Polar Personal Trainer review

The program creator starts by asking you a few questions about your current level of training, providing it with the information it needs to suggest sessions for everyone from a couch potato to a would-be Olympian. Once created, training dates and instructions are added to your future calendar, making it easier to plan your schedule and providing much-needed encouragement to train during the cold winter months.

[IMG ID=”157135F”]Diary view[/IMG]

The diary view allows you to see all your complete and planned training sessions

If you’re training with a specific date in mind, such as a forthcoming race, you can create a program to build up to it, or simply opt for general training. The cycling programs typically include a mixture of interval training, which alternates between sprints and recovery periods, medium intensity activity and endurance work, while running programs focus more on preparing you to handle a specific distance, from 5K to marathon. If you have compatible hardware, you can even upload the programs to your training computer. The programs are well constructed and come with plenty of helpful advice, but we’d have liked more tailored options for triathlon training.

Other tools allow you to view your training load – the intensity with which you’ve been training over a given period – plotted on a graph that displays the intensity of your load. Red, yellow and green zones to show you when you’re pushing yourself to your upper limits and makes it easy to see when you need to take a rest day to avoid overtraining. More graphing tools allow you to track your programs over time based on calorie burn, distance covered or time spent training. There’s a lot of data to see here, and you can overlay some types – including data about your weight, body-fat percentage or average heart rate during exercise – over the main graphs.

[IMG ID=”156991F”]Training load[/IMG]

Training load graphs show you how hard you’ve exerted yourself recently and indicate whether you need to rest or can keep training

If, like us, you use one of Polar’s less expensive HRMs, you can’t view graph data for your heart rate over a single training session; this is a little disappointing, as it’s a useful feature to have if you’re doing interval work or want to see exactly how hard you pushed through that last hill ride or aerobics class. If, however, you have more feature-packed hardware, you’ll be able to plot everything from heart rate graphs to GPS and elevation data for your route.

Polar Personal Fitness benefits from being free and you can use it even if you don’t have a Polar product, if you don’t need heart rate information. Some of its features, such as the training program generator, are certainly good enough to justify doing so. Polar’s hardware is also reasonably priced, durable and accurate – quality remains consistent throughout the range; you just get more features at higher prices.

However, the site design, with its small fonts and occasionally terrifying-looking graphs is mediocre. You have to do a lot of clicking around various menus to find everything, while some options – such as the rather nifty community challenges feature – take you to an entirely different sub-site. At very least, we’d like to see some graphical tweaking in the future, such as the ability to apply different icons or colours to training sessions of various sorts, or at least mark them by sport. Despite these flaws, the website has enough on offer to make it a valuable tool and a powerful incentive to use Polar’s HRMs, cycle computers and GPS kit.