5 compares to its predecessor across all its features — except for sex logging — our Oura Ring 5 vs Ring 4 comparison is the place to go.

Which is the best platform for sex logging?

The story looks worse for Oura when you compare it to how competitors handle the same types of vigorous activity.

WHOOP does the most thorough job.

Sexual activity and masturbation are named journal entries in the WHOOP app, correlated directly against HRV, recovery score, strain and sleep. WHOOP’s own data shows that sexual activity accounts for 2.3% of all journal entries, perhaps single-handedly explaining the fall in Western populations. Interesting findings based on Whoop’s numbers were that pre-sleep sex benefits men‘s recovery more, while post-sleep sex improves women‘s performance in the day.

Fitbit has a chequered history in this area. It originally offered “sexual activity” as a named fitness category, with intensity levels ranging from “passive, light effort” to “active and vigorous.” Fair enough, you might think. But it dropped the category after a 2011 privacy incident in which its users’ activity logs appeared in public Google search results because profiles defaulted to public. With that lesson learned, there is no dedicated sex happening today anywhere in the Fitbit world, and Fitbitters globally are advised to log sex rather boringly under a generic workout type like ‘Other’.

Silicon Valley’s finest but rather staid leader, Apple, has surprisingly offered manual sexual activity in Apple Health since iOS 9, or at least a field for it. It’s filed under reproductive health, with an unnecessarily detailed option to record whether protection was used. The deed is not automatically detected by Apple Watch, but it is a named category in the HealthKit framework, meaning third parties can join in and write to it. It is manual-only, but at least it exists.

Garmin has no sex logging at all. Community forum threads show the brand’s customers being directed, rather boringly, to log it as “cardio,” which might be physiologically correct in some cases but certainly not in others. Amazfit / Zepp has abstained from the entire topic, offering nothing in the way of satisfaction to those who want to log sex.

Thus, humankind’s most important activity is widely avoided across the industry, either ignored entirely or relegated to a footnote in reproductive health. WHOOP is the exception and lets us tell it as it is, giving us the facts straight when we ask for more details in WHOOP Coach. Oura’s broad approach is as beige as the rest of the industry, but its specific auto-detection problem — confidently misreading horseback riding and wrestling as sex — is its own.

I wrote this in bed. Obviously.

Oura story via: Digital Trends

Quick answers

Does the Oura Ring track sex?
Not automatically. Users can log sex manually in the app. Automatic activity detection will attempt to classify the biometric data, but has a documented tendency to misidentify it.

What activities does Oura misidentify as sex?
According to Oura CEO Tom Hale in a June 2026 Wall Street Journal interview, the two activities most frequently misidentified as sex by the ring’s automatic detection are horseback riding and wrestling.

Does WHOOP track sexual activity?
Yes. WHOOP logs sexual activity and masturbation as named journal entries and correlates them against recovery, HRV and sleep data. It is the most developed sex-tracking implementation among mainstream wearable platforms.

Does Garmin track sexual activity?
No. Garmin has no native sexual activity category. Users who want to log it must use a generic type such as cardio.

Does Apple Health track sexual activity?
Yes, manually. Apple Health has included a sexual activity logging field under reproductive health since iOS 9. It is not automatically detected by Apple Watch, but can be logged manually and is accessible to third-party apps via HealthKit.

Did Fitbit ever track sexual activity?
Yes. Fitbit originally offered sexual activity as a named category with intensity levels. It removed the category after a 2011 privacy incident in which users’ logs appeared in public Google search results.

Does Amazfit track sexual activity?
No.

Can I stop Oura from mislogging my workouts?
You can review and correct automatically detected activities in the Oura app. If you ride horses or wrestle regularly, checking and relabelling logged sessions is advisable.

Last Updated on 3 October 2026 by tfk the5krunner

tfk the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. See the gear tfk uses. ID