Polar’s Advanced Running Dynamics ?!

I’ve been playing a bit with the Polar V800 over the last few weeks. I didn’t have to delve too deeply into the product to discover Polar’s ‘advanced running dynamics’, an early incarnation of similar running dynamics found on the STRYD running pod. I didn’t have to delve deeply because they’ve been standard features for a while.

Polar don’t refer to them as ‘advanced’, probably because many watch vendors have similar measures.

You can add: stride length; cadence; heart rate variability; and you can get foot pod pace. With the stride length and cadence, there are also various averages available to display on the watch too.

I’d always heard that Bluetooth footpods were a bit of a nightmare to pair with Polar running watches. Well, I managed to pair a Garmin ANT+ footpod via 4iiii’s Viiiiva V100 heart rate strap (yep, that’s right)…so it can’t be THAT hard unless the other Bluetooth pods are a bit rubbish (Wahoo do a cadence one which I imagine is good called the RPM).

Here’s a little proof of the pudding. Not really a full test admittedly but the graph at least shows that the measures do go through into Polar Flow from em walking around with a footpod.

One interesting thing of marginal note was that it seemed to me that when the V800 was displaying FOOTPOD pace it showed the value in GREYSCALE rather than in BLACK (on the watch). This I thought was a neat little feature, especially of use when using in a normal running session. (Edit: actually it is greyed out whilst auto-calibrating the footpod].

I did a more proper running session today really to look at the accuracy (or not) of Garmin’s new beta firmware for the 920XT and the footpod pace it contains.

With an uncalibrated footpod both the V800 and 920XT showed the EXACT same values on the respective watches. Note from above they were using the EXACT same ANT+ footpod so that should be expected.

From that I deduced that if a footpod is present the V800 uses footpod pace by default on the screen. (V800 Settings > Sports profile > Running > Stride sensor to turn off)

On the other hand the 920XT only shows footpod pace over GPS pace if you configure the sensor to do that (go to the sensor pool and edit the footpod ant+ sensor you have paired).

One thing I didn’t get on the V800 was stride length. I imagine that the V800 will only calculate it with certain pods and/or it COMES from certain pods. The v800 also didn’t show the in-run RR/HRV data although it does with a Polar H7 HRM, which is what most of you will use.

OK there’s no vertical oscillation there but I’ve never meaningfully used that or had need for it. Have you? Indeed Garmin have acknowledged