Polar Beat: Running & Fitness for Pc

I have been using the the app chest and watch heart rate monitors for the past 12 years for cycling and exercising. There was a period of 3 years when work and travel interrupted my daily/weekly routine and I could feel myself falling into poor health. I bought the H10 chest strap and kick started my regimen again. the app has provided me with the information I need to stay healthy and evaluate my progress. I have reviewed my spreadsheet data and compared it to my previous data and can see where the lack of exercise has affected my health. It doesn’t have to be high tech in the training room, just high tech enough for me to see where I’ve been and get me to where I want to be. Thanks the app for keeping it simple !!

The app is easy to use. The display is well laid out. I especially like that the app keeps the iPhone awake which is great for treadmills and other indoor workouts, and you can lock the iPhone manually which is good when in a pocket while lifting weights or jogging outside. There are a lot of sport profiles to help organize your workouts. Inexplicably though while there are profiles for obscure activities like squash, floorball, and Finnish baseball (kudos on that), there are no specific profiles for very common gym activities like elliptical and stair climber. It would be nice to be able to name custom profiles. My old the app/hr watch allowed you to set an upper/lower limit and you’d get alarms for going out of range. I’d like to see something similar in the app. Say I want to exercise in the 145 to 155 bpm range I’d like to be able to set that range and then the app voice coach would tell me to speed up or slow down (that could kick in after a warm up period getting up to range). That functionality would be especially useful when doing certain activities like boxing (heavy bag punching) where you are wearing gloves and the phone is not immediately nearby. Overall the app is good and provides use info and feedback to effectively train.

I think this app has some serious potential, but it needs work. I think the info it provides is great, and tops what the Apple Watch workout app provides. The thing is, there are some major downfalls when being used with the Apple Watch. The first problem is when the screen isn’t active for more than a few seconds, the app closes and most be reopened to view data during a workout. This is pretty frustrating and would be much nicer if all I had to do was glance at my watch to see the data. The second problem I’m running into is the app doesn’t fully transmit data to the Apple Watch activity app. For example, it shows that my active calories were counted, but it does not add to the daily total. This is frustrating because even with an hour workout logged with this app, I’m not achieving my activity goal for the day. These two problems have lead me to stop using the app altogether. If those issues were resolved, this would be my go/to 5 star app.

I use a the app heart rate monitor (“HRM”) to track my workouts’ intensity and calorie burn. I transitioned to the app after my 5-year old Suunto HRM wouldn’t consistently connect to the MovesCount app and frequently dropped the signal mid-workout. The the app HRM consistently connects to the app and, after 1 month, only lost signal once (I’m not sure why—signal interference, maybe). The app display is easy to start a workout, read, and add on optional “upgrades, ” which I have not explored. The app shows lots of information, and everything I want: heart rate (including a graph of heart rate over time of the work out), duration of the workout, calorie burn and % fat burn. The app could be improved by taking some cues from the Suunto Movescount app: The HRM is pretty small, and there’s no estimated EPOC. A big improvement would be to: - Arrange the info so the upper part has one large middle number display, and smaller numbers in each corner. Each display should then allow you to touch & hold to customize what the display is showing in that area. This would allow each user to pick what to display most prominently, and where to arrange the other info. Suunto’s Movescount is a good model for an excellent user interface (Movescount is not compatible with the app’s HRM). - HRM large and in the middle - Add EPOC and training effect