Polar has unveiled its Polar Vantage V, a premium multi-sport watch for athletes serious about performance, and its sister product, the Polar Vantage M, an all-in-one sports watch with advanced heart rate technology for goal-oriented athletes.

The Polar Vantage V is the company’s most advanced watch to date and the Polar Vantage M, offers serious athletes advanced performance metrics and new Smart Coaching features at an affordable price.

Both watches introduces Polar’s new Precision Prime wrist-based fusion heart rate technology for enhanced accuracy. The company says its new unique sensor fusion technology and customised smart algorithm delivers a new standard for wrist-based accuracy.

“We’re thrilled to introduce Polar Precision Prime, which is the only heart rate technology that integrates three sensor types to deliver leading wrist-based heart rate,” says Sanna Merio, Segment Manager at Polar. “Precision Prime uses nine optical channels that deploy two colours and wavelengths of light to extract data from different layers in the skin.

“In addition to the 3D accelerometer, we’ve also incorporated new electrode sensors that measure sensor-skin contact. These advancements mean a faster response time, more sensitivity for readings, and much higher accuracy and reliability for wrist-based heart rate.”

The new devices also come with Training Load Pro, a new Smart Coaching feature that guides athletes to reach the ideal amount of training to perform at their very best. The new feature monitors training load from each training session and helps athletes recognise personal limits by informing them when they’re overtraining, undertraining or training just right.

Some additional features of both watches include:
– Running Index: A straightforward number that scores running performance. Running Index automatically provides an estimate of a runner’s Running Vo2max score based on their submaximal or typical runs.
– Running Program: Polar’s free, personalised and adaptive training program offers guidance on completing anything from a 5k to a marathon.
– Polar Sleep Plus: Automatically detects the timing, amount, and quality of sleep and provides feedback for improvement.
– Daily Activity and Continuous Heart Rate: Intelligently combines activity and heart rate data to calculate daily calorie burn outside of training, offering a comprehensive view on everyday life, accurate calorie consumption and activity data.
– Swim Metrics: Tracks indoor and outdoor swimming sessions with metrics such as stroke rate and distance.

The more advanced Polar Vantage V also comes with features such as Running Power, Recovery Pro and Polar Flow for Coach.

Running Power

Running Power lets athletes train with a level of convenience and effectiveness that hasn’t been possible without a separate sensor before Polar Vantage V.

Polar’s running power unifies several running metrics into one, easy-to-understand number that represents the power that the runner produces during running.

Wrist-based running power also has the added benefit of no need for external sensors. As the trusted brand for heart rate accuracy, Polar now provides both metrics to enable athletes to train smarter and more effectively, so they can reach performance goals.

Recovery Pro

Recovery Pro, exclusive to Polar Vantage V, provides a holistic understanding of the balance between training and recovery by measuring daily and long-term recovery.

Together, Training Load Pro and Recovery Pro offer personalised training guidance to help ensure athletes are improving personal performance while avoiding injury.

Polar Flow for Coach

Polar Vantage V provides Polar’s free Polar Flow for Coach online service. The service allows coaches to develop robust training plans that sync with an athlete’s Flow account and Polar Vantage V.

Athletes can follow daily training sessions on their watch, with coaches able to view data, compare actual training sessions to original plans and make adjustments.

Polar Flow for Coach includes advanced seasonal planning features, providing easy-to-use tools and visualisations that offer an annual overview as well as a detailed look at weekly and monthly training sessions.

Release and cost

Both watches are available for pre-order now on www.polar.com. Polar Vantage V costs £439, while the Vantage M will cost you £249.

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The post New Polar watches bring wrist-based heart rate technology to next level appeared first on Fast Running.

“You’re a runner AND a cyclist but you’re not on Strava?” – this is a frequent dismayed response I get when informing someone I’m not on Stravarian.

After all, if it’s not a Strava, did it even happen?

Don’t get me wrong, Strava and social media are fantastic ways to connect with other runners. Sharing training, getting advice and encouragement from followers, even having friendly competition. Apps like Strava and Training Peaks allow you to accurately track your running.

You can analyse each session’s every heartbeat, minute per mile and foot strike. Both you and your coach can utilise all your performance data to formulate the perfect training plan.

What’s the issue?

I track my training on training peaks meticulously. I’ll get into a quiet rage if I forget to restart my watch. As you’ve probably guessed from previous posts, I have an addictive personality. I’ll be the first to admit tracking training data is done in obsession.

Pre GPS watch, I was clueless how far I ran. I rarely timed reps and didn’t care about weekly mileage. However, once I sold my soul by trading my Casio for a Garmin I started to track times and miles more closely. Becoming more involved in social media and engrossed in the running world opened my eyes to how other athletes trained, including ones I inspired to be like. It became apparent how obsessed runners were about hitting weekly mileage targets. Running 100 miles a week seemed to be the answer to running fast.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t be in my situation if I didn’t have a Garmin or Training Peaks. I was certainly well on my way to having issues.

