The Peloton Guide is far cheaper than some other products in its category (for those with the “all-access” Peloton plan, at least) but it often feels like it’s still version 1.0.
A few months ago I purchased the Peloton Guide. I had been taking some weight training classes, and was intrigued by some of the things the instructors said in the class, namely that if I had the Peloton guide, it would track reps and keep track of how much weight I was actually lifting. I checked on pricing, and found that it was a one-time cost (about $200, if I recall), with no additional monthly cost as I already had the “all-access” plan. (Important note: if you don’t have the “all-access” plan, there is a monthly cost to owning a Peloton Guide, and that changes the value proposition immensely. I like having the guide and use it several times a week, but would not be keeping it if it had its own subscription.)
The guide comes in one box and consists of two devices, the camera and a remote. The camera plugs directly into your TV via HDMI and doesn’t require a smart TV or any particular apps or intermediary devices. Calibration is quick — just repeat a few key phrases and you’re good to go.
You get a remote, but it seems that just about every command can be performed using voice as well. In practice, I only use the voice commands for in-class actions, such as changing the weight I’m using for an exercise (I do not have the Peloton Rack, which apparently automates this as well). I should mention that a second user in my home had a lot of trouble getting the guide to respond to her voice, but this seemed to clear up after she re-ran the voice control set up.
There are videos online from Peloton on how the Guide works, so I’m not going to go into all of the features. Rather, I’ll just give you the highlights and lowlights of the user experience. Spoiler alert: I’m still using it, so all-in-all I have to give it a positive rating, but my wish list is also pretty long.
What the Guide does well:
The one thing the Guide does best is act as a commitment mechanism. It’ll keep track of your workouts, and will set a schedule for you based on your preferences (for example, the number of days in the week you want to train). For some people, I think, this might be just the thing to get them into a routine.
The Guide will also set a schedule, so you can tell it that you want to work out, say, four days a week, and it will set up a new four-workout set each week. I appreciate having that done for me, though I do not know how personalized the recommendations are. It’d be great if it could make some sort of analysis, based on my past performance, to tailor the workouts, but I don’t think it’s likely doing anything nearly as sophisticated. I imagine that most everyone who selects the same number of workouts is recommended the same mix, but I don’t know that for sure.
What the Guide doesn’t do well:
The Guide certainly has some room for improvement in some areas, and the thing I would put at the top of the list is rep counting. There are a lot of instances in which the Guide counts extra reps. To give one example, say you are doing a dumbbell press (pushing a dumbbell from your shoulder to over your head). You do a set of them and they’re counted — all good. Now, you are done, so you lower the weight to your waist or to the floor and the counter counts that as a rep. This is a problem, as far as I’m concerned. I want to be able to return to this workout in, say, a month, to see if I’ve improved, and the difference between being able to do ten reps of an exercise and being able to do eleven is not insignificant. Some exercises are even worse — pushups sometimes are counted wildly, maybe because the motion isn’t all that dramatic and the camera has to see your whole body, but pushup counts (and floor exercises in general) tend to be very inaccurate.
Given that the Guide seems to have a lot of trouble with rep counting, it doesn’t even attempt to try in a lot of cases. Combination moves (say, a snatch to a press) generally aren’t tracked. Often you just see “timed activity” in the display when the motion is just too complicated to track, and that happens pretty often.
The other way in which I think the Guide is a bit of a disappointment is that it doesn’t do anything to correct your form. It does let you see yourself on the TV in a window so you can see your own form and compare it to the instructor, but you can only do that when you’re facing the camera. For many exercises, you’re asked to turn to the side (90 degrees to the camera), so facing to the side and then looking back to the screen is awkward. Additionally, it’s not so easy to look at the screen when you’re on the floor doing floor exercises.
Other limitations:
The biggest limitation, it seems, to the Guide is that everything is either a floor exercise or a dumbbell exercise, so it’s not possible to get an equally good workout for each muscle group. Specifically, exercise in which you’re asked to pull down are next to impossible. Back exercises generally have you leaning forward from the hips, and you could reach the limit of what your lower back can stand before you reach the limit of your upper back muscles to work out. Lower body work tends to be various forms of squats, either one-legged or two-legged. You can get a good workout, to be sure, but ultimately it seems like a workout might contain two or three exercises that work the exact same muscles.
After workouts, you can see some neat graphics that show what muscle groups you have been working out. I think this is really based on the content of the exercise program rather than any feedback from your actual workout. It will tell you how many reps you did and how many targets you hit, but I have yet to figure out how to benefit from that information. On a workout by workout basis you can compare your current effort to a prior effort, but to do so you need to take the exact same workout as before. It would be more useful if the system were to break down by exercise and report on trends on that basis rather than doing comparisons by workout.
Final word:
The Guide works for me because I only had to pay the up-front price for the device and I already have the dumbbells needed. The workout scheduler does create a compelling commitment mechanism. I am hoping that the software will improve over time, that rep counting will become more reliable, that the algorithms used to analyze my progress and select workouts will improve (not sure it’s do any of that today) and that the Guide will gain the ability to help me perfect my form. Will that happen? Hard to say. I do not have any visibility into how much of a priority the Guide is for Peloton. The company’s post-pandemic troubles have been widely publicized, and I’m sure they are being extremely circumspect about where they are spending their energies in terms of building out new capabilities in their products. It would not surprise me if the Guide doesn’t grow beyond what it is today, but if it doesn’t, there is a lot of room for a competitor to seize the in-home weight-training market.