SO......Wife mentioned to me last night (outside of knowing about this thread) that Peleton is offering 2 months free trial on their streaming service. This is just access to the workout content as best I can tell, although I haven't investigated completely at this point.
I signed up this morning and did a 30 min spin "class" with Peleton. It was interesting. I don't have a Peleton bike. I have a decade old Cannondale sitting on a set of rollers in the basement. I have a cheap Walgreens fan pointed at me, and a crappy old DVD shelf sitting in front of the bike to hold the phone. I do have a nice new set of ear buds that made the sound nice (although I did select an "electronic" soundtrack in the filters and got a "Classic Rock" workout, more on that in a minute). I don't have any method to add resistance other than moving up/down the rear cassette, and the whole setup is kind of loud (although the wife swears she can't hear me in the morning, I think she's lying to me to keep me from getting an excuse to not ride). I still climbed off the setup this morning with a drenched shirt, sore legs, and another 30min of intense cardio completed.
The trainer in my first video was a pleasant and very motivating guy with a thick British (maybe Australian?) accent. I had my phone sitting on a little stand off to the side of the bike, and only looked at it a few times. Mostly just using the verbal ques on what to do. He was easy to understand, spoke well, and was generally pleasant to listen to. My only complaint there was he kept saying things like "Annnnnd this section is done.....IN 3--2--1". So there were several times where I dropped my efforts a few seconds early. I quickly caught on and waited for his countdown to reduce effort, just a little nit-pick really. If it was an in person class, I would still go to another one of his classes.
It's wasn't all great though. The trainer kept referencing the resistance numbers. He ranged from 30 to 60. I'm certain these are Peleton specific numbers, and most likely adjustable on the screen at some level, or with a knob or something. Obviously I don't have them, so I worked with these as a percentage of available resistance, and did the workout from that perspective, doing some mental math to match the percentage with the gear I was in. I have a 10 speed rear cassette and used each cog as 10%. It makes complete sense if I was on a Peleton bike, but being on a regular bike it was a little wonky. He also referenced cadence (although he called it speed) quite often. I have a cadence meter on my bike, so that was no issue at all. Just follow along with the instructions. He kept talking about power levels, and that sort of thing as well. I assume the Peleton has a power meter built into, and I don't have access to that data on my setup (although I am considering a power meter for other reasons). He never made comment on what your power level should be, but did mention it several times in a general sense of "Make note where you are now, and you want to be about double that later", and things of that nature. Again, it's no big deal, but something I noticed.
This particular class had a lot of standing climbs. I'm not NEARLY coordinated to do that on the rollers at this point. I can drink water, adjust my shirt, skip tracks on the phone, but I can NOT stand up. That made for me doing some adaptations on the bike to simulate a seated climb. Fortunately I have enough outdoor riding experience to know what a climb looks/feels like from the saddle, so it was an easy conversion in my case. I can see "newbies" having some issues with that. I know I had problems adding enough resistance in gym based spin classes, on spin bikes, to really simulate a high intensity out of the saddle climb, and would often do seated climbs for this reason. At 6'2" tall and 200+ lbs the spin bikes often don't have enough resistance to really simulate that for me.......Anywho, it wasn't a big issue, but I do wish I knew if there were climbs or standing sections in the class before I begin them. I would avoid them somewhat if I knew they were there.
Overall I think using the app, and streaming the "class" helped my workout/training. It was nice to have the structure of a class. Someone else choosing the pace, the intervals, and how the workout was "built". I will say that the 30 min just "whizzed" by, and it was much easier to complete my time in the saddle. When I ride with just music, and my own intervals I often find the time dragging by and it becomes a challenge to stay on the bike. This time I was engaged, and even somewhat enthusiastic to continue as the class came to an end. I could've gone 45 min worth of time with the engagement (my fitness and current poor bike fit won't let me go much more than 30min) that the class provided.
I'll say they have a TON of workouts to wade through as well. I think there were something like 2,875 different spin classes available. That's just a GIANT library and it would take a LONG time to tire of the variety there. The app will let you filter and select classes by a number of different options, and even with EVERY SINGLE filter activated there were still like 185 workouts to choose from that fit my criteria. I think I'm going to keep working through different workouts on the app for the foreseeable future. We'll see where I land in a month or so and reevaluate.
Supposedly you can cancel at any time (for me before March 13th), they are supposed to email me 7 days before it runs out, and if I like it. It's $12.99/mo to continue. We'll see how it goes, March is right about the time it warms up around here, so if I've stuck with riding that long (I have a history of falling off the wagon), then I might just move outdoors with my cold weather gear.
Hopefully this helps some of you guys waiting on your fancy new trainers to arrive. I'll post a follow up after some more usage. Clearly a single 30min stream does not tell the whole story of the platform
Here's the bike (backwards) and the rollers for those interested. I'll take a better picture tonight of the setup with the bike on the rollers and the fan and all the other junk in the basement.
<--Me learning to ride rollers in our condo (Pic taken Jan 3rd 2011)
