What pedals should I replace my Peloton pedals with?
I have been asked that question numerous times since I wrote my blog post on broken Peloton pedals and the need to replace them periodically (about every 12 months, according to Peloton). You’re a busy person, so I’ll give you the short answer first…
Answer: just about any “delta” or “look”-style pedal will do.
Why these particular pedals? The answer has to do with the Peloton shoes and not the bike. As you can see from the photo, the Peloton shoe has three screw holes for the cleat, arranged in a triangle pattern (a.k.a. a “delta”, which is what gives the delta-style clip its name). So, you need to find a pedal that uses a compatible cleat. You’ll get a pair of cleats in the box with your new pedals, so if you’re the only Pelotoner in the family you are all set. If not, you may need to buy cleats for the other riders, as there can be variations between the different delta-style manufacturers that could necessitate new cleats. Fortunately, cleats aren’t all that expensive if you need to buy them.
On my road bike, I have SPD pedals, which make it easier to clip-in and clip-out and therefore more to my liking for actual road use. Neither of these things is particularly important for Peloton use, at least in my experience. Needless to say, if you’re not using your Peloton shoes, SPD might be an option for you. (If your shoes are SPD ready they’ll have two screw holes side-by-side, close to one another near the centerline of the shoe.)
There aren’t too many variables when buying pedals and cleats, but one you should be aware of is “float“. Float has to do with how much lateral motion is allowed when clipped in, meaning how much your heel can swing in or out before you actually unclip. Float can range from zero to a few degrees of angle. I don’t have any reference information to back me up, but I believe the stock Peloton cleats have zero float — you’re pretty locked-in on those. Whether you want to go with something a bit more permissive is really up to you.
My best advice is to ask at your local bike shop. You could even bring your shoes. Any pedals they sell you will work because the threaded holes on the crank arm is standard, so the fact that you are shopping for pedals for a Peloton bike and not a road bike doesn’t really make a difference.
For your indoor-riding money, which is better: Peloton or Zwift? I have both, and although Peloton riders and Zwift riders each have more or less the same goal of getting a good cycling workout, they almost could not be more different. After about 1,000 Peloton rides (just about every day for a couple of years), I switched entirely over to Zwift a few months ago, but am now splitting my time between the two. I’ll explain why…
The author, riding the Peloton bike with a broken arm and multiple broken ribs. The Peloton bike is heavy and stable, more so than my Zwift setup, and it’s pretty hard to crash when you’re riding indoors!
The Peloton Experience
For this comparison, I am going to by relying on my own history with both the Peloton bike and the Zwift experience, and talk about the pros and cons of each. You’ll see that sometimes the comparisons are apples-to-oranges (after all, one is hardware with streaming content and the other is an app to which you bring your own interface) but I think it is possible to make some valid comparison since at the end of the day it’s all variations on indoor cycling / spinning.
My Introduction to the Peloton Bike
I bought my Peloton bike a couple of years ago after hearing my brother go on and on about how the Peloton had improved his fitness. It was hard to miss that he’d lost 70 pounds in the year he’d owned it, and that summer when members of our extended family climbed Mt. Mansfield he certainly did seem to be up to the task (we rewarded him by making him carry the backpack). Even so, my friends who know me as a cheerleader for the bike that goes nowhere might be surprised to learn that I left my first visit to the showroom unimpressed.
In August of 2017, my wife and I went to our local Peloton showroom (yeah, we live in a place like that) where we got to sample the bike. The salesperson showed me that you watch the class on the screen and turn the resistance knob when the instructor tells you.
“If the bike knows the resistance should go up, why do I have to turn the knob?” I asked. This was a dumb bike. Nicely made, and super smooth action (thanks to a drive belt instead of a chain), but just plain dumb.
Eager to please, she showed me a feature called “just ride” that featured beautiful movies of rides on trails and roads that I could just follow, bringing my own soundtrack if I wanted to. “So, if the road goes uphill in the movie, does the ride get harder?” I asked. “No,” she replied. The fact is, the experience on the bike has nothing to do with what you see on the screen. Again, dumb.
My wife and I left without buying a bike. I am not sure exactly how she felt about it at the time, but I was disappointed. I wanted a bike I could ride in the winter, and this didn’t seem to be it. I had never taken a spin class and wasn’t all that enthusiastic to, either. And, for all the hype, the Peloton experience is just a spin class beamed to you over the Internet. I mean, let’s keep some perspective.
