Setting up wrist-based power
Wrist-based power is built into your watch – there’s no special setup needed, except setting your height and weight, and adding power to your data screens.
NOTE: I was not able to include a Polar in my wrist-based study, so cannot confirm whether Polar wrist-based power is repeatable and concurrently valid or not.
Height & weight settings
As explained in the Settings for all Watches/Power Meters book chapter, it’s important to ‘set and forget’ your height and weight.
Height and Weight are entered in the Balance web service, as described in Manually updating your weight on the Polar website.
Auto-lap, Auto-pause, Auto-calibrate, Recording Frequency
These settings are explained in the Settings for all Watches/Power Meters book chapter. They are made on your watch, or via Polar Flow.
Auto-lap
Auto-lap is sport profile-specific. When running with different sports profiles (e.g. road, trail, treadmill), each of them requires Auto-lap to be changed.
Enabling/disabling Auto-lap is described in the manual for each watch model on the Polar website.
Auto-pause
Auto-pause is sport profile-specific. When running with different sports profiles (e.g. road, trail, treadmill), each of them requires Auto-pause to be changed.
Enabling/disabling Auto-pause is described in the manual for each watch model on the Polar website.
Auto-calibrate
Calibration is sport profile-specific. When running with different sports profiles (e.g. road, trail, treadmill), each of them requires calibration to be changed.
The process is described in the Polar Setup page on the Stryd website.
Recording Frequency
Recording Frequency can be set to High, Medium or Low accuracy, as described in the manual for each watch model on the Polar website.
For accurate metrics, record data with High accuracy.
Adjusting what's displayed on your watch
Polar watches allow users to customize which metrics are displayed during activities. Each activity type (run, walk) can have different settings.
How to adjust activity settings is described in the manual for each watch model on the Polar website.
Because Power is natively available on Polar watches, there’s no need to use an additional app – just choose the layout you want to use, and add the metrics you want to see.
Power Averaging
Power averaging is explained in the Settings for all Watches/Power Meters book chapter.
Polar watches offer real-time and lap power. They do not offer smoothed power.
Displaying power, pace and heart rate
Some of the activities in the book ask you to display power, pace and HR on your watch so that you can keep track of changes in those metrics as you begin to experience running with power.
To do this, choose a layout showing at least three metrics, and include real-time power, pace and heart rate as displayed metrics.
Moving to the next lap
To move to the next lap, press the middle right button (labelled OK).
Using structured workouts
To create structured workouts, you can use the Polar Flow app, where you’ll be creating a workout with phases. Each phase can have a different duration and target intensity, and you’ll need to plan each workout step (warm-up, work, recovery, cool-down) including multiple steps for repeating intervals.
You can also use a paid subscription to TrainingPeaks to create structured workouts, which can then be downloaded to your watch, as described in Using Polar Flow with TrainingPeaks on the Polar website.
Uploading completed workouts
Completed workouts will be uploaded to Polar Flow.
If you want completed workouts uploaded to other apps (for reviewing), you should connect Polar Flow to those apps, either connecting from Polar Flow to the other apps, or connecting the other apps to Polar Flow.
I'd like to give feedback ...
If you have feedback – perhaps something that’s missing/incorrect, or something that would improve the content of Part 3, please let me know in the from1runner2another Facebook group.
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