What Wearable Tech Is Teaching Me About Yoga and My Body
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wearing a continuous glucose monitor.
Not because I have diabetes or because I’m trying to achieve a perfectly flat glucose line. I was simply curious about what happens in my body after I eat, sleep, move and practise yoga.
I also wear an Oura Ring, so between the two devices I’ve suddenly got rather a lot of information about what my body is doing behind the scenes.
And some of it has genuinely surprised me.
The cinnamon roll experiment
I’d made homemade cinnamon rolls and ate one for breakfast on two consecutive mornings.
On the first morning, I didn’t practise yoga. My glucose rose quite sharply and stayed higher for longer.
The following morning I ate the same breakfast, but I also practised yoga. This time the rise was noticeably smaller, only taking me up to the midway point between the lower and upper 'normal' ranges.
Obviously, this isn’t a scientific study. Sleep, stress, what I’d eaten the day before and how active I’d been could all have played a part. But it was fascinating to see.
I hadn’t gone for a run or done a punishing workout to somehow compensate for eating a cinnamon roll. I had simply practised yoga.
And then there was the bread
Bread has surprised me too. Shop-bought wholemeal and granary bread gave me a steep glucose rise and the line remained elevated for considerably longer. My homemade white bread produced a much smaller rise that settled much more quickly.
Again, I’m not going to conclude that homemade bread is automatically ‘good’ and shop-bought bread is ‘bad’. There are too many variables for that. But it has made me much more curious about food that can look very similar on the plate but produce quite different responses in my body.
What my Oura Ring sees when I teach
There’s another piece of data I find especially interesting. I wear an Oura Ring, which tracks my heart rate, heart-rate variability and other physiological signals throughout the day.
Its Daytime Stress feature divides periods into Stressed, Engaged, Relaxed and Restored. Restored is the deepest recovery end of that scale. Oura describes it as a time when the body is recharging in a calm state. It uses changes in things such as heart rate, heart-rate variability, movement and temperature compared with your own normal patterns to work this out. And quite often, while I am teaching yoga, my ring puts me there.
I notice it particularly during my Tuesday evening Yin class. You can actually see this pattern in the chart above where I taught yin from 6-7.15pm.
What I find fascinating is that I’m not actually resting. I’m working. I’m teaching, watching the room, talking people through postures and holding the space for a class. Yet physiologically, my body can move into a state that Oura recognises as restorative.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. When I teach Yin, my own breathing slows. My voice softens. I become very present. The room becomes quiet. I might not be lying on the mat doing the practice myself, but my body is still participating in that atmosphere.
Yoga can be subtle. We tend to think exercise has to look vigorous before it is doing anything useful. Sweat. Raised heart rate. Miles covered. Calories burned. Yoga often gives us something much quieter.
You breathe differently. Muscles work and release. Your attention changes. You become aware of tension you didn’t know you were carrying. Sometimes you leave a class simply feeling a little more settled inside yourself.
The glucose monitor and the Oura Ring don’t prove what yoga is doing to me. Nor do I want them to. But they have allowed me to glimpse some of the physiological changes that I would otherwise never see.
A very modern kind of svadhyaya (self-study)
There is something slightly ironic about using all this technology to explore something that yoga has been asking us to do for thousands of years.
To just pay attention.
In yogic philosophy, svadhyaya is often translated as self-study. And that is really how I’m approaching this. Not as a hunt for the perfect glucose line, perfect sleep score or perfect body. I’m still eating cinnamon rolls. I’m still eating bread. I don't want an app to become more authoritative than my own experience.
Instead, I’m interested in the conversation between the two. What does the data say? What do I notice? How do I actually feel?
Perhaps that is where wearable technology becomes useful. Not when it gives us another set of rules to follow, but when it makes us curious about the body we are already living in.
The monitor gives me the numbers. Yoga reminds me to listen.
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