Polar M600 – Short Interval Indoor Bike oHR Performance

Another day, another test on the new Polar M600. Despite a relatively nice day outside I settled down to watch the newish ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’ movie…on the bike, in the shed. It was either that or the ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’ but I thought I just might understand the former and could pedal a bit harder whenever an alien appeared.

The Edge 820 was VERY unresponsive to reason and touch but I won’t go into that right now. It did eventually decide to work.

Instead let’s look at the test which was essentially all I could manage today with a warmup and then some short 1 minute intervals. They were Z5 intervals but felt quite hard even though I did seem to recover form each one quite quickly.

For the purposes of this test I did it on a road bike and purposefully change hands position quite a lot to try and throw the M600 off the scent.

A couple of problems re-emerged. You might notice, at the top of the image, the need for a 50 second offset to align the two tracks and you wont notice but, again, there seemed to be an issue where the display ‘froze’ at 116bpm, That MIGHT have been the bit around 30 minutes. If that is the case then maybe the display WAS aligned with what was recorded (previously it was not).

Despite the ‘freeze’ there was a wobbly bit at 48 minutes and a mini-wobbly at 14 minutes. Still quite good I suppose but not as good as the excellent run results I’ve had.

For loyally following the M600 tests (I’ll probably save the rest until the review next week) here is an interesting graphic I stitched together of the various in-exercise screen displays on the M600.

These are all visible during a single workout.

Here I configured 4 displays in Polar Flow and ALL FOUR OF these are shown in the first proper COLUMN. Well, I thought it was quite cool 🙂 Non-Polar users note that Polar has automatic laps AND manual laps unlike Garmin where a manual lap advances the athlete on to the next autolap.