Smart Calories tells you accurately the number of calories burned during your training sessions, as well as total daily calories, based on your personal information and how hard you're training.
When you track your energy expenditure with your Polar sports watch or fitness tracker, you can see how demanding your training was for your body, from a metabolic point of view. You can also track your total calories throughout the day, which gives you a greater understanding of your total metabolic demands of the day on your body.
Monitoring your individual energy intake and energy expenditure as an athlete is important for nutritional planning, sport conditioning and peak performance. When you know your accurate energy expenditure you can assess your individual nutritional requirements and caloric needs.
The Smart Calories algorithm has been developed using data from studies where wrist-based acceleration, heart rate and reference value for energy expenditure were measured.
Smart Calories calculation intelligently combines heart rate and activity tracking through wrist-based acceleration depending on the intensity of your movement.
The energy expenditure calculation is based on your measured heart rate and activity through wrist movement, and your personal information: weight, height, age, gender, your individual resting heart rate, maximum heart rate, and your individual maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max).
