The Polar Season Planner
Bálint Szinte
When Your Training Plan and Training Log Appear on a Single Dashboard
One of Polar Flow’s most exciting features
For me, one of the biggest innovations on Polar’s desktop platform was when the training plan, pre-scheduled workouts, and weekly summaries were brought together onto a single interface. Together, these elements form the Season Planner, which has become my personal favorite feature in the Polar ecosystem. This step provides a clear, comprehensive overview of how training is progressing over time.
What You Should Know About the Season Planner
The Season Planner offers a wide range of tools that allow athletes to track completed training work in a personalized and professional way. It almost feels like a strategy video game, where upon logging in, the player can immediately see every relevant piece of information about the current state of play. That said, it is not identical to the detailed training plan created by a coach: the Season Planner’s purpose is to present a broader, long-term, summary-level overview.
I like to divide its features into two main categories, which I’ll cover separately:
Planning Features
To receive clear and accurate feedback on completed training, the first step is to build the framework of the season.
Creating a New Season
To track training summaries effectively, it’s essential to define the appropriate time interval. In my case, as a middle-distance runner, the “new year” begins in early October. From October to March, the focus is on the indoor season, while from March to October, training and competitions are planned around the outdoor season. Accordingly, I always define my season within the timeframe that matches the competitive calendar.
Periods and Focus Areas
Once the interval is defined, it needs to be filled with meaningful structure. A training plan is built around different goal-oriented periods: typically a long base phase, a shorter transition phase, a competition season, and finally an off-season or recovery period. Within the Season Planner, these phases can easily be marked on a weekly scale.
Since each period serves a distinct purpose, it’s useful to label them clearly during season planning. This is where focus areas come into play, which can be fully customized. Personally, I track nine different focus areas, with different priorities emphasized in each phase. For example, during base training I do very little speed work and do not practice race pace, but I place strong emphasis on strength training, dedicating four to five sessions per week to it. All of this can be clearly visualized within the Season Planner.
Weekly Target Distance
The values shown in the small boxes beneath each period can be freely adjusted. Once a given week is completed, the Season Planner compares the planned targets with what was actually achieved. The same can be done for total training time. I personally haven’t used this function yet, but for long-distance runners or recreational athletes, it can be highly motivating.
Logging Features
Once the training plan is created and the defined time interval begins, Polar starts logging your training. This happens both on a weekly basis and at an overall summary level. The latter has never been particularly important to me as a middle-distance runner, since race performance is my primary form of feedback on the entire preparation process. However, for runners who focus on accumulating mileage, these cumulative numbers are very much part of the reward for their work.
Weekly Summary
Each completed week represents a step in executing the overall plan. Reviewing the previous week’s training is therefore valuable for every athlete. In my case, the training plan operates in cycles, meaning that three to four progressively harder weeks are followed by a lighter recovery week, from which I begin the next cycle in a more rested state.
The Season Planner summarizes each week’s total distance, duration, and the percentage distribution of heart rate zones, and directly compares them to the planned targets for that week. If I see that endurance was emphasized in a given week and Zone 3 makes up a significant portion of the weekly heart rate distribution, then I know I trained in line with that goal.
When multiple focus areas appear simultaneously in a single week, it usually signals a demanding week ahead: maintaining strength in the first week of a form-building phase, continuing to develop basic endurance, starting hard speed-endurance interval sessions, and finally introducing the first race-specific interval workouts.
Season Summary
As the season progresses, the Season Planner allows you to continuously track the number of remaining days, as well as the cumulative distance and total training time.
Calendar View in the Season Planner
Scrolling further down beneath the main panel reveals a compact, calendar-style training log. Here, you can review the full details of individual workouts—information that the Season Planner, with its broad, high-level overview, does not display. This makes the calendar view a clear, customizable, and easily editable component of the system.
