Polar Grit X

amazon Polar Grit X reviews

The Polar Grit X is the best multisport GPS watch with a rugged yet attractive design, good battery life, and loads of useful features made specifically for the outdoors.

If you are a serious downhill skier, hiker, mountain biker, swimmer, or trail runner, you should check out the latest addition to the line of watches. Polar’s multisport GPS, $429.95 Grit X. It offers everything that $279.95 has, including continuous heart rate monitoring, overnight recovery measurements, training guidance,g training sessions, routing route planning uphill and downhill metrics. It’s a niche product designed for serious outdoor athletes, but this fitness tracker can help you level up your training if you fall into that camp.

Design and specifications

The Polar Grit X is available in white in medium/small sizes (suitable for wrists sizes 5.1 to 7.4 inches) or black or green in medium/large sizes (suitable for wrists ranging from 5.7 to 8.4 inches). I tested the small/medium white model.
The watch has a 1.2-inch color touchscreen with 240 x 240 pixels resolution and five physical buttons. Together, the touchscreen and physical buttons make navigating the interface simple.

To the right of Grit X, the OK button that lets you confirm selections sits between the up and down arrow buttons that let you move through the lists. A dedicated button on the left side lights up the screen above the back/menu/sync button.
The light button is very useful; it lights up the screen for a few seconds before turning off automatically. Indoors, the screen is quite dim without the auxiliary lights, but you can still read it. Outside, the screen is easy to read in the dark.

Grit X is sturdy yet stylish. It’s waterproof to 328 feet, beating the Vantage M, rated 98 feet, though both are safe for swimming and showering. It has a stainless steel frame and covers, a fiberglass-reinforced polymer back cover, and laminated Gorilla glass with an anti-fingerprint coating.

Polar says the watch has passed many US military-grade tests to ensure it can withstand extreme temperatures, drops, and humidity but warns that temperatures below 14 degrees Fahrenheit can affect battery life and performance.
The silicone strap is comfortable, with a printed pattern on the front that makes it look like fabric. The underside of the strap touches your arm very smoothly. If you want a change of look, Polar offers compatible silicone, textile, and leather straps from $29.95 to $49.95. The watch is also compatible with standard 22mm quick-release watch bands.

The medium/small model weighs in at about 2.2 ounces, slightly heavier than the 1.5-ounce Vantage M and 1.7-ounce Coros Apex, although it still feels quite light and comfortable on my wrist.
All in all, I like the look of the Grit X. It’s bulky, 0.51 inches thick, but it has a nice vintage watch design. The side buttons have a sporty feel, but the dial and bezel have a sophisticated look. I can’t see myself wearing it for fancy dress occasions, even with another band, but it looks great with sports and casual, which I often wear.

Battery life

Polar says the Grit X can last up to 100 hours (just over four days) thanks to a suite of power-saving features. With GPS running, you get up to 40 hours of battery life. After my first 24 hours of testing, I tracked two runs of about 25 minutes with GPS plus a yoga session; the watch still had 79% battery left. All told, it lasted 110 hours before the battery dropped to 9%, and it said it needed to be recharged.

To access the Grit X’s power-saving settings, press the bottom left button, select Start Training, then press the lighted button. Here, you can change the GPS recording rate to every minute or two instead of every second or turn it off completely. You can also disable heart rate monitoring and enable a screensaver. These features are good for endurance events and long training sessions.

Meanwhile, the Coros Apex can last up to 24 days in normal use, 24 hours in full GPS mode, and 80 hours in a battery-saving mode known as UltraMax. GPS turns on for 30 seconds every time two minutes (the rest at that point, it uses motion sensors and machine learning algorithms to track you).

Establish

Plug the Grit X into the included USB charger to get started, which magnetically snaps into place. Once the watch is active, it will ask you to choose your preferred language and whether you want to complete the setup on your phone, computer, or the watch itself. If you choose to set it up via your phone, as I did, you’ll need to download and open the Polar Flow app (available for Android and iOS).

When you open the Flow app, it automatically recognizes the watch and prompts you to start pairing. Accept the Bluetooth pairing request on your phone, then confirm the PIN on the watch by tapping OK.

Grit Navigation X

To access the main menu, tap the lower left button. From here, you can use the up and down keys or the touchscreen to scroll through your options: Start Training, Settings, Physical Test, Timer, Refuel, Segment Directly Strava, and Serene.

