Last fall Polar introduced their latest premium GPS smart watch, the Vantage with wrist-based heart rate, even power calculation. Now, with a new firmware update, the Vantage gets improved functionality with better satellite tracking, sleep stage & quality tracking, a new overnight training recovery tracking function, and even a breathing exercise training tool to help focus your recovery and sleep efficacy. All of those are over-the-air updates so existing Vantage M & V owners get the new features, plus there are new color options available, plus Strava Live integration coming very soon…
Polar Vantage smart watch sleep quality & night recovery tracking
The core updates to the Vantage smart watches center around helping get a better look at how you recover from training overnight, when sleeping. While it may seem like you just don’t want to stress about training when it’s time to lay down at night, the Vantage now seamlessly can track your sleep patterns, sleep quality, and tell you how well your body is recovering from training efforts.
The new Sleep Plus Stages tool looks at the quality & quantity of sleep you get, breaking it down into how much time you spend in each sleep stage to better quantify how well you sleep. Clearly good sleep is critical to maintain daytime functioning and a healthy mental state. But it’s also key for proper recovery from physical training efforts, avoiding illness, or even for injury recovery. Presumably by better identifying sleep issues, you can work on improving your sleep habits too as part of your training program.
Beyond sleep quality, Nightly Recharge was developed to quantify how your body actually reacts to rest. It measures overnight recovery to better understand how well your muscles are rebuilding & repairing from exercise-induced training strain, also taking into account other stresses on your body during the day.
Lastly of the new recovery features is Serene, a new series of guided breathing exercises on your wrist. Polar thinks easy-to-access daily breathing exercises will help calm the mind, aid recovery, and when you are more relaxed, help improve the quality of your sleep.
Other training firmware updates
Beyond the new recovery tools, the Vantage now adds Galileo, QZSS & BeiDu satellite system support for faster & more accurate tracking worldwide. There is also new manual stride sensor calibration, Zone Lock training zone control, an updated fitness test that can now be done straight from the watch’s built-in heart rate monitor, inactivity alerts, an optional always-on backlight during exercise, plus more lap details stored in your training files.
New blue & copper color options
As for new colors, both the $500 top-spec, touch-screen Vantage V & more affordable $280 Vantage M now get an electric blue wristband option. Or the new blue silicone band is also available separately as an upgrade for $40/25, respectively. From tomorrow, a matte black version of the Vantage M will also be available with a copper crown.
As for additional Strava integration, Polar says an update slated for December will bring full Strava Live Segment support to the top spec Vantage V. Race Pace & FitSpark integration are also slated at the same time for both Vantage V & M smart watches.
