Apple AirPods Pro 3 with Heart Rate: Sports & Fitness Review

When Apple surprises me, it doesn’t tend to be some flashy feature that blows the rest of the world away. Instead, it tends to be them doing something slightly out of their usual swim lane, or their norms. For example, adding in running efficiency metrics a few years past. This year, that surprise goes to the AirPods Pro 3 team in delivering mind-bogglingly good heart rate accuracy. Like, I won’t beat around the bush: After the dismal accuracy in the PowerBeats 2 Pro earlier this year, this is an astonishing turnaround. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The AirPods Pro 3 have plenty of new features when it comes to sound quality, noise reduction, and more. But more importantly to this site, are all of the sports and fitness features they’ve added. This includes adding heart rate sensing to the tiny little buds in order to measure your heart rate, along with a new feature in the Apple Fitness app to record your workout (including GPS data from your phone), as well as the ability to have Apple’s new Apple Intelligence-enabled Workout Buddy feature.

At the same time, while they had the PowerBeats 2 Pro base to work from, much has changed here – and some features have even been removed. The choice might not be as clear-cut as you think. So, let’s dive into all the details.

Note that Apple has provided a loaner set of AirPods Pro 3’s, though I’ve already ordered my own. Heck, setting aside any fitness aspects, I just want them for the vastly improved noise cancellation. At someone that spends a ton of time on airplanes, that alone is worth it for me. In any case, once I’m done with these, they’ll go back to Apple.

With that, let’s quickly recap what’s new, and then crack open the box.

What’s New:

(Above left – AirPods Pro 2, right – AirPods Pro 3)

Visually speaking, as seen above, they look almost identical. But almost is the key words. Here’s a quick-hit list of the differences between the AirPods Pro 2 vs Pro 3 models

– Added heart rate sensing (in-ear)
– AirPods Pro 3 has 2x more noice cancellation than AirPods  Pro 2 (and 4x more than AirPods Pro 1)
– Apple says they changed internal airflow components which improves transparency mode & Adaptive EQ
– Changed overall design to make this smaller, improving fit
– Changed eartip design to be ‘foam-infused’, which means it basically fits/stays put better
– Added 5th included eartip size (added XXS, also includes XS, S, M, L sizes)
– Updated to Apple’s U2 (Ultra Wideband) chip for better FindMy support (previous was U1 chip)
– Increased water resistance spec from IP54 to IP57
– Increased battery life in ANC mode from 6hrs to 8hrs
– Increased battery life in transparency mode from 6hrs to 10hrs
– Increased battery life for hearing aide mode from 6hrs to 10hrs
– Reduced overall case charge from 30 hours to 24hrs
– Now records steps/move/calories to the Apple Fitness app (and your rings) during a workout

In addition, there’s a few features that were announced with the AirPods Pro 3’s that will also be coming to the AirPods Pro 2:

– Added Live Language Translation
– Expanded Fitness app to include Live HR recording with AirPods Pro 3 (and all HR sensors)
– Expanded Fitness app to include AI Workout buddy feature with AirPods Pro 3 (and all headphones)
– Expanded Fitness app to include live recordings of workouts (AirPods Pro 3 unlocks much longer list of workout types)
– Included ability to do sensor fusion between Apple Watch & AirPods Pro 3 for heart rate data (best 5-minute rolling average selected)
– Added ability to use as a camera remote for your phone

Finally, when it comes to the PowerBeats Pro 2, I want to note two key differences that the AirPods Pro 3 lack:

– No Android configuration app on the AirPods Pro 3 like there was on PowerBeat 2 Pro
– No broadcasting of heart rate on standard Bluetooth HR profiles, like there was on PowerBeat 2 Pro
– And thus, no gym equipment/fitness machine support, like there was on PowerBeat 2 Pro

Ok, with all that noted, the price remains the same at $249USD on the AirPods 2 Pro, which is very much appreciated in a year when prices everywhere, primarily for tariffs, but also overall inflation.

