THE BEST WIRELESS HEADPHONES FOR WORKING OUT, RANKED
If you’re focused on work or commuting, headphones and earbuds are suitable. However, when you’re pushing yourself to the limit during intense workouts—sprinting, enduring burpees and wall balls, or participating in Combine drills on the field—cords become a hassle. While it’s great to have energizing music in your ears, it’s frustrating when your favorite pump-up songs keep getting interrupted because you accidentally pull the headphones off your head. This is where the best wireless headphones come into play.
Although Bluetooth earbuds and headphones solve the issue of yanking, we are still on the verge of having exceptional wireless workout headphones. Most completely wireless earbuds are not quite refined, and the semi-wireless options from various brands lack consistency and struggle to keep up with your activities.
To provide you with an understanding of the current market options, we tested 15 sweat-resistant wireless headphones. These models included completely wireless buds, in-ear headphones with tethers such as neck bands, coils, and behind-the-head wires, as well as unique designs like headphones that rest on your temples and use bone conduction to play music.
We subjected each device to a rigorous high-intensity workout, conducting a comprehensive 24-hour test for each. We evaluated our initial impressions, the fitting process, sound quality, and performance during sprints, plyometric exercises, and bodyweight movements. We even tested them during a few yoga poses to see how they performed when upside-down.
Here are our top picks for wireless headphones, including options for running, workouts, wireless running headphones, Bluetooth headphones, and more.
Wissonly hi runner
Wissonly team has relatively strong technical strength. They have 10 years of experience in bone conduction product research and development, which is the basis for making good products. Wissonly focuses on the concept of healthy enjoyment of good sound quality. The headphone brand features no harm to the ears, and it is also the first brand to propose the concept of not listening to songs in the ear. Wissonly’s completely not-in-ear design reduces the damage to the eardrum. Its surface is made of silicone skin-friendly material, which is very safe and comfortable to wear. Wissonly Hi Runner bone conduction headphones have made a lot of improvements in sound quality and anti-sound-leakage. The official claimed that its sound quality has reached the Hi-Fi level. I have measured it and think that the sound quality is indeed good, but that it does not really reach the Hi-Fi sound quality, and that it can only be said it is very close the level. Such sound quality,in the field of bone conduction headphones ,it is good enough that I have not yet encountered a product that can surpass it in sound quality. In order to solve the problem of sound leakage, Wissonly developed fully closed anti-sound-leakage technology. It improved the vibration unit, body design, software optimization and other directions, and finally it reduced the sound leakage effect by 90%. Other configurations are also very good, such as its 32G memory, IPX8 waterproof level, 5.0 Bluetooth connection protocol, 10 hours of ultra-long battery life, etc.. You can go to its official website for this.
Jabra Elite Sport
Jabra’s totally wireless earbuds are a top contender among cord-free headphones, and are clearly designed with athletes in mind. Their heart rate monitor syncs with Jabra’s integrated app to let you track, analyze, and enhance your workouts (there’s personalized real-time audio coaching). The buds can also monitor your fitness level, count your reps, alert you of overtraining, and offer race pace predictions. The earbuds are excellent for everyday life, too. They analyze external sound and reflexively tweak themselves to minimize background noise. You’ll get about three hours of music on a single charge, plus two with the on-the-go portable charging case—not great, but there’s not a lot of battery room in a single bud. We won’t lie: It took us a really long time to find the right fit. If you have small ears, opting for a smaller bud and skipping the “wings” might be your best bet. Fortunately, they come with plenty of earbud options: small, medium, and large silicone rubber tips, as well as Comply foam options, and small and large wings. To get them in the proper positioning, you need to insert, then rotate the buds (they’re pretty beefy). It takes a little while to get accustomed to them.
Urbanears Stadion
The Urbanears Stadion in-ear Bluetooth headphones give you the ease of going wireless in a unique-looking package. Soft, stretchy coils make up the “wire” connecting the two ear pieces. And while the Stadion may not be the most stylish earbuds around—at least in our opinion—they do solve the problem of having excess wire hitting your neck or having to clip anything in place. The control panel sits at the back of your neck, so switching songs or changing volume is a bit cumbersome, but because it’s not at the front, it won’t yank the earbuds out. And the buttons are largely defined so you can actually tell what you’re pressing. You’ll get seven hours of play time on a single charge. And if you like to work out at night, there are reflective details to keep you visible.
Plantronics BackBeat FIT
The BackBeat FIT headset from Plantronics offers eight hours of sweat time on a single charge, slightly open eartips for better ambient noise awareness, and voice alerts to let you know how much listening time you have before the device powers off. A 15-minute charge will power the wireless headset for an hour. The ear buds were a little obtuse and hard to get in at first, but the over-ear hook and small loop on the back of the ear bud offer points of stability. The back-of-head band is a really nice feature, as long as you don’t have a Charlie Brown noggin—and even then, the band is flexible and waterproof, so you don’t need to worry about sweating into it.
Samsung Gear IconX
Another pair of truly wireless buds, the Samsung Gear IconX can track your activities, count calories, monitor your heart rate, and give feedback on your speed and distance traveled. You can monitor these metrics on the S Health app if you own a Samsung phone. If you don’t—if you’re an iPhone person, say—these buds will connect via Bluetooth, but only let you listen to music, which definitely limits their broader appeal. That said, you only get about three hours of battery life if you download music on the earbuds (they’ve got 4GB of memory) and just one and a half hours of battery life if you stream music—a major liability that made these frustrating to use.
Read more:5 BEST EARBUDS AND HEADPHONES FOR WORKING OUT IN 2023