Beyond Garmin Connect
How to Export Your Polar Data (and What Polar Leaves Out)
August 1, 2026
The short answer
Polar gives you two real export routes: a per-session download from the Polar Flow web service in TCX, CSV, FIT or GPX, and a full account archive requested at account.polar.com that arrives as JSON. The second one sounds like the complete backup, and it is not — Polar states plainly that the archive excludes anything its algorithms derived from your raw data, "so, for instance, activity and sleep information are not included."
That sentence is the whole story of Polar data ownership, and most guides skip it. Below is every route, what each one actually returns, and where Polar beats Garmin and where it loses.
Route 1: exporting a single session from Polar Flow
This works only in the Polar Flow web service. Polar's own instructions for exporting individual sessions are titled for the web service, and its Flow app support page documents sharing a session as a link or an image, plus platform sync — but no file download. If you want a file, open a browser.
- Sign in to flow.polar.com and go to Diary.
- Click the training session to open it.
- Click the Export drop-down at the top right of the session page.
- Pick your format, or pick the zip-package version of it.
Polar's page notes the zip option exists to make downloading faster on slow connections, and that you have to extract the archive before importing GPX or TCX into a third-party service.
Which of the four formats to pick
FIT carries route and training data together and is the most complete of the four. If you are feeding a serious analysis platform, start here.
TCX carries training data such as heart rate, calories and cadence, and is the most widely accepted format across older platforms. Use it when something rejects FIT.
CSV flattens the session into a table you can open in a spreadsheet directly. Useful and lossy, and it sits in the same drop-down as the other three rather than behind a separate menu.
GPX is route data only. Polar says this explicitly. It is for maps, not physiology.
One caveat straight from Polar's page: multisport sessions export in GPX, FIT and TCX only. No CSV for a triathlon. If you race brick sessions and planned to spreadsheet them, that is your wall.
Polar also warns that data can look slightly different once a third-party service re-processes it. That is true of every platform and it is the reason raw files are worth more than screenshots of charts.
Route 2: the full account archive
Polar's account-level export is the GDPR data-portability route, and it lives outside Flow. Polar's instructions for downloading all your data give three steps.
- Go to account.polar.com and sign in with your Polar account email and password.
- In the left-hand menu, click Download your data.
- Click the Download button to start the request.
Polar says collection "will take some time... depending on the amount of it and other data collection traffic," then emails you when the file is ready. From that email you get two weeks to download it before the link expires. That two-week window is stricter than most and worth a calendar reminder — Garmin's equivalent link is generous by comparison.
What the archive contains
A ZIP of JSON files, one per training session plus your profile and account data. This is not a folder of FIT files. If you were expecting to drag the contents straight into another platform, most will not take it.
Runalyze is the notable exception: it built an importer specifically for the training-session JSON out of the Polar backup, precisely because Polar's API cannot backfill history. That is a workaround for a Polar gap, not a Polar feature.
What is NOT included, and why it matters most
This is where Polar's export diverges hardest from what people assume they are getting.
Derived metrics are excluded by design. Polar's privacy FAQ states the export "does not include any data that is derived from the data provided by you using Polar algorithms. Instead, it includes raw or pre-processed forms of data." The support page names the casualties: activity and sleep information.
In practice that means Nightly Recharge, Sleep Plus Stages, Training Load Pro, Cardio Load, Running Index, Recovery Pro and daily activity almost certainly do not travel with you. Those are the outputs of Polar's sports-science work, which is genuinely deep — Polar has been publishing on heart-rate-based physiology since long before wrist optical sensors existed. The irony is that the strongest thing Polar builds is the thing you cannot take.
Polar's legal reasoning is defensible. Its practical effect is not. The GDPR right to data portability covers data you provided, not data a company computed about you, and Polar reads that narrowly and consistently. I think that reading is technically correct and a bad choice. A company confident in its algorithms exports their outputs and lets you compare. Garmin exports a sleep JSON. Polar does not, and calls it privacy law.
Fidelity gaps in the archive files. The developer of intervals.icu investigated importing full Polar history from the export files and found that "altitude is missing and speed is very different" compared with the same sessions pulled through Polar's API, apparently because Polar cleans GPS on its side without exposing the cleaned result in the dump. So the archive is not just missing derived layers. Some of the raw layers are lower fidelity than what Polar itself holds.
No native bulk export of session files. There is no documented way to select a date range in Flow and download 300 TCX files. Community scripts exist; they are unofficial, they break, and they want your Flow password. That is a real limitation, and it is the single most common reason people end up at the JSON archive by accident.