In The Box:

Here’s a quick tour at what you’ll find in the box. First up, here’s all the pieces at a high level:

And then the close look at the ear tips. Note the expansion to include an XXS one, in addition to the existing sizes of XS, S, M, and L (the Medium is on the units already):

There is no USB-C charging cable, which I’m fine with. If you’re a world citizen in 2025 buying the AirPods, I’m pretty sure you’ve got a USB-C cable floating around. And if not, I’m sure your friends do. I would argue for higher-power devices (e.g. laptops and such) including them is still important given all the wonkiness on higher-power delivery devices. But for this sort of thing, it just doesn’t draw huge wattages, so just about any cable will do just fine.

The Basics:

Now, there’s a million places to read about sound quality and such of the AirPods Pro 3, primarily from audiophiles. That’s not really me, and I suspect, not really you either. And, no offense to the Apple engineers, but most of us won’t be able to tell the difference between the already excellent sound quality of the previous generations and the new one – let alone do so mid-way through an interval while breathing hard with a bit of a cross wind.

Instead, I want to focus on the unit from a fitness perspective, but still quickly go over the basics. Because as much as I might use the AirPods in sport, I actually use them just *FAR* more for editing videos, listening to music on the plane, and random other boring tasks like conference calls.

First up, there’s the new fit aspects. They are definitely different. The first time you put them in, it’s like “wow, these fit totally different”. Then about 87 seconds later, you forget about it and it feels normal.

When it comes to the iPhone, after pairing it up, you’ve got a slate of options, though the most common one you’re going to use is the top one to switch between Transparency Mode, Adaptive Mode, and Noise Cancellation mode. In short, in transparency mode, you’ll hear all the conversations and noises around you. At the other end, Noise Cancellation mode makes the entire world go away. And then Adaptive Mode is effectively the middle ground. 99% of the time, I’m using Noise Cancellation mode, because I don’t want to hear anyone else. The exception to that would be in a city or such, where I do want to be aware of things around me.

Next, you’ve just got a whole host of settings. Slightly more than 4 pages worth of settings you can tweak.

And of course, these are shown in your FindMy network, in case you lose your case (the case is shown, not each individual AirPod). You can also toggle off heart rate monitoring altogether here if you want.

As noted earlier, there is the added eartip size, though, I went with the default size and it was perfect for my ears. Keeping in mind that while the HR sensor doesn’t measure through the eartip, the overall fit of the AirPods will drive accuracy. If it’s too loose/flopping around, then it won’t be accurate.

When it comes to that noise cancellation, it’s pretty good. I haven’t had a chance to test these on a plane yet, though, I did one better: A kids pool party. Specifically, more than half a dozen young girls including my daughters screaming all sorts of unintelligible things as they splashed around for hours. While it wasn’t perfect at silencing the craziness, it did give me just enough calm to get some editing done off to the side.

That said, noise cancellation during sport/wind is an entirely different scenario that I’ll dive into below.

Now, there is a new Live Translation piece here. This allows you to have a conversation with someone where you’ll hear what they’re saying in near-realtime. I say ‘near’, because it’s grouping their phrases together, rather than word-by-word. That’s logical, since the ordering of the words differs from language to language. You want the intended translation of the phrase, not the exact words in the order they were spoken. For the other person, you can show them your iPhone, and it’ll translate your words in realtime too.

You can download languages for offline (with your phone, but no connectivity) translation as well:

I haven’t had a chance to dig into this piece deeply. The demos I’ve seen first-hand were all at very slow spoken speeds, and very good there. And that’s great if you need to have a slow transaction in a foreign country in a shop or such (as Apple showed it). Or even a slow conversation for business purposes.

But on the flip side, it really struggles when it comes to translating faster scenarios. For example, when watching snippets of the Tour de France in French, using the Live Translation piece, for listening to the announcers, it didn’t stand a chance. It missed the vast majority of what was being spoken, and incorrectly translated the intent of other pieces. Note that it both shows the translation on the phone, and translates it audibly via the AirPods Pro 3.

