Today I did a session with the objective of comparing:
- Vantage V oHR and Polar H10 in intervals session
- Power measurements from Vantage V and Stryd in high intensity session
The results are not surprising, confirming what we already know – the oHR has its limitations when you’re changing fast the pace and effort; you may be well with oHR for steady sessions, but not that much in intervals.
For HR, the evolution is shown below:
As it’s easy to see, the value or trends are not completely different – with one exception in the last interval, when Vantage V almost lost it and started too late after a deep dive in measurements. Other than that, I think most of the people will be happy with oHR for regular sessions or long runs.
Note: I did tightened the silicon band and wear the watch 1 cm above the bone – no issues come from that – maybe from lower temperature (?).
For power, as already mentioned (others had the same observations), there are two aspects to be covered:
- the value measured by Polar is higher than Stryd – the reasons being algorithms and input data – there is not right or wrong in the values from any of the providers. I tend to agree more with Stryd, since the other measurements are generally considered more accurate. Since I wear the Stryd for distance/pace even more than power, I won’t be using the Polar Vantage V power as a reference.
- the variation under high effort tends to be higher with Polar – I mean, the values grow faster in intervals and the difference between Polar and Stryd becomes higher
That being said, I see no issue for someone (at least an amateur like me) to use either of the measurements when choosing against HR values, because HR have a lag in adjusting to sudden changes in load.
That’s another incentive for people to ask the power based structured workouts from Polar, since that obviously offers more to people (like me) who train in intervals that their heart can’t keep up with 🙂
The session offered a new possibility to compare distances measured by Polar GPS [4.98km] and Stryd [4.88km] – there is a difference of 96m (1.9%) that still needs to be validated when checking the accuracy of my Stryd (which so far I took for granted).
The look of the GPS track is still better looking with Polar that with Garmin Fenix 5X+, but none of them was perfect when looking at the details.
Tools:
Polar Vantage V (FW 3.1.7) standalone
Polar H10 (FW 2.1.9)
Stryd (FW 1.1.9)
Garmin Fenix 5X+ (FW 6.55) connected to Stryd and Polar H10
Brooks Ghost 10
Liviu Nastasa 