Polar Loop First Thoughts: Actually a Whoop Competitor?

For the past 18 months, Polar has been making steps towards a Whoop competitor. Back in May 2024, they announced the Polar 360, which was a business version of such a device, aimed primarily at healthcare scenarios and workplace/wellness entities. Then, earlier this summer they announced it’d be coming to consumers on September 3rd. At the time, it lacked a name, or many details, but, they did commit to it requiring no subscription.

Now, we find ourselves with all the details, albeit, perhaps not the details we wanted.

The new consumer-focused version of the Polar 360 is called the Polar Loop (the same name the company used back in 2013 for a related wearable band). The new Polar Loop is virtually identical in every way to the existing Polar 360. Same sensor package, same internal hardware, same app, and same features.

In fact, there’s only two minor differences:

1) The Polar Loop has a metal clasp/shell (with various colors), versus plastic on the Polar 360
2) Polar slightly expanded the internal battery to get an additional 1-2 days of battery life compared to the Polar 360

That’s both good and bad, as I’d find out. I’ve been using the Polar 360 for a bit now, in preparation for switching over to the Polar Loop. Effectively, the only difference to my daily life would be a different color shell and a few extra days of battery life. Akin to going from a 41mm Apple Watch to a 45mm Titanium Apple Watch. Thus, making my review process faster.

Except, before you jump on the anti-Whoop train, we need to talk about where the differences are. Because they are vast, and very real.

The Tech Details:

(Above, the Polar 360, which Polar has confirmed is identical to the Polar Loop, except for a slightly bigger battery and non-plastic casing)

First up, there’s some tech bits to talk through. Though, frankly you can sum-up this entire band with:

– Small 29g band with no display (just like Whoop)
– Polar’s Precision Prime optical HR sensor
– Battery life of 8 days
– Comes in three color options
– Price: $199USD, 179EUR, 149GBP
– No subscription cost, everything is included
– Extra band color options priced at $29/19EUR/15GBP

See, that’s what you wanted to know. Oh, here’s the band options:

Now, some of you are more detail-oriented, and want a bunch more bits. Thus, here you go, with a giant pile of hardware specs first:

• Colors: Greige Sand, Night Black, Brown Copper
• Size: 42 x 27 x 9 mm
• Weight: 29 g total (19,5 g without wristband / 9,5 g wristband)
• Water resistance: 30 m
• Operating temperature: -10°C to +50°C
• Charging: USB-C, rechargeable battery
• Battery life: Up to 8 days standard use
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.1, USB-C
• Processor: 64 Mhz
• Memory: 1.3MB
• Storage: 16MB
• Battery: Li-Pol 170 mAh
• Sensors: Precision Prime Optical HR, accelerometer
• Battery Replaceable: Yes
• Price: EUR 179 / GBP 149 / USD 199

Oh, and here’s the other band colors:

And then when it comes to a software features standpoint, here’s all the Polar software features it supports. That said, don’t get too distracted by all the bright colorful names below. I’ll distill what actually matters in a second.

– Daily: 24/7 Activity Tracking: Steps, distance, calories, active time
– Daily: Activity Benefit
– Daily: Inactivity Alerts
– Daily: Heart Rate Monitoring: Real-time, average, and Max HR
– Daily:  Continuous HR Tracking throughout day
– Daily: Activity Goal: Daily targets
– Sleep: Nightly Recharge: Overnight recovery measurement
– Sleep: Sleep Plus Stages: Light, Deep, and REM sleep phase tracking
– Sleep: SleepWise: Predicts daytime alertness
– Sleep: Sleep Gate (optimal bedtime window)
– Sleep: HRV Tracking
– Sleep: ANS Tracking
– Training: Automatic training detection (or manual)
– Training: Energy Expenditure: Calories burned per session & throughout day
– Training: Training Load Pro
– Training: Tracking with Polar Flow app (including GPS details with app)
– Training: Fitness Test (with Polar Flow app)
– Training: Voice Guidance (with Polar Flow app)
– Platform: Full access to Polar Flow (web-desktop/smartphone)
– Platform: API & SDK connectivity included (e.g. to Strava, Komoot, etc…)

Now, I do want to circle back to the new Polar Flow platform/app coming soon, but let’s first talk about how the Polar Loop’s functionality, then talk about the upcoming (but not yet available) Polar Flow revamp.

Day to Day Activity & Sleep Metrics:

So let’s just work our way through a typical day with the band. Note that in my case I’m using the release candidate firmware and app that’ll go public with the Polar Loop. Thus, while things might change very slightly, don’t expect much to change significantly in the next week or two, given the Polar 360 has already been in the market for nearly a year now.

