Polar M600 – Short Interval Running oHR Performance

I was a bit tired today but still managed 8×1 minute @’quite fast’. The Polar M600 managed to keep up quite nicely. This time I was comparing to a HRM-TRI as the STRYD+Garmin Strap I had been using seemed to be throwing out a few spikes early in previous runs.

The little blue M600 peak anomaly at about 4 minutes is where I go over a small footbridge. Strange.

There seemed to be a VERY slight lag with the M600 of maybe 2 or 3 seconds on this chart. But nothng of any concern at all.

After I stopped for a chat with someone at 15 minutes there followed 8x 1 minutes with alternating recoveries from standing to jogging. This usually causes oHRMs problems with how their algorithms react ie not usually quick enough

Looking at Polar’s optical unit in the bottom/right picture I have some thoughts on the sampling methods it might apply and could guess that they may well address how well it tracks HRs.

Summary: No Problemo

This was the one test that I thought the M600 would have problems with but it was fine, as you can see. Sorry if you wanted something else! I can only report what I found (yesterday’s M600 swim wasn’t too great if you want to find a bad one 🙂 )

Seriously though, there was one problem. About half way through the intervals the M600’s display seemed to have ‘frozen’ on 170bpm. I looked again a few seconds later and it was the same. The 920XT DEFINATELY had a MUCH lower figure, say 10bpm lower. It was cold and I have poor circulation in my forearms so I covered up the watch to give it its best shot. I was expecting something not great at all on the chart. But you can see what it was. However there clearly must be something slightly amiss with the freezing of the display.

Remember though it is unlikely that you will be doing 1 minute intervals based on HR in any case. More likely they will be based on pace/speed. However it’s quite plausible that the youngsters amongst you can maintain 170s/180s bpm HR rate extended periods. So this test is a part-way house to give you some comfort that such performance might be OK for you – remember that in 2015 and before oHRs typically started to go wrong above 160/165bpm or so. Hopefully things have moved on.