Peloton guide
Buy now £275, Onepeloton.co.uk
Design
Peloton has become so successful in part because it makes excellent workout equipment, but also because it’s the kind of exercise bike or treadmill you’re happy to have as a piece of furniture in your living room. And the guide doesn’t disappoint in this area.
We gladly had it on view next to our TV – and we think you’ll be just as pleased as us to have it on display. Let’s face it, this placement is necessary, given that it can’t be hidden away because the camera is so central to the experience.
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It’s made up of a combination of shiny and matte plastic and soft material while the whole front of that unit can slide across, with a satisfying clunk, which has the effect of covering up the camera. This means that nobody can see you, even if they had access to the machine, and is a comforting addition for a gadget that will probably spend a lot of time in front of your sofa.
Peloton has made that commitment to privacy run throughout the machine. All of its smart features are done on the device itself – meaning that it is not sending video of you working out up to its servers for analysis – which again is a comfort, given what you are likely to be doing in front of it.
Classes
The guide is built around Peloton’s existing classes and is focused primarily on strength training. Its tracking features work best for this and it will highlight strength classes that are intended partly to complement the company’s more famous bike and treadmill workouts. Although, the guide will still let you do yoga, meditation and even those cycling and running classes if you have the third-party hardware for them.
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Peloton has released some classes that work with the new guide, including the updated metrics which make use of that camera. But part of the appeal is that there is no great change: the guide is intended to be the best way to do the classes and workouts that people already know from Peloton.
Experience
When the guide was announced, it was mostly described as "motion-tracking". That gave the sense that it might be something like the Xbox kinect, which tracks the movement of your body precisely enough that it could tell exactly where your limbs were.
In reality, the guide isn’t really like that; it knows that there is motion, but not exactly where that motion is happening. So it can tell that you’re doing the right number of repetitions of a given exercise, but not how you are doing them. It does this by using a little meter that fills up during any given exercise.
The only way to fill up that meter – and to score as highly as possible for the workout overall – is to do the reps as quickly and as often as the instructor is asking you to. This makes it great for motivation, since it will encourage you to do the workout fast enough and not to give up early. But it means that it is a little lacking in terms of helping you fix your form.
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If you are doing squats, for instance, the guide is great at spotting that you have given up early and encouraging you to keep going for the full interval. But if your form needs work – if your feet are too far apart, or your back too bent, or any other common problem with strength exercises – the guide’s motion-tracking capabilities aren’t quite smart enough to realise.
However, the camera does stream a live view of yourself direct to your screen. That might sound anxiety-inducing – and it is, a little, though two years of Zoom meetings have probably made people a little more used to looking at themselves – but it means that you can compare your form with the instructor’s, as you appear side-by-side on your TV.
This proves surprisingly useful. It’s a little like looking in the mirror, only more useful because your view of yourself is so close to the instructor who is doing it perfectly.
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The rest of the experience is classic Peloton: inspirational classes, taught by aspirational instructors, presented in a slick and easy to use interface. There is simply no better home workout experience around than Peloton, in terms of quality or quantity, and it does a great job of bringing that to your living room.
You could argue, however, that Peloton has already come to many TVs; with a lot of smart televisions now offering you the option to install the app directly. Plus, the company has apps for set-top boxes like that Apple TV too.
We should stress that the experience on the guide is a little different though. It’s smoother and gives a lot more detail on the exercise – but is it enough of a difference to be worth spending the extra money on Peloton’s devoted set-top box, and on the more expensive memberhip? (The app only costs £12.99 per month, rather than £39.) Probably not.
The verdict: Peloton guide
If you are without any of Peloton’s previous equipment, and need a devoted way to play the company’s workouts, then the guide is perfect. And, if you have a home gym with a television that you’d like to turn into the smartest instructor there is, then the guide will do the job perfectly.
It has a slick design, helpful interface and a surprisingly useful camera. In our opinion, it is undoubtedly the best way of enjoying Peloton’s strength content and other floor-based workouts. If there is a space for it in your home workout regime, it will fill it beautifully.
But, it may struggle to find people who have that hole in their home gym, and who haven’t already filled it with Peloton’s other solutions. For example, those that invested in the bike+ (£2,295, Onepeloton.co.uk) last year – which includes a screen that can swivel around and allow you to do strength and other workouts on the floor to the side of it – will find the guide adds very little to their setup.
Of course, there’s also the matter of the app’s availability. That is perhaps the Peloton guide’s biggest problem. It is fantastic at what it does, but the brand has already built fantastic experiences of the same kind for smart televisions. And many people have likely spent the last couple of years using the company’s app on an Apple TV, rendering the guide somewhat obsolete.