Polar Grit X

Coach Rob Dallimore reviews the new Polar Grit X

Outdoor Multisport GPS Watch with Essential Features

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So I've got this exciting new piece of kit which has turned up on my desk, it's the newPolar watch.  So let's have a look at it.  

This is the Polar Grit X and as you can see it's pretty similar to the Vantage which is the one I had previously the Vantage V which has been a great watch but there's a few key features with this one that I find quite appealing.  

So it's really really rugged it feels like a very strong sturdy watch the the Vantage V was very rugged as well but this feels like it's a step above again, there's a little bit more metal around the casing the strap feels a little bit more durable as well so straight away it's already got some thumbs up for me.  

The thing I really love about Polar Watches is their Optical Heart Rate Sensor so this has got a really really reliable system so it's wrist based heart rate and I found this to be faultless through the Vantage model as well as with my experiences with the Grit X so far, so a really really cool little device there 

so there's a few key things to be aware of with this watch where it's different to the Vantage, the main thing is the battery life so this has got a massive massive battery life and will go for seven days without being charged for just normal day-to-day use and it's got up to 40hours of battery life when exercising and you can even switch off certain features and GPS etc and you can extend it out to a hundred hours of battery life so it's that's fantastic I mean it's so nice not to worry about charging your watch every few days 

so the other thing that we really like about this is it's got weather information directly on the screen now so as you scroll through the touch screen you have to wake  it up a little bit you can see that we come across to the weather screen and the way I've got the set up is as it goes around the clock I know what the weather forecast is coming up and then you can actually scroll through the touch screen through notifications makes it a really really easy system to use you can actually get into furthermore up-to-date information around the weather as well so you can see the location, time of day, temperature, rain forecast, humidity all those sorts of things so great for planning your workouts knowing what's coming 

and one of the really good features with this watch which the Vantage V had as well was the sleep stats, so I've been amazed at how accurate useful that information will be saying you wake up in the morning you can tell the device that you're awake and it will pull all the information together and give you information on it on what your quality of sleep was, duration, how much with REM sleep how much it was light sleep etc.   

And then it can also give you information around your recovery in your recharge so using HRVHeart Rate Variability it'll tell you whether or not you up to performing in a workout as expected or if you need to have some additional recovery or maybe if you're slightly under exercised all those little features make such a difference.

A couple of things with this is there are new features around the way you can analyze workouts so it's got this feature called Hill Splitter so when you go for a run the watch itself will determine what part of your run was uphill or downhill and it can give you accurate information about the speed you're doing certain hills relative to others so you can get a good idea while you're running how fast you're performing on certain hills compared to other hills you've done in that workout.  so it really is an adventurous watch 

So it's great for Multisport athletes, but it's also going to be really good for people that are out hiking mountain biking, long ultra-endurance events and the other great thing about this is this is you can use this system to help advise on fuelling strategies so the way you set it up is you provide the information to the software and throughout your workout depending on the intensity of your workout and the duration, it will give you information on when you need fuel so I'm really looking forward to using that feature asI go through this I wore this watch for probably three or four runs but they haven't been anything particularly long or strenuous so I haven't really needed to use that feature yet, but I've got some longer stuff coming up soon so I'm looking forward to using it 

so yeah it's this is going to be fantastic watch so if you are looking around for an option to have as a GPS watch then definitely have a look at thePolar Grit X and I don't think you'll be disappointed.  I'm certainly very impressed with what they've got so far

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