Polar FT4 Worth getting?

pa_jorg · January 2014

KristaSandquist, My FT4 did the same thing. You have to leave the battery out for a few minutes when you change it.
This is according to Polar tech support. (Not well documented).

FYI, I went to a Batteries Plus (pretty sure that is a nationwide chain store) and they replaced the battery in mine. It was a reasonable price to begin with but the best part is that they guarantee FREE battery changes in my FT4 for the life of the product. Great savings over time!

Diamond05 · January 2014

Thank you for that info Minnie, I had read some topic on these forums somewhere (it was a bit older), saying there was some study done where they found it wasn't accurate because it didn't account for vo2max or something and on women it was off by about 33% or something.

This. And that's why I got the Ft60. I really doubt mine overestimate calories. Also often I see people smaller than me in my friends list who burns crazy calories with this hrm. And I have a much smaller calorie burn than them. I usually work out at a good pace so I don't know if it's because they work out super crazy or if it overestimate , but I'm happy I went with the Ft60.i am not an expert of any sort and this is just my 2 cents

I can also change the battery by myself with the Ft60 and I don't need to go to a store.

tanagrl · January 2014

Not sure about the FT4, but I bought the FT7 last year and absolutely LOVE it.. seems very accurate and a great motivation while working out-I would be lost without it!! As far as I know the two models are virtually the same aside from a little more memory capability with the FT7..Good luck! You definitely will not regret it.

carlaandres · January 2014

I have an FT40, which has some additional bells and whistles, but if you buy on Amazon, you'll be amazed at the deals you can get. Long story short, I bought mine about a year ago to reference for calorie burn only. I wore it intermittently. Over time, I used it more and more often. Now I use it more to gauge the level of difficulty of my workouts to get the most out of them. This is particularly true for interval running and spin classes. I found it to be very accurate for calories (and similar to MFP), and would not recommend an additional % reduction (except that eating that 20% less calories than you burn might be a good plan!). The Polar is based on your fitness detail specific to your height, weight, gender, and reported activity level. Now, the additional good news/bad news is that as I am in much better physical condition, unless I work harder, my calorie burn is lower than MFP reported. I love mine and use it several times a week. It also has a fitness test that measures your improvement.

Aeramis13 · January 2014

I used to have a Timex IronMan HRM that I suspected was high on burns (I guessed that it was 25-50% high). I finally borrowed a friend's FT4 and wore it at the same time as the Timex one. Sure enough, the calories burned count on the Timex IronMan HRM were almost double the Polar FT4 counts. I've always heard good things about Polar's accuracy (as long as you're using it for steady state calorie only as that's when HRM's are accurate), so I decided to believe the FT4 and buy my own Polar HRM. I shopped on Amazon and found that the FT7 was only a few bucks more but had a couple features I like (you can compare them here: http://www.polar.com/us-en/products/compare), so I went for the FT7 and I LOVE IT! Having an HRM (regardless of how accurate) really is a great motivator. I set a calories burned goal for every gym session and push myself to meet or beat it every time.

As for eating exercise calories back, I personally choose to use the TDEE method for counting calories, so I don't eat my calories back in the same way you do. Might be something worth looking into (http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/fivethreeone/view/how-did-i-eat-the-basics-tdee-calories-macros-570878)

Polar FT4 Worth getting?

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