Do you have a friend, loved one or family member that mysteriously goes missing on Christmas day, only to reappear a few hours later looking all flushed and sweaty? While you were busy gorging on chocolate and eating Baked Alaska for breakfast, your fitness-loving Secret Santa has been pounding the pavement, sitting atop the static bike, or pumping iron in the basement. You adore them, but hate them in equal measure.
Once that inner rage has subsided, it’s time to think about what to buy the fitness fanatics this holiday season. It’s no use handing them a giant Toblerone, that simply won’t cut it. Instead, you need one of the items we have carefully hand-selected below. This collection of gifts for the fitness-loving friend or family member includes some of the latest tech, perfect for tracking all manner of health and wellbeing stats, as well as devices and equipment that perfectly compliment an active lifestyle.
Fitness gifts this holiday season: Our top choices
Apple
Apple AirPods Pro 2
1. Best fitness gift for Apple users
Awesome sound on-the-go
$189 $249 Save $60
Superb sound quality and Personal Spatial Audio delivers fantastic results, whatever workout you might be undertaking. What’s more, powerful Active Noise Cancelation helps drown out the awful music found blaring in gyms.
- Adaptive audio is superb
- Sweat resistant
- Great fit
- They are expensive
- White gets grubby
- Annoying when you drop one
The second generation of AirPods Pro – whether you opt for the USB-C option or lightning port case – make a great gift for the Apple-lover in your life, while doubling-up as a fantastic gym buddy. Dust, sweat and water-resistant, they will happily fend off the sweatiest sessions, while we’ve found the ANC is among the best out there and provides immersive audio to get fitness fans in the right head space to lift or sprint at a personal record.
Better still, Transparency mode makes running outdoors that bit safer, with important sounds (such as approaching vehicles and sirens) allowed to filter through the music or podcast. Up to six hours of listening on a single charge ensures these headphones are good for even the most intensive endurance events.
Google Pixel Watch 2
2. Best health and wellness tracking smartwatch
Like a Fitbit, but smarter
There’s no denying Google has made improvements with the Pixel Watch 2. The fitness and health tracking, as well as the fluid, simple interface, is superb. The design is great, too, but there’s definitely a sense that battery life still needs improving, and it’d be wonderful to have a larger model.
- Lightweight and snug fit
- High level of water resistance
- Fitbit built in
- Pointless for iPhone owners
- Battery life is stingy
- Screen sometimes tricky to read
Admittedly, you’ll need a fairly healthy budget to spoil a friend or loved one with the Google Pixel Watch 2, but it’s a fantastic smartwatch for anyone ingrained in the Android ecosystem. Google’s second stab at a smartwatch is better in almost every respect, but particularly great at health and wellness tracking.
That’s because it has Fitbit powering the back end, which acts as a fitness coach, life coach and wellness buddy, constantly keeping an eye on the wearer’s vitals 24/7 to paint an accurate picture of stress and recovery levels. It’s a powerful piece of kit, boasting the latest heart rate, temperature, GPS and gyroscopic sensors, neatly blending the worlds of fitness and smartwatch into one svelte package.
Therabody
Therabody Theragun Mini
3. Best for soothing aches and pains
A mobile massage gun for slinging in the gym bag
$130 $150 Save $20
This ultra portable percussive massaging gun is perfect for pummeling sore muscles into submission. It fits neatly into a gym bag and the current generation connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth for guided massage session.
- Small and easy to travel with
- Powerful massage
- Now Bluetooth enabled
- A bit noisy
- Relatively heavy
- Prepare for the pain
Anyone working out a lot will have experienced the dreaded DOMS. It stands for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, and it’s the painful sensation produced when the muscles are healing from an intense session.
Massage guns, like this one, can help alleviate muscle tightness and pain through percussive movement over the skin surface, but are also fantastic for getting large muscle groups firing before a workout. This small and compact unit from Therabody is great for chucking in the gym bag, backpack or purse, and using whenever, wherever.
What’s more, this new generation is smaller and slightly lighter than its predecessor, while Bluetooth connectivity allows access to an accompanying smartphone app for an entire library of guided massage routines.
Suunto
Suunto Wing
4. Best open-ear sound for outdoors enthusiasts
Bone conduction tech with built-in toughness
The Suunto Wing offers open-ear sound via bone conduction tech, which doesn’t block the ear canals for much better situational awareness when out running, cycling or hiking the wild. These are well-built, boast a massive battery life and have an additional safety feature in the flashing LEDs on the flanks.
- Lightweight and comfortable
- Better situational awareness
- Massive battery life
- Sound still not great
- Not 100 per cent waterproof
- Recharge unit is bulky
Outdoor smartwatch and tech specialist Suunto has joined the open-ear, bone conduction headphone race with an excellent rival to the likes of Shokz OpenRun.
Better designed and generally more robust, the Suunto Wing offers open-ear sound, which doesn’t block the ear canals for much better situational awareness when out running, cycling or hiking the wild.
Here, Suunto has added a strip of red LEDs to the flanks, which the user can run on or off via an accompanying smartphone app. This aids visibility, while a carry case doubles-up as a mobile charging unit, allowing for up to 30-hours playback for off-grid missions.
JaxJox
JaxJox DumbbellConnect
5. Best for the space-strapped gym buff
A great weight spread in a compact package
Like the brand’s KettlebellConnect, JaxJox offers a connected training experience that makes workouts easier and takes the pain out of counting reps and sets. In addition to this, the company’s smartphone app will give real-time feedback on form, as well as tracking volume over a set period. The dumbbells manage to cram 3.6kg-22.6kg into one neat package, saving space in the process.