I especially like the Serene feature, which guides you through a stress-relieving breathing exercise. By default, the exercise is three minutes with a five-second inhalation and exhalation. Still, you can set it for two to 20 minutes and vary the duration of the inhalation and exhalation.

The Strava Live Segment feature allows you to compete with others for the best time running or cycling on predefined sections of roads or trails. To use this feature, you need ($5 per month after 30 days free trial).
In Fuel, you have access to a feature called FuelWise that allows you to set time-based eating and drinking reminders during long workout sessions. You can also set a Smart Carbs Reminder to calculate the number of carbohydrates you’ll need to refuel based on estimated session duration and intensity, training background, and physical details like age, gender, the cadence of your heart, height, and weight.

See how we test fitness trackers.

The physical exam was awesome. The watch allows you to lie down and relax for about five minutes while it measures your heart rate. It then tells you your VO2 Max, measuring the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise. The first time I tried to do the test, it failed because the meter was too loose. I tightened it up and tried again. This time it works and tells me my VO2 Max is 50, or Elite.

You can enable and disable continuous heart rate monitoring in the Settings menu, do not disturb, airplane mode, inactivity alerts, smartphone notifications, vibration, and more. You can also swipe down from the watch screen for quick access to alarms, not disturb, and airplane mode, or swipe up to see notifications. In testing, the Grit X did a good job notifying me when I had a phone call and showing smartphone notifications from apps like Coinbase, Slack, and Spotify.

You can press the up and down buttons from the watch screen to see your Heart Load Status, current weather, FitSpark daily workout guide, heart rate, Nightly Recharge, workout sessions Latest, and progress towards your operational goals.

On each of the clock screens mentioned above, you can click the OK button on the right side of the Grit X for more details. For example, you can see the current humidity, total precipitation, wind direction, and wind speed for the weather, along with a helpful two-day forecast. Based on your previous training, heart rate load status tells you whether you’re losing, maintaining, productive, or overtraining. FitSpark offers two to four different workout options per day, based on your fitness level, training history, and recovery stats. When you click on your latest training sessions, you can scroll through your list of workouts to find the one you want to reference, then see all your stats for it.

Training with Grit X

Grit X makes it easy to track your workouts. Just hit the menu button on the bottom left, select Start Training, then scroll through the options and choose the type of exercise you’ll do. There are options for body and mind, cycling, downhill skiing, hiking, mountain biking, multisport, other indoor, other outdoor, strength training, swimming, running, trail running, and walking.

To end the session, tap the menu button again, hold it for three seconds, and the watch will automatically save your stats. If you mess up and start tracking a session you didn’t mean to, end it immediately, Grit X will ask you if you still want to save your data, a nice feature that helps you incorrect data processing or manual deletion.

I first used the Grit X to track 24 minutes of running/walking. My test unit was initially set to the metric system, but I discovered that you could easily change the unit to English in the Settings menu.
After your run, you can view a variety of stats on the watch, including your altitude, average and best lap times, average and maximum heart rate, cadence, calories burned, Cardiac Load, heart rate zone, Muscle Load, tempo, measurement Polar running power, Energy Zone and Speed ​​Zone.

Measured in watts, the Running Power metric helps you track how active your muscles are during your run. The company uses a proprietary algorithm to calculate this metric based on the altitude and speed gradient captured by your device’s barometric and GPS sensors, as well as your weight.

Like other wearables, the Grit X measures your heart rate optically, which means it detects blood flow through the skin on your wrist. The company recommends wearing it at least one finger away from your wrist bone for the most accurate results. It would help if you tightened it to not move on your arm and the sensor on the back always touches your skin.

Polar says you may want to pair your Grit X with a traditional chest-mounted heart rate monitor when playing racket sports that involve a lot of hand movement, swimming, and working out in the cold. When playing racket sports, you can also increase the Grit X’s heart rate measurement accuracy by moving the watch to your bare hand.

After my first run, I flipped through my watch and came across the FitSpark workout guide, which advised me to stretch. I decided it was a good idea and did a yoga session, which I also followed on Grit X in the Body and Mind category.

Route planner, Hill Splitter

To help prepare you for an outdoor adventure, Polar has partnered with third-party mapping and route planning provider Komoot to provide route guidance for the Grit X.
Designed for cycling, hiking, mountain biking, road cycling, the Komoot feature helps you find the right route according to your ability and available time. The watch will then guide you through your chosen route, providing turn-by-turn directions.

