We are proud to announce a new partnership with the UFC, the world’s premier mixed martial arts organization. Oura will work closely with the UFC Performance Institute to enhance their training programs while helping maintain the health, safety, and privacy of all fighters and staff.
Why The UFC Chose Oura
In an attempt to enhance training programs and optimize athletes’ physical and mental performance, the staff of the UFC Performance Institute — the state-of-the-art, mixed martial arts training, research, and sports innovation performance facility — spent three years vetting and trialing other technologies before choosing Oura as its first-ever “Official Health Wearable.”
The reason? Oura is not just one of the only consumer health wearables that measures body temperature directly from your skin rather than your external environment, it also combines that accurate temperature data with industry-leading sleep insights to reveal the impact of sleep on the body and help optimize athletic performance.
It’s with these sleep insights that Oura will play an essential role in modernizing the training programs for UFC athletes, prioritizing the impact of sleep on mental clarity, reaction time, physical strain, injury prevention, immunity, and recovery. Participating UFC athletes will use Oura’s long-standing Teams product, which allows members of a group to share their data with a “Coach” who can work with individuals to better understand their health and help identify meaningful patterns to better inform training regimens.
The UFC Performance Institute’s goal is to equip athletes with the most accurate and credible health technology. So, they turned to Oura’s two most recent major research partnerships, UCSF’s TemPredict study, and a separate study at West Virginia University, for validation. In these studies, Oura Ring was donated to thousands of frontline healthcare workers— helping maintain the workers’ safety while contributing to a growing body of illness detection, symptom profiling, and recovery research.
With the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, the UFC’s deployment of Oura’s technology is even more timely given Oura’s unique ability to potentially detect early illness symptoms. This, coupled with Oura’s unique ability to deliver highly personalized health insights is what makes Oura the ideal health technology to help keep UFC athletes safe as they prepare for their moment in the Octagon.
The UFC & Oura
“The UFC Performance Institute is a visionary in its mission to utilize science and technology to keep athletes healthy and performing at their best. We’re glad that we can support these efforts, especially in a time when safety is of the utmost importance. We’re excited about the ability to work with UFC in a collective commitment to prioritize athlete health.”
– Harpreet Singh Rai, Oura CEO
Fueled by mutual respect and admiration, a partnership between the UFC Performance Institute and Oura came to fruition.
With this partnership, the UFC will deploy Oura’s Health Risk Management platform, an opt-in solution developed to support organizations with existing health and safety protocols, like the UFC, to help keep athletes and training staff safe while protecting their privacy.
“We want to make intentional decisions that drive powerful conversations around health, wellbeing and performance. Oura is the perfect solution to enable this given its unmatched accuracy and focus on personalized baselines.”
– Duncan French, Vice President of Performance, UFC
These fighters put themselves through unimaginable physiological and mental strain—extreme weight cuts, years worth travel, the viewers’ entertainment expectations—and it can be easy to get lost in the intensity and physicality of the sport. That’s where the UFC Performance Institute hopes Oura will make a difference, offering personal, meaningful insights to guide fighters’ preparation leading up to a night in the Octagon.