Polar RS800CX

The Polar RS800CX is my fifth or sixth Polar HRM. I have slowly worked my way up to what I consider to be Polar's best offering. The features available on this unit are absolutely splendid. Every exercise creates a new digital object
that one can study to chart one's progress but you can also just gather them as digital remembrances. I can pin point the moment in time when I injured my IT band, the time of the run when my heart rate raced to 194 (against my "theoretical" limit of 170) and the Iyengar yoga class when it sank to 26.

My biggest gripe about all Polar products is the awkwardness of the documentation they provide. All the statements are grammatically correct and all the information is there somewhere but it is organized in an odd manner and I find myself wrestling with "them" to find answers to obvious questions. To unlock all the features, you need to have the units themselves, a computer to get on the web, the paper documentation the unit shipped with, the on line documentation for the Polar ProTrainer software and then you need Google to find the needle in the haystack.

The RS800CX reigns supreme within the Polar family. It is the only unit that can sample, record and export your heart rate, as a time series, at a user selectable sampling frequency, down to once every second. It is currently the only unit that can measure Heart Rate Variation (HRV). HRV provides a measure of your state of relaxation. More precisely, HRV measures how well your parasympathetic nervous system is asserting itself over the sympathetic nervous system. The larger the HRV the greater the degree of relaxation.

The practices of Yoga (asanas, pranayama and meditation) activate parasympathetic influences while activities like running activate the sympathetic nervous system. The beauty of the RS800CX unit is that it actually allows you to track the HRV of different practices. It can measure not only how hard you are exerting but also how deeply you are relaxing. The calories you burn in most styles of Yoga barely rises above the base metabolic rate. But the outlook changes when you look at HRV. When I am running at say 8.1 MPH my HRV is down to 2.1 ms and when I let myself into and hold a posture, like trikonasana, for an extended period of time, in an Iyengar Yoga session, I have seen numbers as high as 90 ms. The RS800CX manual is mostly silent on the value of this feature. I actually track the effect of different styles of Yoga by looking at the HRV they induce in me. I can even tell which teacher, studio and style is right for me! For example, last week during a 90 minute Iyengar Yoga session I expended 167 cal, and ran up a HRV standard deviation of 147, the next day during a 90 minute Ashtanga Yoga session I expended 275 cal and logged HRV standard deviation of 107. Most of us need to burn plenty of calories and also learn to let up and relax. Nearly everyone knows how to burn calories but how does one actively relax. Now you can plan and track relaxation quantitatively. I hear many Ashtanga practitioners say that Iyengar doesn't work for them because they "don't break a sweat" or "nothing is moving". If only they had a RS800CX on they could see the difference in real time!

If you take the trouble to traverse through a somewhat non-intuitive sequence you can get the RS800CX to display any of two dozen measures it tracks in real time right on your watch dial. The hoops to jump through to do this require that you first fire up the Polar ProTrainer application and link your watch to your computer. On most laptops with built in IR ports, this requires that you use one hand to position the watch correctly, so that it can link up with the IR port. With the other hand you must bring up the "Edit Polar Product Setting" menu, and let it sync up. Once it has synced up you can drop the watch and click on the "Product" tab of a menu screen that pops up after the syncing. On the screen that comes up you see a button labeled "Customize Display Sets" which you click on and then a panel pops up drop with this smorgasbord menu of 23 different real time readouts organized around four or five display panels that get activated depending on what accessories you have associated with the RS800CX. So there is more confusion here. If you don't have the cadence or speed sensors accessories, the settings under those tabs will not register on the the wrist unit. Once you make your choices, hold up the watch again to the IR port and click on the sync icon to download to the watch and you are all set.

My last RS800SD died recently- the screen went blank afte about six months. The retailer gave me a full refund and so I bought myself a new RS800CX. Others have said this before, but the RS800CX is significantly better than the RS800sd even though they share accessories. I am surprised they continue to sell the RS800sd. You have to wade through some additional confusion when you try to figure out which RS800CX to get. The main point to remember is that the wrist unit is RS800CX and common to all the bundles that currently exist. You can attach stride sensors, bike sensors or GPS sensors at any point in time to obtain the additional capabilities. If you run on a treadmill a GPS sensor will do you no good, you need the S3, if you bike you need the cadence and speed sensors for bikes. These are little devices that physically attach to your bicycle frame and crank. They will do you no good if you are trying to log data from elliptical machines and stationary bikes in gyms. If you do your panting outdoors or practice multiple activities you likely want the GPS unit to track the route and speed. If you want all three, make sure you are not duplicating accessories by buying packages.

My transition from the RS800sd to the RS800CX took a few hours of persistence. But for the markings the two look identical but work quire differently! I finally managed to figure out how to get an old S3 stride sensor to transmit stride length and cadence data to my RS800CX unit. I was trying to get the old S3 to work with the new RS800CX and although I could easily get the RS800CX to learn the S3 sensor, the cadence and stride length data were not getting transmitted to the RS800CX.

The trick was to (1) Hit the red START button to go into the exercise mode the unit starts to search for the heart rate data then (2) hold down the the upper left "LIGHT" button to bring up a new SETTINGS menu that lists the shoe sensor that had previously been learned by the RS800CX. You can now activate it. When this has been correctly done r1 (or r2 or r3) displays next to where the heart rate normally shows (bottom right of display). r for run even though these features are sometimes grouped under shoes. Once done, the RS800CX seems to remember the association. It was quite frustrating to not find a way to complete this association through the settings menu that one steps through by hitting the up/down buttons. The manual does explain it but this critical feature is awkwardly placed behind a button labeled "LIGHT".

Even though the Polar manuals aggravate me, this unit has changed my attitude towards exercise and wellness by bringing a level of rigor and accuracy that is very addictive. I have spent over a thousand dollars so far buying their stuff and I think it is one of the best investments I have ever made in my health.