I often work at the Tour de France, and while my French is passable for many day-to-day pieces, being able to have translation on and listening to some of the announcements in the background and such would be helpful.

Don’t get me wrong, I think all the companies in this space doing this are doing super cool things. And obviously, you have to start somewhere. But just set your expectations accordingly.

Anyways, with that, let’s look at the sports piece.

Heart Rate & Usage in Sports:

The biggest change in the Apple Fitness realm this September is honestly the inclusion of a full app feature dedicated to recording your data from your AirPods, and in fact, any heart rate sensor. This feature is found within the existing Fitness app, on a new tab called ‘Workout’. When you open up that tab, you’ve got a host of workout types (once you’ve paired a Apple fitness product, else, it’s a more basic selection for just a general HR sensor).

Below each workout type is essentially three options:

– Music
– Workout Buddy
– Goals (e.g. Calories/Distance/Time)

This isn’t super complex. But, it does the trick. So, once you’ve got your AirPods in, it’ll grab the heart rate from those, and you can press the star button. From there, it’ll give you a 3-second count-down, and off you go. Workout Buddy will kick in automatically if enabled, and give you the Pep Talk at the start, followed by updates throughout the workout, and then finally, the Walk Off, at the end of the workout. This does require your phone be with you, and that you have some sort of internet connectivity (cellular or WiFi). It’s the same as the Workout Buddy as I detailed/tested on the Apple Watch.

But first, it’s worthwhile mentioning *how* it does heart rate data recording. On the sides of the pods, is a little black area, and under that are two infrared sensors that pulse light at 250 times per second. That’s notably different than the more standard green LED’s used in the PowerBeats 2 Pro (which didn’t work well):

These infrared sensors look at the blood-flow in your hears, and measure the movements of said blood. This data is then feed into a whole slate of algorithms, which attempts to figure out what’s your heart rate, versus something like your thunking footsteps (which is typically what messes up HR sensors). In most cases, it’s the algorithms that are the magic for most companies. But we’ll come back to accuracy later on.

In any case, during the workout you’ll see a single page of stats. Here’s an example from three different workouts (indoor bike, outdoor ride, and outdoor track run):

Again, there’s only *ONE* page of status, and these are not configurable. So for example, I can’t see my current speed/pace, just the average speed/pace for the entire ride. I can see my current heart rate, and total calories, as well as total distance. And I can create laps. Otherwise, that’s kinda it.

Note that this will appear on the Lock Screen as a live activity. Further, if you swipe up while in the Fitness app, you’ve got a few more options, including muting Workout Buddy, and doing a Check-In.

Once you’re done, you can hit pause, and end things. This will bring up a selection of summary stats:

One of the options you’ll have here is to Rate your Effort, which will in turn update your training load data.

You can then view/plot this data longer-term if you wanted to:

Next, let’s talk briefly about noise cancellation during workouts at speed/wind. I should note that I generally don’t recommend riding outside with in-hear headphones (bone induction headphones would be different). It’s usually a safety risk since you can’t hear traffic overtaking you (or anything else for that matter).

In any case, Apple said they changed aspects of the wind flow within the headphones, which may or may not improve how much wind you hear. You see, one of the challenges with either transparency mode or noise cancellation mode is that it’s actually using the microphones on the outside of the AirPod, to pull that audio inside to you. But it has to figure out what’s wind and not, and then remove that wind noise.

While there are some improvements here compared to the AirPods 2 Pro, I don’t feel they are vast improvements. It’ll still sound like a tornado is in your head, though, the audio is usually listenable for all but the fastest descents.