I was desperate to run faster and I was able to see how other athletes were able to do that. It’s normal to scroll through social media and see exact details of athletes daily training. It’s natural for humans to compare themselves to others. You want to be like your hero. You want to beat your rival. You want to show your training partners just how hard you train and boast to your friends about your PBs.

We are often most influenced by people we relate to. Seeing your friend running 100-mile weeks or a rival running 10K PB can fuel your ambition to train harder. A bit of healthy competition is fine but it can easily turn an unhealthy obsession.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of becoming addicted to logging weekly mileage or ensure you do no less than two hours of training a day. It’s not unusual for an athlete to be obsessed with getting course records on every segment and to check up on competitors training sessions to see what shape they are in.

Everyone is different

Not everyone has unhealthy compulsions about training. The online running community is a brilliant way to share training methods and give each other advice. The trouble is each athlete has different physiologies and circumstances.

One athlete’s healthy training may push another over the edge. Trying to copy your role model who is a full-time athlete when you work a 40 hour weeks may be at a detriment to you. We are all individuals and respond to different stimulus.

The reason why I don’t have Strava is that I know I am vulnerable to comparing myself and getting caught up in what other athletes are doing.

Similarly, I hate to think that I could negatively influence another athlete by my obsessive training behaviours. I am of the personal opinion that intrinsic details of training should be kept between an athlete and their coach. I have enough (in fact too much) internal drive to train without the additional pressure of posting every single run to justify my worth as an athlete.

Training apps like Strava have benefits, but for a vulnerable athlete, it can promote obsessive and addictive behaviours which can drive overtraining. It’s important for a coach or athlete to recognise personality traits and consider the best approach to record their training. Perhaps reverting back to the old school pen to paper is the way forward.

But first ditching the GPS and not uploading your run before you’ve even taken your trainers off takes bravery.

After all, if it’s not on Strava, did it even happen?

Anna Boniface features in the ‘Fast 10: class of 2018’ and will share her running journey throughout the year. You can read Anna’s previous posts here and further information about the ‘class of 2018’ can be found here.

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The topics of training hard and the benefits of incorporating easy running have both been discussed on Fast Running before, so what did the wearable tech company learn from analysing data of 45 million runs from April 2017 to March 2018?

The analysis started by separating runners based on their data, that included heart rate, into three distinct groups; ambitious, regular and intensives.

‘Ambitious’ runners trained on average of nine hours a week and included professional athletes. The group ‘regular’ trained four hours a week on average, as did ‘intensives’, but as the name suggests, everything the intensives did was at a higher effort level.

After analysing the data it was concluded the intensive runners were missing out on key physiological adaptations. They were not doing the slower work to develop their aerobic base, thus more at risk to injuries and fatigue. On top of this, they were also less efficient than the other groups.

Basically, the regular runners saw better results than the intensive runners, even though both groups averaged four hours a week. It may seem counter-intuitive but those including easier running actually showed the greater improvements.

This is down to an increased aerobic base from training in lower heart rate zones and increased efficiency. Run too fast all the time and you miss these benefits of training.

The graphic below shows the heart rate zones that the runners were working in.  

Studies and research on polarisation from the likes of Stephen Seiler and Jonathan Esteve-Lanao concur with the findings of the data analysis. 
To make running efficiency and VO2max easier to understand, Polar developed a Running Index score, which is calculated using heart rate and speed data. A higher score indicates a person can run faster with less effort.

Polar data supports that incorporating effective heart rate training results in better running efficiency (but they may have a bit of bias with that one):

Ambitious: The average running index score for ambitious athletes is 54. It comes as no surprise that, given their much higher weekly volume, Ambitious runners get the top score for Running Index. However, these more dedicated runners also spend a dramatically higher percentage of their running time in zones 1, 2 and 3 than do the Regulars and Intensives.

Regular: Regular runners have an average score of 50, four points better than Intensives. The key difference is that Regulars spend significantly less training time in zones 4 and 5 and significantly more time in zones 2 and 3.

Intensive: Intensive runners have an average score of 46, supporting the notion that although they train as often as regular runners, they do not experience the same benefits. While it may seem non-intuitive, these runners, who push themselves significantly harder than the Regulars, under-achieve when it comes to Running Index score.

The data in the graphic below shows regular and intensive runners are training at the same volume, but are experiencing very different results.

The analysis concluded: “Regular runners are training at lower intensities and slower paces, but are developing a better Running Index, even though intensives seem to be working ‘harder’.

“This indicates a major difference on race day: the regular runners can perform significantly better with less effort than the intensive runners, simply by incorporating data-based heart rate guidance.”

