GPS 4 Sport

In the last post I described the problem which each Edge 705 user encounters, such user who tries to treat the calories value given by the Edge seriously as a burned during a training. From my experience I can tell that this value is too high and discorrelated with HR measurement. In an extreme case it may therefore turn out that going 20km/h against the wind and you burn as many calories as when you’re seated on the couch. For this reason, I decided to find a solution of this issue. With little effort you can now solve the problem with miss-counting burned calories in Garmin algorithm and have a more interesting data analysis. I decided to rely on Polar algorithm which is the most reliable for me (if at all, you can talk about this without measuring the power). After getting acquainted with files generated by the Polar CS400 and CS600 (probably all of Polars are so) it turned out that in Polar file (*. HRM) the number of burned calories wasn’t saved. The calories are shown in the device and in software, so device (e. g. Polar CS400) and software (e. g. Polar ProTrainer) calculate themselves the number of burned calories based on data form the file. Well now, you just copy the file from Garmin Edge to Polar software and it will generate the number of calories based on HR.

You must have a tcx2hrm converter to carry out such operations.

There are several programs that are able to do so, but none of them takes into account the fact that Garmin saves data in non-steady arranged before intervals in case of  SmartRecording function. (On the other hand recording every second causes that from time to time wrong speed and distance reading appears in tcx file at least in the 2.6 firmware version). So I decided to write a converter that will be devoid of this disadvantage.

When we have already converted file, we need Polar software, which we will load the data in.

We have 2 options:
Polar ProTrainer – software included in the Polar device – free 30-day version and payable version.
Polar Precision Performance – an older version of the predecessor, which is available for free.

Both programs are count calories with the same algorithm, which takes into account our HR max, HR rest, VO2max and our weight. This way we can omit the problem of calories counting.

Links to software:
* Polar ProTrainer
* Polar Precision Performance
* Free Online tcx to hrm converter

The converter doesn’t take into account laps or stopping time yet , hence there is a slight difference between exercise time in the Polar and Garmin software.
Maybe some day it will take that into account
So, now I’m recommending you to use it:

Free online TCX2HRM converter

If you have any remarks or you notice some outage, please comment below this post.