Polar is a name synonymous with fitness, as it should be given the number of fitness-related technology that it’s released over the years. It now has a new fitness watch on the market called the Ignite and it comes with a handful of new features that will surely make fitness enthusiasts take a second look, including the ability to measure your heart rate overnight and a more informed set of sleep analysis details.
In fact, the overnight heart rate measurements are aimed at giving your more information about how well you slept, while the heart rate measurements during the day can work as they do with any other fitness tracker that offers a heart rate monitor so you can track it during more active engagements like exercise.
This around the clock heart rate measurement works with your heart rate variability and breathing measurements to provide information to your autonomic nervous system, the status of which is combined with the data from your analyzed sleep status and used to provide you with a series of helpful tips and information that aim to help you continue getting better sleep and help you recover more quickly.
This new ‘Nightly Recharge’ feature as Polar is calling it has one goal, which is to help improve your fitness performance, and that all starts with better sleep quality and making sure that you’re allowing your body the time it needs to recharge adequately to take on the activities of the following day.
Of course Nightly Recharge hinges partly on the sleep data the watch is able to provide, and while sleep tracking is nothing new in the world of fitness watches the Polar Ignite kicks things up a notch by claiming to provide a much more well-rounded set of information. These “sleep quality insights” are thanks to the Ignite’s new Sleep Plus Stages feature.
With Sleep Plus Stages users can look at things like how well they slept, how long they slept, and how they transitioned through the different stages of sleep like light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. All of this is then accumulated with other sleep data into an overall sleep score that Polar states should be extremely easy for the user to understand.
Users can glance at the score for a broad understanding of their sleep quality, but should the user want to look at things more in-depth they can see how the previous day’s activities affected their sleep. Things like lifestyle habits such as what you do on a daily basis and how active you are can affect the quality of sleep. With this information in hand the Ignite can seemingly help users to adjust these activities to achieve even higher quality sleep and thus perform better during fitness the next day, which, is the ultimate goal with this watch.
The watch also features other tools to help you achieve your fitness goals, like the FitSpark personalized training which features smart coaching and suggest things to throw into your training routine like which exercises to do with cardio and which strength training exercises to do.
Polar says the Ignite is available immediately from its website at a price of $230 and it comes in three different colors which are Black, White, and Yellow. Polar also offers additional wrist bands for $25 and those are available in the same colors, meaning you can pick up all three and swap out upon desire.