I had previously written about the Polar M400 and it’s ability to track your daily activity, including inactivity and sleep. In this segment we’ll take a look at the diary aspect of the M400, both on the watch and, briefly, on the website.
For transparency purposes, I will mention that I am a Polar Ambassador however the opinions and discussions in this article (and this blog) are my own. I write about the M400 only because I think it’s *amazing* and would love to help educate people on how to use it! 🙂
According to Polar’s website the Polar M400 “Stores up to 30h of training time (may vary depending on your language settings). You can see your training history from the past four weeks and what you have planned for four weeks ahead.”
I like to look at what I did that week, and maybe the week before, but not really much further than that (on the watch), so that works perfectly fine for me 🙂
Let’s look..
From the main watch screen there are three buttons on the right hand side. The center button either starts the process of a new workout or, within the menus is like your ‘Enter’ button. To get to the Diary you will press the down arrow twice, then hit the red / Enter button when you see “Diary.”
From here you will see your current week, with the first day of the week being whatever you set it up as on Polar’s Flow website. For mine, I set it to start my weeks on Sunday because I like to think like the calendar 🙂
For my example, we are going to
look at Tuesday .. because Tuesday is the day that I teach so much that it makes it a rough day but still a good example!
Since I am looking at a Tuesday on a previous week I pressed the up arrow until I got to that week, highlighted Tuesday, then pressed the red / Enter button to take a look at those numbers.
What you will see on the next screen depends on what you did that day.
If you did not log any workouts on the device then you will just see your daily tracking numbers (as in your Active Time, Smart Calories, Steps, and Approximate Distance Traveled). That is shown in the image as 317% Daily Activity. Highlighting that, and clicking on the red button, will give you the details that I mentioned above.
If you logged a workout, or workouts, then you’ll see those as well. In this example you see one activity for Indoor Cycling. We’re going to look at that work out.
If you like stats and
instant feedback, then you will love the Polar M400. After completing a workout you have access to a nice set of information! Can we say stats galore!
On the feedback screens you will see how many calories you burned, what heart rate zones you worked in, average and max heart rates, and even feedback on what your workout accomplished (on the screenshot that says “Training benefit tempo & Maximum training” .. clicking on that actually gives you even more feedback!). You will get this for every workout you log on the watch.
Taking it a step further, the new site Flow, will have even more stats goodness to sink your teeth into. Let’s take a quick look at that same week on the website.
Here is a peek at the same week, below, on their site.
It summarizes the different activities and gives you a quick view of
- Workouts, including calories burned and an icon to show you what the workout was
- Your Daily Activity percentage achievement (the teal percentage # at the bottom of each day)
- Your inactivity alerts (see the yellow icons on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? I had a good excuse .. we got more snow and I was enjoying the lazy time at home!)
Then at the end of the week you’ll see a week summary of what you accomplished.
Let’s take a look at Tuesday, which is what we were looking at on the Polar M400 itself:
This is a general view of what we say on the week view but scrolling down further on this page is where you see all the fun stuff 🙂
Activity Summary is an overview of the entire day, including my workouts, daily activity, and sleep.
Training Summary is more specific to the workouts that you logged on the Polar M400, and gives you a fancy summary of what zones you worked in between them all. Because all three of these were indoor workouts (classes I was teaching) I logged zero miles but I knocked out too many calories. Thankfully I only have one day a week like this .. !
I really hope this helps someone out there.
I will continue to blog about the Polar M400 and, additionally, am going to start talking about the newest Polar watch, the Polar A300, which is similar yet different, yet also fantastic!
If you have any specific topics that you’d like me to cover, please let me know in the comments!
If you’d like to see all of the blog posts I’ve written on the Polar M400 I’ve made an easy tag for that!
Thanks for reading!
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