Polar Fitness Program
Polar Fitness Program is designed for individuals interested in improving their fitness with a virtual personal trainer. While it is primarily intended for non-professionals, the program is equipped to accommodate individuals with various fitness levels.
The Fitness Program consists of 20 levels, starting with level one as the easiest and progressing to level twenty as the most demanding.
To summarize, this is what you receive:
- A training plan tailored to your training history and your fitness level.
- The ability to choose preferred training and rest days, ensuring you can train when it best suits your schedule.
- The option to select the sport for each training session. You can keep it the same for every session, or choose a different one each time.
- Suggestions on how to adapt the training plan based on your Nightly Recharge and Cardio Load.
- Rewards, feedback, and tips based on your success in achieving your personal, weekly training time goals.
The Fitness Program gives you successive 4-week training plans tailored to your training history and fitness level. These plans are designed to improve your overall fitness, establish regular, versatile training habits, and introduce new ways to train. The program sets training time goals and provides ready-made cardio, strength, and mobility training targets to guide your progress.
You'll receive regular feedback and rewards based on your performance, which will motivate you to stay on track and achieve even better results. Importantly, the Fitness Program guides you to train when you’re at your best, and rest when you need it most.
Polar Fitness Program is compatible with the following Polar watches:
- Grit X
- Grit X Pro
- Grit X2 Pro
- Ignite
- Ignite 2
- Ignite 3
- Pacer
- Pacer Pro
- Unite
- Vantage M
- Vantage M2
- Vantage M3
- Vantage V
- Vantage V Titan
- Vantage V2
- Vantage V3
When you start with the Fitness Program, it creates you a personalized training plan based on your training history and current fitness level. If you have enough previous training data on your Polar account, it does this automatically. If not, you will be asked to answer a set of questions to let us know your training history.
To start your personalized training plan:
- Open Polar Flow app.
- Find Fitness Program from the main menu and tap Start.
3. You will be forwarded to Google Play to make a subscription with your Google account payment method.
After completing the subscription, you will be brought back to creating your first training plan.
4. Fill in or review the training background information, and tap Next.
5. On the plan creation page you can modify the following options:
- On top of the page is a color-coded training level card and the suggested level is based on your training history and current fitness level estimate. Swipe left on the Level card, if you wish to change the level to be a bit easier, or a bit more challenging. We recommend choosing the suggested level.
- Select your favorite training and rest days of the week, and whether you also want to see suggestions for strength and mobility training sessions.
- Choose whether you want to start the program Next full week or Now.
Please note that the program is weekly-based. If you choose Now, make sure there is enough time to do all the training sessions of the week.
If you have chosen Monday as your week start day, it is not possible to start the program on Sunday.
- Read and accept the Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire on the bottom of the page by checking the box.
6. Tap Start.
The training plan is now created. You can still review the plan if you want to change the training and rest days, or select/unselect strength and supportive training sessions. Just hit Edit on the Programs page, make your modifications and tap Save.
Any changes made here will be applied in the beginning of the next full week.
The plan itself is based on successive four-week training periods with weekly personal training time goals and ready-made cardio, strength and mobility training targets. These targets help you reach your goals. Following these targets is not a must, but will help you on your way towards better fitness. You can move, modify, and even skip them. Just make sure you reach your training time goals. You can choose any sport, except Multisport, and get going.
Each week within a period is slightly more challenging than the previous one, third week being the most challenging one. The fourth week is lighter and reserved for recovery to make fitness improvement possible. To track your progress, you can take a fitness test on your watch following the fourth week.
The ready-made training targets you receive are not set in stone. If you have another engagement, or the time doesn’t suit you, you can move the training target to another time or day in the Flow Diary in the web service or in the mobile app.
Tip: Switch on the Apple Calendar or Google Calendar lever from the Flow app General settings to receive reminders of your Fitness program training sessions from your mobile's calendar app!
To move planned training targets in the Flow app:
1. Open Calendar in the weekly view and scroll down where you can see all your training targets the Fitness Program has planned for the week.
2. Choose the one you wish to move.
3. Tap and hold it, and drag to another day in the week period.
To move planned training targets in the Flow web service:
1. Open Diary and click on the training target you want to move.
2. The Edit view opens and you can change the date and time from there.
3. Click Update changes to save them.
In order to get more accurate performance data relative to the plan, the program-generated training targets can only be moved within the same week.
If you wish, you can ignore the training targets on your calendar and simply focus on reaching your weekly training time goals. These goals are the only part of the Fitness Program that do not adapt.
Additionally, any training sessions you complete outside of the program while it is active will also count towards your weekly training time goals. This means you can follow your own training regimen entirely, while the Fitness Program monitors and guides your progress to ensure you stay on track.
