This past September, it appears Polar started the “Polar Journal”, a monthly publication about all things sports/fitness/etc. Given it launched in September, it easily got drowned in the gazillions of other sports tech news stories that occupy that historically slammed month. But more importantly, some of the stories in that initial issue were frankly pretty boring, bland, and without much concrete geekery/detail.
But just a few minutes ago, I stumbled into the most recent issue, from this month (February 2025), and it’s really damn good. Like, surprisingly good. This issue is on female athletic topics, and it’s got some really deep scientific dives on a number of topics (seen below). Each article is packed with details, but also more critically, packed with citations left and right.
More curious, I then went back an issue, and turns out, that one’s got a number of good articles too – also packed with details. It looks like, over the course of the fall, the company slowly pivoted towards heavy geekery and data, versus wishy-washy blah. Which is awesome. The internet is full of wishy-washy blah, we don’t need any more of that. Versus this stuff is packed and concrete.
A few examples of articles that caught my eye with sufficient geeky within are:
– How Endurance Training Transforms Your Blood
– What Are the Benefits of Cycle Syncing Your Training?
– The Bizarre Tales from the Early Olympic Games
As a quick trend here, most of the best ones are tagged ‘Science’, and seem to be all written by Bronwyn Griffiths. The rest of the articles are fine, but Bronwyn’s are definitely top-notch. Also, it seems like as the issues have gone on, the articles have gotten longer and more detailed (which I appreciate).
You can find the base homepage of the journal here:
And, you can also add that to your RSS reader as well (which is how I stumbled upon it, as this issue went into my Polar Flow updates RSS feed for whatever reason). I’m not terribly sure how other people would know about this, perhaps they get e-mails or such. It looks like I got one e-mail back in September in Dutch (since my account was listed as Netherlands), but after that, nothing.
Either way, I rarely find company efforts like this good. But this was an exception. The articles aren’t crammed full of Polar product marketing, but are hyper-focused on giving specific and detailed data/advice, regardless of which product you use. In many ways, it kinda reminds me of the TrainerRoad Podcast.
In any case, I just wanted to briefly call it out, in hopes it continues.
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