How to Use a Polar Heart Rate Watch

Polar provides a variety of heart rate watches for basic fitness, runners, cardiac rehabilitation, cyclists and triathletes, and swimmers. The watches, besides providing the obvious time and date functions, give useful information for fitness. While watch models differ, here are some ideas on different features you can use.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Define your Target Zone for heart rate intensity using the watch's special feature. You can base this on heart rate, cadence or speed.
2. Use the OwnZone feature to guide you through warm-up exercises and determine a heart rate that is safe and effective for exercise. This feature has Basic, Advanced, Light, Moderate, Hard and Weight settings.
3. Monitor the maximum heart rate during your exercise time in beats per minute.
4. Use the Total Exercise Time feature to track total amount of time you have exercised while the watch is on. This feature helps you set daily or weekly goals.
5. Track efforts with the Time in Target Zone feature. This, combined with Target Zone mentioned in Step 1, helps to determine the effectiveness of your program.
6. Keep up with your calorie burnup with the OwnCal feature. It allows you to monitor the kilocalories burned in one exercise session and the total burned over several sessions. It also tracks the percent of fat kilocalories burned as a percent of the total kilocalories burned.
7. Look at the ZonePointer, a visible symbol on the face of the watch, to find out whether you are in your target zone.