Polar Ignite CrossFit Tracking Review
Polar Ignite Hands On Review
Polar Ignite General Review
Best CrossFit Trackers to Date - Garmin 245, Polar Ignite, Suunto Fitness 3
The latest release from Polar is the Ignite - a highly visual touchscreen with new advanced components for analytics on sleep and recover. More detailed review coming soon.
Here is a comparison versus the H10 chest strap directly linked to Polar Beat. You can see the Ignite wrist OHR struggles on the movements requiring wrist flexing. It’s not terribly off, but enough to bring the output/TRIMP down from 94 to 80
|
|
|
|
|
Workout versus Polar H10 chest strap - I’ve also circled the area on the Polar Beat app where you can find the recovery time that is not currently available on the Polar Flow app regardless of whether you are using the optical heart rate sensor or the H10 chest strap
|
|
|
|
|
Another comparison versus an H10 chest strap. It’s not terribly off but clearly doesn’t track quite as well and the heart rate load isn’t calculated as properly. It was Partner WOD so it was basically 2 min on, 2 min off. Grey heart rate chart is always H10.
|
|
|
|
|
This workout versus the H10 chest strap (one listed as Beat) shows some lag likely due to wrist flex in a workout. You can see the H10 keep steady heart rate during the metcon and the Ignite’s Optical was more fluctuant via all of the wrist dependent movements in the workout. EMOM of front squats very similar. TRIMP rating 12% lower as a result.
|
|
|
|
|
Another workout - this one carried a lot of flex across the wrist so you can see the differences in heart rate evaluation at different points.
|
|
|
|
|
An interesting difference of value in sleep calculations. The Garmin said my body battery was almost full, but the way the Ignite tracks recovery shows a different story, which exposes that I may have more issues going on and is much more helpful to training.
The difference in heart rate and distance between heart beats shows that something is up, and the Garmin didn’t pick up on it - at all. And you can see that the Garmin stats reflect it when looking more deeply at Pulse Ox, but their tracking methods didn’t catch it or alert me of it, so the Ignite wins the prize here for sure.
The difference in heart rate and distance between heart beats shows that something is up, and the Garmin didn’t pick up on it - at all. And you can see that the Garmin stats reflect it when looking more deeply at Pulse Ox, but their tracking methods didn’t catch it or alert me of it, so the Ignite wins the prize here for sure.
|
|
|
|
|
Step Counting Accuracy and Calorie Tracking
There have been a lot of questions about the accuracy of step counting and calorie tracking for Polar in general versus their competitors. Here is a chart of a variety of days to compare the differences. You can see that the step count has a good bit of discrepancy of one device versus another, but that calories are somewhat similar. I took out the days that included workouts because I felt like they skewed the numbers on step counting, Polar seems to give step credit when doing GPS-based activities or otherwise. I am comparing against Garmin’s Vivosmart 4 - one of their best basic trackers. 
|
Sleep Tracking is incredible
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
And the recharge versus Garmin’s Body Battery
|
|
Steps and Calorie count is kind of an issue. Here are some daily snapshots where no exercise was done to compare. Also of note - there could have been charging for one or both of the devices that adds to this discrepancy, but in general too many differences to be a one-off.
|
|
|
|
|
|
And here are days with exercise. The set on the left is from a day with a 10 mile bike ride. The set on the right is with a shorter metcon. I believe the day of biking the Polar is adding steps as a credit from the ride - the step count is very different.
|
|
|
|
