Apple AirPods PRO 3 – Perfect for the gym. But…

TL;DR – For those buying for the sports experience, it’s only certain kinds of sports experiences that may wow you.

Apple’s series of AirPods is designed to get the most out of your immersion in the Apple ecosystem, and the new PRO 3 model continues that, but with a twist. Now you get a new and accurate heart rate sensor, an ideal partner to record your fitness endeavours with the Apple Workout app on your iPhone and get encouragement from Workout Buddy.

Why It’s Perfect For The Gym

These AirPods offer a great way to record your gym workouts, including accurate heart rate. With the closeness of blood flow to the surface, the ear canal has long been known to be a potentially perfect place to accurately record heart rate during a workout. However, poor fit and inferior sensing methods have invariably resulted in poor, sometimes very poor, data.

Apple seems to have countered this with a new LED, shape and more options for earbud tips. No doubt the new fit won’t work for everyone, and some of you may not get great accuracy, but it seems from early reviews that for the first time, Apple may have hit the sweet spot for accuracy and fit for many people.

AirPods are perfect for the gym for a few more reasons.

• You can listen to music. Your iPhone can be strapped to your arm or left at the side of the room during the class, and still work.
• If grunting testosterone-filled men lifting iron is not what you want to listen to, the active noise cancellation should tone it down or remove it entirely.
• A good chance of accurate workout heart rate data
• No need for any more subscriptions. The whole workout experience sits within the Apple ecosystem.

But

• AirPods Pro do not broadcast heart rate to gym equipment, which is a significant omission for some.
• The optional Fitness+ service still requires a subscription if you want real human motivation and an at-home gym class experience.
• During arm-based exercises, in-ear HR measurement might be advantageous over arm band optical sensors like Whoop or Polar LOOP.
• No such accuracy advantage exists for AirPods over chest straps, with the latter being more likely to be incorrect for some people, sometimes. A chest strap gives a high chance of an accurate heart rate, although not everyone can or wants to wear one. It depends.

ArPods Pro 3 – Tech Corner

Few media outlets have noted that AirPods 3 Pro support SPR AVS. It went largely unmentioned in the press releases and official presentations. However, when used with the Phone 17 and its N1 wireless chips, SPR AVS offers lossless audio with ultra-low latency (not at launch).

That’s a bit of a mouthful, but it means that Apple has a clever way to compress audio without losing quality and a way to do this without lag. The former is common, whereas eliminating the lag represents a significant step,  if true.

This will make zero difference to music playback where lag is unimportant, but it’s a biggie for audiovisual media consumption or language translation (and hence spatial computing)

Take out

AirPods Pro 2 stand out as best suited for everyday use as a companion to your life – be that listening to music on public transport, working free of distractions or even helping out with live language translation on holiday. Sports? Yes…but less so.

Apple tends to over-hype some of its latest features, which can be small in scope and of peripheral usefulness. As good as Apple’s AirPods are this time around, the reality is that the noise cancellation and audio quality will be better in some competitor models. However, few of us will notice any difference.

On a more positive note, Apple’s innovation in linguistic translation looks cool, similar in some ways to how the iPhone was integrated into TV 4K for FaceTime. Apple excels when making its tech and services work together.

So it is with the sports side of things. The reality is that Fitness+ subscribers who grab these new Pods will probably be delighted with the fit, quality, and noise cancellation, but less so when they want to show the heart rate on their Peloton.

All will be good for the majority who want public peace and quiet, and a great way to mesh with Apple Music or Spotify. Even more so when conversing with the locals on their next holiday.

Let’s hope your ears are the right size.

Last Updated on 29 January 2026 by the5krunner

the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors.