It’s been 5 months since I posted this, and we got our Peloton bike a week later, so I feel like enough time has gone by for an update. In short, I’m thrilled with the purchase. To get the obvious out of the way:
- It’s a really expensive bike ($1,895 for the version we got, $2,495 for the advanced version)
- It gets far more expensive when you take into account the $40 monthly fee that provides content (the classes)
To me, the test of whether a piece of equipment is worthwhile is whether you actually use it, rather than some evaluation of that thing’s attributes. And both my wife and I have definitely used it. Over the last 5 months, this is my usage:
Basically, I’m doing something virtually every day, and I’d be surprised if that changed going forward. There are 4 pieces to this:
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The physical bike. It seems like a solid piece of equipment. But I’m sure you could buy equally good or even better equipment for the same price. So this isn’t actually a major plus.
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The content. The digital classes are great. There is a broad mix of instructors with very different personalities and different types of classes in terms of both music playlists and class types. For example, there are almost 1,900 45-minute long cycling classes. And even though I don’t have a treadmill, I download running classes to listen to on all my runs now.
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The way it game-ifys workouts. You know the way some websites and games make it very addictive for you to use them? Peloton is the same. At the top of your screen you see your calendar history, which looks like this:
So it becomes a little bit addicting to get your “dot” in each day. Some other smart things they do:
- They give you your current streak, but they do it in weeks rather than days. That way you’re motivated to keep the streak going, but you can miss a day or two and still feel like you’ve got this very strong streak going.
- While you’re riding, you’ll get little notifications (that can be turned off) if other current riders hit a milestone, like a 10-day streak or their 100th ride.
- You can virtually high five other current riders, which sends them a little notification (I think this one is dumb, but others seem to like it.) Putting these last two points together, you tend to get a whole lot of virtual high fives when you hit a milestone, which is kind of motivating.
- They send you a free shirt when you hit your 100th workout.
- During live workouts (workouts are either live or on demand), instructors will call out users that hit milestones. “Hey spidercrab, nice work on your 100th ride.” I’ve only done on demand rides and so I haven’t ever experienced this, but people seem to love it.
- The large community, and the additional content they provide. One of the most surprising things for me is how many non-cycling workouts I’ve done. The stretching workouts have been excellent, and something that I probably should have been doing forever. (I’ve always been a runner and super inflexible and often sore/injured - it’s no coincidence that I didn’t historically focus on stretching.) And the strength workouts are great, too. There’s nothing super novel about the strength workouts - they’re basic bodyweight and dumbell workouts focusing on different parts of the body. But what’s been fantastic is that there’s this very large Peloton community where a personal trainer puts together a monthly calendar providing workouts each day. That way, I don’t have to burn the energy trying to decide which workout to do, I just click the link on the calendar. At this point, I might be getting more benefits from the strength workouts than the actual cycling workouts.
So that’s a quick summary of my Peloton experience. Do you need a Peloton and its expensive membership to do these things? Again, no. But the fact is that I wasn’t doing these strength and stretching exercises before, and I’m now doing them regularly. Plus the thing that I actually intended when I bought it, which is getting a good, low-impact workout that I could use to complement running.
Five thumbs up.