Lisa Whitney, a nutritionist from Reno, Nevada, got to know the business of her life about two years ago. A fitness center was closing its doors and selling its equipment. She won an indoor exercise bike for $ 100.
Mrs. Whitney soon made some additions to the bicycle. She rested her iPad on the handlebars. Then she experimented with online cycling classes streamed on YouTube and on the Peloton app, a manufacturer of Internet-connected exercise devices that offers interactive fitness classes.
Whitney did not want to upgrade to one of Peloton’s luxury exercise bikes for more than $ 1,900, which includes a tablet for transmitting lessons and sensors that monitor your speed and heart rate. Then she further modified her bike to become a do-it-yourself Peloton, buying sensors and indoor cycling shoes.
The grand total: about $ 300, plus a $ 13 monthly subscription to the Peloton app. It is not cheap, but a significant discount compared to what she could have paid.
“I’m happy with my setup,” said Whitney, 42. “I really don’t think the update would do much.”
The pandemic, which forced many gyms to close, has led hordes of people to splurge on luxury items like bikes and Peloton mats so they can exercise at home. Capitalizing on this trend, Apple launched Apple Fitness Plus last year, a fitness app that is offered exclusively to people who own an Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone to function.
But all of this can be expensive. The minimum prices for an Apple Watch and iPhone reach $ 600, and the Apple Fitness Plus costs $ 10 a month. So, to stream lessons on a big-screen TV instead of on a phone while you exercise, you need a streaming device, like an Apple TV, that costs about $ 150. The complete Peloton experience is even more expensive.
With the economy in crisis, many of us are trying to reduce our spending while maintaining good health. So, I experimented with how to minimize the costs of doing video-based workouts at home, talked to tinkers and evaluated the pros and cons.
Here’s what I learned.
The pros and cons of Free
To start my experience of working out at home cheaply, the first question I answered was whether I should sign up for a fitness app or watch YouTube classes for free. Both provide videos of instructors guiding you through training.
So I bought a $ 8 yoga mat and a pair of $ 70 adjustable dumbbells and turned on my TV, which includes the YouTube app. So, I subscribed to three of the most popular YouTube channels that have free content to exercise at home: Yoga With Adriene, Fitness Blender and Holly Dolke.
An immediate disadvantage was the excess of content – usually hundreds of videos per YouTuber – making it difficult to choose a workout. Even when I finally chose a video, I found that I needed to prepare myself for some quality issues.
On the Yoga With Adriene channel, for example, I selected the video “Yoga for when you feel dead inside”, which seemed appropriate for the time in which we live. The video sounded good, but sometimes the instructor’s voice was muffled.
The production problems were most visible on the Holly Dolke channel, which has a collection of intense workouts that you can do without any equipment. When I tried the video “Muffin Top Melter”, one instructor in the background demonstrated how to do a more challenging version of each exercise, but the other instructor, in the foreground, constantly blocked it.
Then there were the announcements. While I was lifting weights while following a 10-minute fat-burning workout on the Fitness Blender, YouTube stopped the video to show an ad for Dawn soap. This left me holding a dumbbell over the back of my neck while I waited for the ad to end.
Leaving these issues aside, I was able to do all the exercises demonstrated by these YouTubers and they left me breathless and sweating. For the cost of grace, I can’t complain much. More importantly, Yoga With Adriene managed to make me feel less dead inside.
What you get when you pay
To compare YouTube’s free exercise videos with the paid experience, I signed up for Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus on my Apple TV set-top box. I did training with both products in the last two months.
Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus solved many of the problems that affected free exercise content.
On the one hand, workouts were organized into categories by the type of workout, including yoga, strength training and core, and then by 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 the video and audio was very clear, and the exercises were filmed from various angles to get 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 the Apple Watch and on the TV screen.
In short, paying for these subscriptions provided convenience and refinement, which made training more enjoyable. I concluded that Peloton’s videos were worth paying $ 13 a month. And $ 10 a month is reasonable for Apple Fitness Plus, but only if you already have an Apple Watch and an iPhone.
Making a DIY Squad
What about fitness equipment like spin bikes? If you want the technology trappings of a Peloton, but don’t want to spend on equipment, there are two main approaches.
To make the trip cheaper, you can use a bicycle you already own. This is where home repairers can be especially crafty and resourceful.
See Omar Sultan, manager of the Cisco network company. He modified his road bike with some accessories: a bicycle trainer, which protected the rear wheel and frame of the bicycle and costs about $ 100; a $ 40 Wahoo cadence sensor that tracked your output and pedaling speed and transmitted the data to a smartphone; and a heart rate monitor strapped to his chest, like the $ 90 Polar H10. Then he used a streaming device to follow Peloton’s classes on his TV.
“The DIY setup is 80 percent of the way there” for a Peloton, said Sultan.
The most expensive option was to buy an indoor exercise bike and use a tablet or phone to broadcast cycling lessons on YouTube or the Peloton app, as Whitney did. The $ 700 IC7.9, for example, includes a cadence sensor and a support for your tablet. You could then buy a heart rate monitor and a $ 100 pair of indoor cycling shoes that fit the pedals.
But if you use your own bike or a modified spin bike and try the Peloton app, you will not be able to participate in the so-called leaderboard of the app, which shows a graph of your progress compared to other Peloton users online.
With a DIY bike, it can also be difficult to figure out how to shift gears to simulate when the instructor is telling you to increase endurance – like when you’re pretending to be going up a hill.
Nicole Odya, a Chicago nurse who modified a high-tech indoor bike, the Keizer M3i, said there were big advantages to the do-it-yourself route. Using her own iPad, she has the flexibility to choose the fitness apps she wants to use, like Zwift and mPaceLine. It also gave her the freedom to personalize her bike, so she traded the original pedals for better ones.
“I didn’t want to be stuck on their platform,” she said of Peloton.