Hill Splitter is one of Grit X’s distinguishing features. It uses barometric altitude data and your GPS-based speed and distance to automatically detect uphill and downhill sections and report them about your uphill and downhill performance. By default, Hill Splitter is available when you’re tracking cycling, downhill, or running sessions, but you can add it for any sport that uses GPS and barometric altitude through the Flow app or web service.

After starting a session, you can use the up and down buttons to scroll to the Hill Splitter to see the details of your up and down progress. In downhill sports like skiing and snowboarding, you even get a pop-up with details of your achievement after completing a hill. After finishing a session, the training summary will show the number of foothills and foothills you have traveled and your distance.

where can you get a Polar Grit X online

POLAR Grit X – Rugged Multisport GPS Smart Watch – Ultra-Long Battery Life, Wrist-Based Heart Rate, Military-Level Durability, Sleep and Recovery, Navigation – Trail Running, Mountain Biking: Buy it now

Polar Flow app features

The Polar Flow app is a great companion to the Grit X, providing even more helpful insights to aid your training. There are sections for Activity, Training, Nightly Recharge, and Sleep.
In the Activity section, you can view your stats for the day, week, or month. It shows your active time, calories burned, distance traveled, daily goal progress, steps, and more. This section can also see your highest and lowest heart rates for the day and when they occurred.
In the Training section, Polar saves your workout history, and you can click on each session to see a detailed summary of your stats, graphs of calories burned, and your heart rate throughout your workout routine and route map.

Training Load Pro aims to help you determine how often you should train, based on how intense your training sessions are. It displays values ​​for Exercise Load, Muscle Load, and Perceived Load, based on your assessment of the difficulty of the exercise on a scale of one to 10.

You’ll see your Running Score for runs, a measurement of your training performance based on your heart rate and oxygen uptake. Polar says that for women my age, a Running score of 38 to 42 is considered Good, a score of 43 to 46 is considered Very Good, and anything higher than 46 is considered Excellent. For a 26-minute beach run, the app says my Running Stats score is 38 or Good.

At night, Grit X tracks your deep, light, and REM sleep, along with any interruptions. The app displays a graph of your sleep cycles so you can see how they fluctuate throughout the night and exactly how long you’ve slept in each stage of sleep.
It also gives you a daily sleep score from 1 to 100, based on how you close your eyes, compared to “current sleep science indicators.” Polar says a typical sleep score is around 70 to 85.

After tracking your sleep for three nights, the Grit X will populate your nightly Recharge status, showing how your body can recover from the training and stress of the night based on the information it collects about your sleep and autonomic nervous system. The watch and app first reported my Nightly Recharge Status on Saturday morning after drinking too much red wine the night before. Interestingly, it said my status was Very Poor and advised me to “take it easy today by resting or exercising very lightly.” I took the advice and did 30 minutes of yoga.

The next night, my Nightly Recharge status was OK. It told me I was “good to go” for exercise and advised me to check out the FitSpark feature for workout guidance. On Monday morning, after a good night’s sleep, my Nightly Recharge status was Good, meaning my autonomic nervous system was able to calm down more than usual when I slept. The app advised me to “get started” and said, “remember, if your body tells you to slow down, listen to it.”

Compare and conclude

With its price, in-depth stats, and outdoor features, the Grit X isn’t for the average person who wants to track casual runs and workouts. There are plenty of more affordable wearables that can help you track your workouts and track your health, like the awesome $149 Fitbit Charge 4, which also has GPS and a heart rate monitor, plus NFC for contactless payments and Spotify support.

Grit X is for serious outdoor athletes, especially those training in the mountains. Its Hill Splitter, Komoot route planning, and FuelWise features make it an attractive choice for anyone interested in cycling, hiking, mountain biking, participating in health events durable, trail running, skiing or snowboarding. Grit X and its companion app Polar Flow will track your progress, motivate you to move, and provide insights to help you work out more efficiently. Its long battery life, stylish yet sturdy design, and useful outdoor features.

That said if you’re looking for a triathlete-friendly multisport GPS watch and don’t need up and down stats, route planning, and refueling advice. For long training sessions and events, the Polar Vantage M essentially offers all the features of the Grit X for $150 less. The Coros Apex is also a solid choice, offering great battery life and a data-rich companion app.

Advantages
Continuous follow-up
Komoot route planner feature
Refueling reminders for long events and training sessions
Provide training advice
Data-rich companion app
Sleep tracking
Good battery
Always-on display with a dedicated button to light up the screen

Defect
Expensive
No smartwatch features other than phone notifications.