Your new in-ear fitness coach

Cross training is a fantastic way to workout. It can be absolutely exhausting. Many hire personal trainers to coach them through a session, some just wear these earphones.

Jabra have made a huge range of fitness earphones in the past. The Jabra Sport Pulse was a great set for tracking your heart rate and your run, the Jabra Sport Wireless was handy just for music during your workout but what about a real training session full of push ups etc, how do you track that?

Jabra have partnered with fitness trainers and created a marriage of smartphone application and earphones. The process is rather simple. Buy the Jabra Sport Coach, download the app, pick a workout in the app (or create your own) and start your routine. The Jabra Sport Coach earphones have controls for volume and play/pause as well as a button on the earbud for confirming to the app when you have completed some workouts. For example, the workout routine will tell you to do 10 push ups, get them done and push the button on your bud to move to the next set. If your next task is a timed based task such as 30 seconds of star jumps you will automatically be moved to the next task after the time, or skip it with the push of the button.

The Sport Coach app has some predefined workouts that will help you sweat profusely, I however chose to build my own based on what my environment would be like and what I had at my disposal. It was a fantastic way to workout alone without worrying about piking out on completing it. On a recent trip to Shanghai I took the Sport Coach with me and did some great workouts in my room. The audio from the earphones is great, music control was simple and the audio feedback from my “coach” was simple and clear. After it was all done I had a record of the session.

The one issue I did experience from time to time on the iPhone was having the Sport Coach app randomly crash mid-workout. This sucked big time when you’ve done 15 minutes of a 30 minute workout and you gotta start again. A couple of updates later and it has been much much better.

I’ve really enjoyed using these earphones but mostly enjoyed how much my workouts have improved. A personal trainer can cost you an easy $60 per hour, these will cost you $199 RRP and the app is free. Your call.