That said, in either scenario, there’s absolutely ZERO awareness of cars overtaking you. On this particular ride my cycling radar wasn’t with me (long story, a rarity, it just wasn’t), which usually would alert me to overtaking traffic. However, it was astonishing how even on a relatively quiet country road, how quickly cars snuck up on me (in either transparency or noise cancellation mode). Never heard them. So again, totally cool for indoor usage, but definitely not riding outdoors. For running, it was good, though still a bit of wind noise when the wind blew in certain directions.

Ok, let’s talk about waterproofing briefly. The AirPods Pro 3 actually have increased water proofing from IP54 to IP57:

The first number (’5’) in the IP number is talking about dust resistance, whereas the second number is covering water resistance. And in this case, it increased to ‘7’, which technically means it supports 30 minutes at 1-meter deep. Yet also technically, Apple’s site says not to immerse it:

Obviously, since Apple touted meeting that standard, I’m going to validate it. So, off we go.

Now, a couple of things of note here. There’s no music/sound coming through. This is because once it loses connection with my phone (which was actually with me in the orange openwater swim bag near me), it drops the signal. It did this instantly upon hitting the water. Also, the water may just be causing it to pause the music too. Either way, it doesn’t work (which is different than other headphones designed for swimming that do have offline playback modes).

The second thing to note is just how good the fit was. My wife looked at me and was like ‘You are definitely gonna lose these’, but there was no chance I was losing them (this has not been a strong summer for me and losing things on my openwater swims). In any case, they were locked in there, both above water and a bit deeper.

Afterwards, per usual thing on putting devices in saltwater, I rinsed them off with fresh water. See, safety first! Err…last.

I let them dry a bit, and they were good to go. No issues since then, and all is good. Which makes sense, because again, on paper, that’s literally what it says they support.

Now, a key difference between the AirPods Pro 3 headphones and the PowerBeats Pro 2 when it comes to the heart rate signal is that the AirPods Pro 3 are *NOT* sending out a standard Bluetooth heart rate signal (BT HR profile signal). Whereas the PowerBeats Pro 2 actually do send out a standard Bluetooth HR signal that’s compatible with virtually every app & 3rd party device made over the last decade or so. This is important for areas like a Peloton Bike, which can pair with the heart rate of the PowerBeats Pro 2, but not the AirPods Pro 3. Likewise, if you have other devices like dedicated bike computers, or simply just an Android phone – you won’t be able to get the heart rate signal on those devices.

It sounds like Apple views the PowerBeats Pro 2 as part of the greater Beats brand, which is designed to be slightly more device-agnostic (hence still drawing in Android users). And sure, that’s fine. But the reality here is that this is limiting their appeal to actual iPhone owning users too. The majority of Peloton owners are on iPhone. The majority of Garmin bike computer users are on iPhone. The market for these higher-end devices skews overwhelmingly iPhone (as it has for more than a decade), and this ignores their best customers.

And that sets aside the Android realm. No Android user is going to switch phones just for the AirPods Pro 3. But, they might just go and buy them if they fit their fitness use cases. Now, if they need heart rate, they certainly won’t. Again, this whole decision is baffling.

Ok, with that, let’s get into the accuracy bits.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

For all of the heart rate accuracy recording here, I had separate devices/phones recording the data. Thus, when an Apple Watch was also involved, it was on an entirely separate phone/account (and therefor, might as well be a friends phone). All other watches/devices recorded separately to themselves, and the AirPods Pro 3 recorded directly into the Apple Fitness app on an iPhone updated with iOS26.

First up, we’ll start with something that should be relatively easy – indoor cycling. I say ‘easy’, because while my heart rate will fluctuate quite a bit, my head isn’t really moving anywhere in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t have to figure out the difference between heavy footsteps running down a hill and my heart rate, there’s not much signal noise, etc… In the grand scheme of heart rate monitoring (of all sensor types), indoor cycling is pretty much the easiest to do:

And indeed, it nails this. Kudos. Then again, so did the PowerBeats 2 Pro. Again, this is the easiest possible bar to test.

