Under Armour Sp Sport Wireless Heart Rate

List Listen to your heart with fitness ea earphones

We’ve seen watches and wristbands that measure your heart rate, and many people find them useful for monitoring the effects of exercise. These are the first earphones we’ve seen withith this feature.

The idea is logical: likee a watch, earphones are in contact with your body, so with the right technology they can detect blood flow and calculate how fast your heart is beating. It’s like taking your pulse but using light rather than pressure. And it works. Without a medical team to hand, it’s hard to be sure how accuratecurate they are, but when we went for a run the results in the UA Recordcord app matched what we’d expect and were more convincing than those from the Fitbit Blaze watch (£140 from Amazon www.snipca.com/24342).

As with many fitness devices, the earphones rely on your smartphone for their heart-rate monitoring feature, but at least you don’t have to keep checking your phone: the earphones can tell you your heart rate aloud at set intervals. The app also charts how long you exercised and how far you went, and works with gadgets from other companies too, so you could use it with a fitness band that lacks heart-rate monitoring.

The earphones look good and feel comfortable. A stiff loop goes over each ear, and while not everyone will like this, it stops them falling out during exercise. The earphones use Bluetooth to connect wirelessly to your phone, but there’s a cord between the earbuds with a built-in microphone and control buttons. The battery takes a couple of hours to charge and then lasts five to eight hours.

£134 is fairly expensive for a pair of earphones, but not outrageous. There is a cheaper version, minus the heart-rate monitor, for £120 ( www. snipca.com/24340). Both sets have speakers produced by audio specialists JBL. We found the sound they produced acceptable – bassy but a little harsh, and more like a £50 pair. If you want to track your heart rate and like using earphones, though, it could be worth the money.

Accurate heart-rate monitoring in a pair of reasonable-sounding earphones