I’ve never seen an average power setting for the display. You want to see the power in real-time, you want to know what you’re putting out at every instant. As you ride you try to keep your power within certain power ranges and need real-time info for that. If you’re trying to climb at say 225 watts, to keep from blowing up, and your power is an average you don’t know what you’re putting out at that instant. You could have been riding at a lower level, say 160 watts, and now you’re pushing 300 watts while climbing but the power meter is showing 200 watts (because of averaging). You think you can push harder to get to 225 and now you’re up to 350 and you blow up. It would be like lifting weights, you want to lift 30 lbs 10 times, 300 lbs total. So you lift 10 lbs 5 times (50 lbs) and try to lift 50 lbs 5 times (250 lbs, total 300 lbs), but your max lift is 50 lbs once, you can’t do it. Make any sense?
I was watching my meter on my ride today and it was changing about every 2 seconds. As you ride more with power you will find the change will become less as you get smoother with your pedaling and being aware of your power output. Having learned to keep me power output smoother has helped me ride longer because I’m not over powering and burning up. I hoped this helped.
Here is a link to Polar’s discussion forum http://forum.polar.fi/.
__________________
Make mine a double!