Route 3: living syncs
For anything ongoing, a connection beats an export. Polar's integrations live in Flow under your name, top right, then Settings → Partners → Connect next to the service.
Strava. One-way, Polar to Strava. Polar's page is unusually honest about what will not cross: manually added sessions, sessions with no sample data, sessions from third-party apps, and anything recorded before you connected the accounts. Calorie data is not transferred; Strava recalculates its own.
TrainingPeaks. The only genuinely two-way one. Sessions flow to TrainingPeaks, and compatible TrainingPeaks plans and target workouts sync back to Polar Flow once a day and onto the watch. Limits Polar states: a maximum of 20 phases per training target, targets are editable only in TrainingPeaks, and custom zones must be on per sport profile for structured guidance.
intervals.icu. Authorise from its settings page and it pulls activities plus selected wellness fields. Its own announcement is blunt: "Only new activities are downloaded. This is a limitation of the Polar API."
Runalyze. Same story for the live sync — future activities only, with up to about 30 minutes of delay — plus the JSON backup importer for history.
Apple Health and Health Connect. One-way out of the Flow app, across seven categories: active energy, workout heart rate, resting energy, sleep analysis, steps, weight and workouts. Continuous heart rate does not sync, and nothing flows back into Flow.
The pattern across all of them: your future is portable, your past is not.
Route 4: the AccessLink API
Polar runs an open developer API, AccessLink, and it is more generous with derived data than the export is. Exercises, daily activity, continuous heart rate, cardio load, Sleep Plus Stages, Nightly Recharge, SleepWise and Elixir biosensing results are all exposed. Compared with Garmin's Health API, which requires a commercial approval most individuals never get, Polar's registration path is more open. Point to Polar.
The catch is severe and it is the reason every tool above says the same thing: per Polar's documentation, only exercises uploaded to Flow in the last 30 days are returned. There is no history backfill. Connect a new analysis tool today and your first ten years are simply absent from it.
Polar versus Garmin, point by point
| Polar | Garmin | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-activity export | 4 formats (TCX, CSV, FIT, GPX) + zip | FIT, TCX, GPX, KML — no CSV |
| Bulk session files | None documented | Account archive of FIT files |
| Account archive format | ZIP of JSON | ZIP with FIT files plus wellness JSON |
| Sleep in the archive | Stated as excluded | Present as sleep JSON |
| Derived training metrics | Stated as excluded | Partially present, incomplete |
| API history backfill | 30 days | Broader, but commercial approval needed |
| Two-way plan sync | TrainingPeaks | TrainingPeaks and others |
Polar wins the single-session export — four formats plus zip out of one clean drop-down beats hunting for Garmin's gear icon, and Polar's four include CSV where Garmin's do not. (Garmin's CSV exists, but only as a summary table off the activity list, one row per session.) Garmin wins the archive, and it wins it decisively, because sleep and wellness data actually arrive in the ZIP. Our Garmin export guide covers that route in full, including its own gap: Garmin's derived training-status history does not come out in usable historical form either.
So neither company hands you the coaching layer. Garmin at least hands you the inputs. That is the honest scoreboard, and it is a smaller gap than brand loyalists on either side will tell you. The broader problem, platforms holding more about you than they show you, is not brand-specific.
Frequently asked questions
Can I export Polar data from the mobile app?
Not as a file. Polar documents session export for the Flow web service only; the app's documented options are sharing a link or an image, plus Apple Health and Health Connect sync.
Does the account.polar.com export include my sleep data?
No. Polar states that activity and sleep information are not included because they are algorithm-derived.
How do I get old Polar sessions into Strava?
Export them individually from Flow and upload the files. Polar says outright that sessions created before you connected the accounts will not sync.
How do I delete my Polar data?
Sign in at account.polar.com and use Close your account. Export first — the two are not reversible in the other order.
Can Polar's export drive a race prediction or load model?
Only partly. The session files carry the workout; the load and recovery layers do not travel. If you want a pace estimate from raw session history rather than a vendor's number, a race pace predictor working from your own files is the honest version.
If your goal is a backup, request the archive today and diarise the two-week download window. If your goal is analysis, the export is the long way around: pick a tool that reads your account continuously, accept that it starts from today, and start it now rather than in six months. The 30-day API wall means every week you wait is a week no external tool will ever see. Our roundups of Garmin data analysis tools and Garmin Connect alternatives cover several platforms that also take Polar accounts, and the reasoning about what a second opinion on recovery metrics like HRV status is worth applies identically to Nightly Recharge.
