Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor Review

Recently I wanted to get into some heart rate training techniques and do some other work evaluating calorie burn.

This is my review of the Polar H10 Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor.

The Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor is a highly accurate premium heart rate monitor – it supports both bluetooth and ANT+ connections.

Why a chest strap heart rate monitor (HRM)?

These types of heart rate monitor are known to be the most accurate.

Because it’s a chest strap, it isn’t impacted by movement (like a heart rate monitor you wear on your wrist or arm).

Secondly, it operates by detecting the electrical signals of your heart – and this is a more consistent and accurate method than that used by wrist mounted heart rate monitors (which use optical sensors.)

Here’s some of the gear I used during this review.

Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensor The Polar H10 Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor is a premium product with high accuracy. It supports both Bluetooth and ANT+ connections. Works with your phone, the Echo Bike, or C2 Rower - and more.

$89.95 (Rogue Fitness)

WHOOP Strap 3.0 The WHOOP Strap can also measure your heart rate - but it does a lot more as well. It provides a detailed activity and sleep tracker and provides recommendations on recovery. It does this primarily by measuring your overall cardiovascular strain and your sleep quality. It is expensive, but does give deeper insights than just straight heart rate monitoring.

Click to See Price (WHOOP)

Rogue Echo Bike Rogue took the air bike concept and made the best air bike you can buy - this unit is smooth, solid, and quiet (for an air bike) thanks to the belt drive. This is an excellent, versatile training tool. You can get your heart rate into any of the 5 zones with a simple, efficient workout.

$775.00 (Rogue Fitness)

Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor – Overview

The Polar H10 transmits your heart rate data on two different technologies – ANT+ (5 Khz) and Bluetooth.

This means it is compatible with almost any piece of equipment that is prepared for a heart rate tracker.

How To Make The Rogue Echo Bike Even Better — The Polar H10 is ANT+ compatible – that means it’ll work with equipment like the Rogue Echo Bike. Just jump on the bike and fire up the monitor – your heart rate will be picked up and displayed automatically.

The Polar H10 works great with the Rogue Echo Bike.

The Rogue Echo Bike doesn’t support Bluetooth, but it does support ANT+, which is a 5Khz signal.

Bluetooth connectivity means it’ll work great with your smartphone as well.

I have been using the Polar Beat smartphone app from Polar.

It is simple, robust (doesn’t crash), easy to use, and gives me the information I need.

One of the reasons I bought this was so I could conduct some experiments and find out how many calories does rucking burn.

The Polar H10 combined with the Polar Beat app was a great tool for that job.

Rucking on a walking trail with Rucker 3 and Ballistic Trainer shoes - 4 — I used the Polar H10 chest strap with the Polar Beat app to calculate rucking calorie burn.

The Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor uses a CR 2025 size of battery.

Battery life is quite good (estimated 400 hours), but they do recommend you disconnect the monitor from the chest strap when storing it – to provide maximum battery life.

That is easy enough to do.

Knowing your heart rate is one thing, but i find the quick and easy way that Polar Beat shoes your heart rate zones in a chart format to be very helpful.

For example, here’s a workout on the Rogue Echo Bike.

It’s nearly all Zone 5 – all the time. That’s why they call it “The Devil’s Tricycle”.

Here’s some heart rate zones from rucking:

Rucking is a much less intense exercise activity – as compared to the Echo Bike. I didn’t need an HRM to tell me that, but it’s good to have raw data to plan my training in detail.

Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor – In Summary

Overall, the Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor works as advertised.

With ANT+ and Bluetooth compatibility it is very versatile.

Battery life is quite good, and while wearing the chest strap is not as streamlined as a wrist mounted HRM, I found it to be secure and it seems to be accurate.

References

Heart Rate Zones | The Basics (www.polar.com)

Polar H10 User Manual

Photo Credits

Some product photos on this page are property of the vendor.

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