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An iPhone running iOS 26 or later, and AirPods Pro 3. That's it — no Apple Watch, no chest strap, no account.

No. That's the point of the app: AirPods Pro 3 have their own heart rate sensor, and FitZones reads from it directly. If you do wear a Watch, its readings also flow into Apple Health and FitZones will pick them up, but they arrive in delayed batches — the live, second-by-second stream comes from the AirPods.

Only AirPods Pro 3. Earlier AirPods (including AirPods Pro 2) don't have a heart rate sensor, so there's nothing for FitZones to read.

Health — to read your heart rate during workouts and your resting heart rate, and to save finished workouts to Apple Health.

Location (while using) — only for outdoor activities, to measure distance and pace and draw your route map. Indoor workouts never use it.

In rough order of likelihood:

1. Fit. The sensor needs steady skin contact. Make sure both AirPods are seated snugly; try a different ear tip size if they wiggle when you run.

2. Give it a moment. After you start a workout it can take 15–30 seconds for the first reading to arrive.

3. Health permission. Open the Health app → your profile → Apps → FitZones, and confirm heart rate reading is allowed.

4. AirPods health sensing. In Settings → your AirPods, check that heart rate sensing is enabled.

5. Restart the workout. The heart rate stream starts with the workout session; ending and restarting it re-triggers the connection.

AirPods deliver heart rate samples every few seconds rather than continuously, so a short lag is normal. FitZones is built around this: zone changes must hold for several seconds before they're announced, so a single odd sample won't trigger anything.

Zones are computed from your profile, so start in Settings:

1. Age and sex drive the max heart rate estimate (Tanaka formula for men, Gulati for women). If you know your real max from a test or race, set the manual override instead.

2. Zone model. Heart Rate Reserve (the default, same method as Apple Watch) uses your resting heart rate too; % of Max ignores it. If your zones look different from another app, it's usually this choice.

3. Resting heart rate. By default it syncs from Apple Health; you can refresh it or enter one manually.

Yes — everything spoken is optional. You can toggle zone-change announcements, "approaching zone" warnings (and how close they trigger), and the periodic stats readout, where you choose the interval and exactly which parts are spoken: time, distance, pace, average heart rate, zone.

That's intentional. Announcements briefly duck your audio so you can hear them without stopping, then volume returns as soon as the announcement finishes.

Workouts under one minute are treated as accidental starts: you still see a summary, but nothing is written to history or Apple Health. Anything 60 seconds or longer is kept.

If longer workouts aren't appearing in Apple Health specifically, check the "Save to Apple Health" toggle in Settings and the write permission in the Health app.

They can, since both devices would write a workout to Apple Health. Turn off "Save to Apple Health" in FitZones settings: your Watch keeps writing to Health, and FitZones keeps its own in-app history with zones, route, and charts.

No. Each workout stores the zone boundaries that were in effect when you ran it, so past workouts always show the zones you actually trained in.