Polar joins Garmin in placing smartwatch features behind a paywall

We’ve already reported on Garmin’s rather controversial decision to put certain smartwatch features behind a paywall, and now another company has followed suit. Polar offers smartwatches with the usual functions such as showing notifications from a connected smartphone, but the brand has also put a strong emphasis on sports.

Some fitness features are now part of a paid subscription, which offers a free 14-day trial and costs €9.99 a month afterwards. For now, this new offering called "Polar Fitness Program" is only available to European users with an Android smartphone, iOS compatibility is expected to follow later this year. This new fitness program is intended to act as a companion for athletes or users who are regularly active.

More specifically, it can adapt to individual goals and lifestyles by incorporating data collected by a Polar smartwatch. It’s supposedly able to recognize how users physically react to a workout and can create a four-week training schedule that is automatically adjusted if the user needs more time for regeneration. These data-based adjustments are intended to make workouts more efficient and even reduce the chances of injury and fatigue, all while making sure that users still improve their performance.

Moreover, the program adapts to individual routines and 20 different fitness levels. However, Polar’s new paywalled offering has a weakness that is also found in other smartwatches, namely that all these training plans are focused on endurance sports. While optional strength workouts and mobility exercises can be incorporated into the schedule, current wearables can only accurately optimize the intensity of an endurance workout based on their heart rate readings. But Polar smartwatches cannot detect the muscle failure that occurs during strength workouts, for example.