Exporting — Polar

Export a GPX from Polar Flow, heart rate included

Polar Flow keeps every session and its heart rate. To analyse a precise portion geographically, the .gpx export is direct. Here are the steps.

By Web developer & trail runner

3 min read

I.Why export from Polar Flow

Polar Flow is the direct heir of the heart rate monitor: physiological data here is rich — heart rate, effort zones, variability, training load. For those analyses, Flow remains well equipped. But for the geographical analysis of your outings — isolating a precise portion on a map, reading the elevation gain of a single climb —, a specialised tool is more direct. GPX export is straightforward.

Some reasons to export: archive your tracks before a platform change, share an outing with a non-Polar friend, or analyse the twelve precise measures of a particular segment. The exported .gpx preserves the heart rate recorded by your watch — useful for anyone who takes those numbers seriously.

II.On desktop, in four clicks

  1. Open flow.polar.com in a browser and sign in.
  2. Click Diary in the top bar to see your sessions by date.
  3. Click the session you want to export to open its analysis page.
  4. Click the gear icon or the « Tools » menu at the top of the activity page, then select « Export session → GPX ».

The file downloads immediately. Useful bonus: from your settings (« Account → Account settings »), Polar also offers a complete export of all your data — handy for archiving an entire season in one shot.

III.On mobile, via the browser

The Polar Flow mobile app is centred on consultation, not export. The most reliable path: open flow.polar.com in Safari, Chrome or Firefox on your phone, sign in, and use the desktop method. The .gpx file lands in your « Downloads » folder, ready to be dropped into any analyser.

IV.And then?

You have your .gpx, heart rate included. To read what the average HR and max HR of each portion really say — not the global average that blends everything —, drop the file into GPXchunk and isolate the portion you care about. The twelve measures, including the two HRs, recompute live for that segment alone.

Stepping out of Polar Flow also means leaving an online service to process the track yourself. Analyse a GPX without uploading anything spells out what a GPS file actually reveals, and why keeping it local beats pouring it into another silo.

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