A key feature of the Apple Watch is its Apple Health app, which tracks more than just your time on a bike. Peloton locking a portion of your data away from you is going to make it a lot more tempting to switch when you find a bike that integrates with all your other data.
I think there are two (or more) segments of Peloton riders. The data geeks who want to track all of their workouts and metrics, and the casual rider who just wants a convenient way to get some solid exercise without leaving the house. I fall into the casual segment - I ride my Peloton 1-2 times per day, and I don't care about any of my stats, but I love the workout and I love the Peloton instructors. Unless another platform somehow convinces my favorite instructors to leave Peloton then I'm sticking around.
*edit: I also own an Apple watch, but I only use it for tracking # of minutes while running outside. And for telling the time.
Across all of their active subscribers, the average is 21 workouts per month [0]. So that user is technically above-average, but I'm curious what the actual distribution looks like, if it's like a bell curve or more "camel shaped" with a mixture of infrequent users and very frequent users at opposite ends.
I don't own one, but from people I know that do own one, the brand seems very good at turning their customers into that sort of ideal fanatical user. [1]
[1] I don't mean fanatical as an insult to the users :P More power to you if it makes you work out. But for a company a 'multiple times per day' user who is probably also telling friends about the product is the dream.
It’s worth noting that many riders add 5-minute warm-up, cool-down and stretching sessions to their main rides. Peloton counts all of these as separate rides and frequently recommends them. Frustratingly, they also count toward the user ride milestones that take up so much instructor focus during rides (100 rides, 500 rides etc.).
It all seems intentionally designed to juice their engagement data.
This. As a peloton user, I actually wish there was a way to set the system to "ignore" those rides for the purposes of ride count, stats, Strava upload, etc. The warm ups/cool downs are important things to do but it makes for a ton of digital clutter. If I ride 5 days a week that is 15 "activities" minimum.
That being said, most of the more casual users are probably not doing this. I know that most of the people I know/follow on there are doing one or two activities per day of use, and it seems they are a mix of discipline, so like a 20 min ride and then a stretching class or weights.
Same here. I do a lot of bike riding, hiking, canoeing and open water swimming. All this stuff keeps me in very good shape. I look fine I feel even better so do not care bout them metrics.
The Apple Watch health stuff kind of sucks (the health app itself that can take in/track other data is okay). It sounds like Apple is just blocking Peloton from their fitness competitor bootcamp stuff, but Peloton can still integrate data in Health.
I have a Peloton and Apple Watch, I've historically had a FitBit.
The FitBit would recognize when you were on a run and auto record everything - the Apple Watch can't do this, about 20% of the time it'll ask if you're on a run and makes you confirm that you are (which is easy to miss).
The Fitness app has a bug that suggests nobody even looks at it. If your speed is increasing (you're running faster) and so your mileage time is going down (takes you fewer minutes to run a mile) and that's trending down as a result the App says "oh no you're trending downward" - but obviously in that case getting faster and getting your mileage time down is a good thing.
The Peloton stuff is solid and you can still share it to the health app - real time tracking via the watch doesn't matter that much. Anyone who does actual cycling will have a garmin computer or something anyway.
The Apple Watch fitness stuff is maybe okay for people that don't exercise and just want some walking tracking motivation - it's pretty bad for everything else.
You can (and many Peleton members do) just start a workout on the Apple Watch's Workout app whenever you take a class. It is more or less tracking the same thing, except your workout will show as "Indoor Cycle" or whatever instead of "Alex's 20 minute Hip Hop Ride".
The one thing you lose is heart rate tracking on the Peloton. With GymKit, your Apple Watch tracks your heart rate as you work out and displays it on the screen, along with which heart rate zone you are in (1-5). It shows what percentage of your max heart rate you are using at any one time and gives you a heart rate graph readout when you are done.
You could just use a third party heart rate tracker to accomplish this, but that's one more thing to put on.
You could also use an app like BlueHeart to do it. It fakes a BLE HR tracker on your phone while pulling the data form your watch, so that you still get your HR data on the big screen.
They sell different packages and some come with a chest strap. I got just the bike and shoes. I already use an Apple Watch to track my heart rate for everything else, and it's been rated as accurate.
But if you got a chest strap with it, that would 100% do the same thing.
I like having one device that tracks my heart rate through all of the activities I do (including sleeping).
You can also "just" follow a youtube spinning class on a turbo trainer. The point of smart fitness devices is so that I don't have to put my diet, workout and schedule into 3 different tools and merge them myself.
So the issue then is with Apple Health integration, not with the Apple Watch specifically. Apple Health also runs on other iOS devices and has a back end API.
There are some neat things you can do with the Watch specifically - there's NFC stuff you can do to automatically start a specific workout type when the user taps their watch on a piece of equipment, for instance.
The Apple Watch is a pretty good heart rate monitor, and it brings your Peloton data into the Fitness and Health apps. If you wear and Apple Watch while cycling, your heart rate shows up on the Peloton, and it breaks it down by heart rate zones.
I use an Apple Watch with my Bike+. I only do cycling workouts, so I never noticed this limitation, but it does seem odd.
It's possible that Apple didn't feel some of the data tracking for other activities was particularly accurate. Apple spends millions to test people doing different workouts and to measure the caloric spend, and maybe Apple only thought the data was accurate for cycling. Bootcamp classes in particular are a really nebulous concept.
Apple has workout modes for all different kinds of exercise built into the Apple Watch based on data they have gathered from large samples of test subjects. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt the cycling data was accurate, and the other stuff that Peloton was doing a lot less so (and a lot less accurate than popping into a workout mode directly on your Watch).
I would say it's the singular most important aspect for a large number of riders. My wife is absolutely obsessed with hitting her numbers everyday. This is all done through the apple watch and Peloton.