In any case, waking up you’ll see your sleep metrics within the Polar Flow app. The app is identical to the existing Polar Flow app. You can see my sleep times, sleep phases, HRV metrics, etc…

Now, to Polar’s credit, they willingly admitted the existing Polar Flow app is ‘not awesome’ (to paraphrase a long presentation section on it). Thus, what you see above is the production iOS app. Soon, an updated Android app will be available with a revamped user interface. That will bring things closer to their goal state next year. Then, later this year the iOS app will get a similar Phase 2 revamp. Here’s a couple of screenshots provided by Polar on what this will look like:

You’ll notice things like HRV status are now brought forward much more prominently, versus being buried deep in other metrics. It definitely looks a lot better than before, though, does fall a bit short of the type of revamp that I think is really needed to compete with Whoop here (a company that I disagree with on lots of things, but I think their app is excellent at surfacing information in easy to understand ways).

As you can see above, that looks fantastic. So much better than before. But that’s really only the start.

(One important note: Everything from here on out is concept art. It’s not real…yet. And thus, probably will be different in it’s final form.)

After that, Polar’s going to move into Phase 3, and that looks even better. Finally!

Here you can see the onboarding process:

Then we’ve got the ability to customize the tiles that you want to see:

And here’s a bit more on down-the-road bits:

Overall, I really like the looks of this. Though, when exactly we’ll see it remains to be seen.

In any case, moving along back to the Polar Loop. Note that there is no wakeup alarm functionality on the Polar device. That’s still in the realm of your other devices (phone, other watch, Cuckoo clock, etc…).

Now, throughout the day it’ll track your steps/activity, just like other Polar devices. You won’t see flights of stairs though, as it has no altimeter in there. This is an area where Polar’s UI is quite far behind virtually all their competitors (in talking about basic activity tracking). For example, I can’t tap/click on any of those metrics at the bottom to see those charted over longer periods of time, etc…

Ok, with those basics out of the way, let’s step it up.

Training & Workouts:

Next, let’s go do a workout. The Polar Loop/360 will automatically detect the act of a workout, though, will not detect what type of workout it is. Thus, all workouts detected are simply classified as ‘Other Indoor’. This is a massive difference to Whoop, which will detect whether it’s road cycling, indoor cycling, mountain biking, and a gazillion other workout types.

In Polar’s case, there’s a (very important) slide that lets you tweak the sensitivity of the workout detection algorithm. You can see it below:

The idea behind this is to find balance for when it triggers to start recording a workout in the background. Polar says the thresholds are roughly as follows:

High: Training is only recorded when you’re doing vigorous activities, such as running, skiing, or other high-intensity sports.

Medium (default): Activities like a brisk walk or light jog are enough to start recording.

Low: Even light activity, such as leisurely walking or doing household chores, can trigger training recording.

But wait, there’s more! I do appreciate how often Polar comes back with tons of details, as is the case here. Here’s even more details on how/when/what/why it triggers:

For a training session to be automatically recorded, it must meet certain duration and intensity requirements.

· Duration: The activity must last at least 10 minutes to be saved as a workout.

· Intensity: Your heart rate and activity need to reach and maintain certain levels:

To start tracking, your heart rate must exceed 50% of your Heart Rate Reserve (HRR) — the difference between your maximum and resting heart rates. This typically means the activity should fall within Heart Rate Zone 1 or higher.

To keep tracking, your heart rate must stay above 25% of your HRR, or alternatively, the device must detect continuous high physical activity via the accelerometer.

Your activity level must reach 6.0 METs (a measure of exercise intensity) or higher to start. Tracking stops when activity drops to 3.0 METs or below, unless your heart rate remains high enough despite low movement. This can happen, for example, when cycling, where your wrist stays almost still while holding the handlebars.

MET examples: 

· MET: Sitting quietly

· 2.5 METs: Walking slowly

· 5.0 METs: Walking briskly

· 9.8 METs: Running at a 10-minute mile pace (6:00 min/km).

· 11.0 METs: Running at 7.0 mph (11 km/h, or about 5:25 min/km)

Note: These intensity values apply to the Medium training intensity setting, which is the default. The thresholds are higher for the High setting and lower for the Low setting.

Now, as much as I love detail, I also love things to ‘just effing work’. And honestly, this just doesn’t work.

In all my testing thus far at different levels, I have yet to capture a single workout correctly. They are either missing entirely, broken into vast chunks with missing pieces, started late, or ending 30-45 minutes after the workout complete. For example, it didn’t track my 30-minute trainer ride at all today. It wasn’t super long, as I was running late to catch a flight – but, nonetheless, it was a workout.

