Sunday, February 21, 2010

Polar FT80 - Review

Polar's FT80 Puts A Personal Trainer On Your Wrist In Your Heart Rate Monitor

As a heart rate monitor watch, the Polar FT80 is targeted at multi-sport fitness buffs trying to connect with aggregate fitness goals and is suited to multi-sport athletes, meaning individuals that rotate between endurance days, lifting days, calesthentic days, and everything else imaginable. The Polar FT80 provides very good features for both aerobic and weight excercise, while also being able to connect to GPS and running sensors.

Product Highlights include:

    * Graphical Guidance (shows you exactly when your body is ready to do your next exercise set/interval)
    * Polar STAR feature (get daily targets based upon previous work outs)
    * Polar OwnCal (displays calorie burned during exercise)
    * Polar Strength Training (shows when body is ready to do next weights set)
    * Polar Fitness Test (a 5 minute test that determines you fitness level)
    * Polar OwnZone, ZoneLock and ZonePointer (helps to remain in specific heart rate zone)
    * Polar OwnCode Transmission (prevents interference)
    * Heart rate displayed as a percentage of maximum, beats per minute or graph
    * Upload data to polarpersonaltrainer.com

Optional Outdoor Features

The Polar FT80 heart rate monitor can be linked to:

    * Foot Pod (Running speed/distance)
    * Polar G1 GPS Sensor (Speed/distance for outdoor sports)

The FT80 is an exceptional watch for sports club exercise and lifting exercise but the FT80 truly was off target on display screen contrast, this can make the monitor challenging to read in brilliant sun. White font against a black backdrop are hard to see in brilliant light. This aspect is the one important downside if you work out outside on many brilliant, sunny days and it instantly reduced one star from the monitors ranking in our judgment.


Alright,so right now you understand the largest downside connected to the FT80 and we will drill down on all the features that are truly notable with reference to this monitor.

The custom display of recuperation period, branded as graph feedback, and it is exceptional for lifting. Perfecting recuperation periods sandwiched between repititions is critical to realizing the greatest benefit from your weight work outs and the FT80 is stellar in this respect. Not one other watch maker provides this characteristic and it creates significant usefulness in your exercise knowing exactly at what time to start your next series to gain the greatest benefit. We almost gave back a star for this quality alone however we were in a critical mind set on the date of our evaluation.

The chest strap functions well and helps your watch avoid cross-talk and picking up the data of other exercisers, this is critical because this is where we think the FT80 truly excels. We advocate the FT80 strongly for competitive health club environments as a result of of the out-of-doors drawbacks attributable to display screen readability in brilliant light conditions.

Training Star is an added terrific attribute that renders weekly excercise goals based upon your preceding exercise. Download new exercises directly from Polar's website.

The chest band is the best chest belt that we have tried and being able to remove the sensor to clean it is a true plus. If you desire to get liberated of your band completely the sensors work with Numetrex pulse-sensing muscle shirts and cardio bras. These unique pieces of clothing contain heart-sensing clothe and you can attach the transmitter directly to the garment and presto, you lose the strap.

Our combined appraisal is that the FT80 is a great monitor for competitive fitness enthusiasts but that their monitor is best not included for outside fitness routines on sunny days. This is why we assign the monitor a 3.75 star ranking out of five stars. If your foremost focal point is on sports club connected working out then we would give this monitor a green light.

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