With wearables now
smarter than a lab’s worth of sports scientists, it’s easy to feel bombarded with data. Ditching the screen is one way to avoid that – at least until you open a companion app – and while Whoop set the standard, its subscription model (see p53) isn’t for everyone. Polar is happy to charge a one-off fee for the Loop, and the Finnish firm has enough sporting pedigree that its fitness metrics should be just as insightful. At least, that’s the theory…
The sensor is beyond minimalist, with a metal clasp and plastic underside; it’s barely wider than the included strap, and weighs a barely-there 29g all-in. The ‘sand’ version’s gold finish treads the line between blingy and sophisticated; the black and dark brown models are a bit more subtle.
Once you slide on the elasticated fabric strap, the top metal section is the only bit on show. Swapping bands is the work of a few seconds, and it’s worth having a spare (£16 each) if you plan on taking the Loop swimming or have incredibly sweaty wrists after workouts.
I can’t fault it for comfort: it felt so featherweight, and so barely protruded from my wrist, that I had no problems wearing it to sleep.
Rolling in the sleep
With no onboard GPS you can’t add route tracking to your workouts, but the heart-rate monitor and accelerometer record pulse, step count, training activity and sleep. Accuracy is on a par with far more expensive sports watches. While it can’t determine muscular strain like Whoop can, training load acts as a good indicator of when to step up your efforts – except this is only calculated when a workout is detected, and the Loop isn’t always great at doing that.
It’ll ignore most movement below a run at the default intensity setting, and there’s no way to go into the app post-exercise to retroactively tag a period of activity as a workout. You can’t extend or trim ones that are recorded correctly either. Manually starting tracking means reaching for your phone – which defeats the object of buying a wearable without a screen.
Can you dig fit?
The Polar Flow app’s home screen is a cluttered diary view that doesn’t always surface the most relevant fitness data, forcing you to change tabs or dig down to the individual entries. The activity screen’s donut graph breakdown of your day – with heart-rate highs and lows, training records and sleep sessions you can tap to see more detail – is more useful, although it can get a touch messy if you often bounce between different activity levels.
Given its more affordable pricing, it stands to reason that the Loop is targeting a mix of fitness levels, so it could really use a way of stripping back the app if you just need the basics, or prioritising the hardcore stats if you’re a pro.
It’s comfortable to wear, delivers consistently good battery life, and gets both sleep and basic health tracking right – but the Loop’s app is nowhere near on Whoop’s level. Wide-reaching updates are promised soon, though. If in the meantime you can look past the cluttered UI and focus on the training data that matters most, the one-off price means it still has merit.
£150
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go.stuff.tv/Loop
Key specs
● HR, motion ● 30m ● 8 days ● 29g
STUFF SAYS Even with no subscription fee, this screen-free tracker can’t quite match the best for intelligent, accurate training data ★★★☆☆
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