- Rep-counting built-in
- Digital weight adjustment
- A great space-saver
- Not the toughest
- Weight spread won’t be enough for some
- Odd weight increments
Embarking on a strength training program requires tenacity, as well as a decent spread of weights to promote progressive overload. You can rep out all you want bro, but everyone knows the secret to getting stronger and building muscle is to gradually increase the weight over time.
Unfortunately, not many of us have the space for an entire rack of dumbbells, which is where a good set of adjustables comes in handy. The JaxJox Dumbbell Connect boasts a weight spread of 3.6kg-22.6kg in one convenient package.
What’s more, they also feature built-in smarts, allowing the user to connect to a smartphone app to count reps and sets during a session and log weight progress over time.
MyZone
MyZone MZ-Switch
6. Best motivational fitness tool
Gamifies the workout experience and rewards movement
The world’s first interchangeable exercise tracker for the gym, outdoors or in water. Monitor your heart rate on your chest, arm or wrist. MyZone’s innovative system allows wearers to rack up points depending on the heart rate zone they operate in. Compete with friends and fellow gym-goers for the ultimate gamified fitness experience.
- Small and discreet
- Six months of battery life
- Earning MyZone Points is addictive
- MyZone app is clunky
- It is pricey
- Not the comfiest
MyZone aimed to level the fitness playing field when it first launched, assigning zones to various levels of a user’s maximum heart rate. The idea is that everyone can compete, regardless of fitness level, as pro athletes will have to work twice as hard to get into the highest zone – and therefore earn the most MyZone Effort Points (MEPs) – as the uninitiated.
A number of gyms and fitness facilities offer classes where live MyZone readings are beamed to a large screen (there’s no slacking-off allowed), while MZ-Switch owners can compete against friends of fellow club members. This model is one of the priciest, but it sees MyZones tech distilled into one unit that can be worn three ways – either as a traditional chest strap, or on the arm and/or wrist for added comfort.
It is waterproof, so great for swimmers, packs a massive battery life and can store up 36 hours of exercise data before it requires synchronizing with the smartphone app.
Whoop
Whoop 4.0
7. Best discreet lifestyle coach for your wrist
A fitness tracker that is more concerned with recovery
Whoop blends into the background, a lifestyle coach designed to feedback on your rest and recovery, guide you to better sleep habits and to make better choices. It’s not a replacement for a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, but for those wanting something that isn’t obtrusive, the Whoop is an interesting choice.
- Great for sleep tracking
- Automatically detects workouts
- Superb for achieving long-term goals
- Battery life is poor
- Requires expensive subscription
- Lacks performance details of rivals
Although not necessarily a fitness tracker, Whoop aims to gather as much data from your body as possible to paint a picture of your overall health and wellness. There’s no massive touchscreen here, a distinct lack of fitness advice and nary an alert from the wrist.
Whoop blends into the background, automatically detecting exercise and workouts using heart rate and motion data. It then adds this to detailed sleep data to begin coaching you on the upcoming day, week or month.
Similar to Garmin’s Body Battery status, Whoop will let the wearer know when is the perfect time to exercise and when it is better to get some rest. Arguably one for the more seasoned fitness fanatic, it is not design to replace the Garmin, Fitbit or smartwatch, but instead compliment it with even more healthy insights.
Hydrow
Hydrow Wave
8. Best premium fitness gift
The Peloton of the rowing world
Smaller, slimmer and easier to store than its larger, original sibling, the Hydrow Wave is a compact, connected rowing experience for home. Fans of Peloton will dig this workout.
- Compact design
- Easy to store
- Lots of on-demand workouts
- Not as engaging as some rivals
- Expensive monthly subscription
- Difficult to gift wrap a rowing machine
Hydrow spotted a gap in the connected fitness market a number of years ago, when it released the first iteration of its Hydrow Rower. The second generation came in the lighter, more compact, and easier to store Wave model.
Offering a similar, Peloton-esque guided workout experience, Hydrow will appeal to anyone looking for a solid cardio and full-body workout, but under the guidance of a professional coach. Hydrow workouts aren’t quite as engaging as the bass-pumping, saccharine studio world of Peloton, as this brand prefers to create its videos on real bodies of water. Rowing on picturesque Italian lakes is a nice form of escapism, though.
Granted, this is large, heavy and expensive, but if you really want to show someone how much you care via a sizable gift, this is a good one.
What is the best fitness gift?
That really depends on your budget, but we feel the MZ-Switch will appeal to the widest group of people, and it’s not absurdly expensive. Simple to use, easy to wear and very addictive once you get into the MyZone ecosystem, it rapidly becomes a great motivator for getting a few extra steps in or trying harder in the next spin class.
How did we pick the best fitness gifts?
Personally, I have been writing about fitness equipment on and off for over ten years, so have been lucky enough to get hands-on with pretty much everything on this list.
The only thing to evade my grubby grasp is the Google Pixel Watch 2 but thankfully, that has been reviewed and recommended by the wider Pocket-lint team, so seems a no-brainer to include it here.
Can I buy a fitness gift for those new to working out?
Certainly, and there are a number of items on the list that will benefit those new to the whole fitness and workout game. Firstly, the Theragun Mini will be a lifeline for those just starting out, as they are more likely to suffer from pain and muscle stiffness while the body adapts to a new workout routine.
What’s more, both headphones we’ve recommended add a little audio spice to any fitness session, regardless off ability, while the MZ-Switch is also a great motivator for those new to the game.
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