Polar Beat: Running & Fitness 4+

It’s a great way to not miss out on recording your training. Also gives you one less excuse to “not exercise today because I can’t record it, it would be a wasted session” which has gone through my mind before.

Drawbacks is the phone needs to have a decent charge to complete the session.

The app doesn’t seem to draw much power. After 1 hr session I’d used around 20% of my battery but it’s best to leave your display off during sessions and only check a few times. The voice instructions/notifications play over the top of any music you might be listening to, automatically fading the music until the info is complete. A nice touch.

Update 2024

Still a solid app. Those saying it won’t connect to one device but does with others haven’t gone in to the settings to allow it to sync with multiple devices… that’s literally all you have to do.

I’ve used this app for years and it used to be really good. Both Beat and flow had a workload measure where it could tell you if your workout was reasonable, demanding, very demanding et cetera. Now you only see that on the beat app and only if you delete and then reinstall the app. For instance if I want to see what my workload strain of this last week of training I’d once again have to delete the app reinstate it and then for some reason it would show me. Also, the beat app only goes back like a month of data for some reason where before it’d go back to very first workout so I can compare HR and workload across my weeks/months. Any time I contact customer support all I get is an absolutely useless “this is a bug and we are trying to look into it but can’t promise that it will get fixed in the future” as though it’s just some kid with a bog standard template response for every single issue for the app. Absolute joke for a supposed high end, serious fitness brand.

This app has many failings, principally

1) requires you to run with your phone. Most other apps (eg native apple, Strava) don’t

2) it goes into the background on Apple Watch, even using always on. You have to use the dock every time you want to check your run data.

3) it does not record altitude

It’s only good feature is that is shows your HR from your Polor HRM in real time during a run.

As an alternative to Beat, try the Apple workout app or strava etc and they log the polar HR without having to use the Polar apps - you just connect the Polar HRM via Bluetooth. But bear in mind Beat will stop working if you connect the HRM using Bluetooth.

However - a big “but” here - One thing Beat can do but the Mapmyrun etc don’t do is to show the polar HR on screen in real time during a run. If you experiment with power saving in the watch you’ll see that most other apps show the Apple HR during the run - even though they record the polar HR in the log.

So this leaves you with a choice

Bluetooth off - stuck with Beat

Bluetooth on - Beat stops working, you can only see the Apple HR as you run (polar HR still recorded in your log)

If this sounds odd, test it and see. I’m still searching for a running app that displays the Polar HR when you run and logs it and meets basic functional standards.

Apple and Polar blame each other. Based on. User experience I think the main issue here is Polar. They are really not in touch with the customer