training targets – Finding Fitness

Interested in the newest line of Polar watches, and all that they can do for you? Well, I’ve started writing a series of blogs that will look at a couple of their watches, the Polar A300 Heart Rate Watch and the Polar M400 GPS Heart Rate Watch.

If you’d like to see all of the blog posts that I’ve written for the Polar A300 I’ve made an easy link for you. 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 too!

In this blog post we’ll take a look at an aspect of Polar’s Flow website that you can take advantage of if you are an owner of either the Polar M400 GPS Heart Rate Watch or the Polar A300 Heart Rate Watch .. this is setting up training targets for your watch.

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 these watches only because I think they are *amazing* and would love to help educate people on how to use them! 🙂

So let’s talk!

For this blog post / demo I’m initially going to set up training targets based on indoor activities .. then send them to my watches so you can see the full cycle 🙂

To start the process you’ll want to travel to https://flow.polar.com/diary where I’m assuming that you have already set up your profile and watch details.

In the screenshot below you’ll see both completed exercises and planned exercises, or training targets. The completed ones are in red and dark gray, and have their resulting calorie burns, the planned ones are in light gray.

Let’s add another training target to the plan..

As you can see in the image (above) we are going to add a new workout to Thursday, for BODYPUMP. We’ll start this by clicking on the Add button. Easy enough so far 🙂

The next web page that you’ll see is in the image below.

If you have sport profiles set up (we’ll talk about that in a future blog post!) you can set the one you want here. For BODYPUMP I like to use the sport profile I have set up for “STRENGTH TRAINING.” After that you’ll give it a name (I called it BODYPUMP), then set the date and time for this workout.

If this training target is going to be a recurring activity then you can add this as a favorite. If you added this activity as a favorite in the past, you could grab this workout template quickly by clicking on that “Favorite Targets” button. You’d click on the favorite and the general information will load for you automagically!

On this training target page you’ll set a target type, between Quick, Race Pace (only available if you have the V800), and Phased. This selection is going to vary based on what type of workout you have chosen. For mine I went with Quick and set the duration .. which is 1 hour.

Now, we save, above, and we’ll see the new workout has been added to our diary..

And .. the next time you open the Flow Mobile app you’ll see you’re training targets as well.

Now, you may ask, how do we get that to our watch? The next time you sync your watch it will automatically download the workout to your watch.

This is the point where there are slight variances between the M400 and the A300. Let’s look at them one at a time.

On the Polar M400 (shown in the Training Targets on the Polar M400 GPS Heart Rate Watch image to the right) the new training targets will appear under “Diary”, off of the Main Menu, for their training dates. The names that you set in Flow even come across to the watch, which I love!

On the right side of the dates in your diary you’ll see the ’empty’ boxes with dashes .. that is designating training targets that you have not completed yet.

On the Polar A300 you will see the same information but it is located in a different part of the Main Menu. From the Main Menu you’ll want to navigate down to “Targets” (looking at the image to the left). Any training targets that you set will be stored here, and again, will include the name that you set them up under.

So, what do we do with these now?

When you are ready to workout you simply go to your training target on your watch, select it, and it will automatically take you to the sport profile you set up for it (or if you did not set one up then it takes you to a general sport profile). Then .. off you go!

Remember that this can work for any planned workouts, tough or easy, indoors or outdoors.

If you are following a running training plan you can quickly and easily set up your running diary in here. You could make a template for running, load the favorite each time, and change the date and mileage .. quick and easy!