Polar Personal Trainer review

Whether you’re trying to shed a few post-Christmas pounds or training for a triathlon, you’ll probably hit a point where you want to be able to collect and analyse more information about your fitness, progress and calorie burn than you can easily handle with a pen, paper and stopwatch.

Polar is a renowned maker of sports and fitness tracking equipment, most notably heart rate monitors (HRMs). To test Polar’s Personal Trainer software, we used Polar’s FT7 monitor. At around £70, it’s an entry-level monitor without the extra features of some rivals. A strap goes around your chest to track your heartbeat and wirelessly send that data to the HRM computer, which takes the form of a rather snazzy looking digital watch. Both strap and watch are waterproof, so you can track your performance while swimming as well as on land.

When you start the HRM’s monitoring mode, it logs your heart rate in real time, along with whether it’s within your personal “fat-burning” (70% to 80% of maximum heart rate) or “fitness” (80% to 90% heart rate) zones. The ability to display your current heart rate is a valuable aid to training, particularly if you use intervals of high-intensity anaerobic exercise interspersed by slower recovery periods. Based on this data, the HRM will store a log of your training session, including peak and average heart rate and total estimated calorie burn.

You can look at the key data, including weekly stats, on the watch’s mono LCD display, which also makes it easy to enter key information about your age, weight and height, which is required to calculate your personal heart rate training zones. However if you want to analyse your performance properly, you’ll need other tools and a free subscription to the Polar Personal Trainer website.

[IMG ID=”158401F”]Polar FT7 + Flowlink[/IMG]

We used the Polar FT7 Heart Rate Monitor in our tests. It comes with the essential chest strap, but the FlowLink USB dongle is sold separately

To get data from our FT7 heart-rate monitor to the site, we had to use the Polar FlowLink USB device and WebSync software (available for PC or Mac OS X), which sends the latest data from your HRM to the website when you put the watch down on the FlowLink receiver. It’s a fairly hassle-free process, but you’ll have to buy the FlowLink separately for around £35. It’s worth noting that some of Polar’s more expensive HRMs such as the £161 FT80 come with an included FlowLink module.

The Polar Personal Trainer website isn’t much to look at, but it’s bursting at the seams with features. Left to its own devices, the website simply stores all the data you upload to it and plots each training session as a calendar entry, including all the data recorded by your HRM. The next step up is to add your favourite sports and disciplines to your personal profile. With that done, you’ll be able to pick a sport for each training session and sort your uploaded data accordingly.

A section for strength training exercises allows you to list personal records in the form of one-rep maximums for a range of popular weight lifts and allows you to assemble your own strength workouts. You can add your own exercises, which is helpful, because the limited pre-set lifts, which come with instructive animations, lack many standards, including deadlifts. It’s perhaps not surprising that strength training is a little underrepresented. The core use of HRMs – and other Polar products such as cadence and stride sensors – is for cardio work. To this end, there are tools to help you build and track training programs. You can choose between running, cycling outdoor and general aerobic fitness.

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.