Over the Edge with the Polar RS200SD Heart Rate Monitor

If you're an athlete who's into endurance sports, you already know how important metrics are. One of the best tools for this is the Polar RS200SD heart rate monitor. Resting heart rate, exercising heart rate, and how quickly it changes over what distances are an important part of your training regimen.

One of the best tools to use for monitoring your fitness goals is a heart rate monitor, and the best ones are designed around ease of use. Polar is one of the higher end manufacturers of sporting electronics, and their RS200SD heart rate monitor is one of their entry point models. Arranged as a wrist watch style monitor and stop watch, it includes a foot pad that can give you your running speed and the total distance traveled.

Features And Defining Functions

It's water resistant to 50 meters, includes a calorie counting metric and gives indicators of total energy expended, both for this workout and since you started a particular training regimen. The RS200SD is a runner's heart rate monitor, and is geared to provide you with all the information needed to tailor your workouts.

The Polar RS200SD's heart rate monitoring runs the full gamut – targeted maximum heart rates (set by fitness tests and age and gender), the average for a total exercise run, or for each lap, plus notifications when your heart rate has hit target zones (you can set up to three of them) as well as the usual stopwatch and timer functions, and it works perfectly well as a wristwatch.

Because more and more gear for personal electronics is going wireless, the Polar heart monitor has coded transmissions through their wear-link fabric transmitter. This prevents cross talk from other pieces of equipment used on your run by other training partners.

In addition to the "casual" calorimeter functions, it comes with the S1 foot pedal which will give you stride length and force, the total distance traveled in a given workout and your current speed in km/h or m/h. These traits make the RS200SD ideal for serious runners trying to get their workouts tempo-ed properly for peak performance at an upcoming competition.

Ease of Use Is Key

It does this through use of the Polar Sports Zones and Event Countdown timers. By uploading your workout profile, you can train to build endurance, and then back off by just the right amount to avoid over training prior to your event, giving your muscles time to rebuild from the workout and store up reserves.

While the Polar RS200SD heart rate monitor is great for experienced runners gearing up for competition, the Polar Sports Zone software avoids most of the hassles of high end running and fitness electronics: The user manual. Anyone who's bought gear like this before knows exactly how that tends to run – you can get the basics going, but need a degree in engineering to get the advanced features running. Polar has put a lot of talent in the user interface to make sure that their products are accessible to a beginner as well as useful to a high end competitor, even down to using over-sized buttons that can be pushed while running. No stopping and jogging in place to change to the settings required.

For the latest Polar models, check out the wider range of Polar Heart Monitors.

If you are interested, check out the Polar F55 or the Polar Rs300x Heart Rate Monitor.