Longstanding vs Oura Cardiovascular Age
Oura estimates how your large arteries are ageing from the shape of the ring’s pulse signal. Longstanding measures what you can do: strength, balance, stairs, aerobic capacity, each against norms and the line for 85.
Checked against Oura Cardiovascular Age’s own pages on
The short answer
Different organ, different question. Oura’s Cardiovascular Age is an estimate of arterial stiffness, read from the ring’s pulse wave and reported as younger, aligned or older than your age. Longstanding is about capability: ten tests of strength, balance and aerobic capacity, re-tested every quarter against published norms and an age-85 line. Neither replaces the other; a stiff artery and a weak leg are both worth knowing about and neither product sees the other.
What Oura Cardiovascular Age is
Oura describes Cardiovascular Age as an estimate of how your large arteries are ageing compared with your chronological age. Its page calls pulse wave velocity the “gold-standard measurement of arterial stiffness”, and says the ring does not measure it directly: the infrared sensors pick up blood-volume changes in the finger, and the algorithm extracts signal features that correlate with pulse wave velocity, which Oura calls a “PWV-proxy”.
Oura says the algorithm was built from anonymised data from hundreds of thousands of members and clinical studies with 600 participants, with partners including the Kuopio Research Institute of Exercise Medicine and UCLA. You need at least 14 nights of data; the result falls into three bands (younger by 5 years or more, aligned within 5 years, older by 5 years or more), and Oura recommends watching month-to-month trends. Its page reports no accuracy statistics for the estimate itself, and states that the ring is not a medical device.
Side by side
| Longstanding | Oura Cardiovascular Age | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Ten field tests you do yourself: single-leg stand, 5× sit-to-stand, floor sit-and-rise, grip, dead hang, push-ups, farmer carry, VO₂max, zone 2 minutes and a four-flight stair climb. | A proxy for arterial stiffness from the pulse signal, reported as an age band. |
| How often | A baseline, then a re-test every quarter. Nothing is measured in between. | Nightly, with a 14-night minimum; Oura suggests reading monthly trends. |
| Reference | Each result is a percentile against a named published table for your age and sex, labelled estimated where no clinical table exists, and read against the line you need today for your age-85 goal. | Three bands around your chronological age. The reference ranges for pulse wave velocity by age are cited; the estimate’s own accuracy is not reported. |
| What it cannot see | Anything you do between quarterly tests. | Strength, balance, how you get off the floor, how you climb stairs. |
| Where the data lives | On your phone, with an optional iCloud or Google backup. No account and no server for your results. | On Oura’s servers, under a membership. |
| What you need | A timer, a chair, a wall, a bar, two weights and a staircase. A grip dynamometer for one test. A watch is optional, for VO₂max and zone 2. | An Oura ring worn at night and a membership. |
| Cost shape | The baseline is free. One purchase, or a yearly one, unlocks re-tests, backcast lines and history. | The ring, then a subscription. |
| The age-85 question | The point of the app: every test has a line for 85, worked backwards to today. | Not something the feature describes. It compares your arteries with your current age. |
The big difference
Oura is reading your cardiovascular system; Longstanding is reading your body’s capabilities. Both are about ageing, and they overlap almost nowhere. The research the app rests on is about what people can do: people who cannot stand on one leg for ten seconds, who are slow to stand up from a chair, or who cannot get up from the floor without using a hand have markedly higher mortality in follow-up. None of that is visible to a ring.
The honest reading of both is the same. Oura says to watch trends over months rather than single readings; the app re-tests every quarter and shows change from your own results rather than the slope of a population chart. If you wear an Oura, keep it for the nightly picture and use the app for the quarterly one.
Where Oura Cardiovascular Age is the better choice
For a nightly, effortless read on sleep, heart rate variability and now arterial ageing, with clinical partners named on the page, Oura is the better product; nothing in Longstanding touches the cardiovascular system directly.
Longstanding is not for you if
You want sleep and recovery tracked, or a signal you never have to act on to collect. The app only knows what you tested, when you tested it.
The research behind this page
- Adults aged 51–75 who could not stand on one leg for 10 seconds had 1.84 times the mortality of those who could
- Across pooled cohorts, the slowest quarter on chair rises had about twice the mortality of the fastest
- In adults aged 51–80, the lowest sit-and-rise scores went with five times the mortality of the highest
- In adults over 65, each 0.1 m/s faster walking speed went with 12% lower mortality
Everything on this page about the other product was read off its own pages on the date shown. Prices are not listed, because they change and a stale one would mislead.