Lisa Whitney, a dietitian in Reno, Nev., Came across the matter of a lifetime about two years ago. A fitness studio is selling its equipment. She got an indoor exercise bike for $ 100.
Ms Whitney soon made some additions to the bike. She puts her iPad on the handlebars. Then she experimented with online cycling classes offered on YouTube and on the app for Peloton, a maker of Internet-connected exercise equipment, that offers interactive fitness classes.
Mrs. Whitney did not want to upgrade to one of Peloton’s $ 1,900 luxury exercise bikes, which includes a tablet to stream classes and sensors that track your speed and heart rate. Therefore, she further adapted her bike to become a DIY peloton, with sensors and indoor cycling shoes.
The total total: about $ 300, plus a monthly subscription of $ 13 on Peloton’s app. Not cheap, but a substantial discount on what she might have paid.
“I’m happy with my setup,” Whitney, 42, said. “I really do not think upgrading would do much.”
The pandemic, which has forced many gyms to a halt, has driven hordes of people to brag about luxury items like Peloton’s bikes and treadmills so they can exercise at home. Using this trend, Apple released Apple Fitness Plus last year, a fitness app for instructions offered exclusively to people who own an Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone to work.
But it can all be expensive. The minimum price of an Apple Watch and iPhone is up to $ 600, and Apple Fitness Plus costs $ 10 per month. To stream classes on a big screen TV instead of a phone while exercising, you need a streaming device like an Apple TV, which costs about $ 150. The full Peloton experience is even more expensive.
With the economy in a stimulus, many of us are trying to sharpen our spending while maintaining good health. Therefore, I experimented with how to minimize the cost of video-instructional workouts at home, talk to the tinkerers, and evaluate the pros and cons.
Here’s what I learned.
The pros and cons of free
To begin my experiment of exercising cheaply at home, the first question I tackled was whether I would sign up for a fitness app or stream free lessons from YouTube. Both largely contain videos of instructors guiding you through workouts.
So I bought a $ 8 yoga mat and some $ 70 adjustable dumbbells and turned on my TV, which includes the YouTube app. I subscribed to three of the most popular YouTube channels that have free content to practice at home: Yoga With Adriene, Fitness Blender and Holly Dolke.
One immediate drawback was almost too much content – often hundreds of videos per YouTuber – making it difficult to choose a workout. Even when I finally chose a video, I learned that I needed to focus on a few quality issues.
In the Yoga With Adriene channel, for example, I chose the video “Yoga for When You Feel Dead Inside,” which was appropriate for the time in which we live. The video looked good, but sometimes the voice of the instructor sounded muted.
Production problems were more visible in the Holly Dagger channel, with a collection of intense workouts you can do without any equipment. When I tried the video “Muffin Top Melter”, one instructor in the background showed me how to do a more challenging version of each exercise, but the other instructor in the foreground constantly blocked her.
Then there were the ads. While lifting weights while following a ten-minute Fitness Blender workout on fat burning, YouTube interrupts the video to play an ad for Dawn Soap. It held me a dumbbell above the back of my neck while I waited for the ad to end.
Aside from these issues, I was able to do all the exercises demonstrated by these YouTubers, and it left me windy and sweaty. For the cost of free I can not complain much. Most importantly, Yoga With Adriene managed to make me feel less dead inside.
What do you get when you pay
To compare the free YouTube workout videos with the paid experience, I subscribed to Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus on my Apple TV decoder. I have been doing workouts with both products for the past two months.
Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus addressed many of the issues that plague free exercise content.
First, workouts are organized into categories according to the type of workout, including yoga, strength training and core, and then according to the difficulty or duration of the workout. It took little time to choose a workout.
In both Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus, the quality of video and audio was very clear, and the workouts were shot at different angles to take a good look at what the instructors were doing. The bonus of Fitness Plus was that my heart rate and calories burned were displayed on my Apple Watch and on the TV screen.
In short, the payment of these subscriptions provided ease and polish, which resulted in a more enjoyable workout. I came to the conclusion that Peloton’s videos were worth $ 13 a month. And $ 10 a month is reasonable for Apple Fitness Plus, but only if you already have an Apple Watch and iPhone.
Make a DIY Peloton
So, what about exercise equipment like bicycles? If you want the technological frills of a Peloton, but do not want to spend on the equipment, there were two main approaches.
To follow the cheapest route, you can use a bike you already have. This is where household thinkers can be especially smart and resourceful.
Take Omar Sultan, a manager at networking company Cisco. He adapted his road bike with a few additions: a bike trainer that fastened the rear wheel and bike frame and cost about $ 100; a $ 40 Wahoo cadence sensor that tracks its pedal output and speed and transfers the data to a smartphone; and a heart rate monitor strapped around his chest, like the $ 90 Polar H10. After that, he used a streaming device to follow Peloton classes on his TV.
“The DIY setup is 80 percent of the way there” after a peloton, said Mr. Sultan said.
The more expensive option was to buy an indoor exercise bike and use a tablet or phone to stream bike classes via YouTube or the Peloton app, like me. Whitney. For example, the $ 700 IC7.9 includes a cadence sensor and a holder for your tablet. You can then buy a heart rate monitor and a pair of $ 100 indoor cycling shoes that fit into the pedals.
But if you use your own bike or a custom touring bike and try the Peloton app, you can not participate in the so-called leaderboard of the app, which shows your progress compared to other online users of Peloton.
With a self-driving motorcycle, it can also be difficult to figure out how to shift gears to simulate when the instructor tells you to resist, such as when you pretend to be riding a hill.
Nicole Odya, a nurse in Chicago who customized a high-end indoor bike, the Emperor M3i, said there are big respects to the DIY route. Using her own iPad, she has the flexibility to choose which fitness apps she wants to use, such as Zwift and mPaceLine. It also gave her the freedom to adjust her bike, which is why she swapped the pedals for better.
“I did not want to be locked into their platform,” she said of Peloton.