The post Running data reaffirms the benefits of ‘easy runs’ appeared first on Fast Running.

I’ve kept my training logs for about 20 years, starting off from just having times and mileage scribbled down on six-week plans in A4, to more detailed logging in the past 10-15 years, where I write down my training and races in quite a lot of detail using hardback journals.

Even now, with the ability to upload training just by holding your GPS watch next to your phone, I think it’s still incredibly important to be connected with what you’re doing. Putting pen to paper really makes you think more about what you’re doing, rather than just a load of incomprehensible stats recorded by technology.

When I look back on my training, I can pinpoint mistakes where I might have gone wrong more easily (there’s also more swear words and exclamation marks!). By writing down how you felt after training you can often spot a potential demise before the splits or times start showing it. You should always be in-tune with how you feel in your training, as well as being connected to what the purpose of your training is.

As with most technology, it’s ever changing. I would have lost all my logged training from the Garmin Trainer Centre (the days of Forerunner 201’s if you’ve been running less than 10 years) when it changed to Garmin Connect and there’s no guarantee that Strava will be here forever.

Still, if I want to look back at any period of my training, I don’t need to worry about that, all I do is walk over to the bookshelf and “voila,” there it is!

There’s something very unemotional about logging training online that I’ve never been fond of. I feel far more connected thoughtfully and emotionally with what I’m doing when I write it down. It brings a personality and an individuality to your training, rather than some generic format on the internet.

Statistics don’t always tell you the full story, only the written word can.

Now to my recent running

This past month has been about getting that sharpness back following the London Marathon. I didn’t recover quite as well as I expected and had a few days were I felt a bit groggy, but at least the legs felt fine. By the time I did the 5000m for Blackburn Harriers in the Northern League two weeks later, I felt pretty much 100%, though I hadn’t done much in the way of speed-work.

I was up against Karl Darcy, who’s been in fine form recently, so I knew it would be a stern test. I took the lead and felt surprisingly comfortable, rattling off 72 second laps. By about halfway I started to open up a gap on Karl and I pushed hard to really turn the screw and put myself out of reach. I started to feel it a bit in the last few laps, it was very hot out there and the lack of speed was catching up with me, but still, I managed to win by around 100m in 15:18.

After that, it was a well overdue holiday with Hannah, and we spent a week in Pembrokeshire, Wales. It was nice to spend some time together, relax and enjoy a change of scenery. I didn’t fret about mileage, but I ran on most mornings and nailed a couple of good speed sessions (6 x 6 mins with 2 min rec and 12x 300m hills).

The next race was the Wesham Summer 10k, which is a new addition to the long established winter one in November. The no-nonsense approach of no medal, t-shirt or presentation with £6 entry, proved very popular and the race sold out very quickly.

RELATED: Do we want fast times? Then let’s get back to basics…

The start list also boasted some of the fastest runners in the area, though, sadly there were a few missing due to injuries or illness. The most notable absence was Wesham’s protege, Rob Danson, who would have been the race favourite. As it was, the heavy burden of race favourite seemed to fall on my shoulders, though having seen how well my clubmate Tim Raynes has been running, I wasn’t so sure.

I certainly didn’t make things easy for myself, on checking the race location, which wasn’t actually in Wesham as such, and mapping my route, it was likely to take 45-50 minutes to travel over there on my motorbike.  The route ‘seemed’ simple enough, but after passing by Longridge, it started proving to be anything but.

All the winding country lanes made navigating very difficult and I soon learnt there are a lot more small villages between Preston and Wesham than I realised. Time was starting to run out and I was beginning to panic, the race was at 7:15pm and I was expecting to get there for 6:30pm after work. After having to keep pulling over and checking the map on my phone I finally got there with 20 minutes to spare!

The race started off as expected, with myself and Tim battling it out, but I was feeling far from comfortable in the first 2km. I seemed to be running more smoothly after that and just before halfway I started to put a gap on Tim. I passed 5km in 15:19 and there was a chance I might threaten Jonathan Prowse’s record of 30:56, which has stood for a number of years.

However, I could sense my pace was starting to slow in the last 3km and on checking my watch at 9km (28:08) I knew the record was well out of reach. I finished in 31:23, followed by Tim In 32:01 and the evergreen Rob Affleck in 33:03. It was a great day for the club with Ben Costello bagging fifth place ahead of Chris Davies in seventh and Josh Holgate in eighth place. We also had Victoria Mousley finish third in the ladies race and Joanne Nelson in seventh.

Looking ahead I will have one or two half marathons in June, then I’ll switch my attention to racing shorter distances and will do more on the track, with the hope of improving my 3000m time at the Stretford Open races.

The post Technology’s fine but write down your training too appeared first on Fast Running.