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The Polar FT60 heart rate monitor is your own personal coach and electronic motivator. It will plan your workouts and give you specific training advice. Here’s why you need it.

I was always taught when working out, no pain no gain. If my 10K times weren’t improving it was because I wasn’t working hard enough. Train more, train harder. Ignore pain and injury. Well, over time I’ve learned that is not what you want to do, especially if you want to get better in endurance sports like running or cycling.

You should listen to what your body is telling you. But unfortunately your interpretation of that can be notoriously inaccurate. I know mine is. If my body is sore and I just want to go for a nice easy 5K run I always end up telling myself, “Kick it up you lazy bum!” “You need to do a 15K today with some interval sprints if you ever want to see your time drop!” In reality, I probably should just go for a light recovery type run. But without a track coach measuring my workouts, how do I really know? The only real way to know if you are over or under training is to monitor different fitness measures. And the best measure you can look at for this is your heart rate.

There are many heart rate monitors on the market, but the Polar FT60 does the best job of actually providing coaching and training recommendations. It’s like having your own personal electronic trainer. It will measure and interpret your training and cardiovascular data and make recommendations on how much and at what intensity you should train for the next week.

If you’re not working hard enough it will tell you to pick it up, and if you are working too hard it will tell you to slow down and take a recovery week. If you follow the Polar FT60 recommendations you should see a fantastic improvement in your fitness level and your running or cycling race times should really start to drop. And that is really what this technology is all about.

Here is what you can expect from the Polar FT60 in detail.

The Polar Star Training Program Takes Your Training To A Whole New Level

When you first start using the FT60 you enter some basic data about yourself such as your age, weight, height, sex, fitness level, activity level, and training goal. Then the Polar FT60 will design a training program specific to you. Using the Polar Star Training Program you’ll know that you’re training at the optimal intensity and for the correct length of time to meet your fitness goals.

The FT60 will map out a whole training program for you based on your particular goals. You get specific feedback from the Polar wrist unit on your performance after each training session and once a week. You get constant feedback while you workout so you know what your average and maximum heart rate is, and what zone you are training in. If you go above or below the zone of the day, the alarm will sound, telling you to dial it back or speed up to get back in the right heart pace zone. On the watch face you can see your zones in a nice graph so you can tell how hard you’re working with a glance.

The FT60 will give you daily and weekly training targets and tell you exactly what you need to do in terms of length and intensity of your workout and what cardio rate zone you should be training in. After you complete a weeks worth of training, the FT60 will then analyze your training results and give you recommendations for how to train the following week. Just like a real life coach would do. The training program recommendations will automatically adapt to your improving fitness level and your particular training habits.

You can choose from three training goals on the FT60. You can change these goals at any time as your fitness level changes by creating a new training program.

1. Improve fitness – This is your goal if you want to boost your cardiovascular fitness level and you are able to work out consistently.




2. Lose weight – This training goal will focus in on burning calories and cutting fat. When training with this goal in mind, the FT60 will display how much energy and how many calories you’ve burned for each workout session. You can also look at weekly and monthly totals. The FT60 will set daily and weekly calorie burning goals for you. It will also let you know what percentage of the calories you burned were fat.




3. Maximize fitness – You should focus in on this goal if you want to maximize your cardiovascular fitness level and training every day is doable for you. This is for people who have been training regularly for at least 10-12 weeks prior to starting with the Polar FT60.

This video really explains the program well.

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