Still, I’ll pause that line of thought to say that Polar says they may have delivered an incorrect firmware to my Polar 360, which may be resulting in my issues. They say that I should wait until the final firmware next week (Sept 10th) to re-test things.

And look, I’ll obviously do that. But at the same time honestly, I remain pretty skeptical about this line of reasoning. With the company saying they’re going to ship in a mere 7 days, I’m kinda surprised that any near-final firmware would be meaningfully different than what comes next week. Activity detection is clearly happening, just not at all very well. In the current state, it’s unusable.

But, let’s set this all aside for a second and pretend it nails the start/times exactly correct. The next challenge is there’s no way to modify any of these sessions. So if I wanted to edit/truncate an automatically detected training/workout, I can’t do that. Inversely, if it misses the first 15-20 minutes of a session (as it does), I can’t simply extend it forward. And if it misses entire sessions (like all of my panel sessions), I can’t do that either.

This is a *massive* difference to Whoop, which not only gets virtually every single workout I have correct down to the minute, but also lets me edit them (longer/shorter/new) in the unlikely event it’s incorrect.

Further, in Whoop’s case, it doesn’t actually matter if it’s categorized as a ‘workout’ or not. It just looks at your heart rate throughout the day and calculates load based on that. Whereas Polar only calculates training load if the workout is detected/manually started as load. Thus, for today’s workout where detection didn’t happen, it sees no load.

I can’t overstate how much of a difference this is. It’s literally like looking at a Boeing jetliner, and a one-person glider (no engine), and saying they’re the same. Yes, they are both airplanes, but that’s kinda where it ends. Again, to be clear – I’m absolutely going to give Polar their chance there, but knowing how it’s supposed to work, it’s already operating at a huge disadvantage to Whoop (even if it works perfectly as Polar plans).

In any event, setting that aside or the moment, here’s the details you get about said workout once completed. Because it doesn’t have GPS in it, you won’t get that data by default.

You can however use the Polar Flow app to create a GPS workout, and then use the sensor from the Polar Loop/360’s heart rate sensor. In this scenario, you get exact control over the activity duration (start/stop times), as well as full GPS tracks that sync to platforms like Strava, TrainingPeaks, and others:

All of this then feeds into the training load bits that you have, identical to that of Polar’s other wearables, which track training load and recovery recommendations. In the case of below, I had no less than 90 minutes of workouts per day every day that week, and some rides upwards of 2.5+ hours. But only the ones Polar detected will show up here (which…umm…isn’t much).

This is where Polar starts to shine. While the current Polar Flow UI is still ‘not beautiful’, I feel it does deliver more factually useful information in the training load/recovery realm than Whoop does. Whoop has their completely silly-ass 0-21 strain system for training load. Meaning that the most training load points you can ever attain in a given day is 21. I’ve covered in my past reviews how broken this is (and why every other company, scientific study, sports device, etc doesn’t use this type of tracking).

Whereas Polar uses a very logical (and widely used) system with TRIMP, that allows you to accumulate as much training load as you’d like (just like real-life human physiology). You can see those cardio load scores below:

Again, all of this is exactly how it works for all other Polar wearables.

Finally, when it comes to accuracy, all of my testing with the Polar 360 (which Polar has repeatedly emphasized is exactly the same sensor, internals, etc…), shows it spot-on. Well, at least once it detects the exercise is occurring. Here’s an interval run I did (including the Whoop MG too), and all were spot-on.

And here’s another snippet from a gravel ride with a bunch of climbing (auto workout detection stopped as I started descending, ending that activity, so I’ve trimmed this to just be the relevant part). Again, Whoop MG in this set too. Note the colors have changed :

And these results match my other workouts with it as well.

Going Forward:

Someone at Polar needs to print off a giant banner (like 3 meters long), and hang it up in the office area of whatever product team owns the Polar Loop. That banner will say one thing on it: “Get Activity Detection Right”.

That includes, but is not limited to, nailing down workouts to the minute, and also getting the workout type correct. These two factors are hugely fundamental to Whoop’s success in their wearable. It makes it truly ‘wear and forget’, versus the Polar Loop/360 & AmazFit Helio requiring a fair bit more phone app updating interaction in order to get the same type of data.

Which doesn’t mean that Polar is on the wrong track. There’s a lot of goodness in the Polar ecosystem, from better workout tracing and cardio load tracking, to better recovery metrics, to generally more accurate optical HR sensors, to the fact that it doesn’t have a subscription. That piece alone is huge. But we also can’t let it overshadow the product itself (as some people have on the Amazfit Helio band). Just because it’s positioned as a competitor, doesn’t make it a true replacement. At least, not yet today.

Still, I’m looking forward to testing it out, and seeing where it does fit, and how fast Polar can iterate on it.

With that – thanks for reading!

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