Review on 💪 Polar FT4 Heart Rate Monitor - Accurate Fitness Tracking for Optimal Performance by Darrell Ricks

Pros: Cute as a watch Tracks calories Heart rate monitor Summarizes workouts Has a backlight Connects to Polar fitness equipment at the gym Cons: Tracks only 10 workouts Has no pedometers Can't download workouts online Me had this watch for about 2.5 years. I like it very much as a watch or as a heart rate monitor. I usually train consistently for several months, then take a few months off and repeat this cycle. When I exercise, I like to keep track of my calories and heart rate. This isn't a fancy heart rate monitor that uses GPS or other advanced technology features. The clock is pretty easy to set up. You can input height, weight, age and gender for accurate tracking. When the watch is in exercise mode, you can easily toggle the screen between heart rate, calories burned and the current time. It also has a screen that lets you know if you're "in the zone" - within the minimum and maximum heart rate for your age group. It has a beep that bugs me when you're out of zone. This beep can be turned off in the settings. The monitor comes with a strap and a transmitter. I found the strap comfortable and hardly noticed it during my workout. I had a problem with the transmitter after about a year of use. I noticed that sometimes it stopped sending to the watch. This happened a couple of times (not due to low battery). If I turn off training mode and turn it back on, everything would be fine again. So far the battery life has been excellent. The battery in my watch died last week (after 2.5 years) and the battery in the transmitter had to be replaced last year. Be sure to remove the transmitter from the strap to extend battery life. As I said before, the transmitter transmits data to all the Polar devices in the gym. I noticed that it transmits heart rate data to the device, but the fitness device still counts its own calories. I tend to trust the calories on the watch as they take into account age, gender, height and weight. The gym only tracks age and weight for calorie counting. The only thing I don't like is that the monitor only records 10 workouts. Since I keep a training diary, this is not a problem for me. Another problem is that you can't track your workout progress online. There are other Polar products that can be connected to a computer so you can upload your workouts and track your progress on their website, but not this model. You have to manually enter information about this model online, which seems tedious. Overall this is a great product for the price. I definitely recommend it.