The Fitness Program also monitors your Nightly Recharge and Cardio Load. If it detects that your body isn't ready for training or that you've been training too much, it suggests lighter training sessions. This ensures you only train when you're at your best and rest when you need it most.
The Fitness Program consists of 20 levels, starting with level one as the easiest and progressing to level twenty as the most demanding.
Every time the period changes, the Fitness Program checks how well you’ve achieved your previous training time goals and adjusts the plan accordingly. If the plan has been too easy for you, it suggests a more demanding one for the following period. Conversely, if you haven’t been able to reach your goals for any reason, the Fitness Program creates a less demanding plan for you to follow.
Exceeding the target times for moderate and vigorous training significantly will not be rewarded, and consequently, the program will not recommend progressing to the next level at the end of the period. Try to match the training time goals for each intensity as closely as you can.
If the suggested level seems unsuitable, you can select an alternative level for the forthcoming period. Swipe left or right to navigate through the levels and tap on the one you prefer and Save. Generally, it is advisable to follow the level recommended by the program.
If you want to end the Fitness Program, you will need to end the program and the subscription separately.
To end the Fitness Program:
- Go to Fitness Program > Edit.
- Under Program settings, end the program by scrolling down to Manage your Fitness Program and End program.
- End the subscription under Manage subscriptions > Cancel subscription.
Aerobic exercise reduces the risk of many conditions. These conditions include obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, stroke, and certain types of cancer. Weight-bearing aerobic exercises, such as walking, can help lower the risk of osteoporosis. Aerobic exercise may ease the melancholy of depression, reduce the tension associated with anxiety and promote relaxation. It can also improve your mental well-being and your self-esteem, as well as improve your sleep.
Value promise
The Fitness Program improves the users’ well-being and quality of life through improving their fitness in a healthy and safe way by inspiring sufficient, diverse and regular exercise and by promoting long-term changes leading to a healthier lifestyle.
Healthy and safe
The starting point of the program is to guide users to meet the minimum physical activity requirements for healthy adults. The program is aligned with WHO’s physical activity guidelines which are also the basis for several national PA recommendations.
Users’ capability to start such physical activity is ensured with physical activity readiness questionnaire (PAR-Q) originated by American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).
The program promotes good and safe training habits by offering ready-made exercises with planned structure. It guides you to reasonable progression to avoid injuries yet sufficient for fitness improvement. When you're not at your best, training may not be as beneficial as it could be, and the risk of injury is higher.
Guiding principles
Endurance training includes physical activities that develop cardiorespiratory endurance. They improve both the capacity and efficiency of the cardiovascular, respiratory, and metabolic systems. These activities may also help one control or reduce body weight. Activities such as walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, rowing, group cardiorespiratory endurance and other exercise activities, and hiking are good endurance activities. Sports such as handball, tennis, badminton, and basketball also have aerobic potential if they are pursued vigorously.
Strength training includes activities that develop collectively muscular strength, endurance, and power to make activities of daily living physiologically less stressful and effectively manage, attenuate, and even prevent chronic diseases and health conditions such as osteoporosis, Type 2 mellitus, and obesity.
The purpose of flexibility training is to improve the range of motion (ROM). ROM is acutely and chronically improved following flexibility exercises. They can be done dynamically or statically. Regular strength and flexibility training are also important as preventative actions against injuries.
Frequency of exercise:
The frequency of PA (i.e., the number of days per week dedicated to an exercise program) is an important contributor to health and fitness benefits. Aerobic exercise is recommended to be performed on at least three days per week. For most adults, spreading the exercise sessions across three to five days per week may be best to reach the recommended amount of PA. The frequency of exercise can vary, as can the intensity and duration, as these three variables are interdependent on each other.
Individuals who are new to training can achieve significant improvements in muscular fitness by exercising each muscle group just once a week. For those who are past the beginner level, the primary factor for advancements in muscular fitness is the cumulative training volume for each muscle group per week, while the frequency of training is of secondary significance compared to the total volume.
Training intensity distribution:
The program follows the pyramidal intensity distribution training programming approach, which is the most commonly used one among aerobic fitness training programs.
Duration of exercise:
Exercise time/duration is prescribed as a measure of the amount of time PA is performed. The recommended time/duration of PA may be performed continuously (i.e., one session) or intermittently and can be accumulated over the course of a day in one or more sessions. Any amount of PA can lead to health benefits, which is particularly encouraging for individuals who are currently sedentary or minimally active, because moving from a state of physical inactivity to any level of activity can result in significant mortality risk reductions.
Progression:
The recommended rate of progression in an exercise program depends on the individual’s health status, physical fitness, training responses, and exercise program goals.
Versatility:
The program includes versatile set of exercises in the sense of different training modalities (cardio, strength and flexibility) as well as variation between individual exercises of each modality.