So we’ll increase the bar with a steady-state run. Nothing complicated here, just…well…running at an even steady pace outdoors. Here we can see:

As you can see, that’s really good, and virtually indistinguishable from the other units. This isn’t considered a complex task, but hey, the PowerBeats 2 Pro would have failed this one too.

Next, we’ll increase complexity with an outdoor ride. This is one of the areas that can be very tricky for optical sensors, primarily wrist-based ones. Your wrists are flexed stiff, and often absorbing the vibrations of the road. Thus when a watch gets this correct, it’s pretty impressive. For upper arm band type devices, they tend to do super well here, because the rest of the arm acts as a shock absorber. And therefor, when you look at ear-area devices for optical HR sensing, you’ve got your entire body acting as a shock absorber. In any case, here’s that data:

Overall, this is pretty darn good. You do see a few moments (in purple) at the peak of an interval that it struggles a bit. Interestingly, usually you see the struggling happen on the ramp up into the interval, but this was at the steady-state portion, which is kinda a quirky failure.

Finally, we’ve got an interval workout set. This was 4×800, then 4×400, then 4x30s, plus some warm-up and cool-down boringness:

Holy crap that’s good. And frankly, good by everyone. Only one minor blip from the Whoop 5.0/MG and the Polar 360 band on one of the intervals for no obvious reason, but otherwise, spot on by everyone. I fully expected the AirPods Pro 3 to fail here, and it aced it.

Note that if you’re looking for some lifting/gym sets, I recommend you check out DesFit. Note that lifting/gym is frankly one of the easiest things you can do with something like the AirPods Pro 3, because your head isn’t bouncing/moving/etc much (if at all), and the heart rates in lifting tend to be quite low in comparison to other cardio-focused activities. Where you’d see potentially more complexity would be a CrossFit type scenario, where you’ve got lots of quick movements and shifts in intensity. Though from a HR processing standpoint, it’d be similar to the intervals I did above.

In any case, I’m blown away. Like, legit blown away. Not because Apple couldn’t do it, but because the PowerBeats 2 Pro were so bad (and only about 8 months ago), that I’d kinda written off Apple’s ability to get optical HR correct. Further, other companies recent attempts (e.g. Polar’s with Sennheiser), have also been pretty darn bad. All of which tracked with numerous other companies over the years trying, and failing horrifically.

Apple has managed to do something that really nobody else has: Produce a pretty solid heart rate sensing device in your ears. It’s not absolutely perfect, but it’s really strong. Plus, despite urban legends to the contrary, chest straps are rarely perfect either (especially in the cool faller temps, when there isn’t quite as much sweat, you’ll see issues in the first 5-10 mins).

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainer apps, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Wrap-Up:

As I said above, I’m impressed. Super impressed. Partly because no other company has succeeded here, or even come remotely close. And partly because Apple was so far away from success back in February, to come full circle to a very solid product is most unexpected. At the same time, it has all the other bits that I use daily in my previous AirPods Pro 2 units that both myself my wife and bought last time they came out. They’re great, and entirely my daily drivers.

That said, I really wish Apple hadn’t yanked out the standard Bluetooth HR sensing profile. This seems pretty counter to a wide array of people using the device for fitness purposes. Even the simple and common use case of a Peloton Bike (for HR) is broken here. There are 5 million Peloton users, who also being Apple iPhone users. These people largely aren’t converting to Fitness+ (because they would have done it already), so meeting them where they are seems like an easy solution for increased sales. Same goes for other cycling and non-cycling platforms that want accurate HR data, but can’t really leverage Apple’s (mildly wonky) API’s for accessing that on the Apple platform (limitations the PowerBeats 2 Pro don’t have).

In any event, if you want great sound for workouts with great heart rate, this seems like not just the easy button, but frankly, the only button. No other heart rate-capable headphones has been anywhere near this accurate (or even usable for that matter). And this seems to check both the accuracy and audio boxes.

With that, thanks for reading!