The Peloton is not a biking simulator
Over the next few days, I actually found myself starting to reconsider my first impression. I had been disappointed in the Peloton bike because wasn’t the indoor bike simulator I wanted, but then again, it wasn’t trying to be. I realized on reflection that a big factor in my disappointment was my expectations and not anything to do with the bike itself. The following weekend, my wife and I went back to take a sample class on the bike.
This time, I started to think of the Peloton as a training tool, a piece of equipment that could make me a better cyclist not though a true simulation, but by focusing on very specific elements of the experience, namely building up my cardiovascular endurance and my leg muscles. The Peloton bike is a direct-drive setup (like a fixie) and there is no coasting on the Peloton — something that took some getting used to… I felt like George Jetson on the treadmill sometimes! With no coasting, there really isn’t any “downhill” on the Peloton, either. You can lighten up the resistance to next to nothing, but you are still spinning even when your are in so-called “active recovery,” which is the closest thing to rest that you’re ever going to get as long as class is in session.
This is what happens when you coast on your Peloton bike.
Given how happy I am with my Peloton bike today it’s funny to think that purchasing it was such a close call. Even after the second visit, I was still on the fence. After all, start-up cost for the bike was north of $2,500, and I’d pretty much agonize over that sort of spend if I didn’t end up using it. My wife seemed interested, though, and in the end each of us rationalized the purchase by telling ourselves that we were doing it for the other.
Does the Peloton really work?
Yes. Yes it does. You have to actually ride it, though. Get yourself on a schedule where you’re doing, say, three or four 45 minute rides a week and I can’t imagine how you won’t see a difference. And cycling is one of the lowest-impact exercises there is, so if you’ve got the motivation you can do it every day.
On the topic of the Peloton’s effectiveness, I’d say that for building cardiovascular fitness it’s probably even better than actual cycling out on the road. On the Peloton, there really is no downhill-as I mentioned before there is no coasting. You also don’t ever need to stop for traffic lights or stop signs or anything like that. It is one continuous workout. In fact, the only way I’d say the Peloton bike was easier than the road bike is that on the Peloton you choose your own resistance and can increase or decrease it at any time, whereas on the road bike the hills are what they are, and although you get to select your gearing you still have to get up the hills on your route.
So, if you love your Peloton, why did you pony up for a Zwift setup?
After about two years riding (generally daily) on the Peloton, I was starting to wonder if there might be more in life. We had a couple of great years, and at the end of it I was in excellent shape, maybe twenty pounds lighter, and able to keep up with riders half my age (and drop them on the hills — priceless!). The Peloton is a low-impact exercise and it’s something you can do every day, and I really couldn’t ask for more. Still, I had started seeing the Zwift demo bikes set up in the bike shop and was being bombarded constantly on YouTube by Zwift ads, and I started to think, “it really would be fun to actually do a bike riding / racing simulator.”
I didn’t take the plunge right away. After all, although I owned a road bike I didn’t have the other equipment needed to get started. For the uninitiated, it’s important to know that Zwift is an internet service / app(s), and not a hardware/software/service combination the way Peloton is. The hardware component of Zwift is BYO, and the cost can be significant, particularly if you don’t have a bike. (On the other hand, if you do have a bike some Zwift setups can be relatively inexpensive.)
Since I didn’t already have an indoor trainer, I used Zwift’s website for guidance and settled on a Wahoo Kickr / Wahoo Climb combo. I already had an Apple TV and (as I mentioned) a bike, so I wouldn’t have to purchase anything else, but the Wahoo gear ran north of $1500 all by itself. Zwift is a subscription service with a monthly fee, too, so if depending on what equipment you have already the Zwift experience cost can rival that of the Peloton (though over time the much higher Peloton subscription cost will make a big difference). Setting up Zwift wasn’t too difficult, but unfortunately that is only half the battle in this case, because the trainer itself needs to be set up. Getting my bike connected to the Wahoo (I bought the wheel-off model) and dialed in took a fair amount of time, so advantage Peloton in the “getting started” matchup.
Closer, but still not a perfect simulator
Heading to the top of Mt. Zwift on a climb known as the “Epic KOM”. A mountain goat greets you at the finish line.
Although I enjoy the Zwift very much, it is sadly not a perfect bicycling simulator, either. Now, I’m aware that most of the shortcomings I’m about to detail have to do with the (Wahoo) hardware and not the Zwift program, exactly. But you can’t Zwift without hardware, and I’m using what seems to be their preferred setup, so at the end of the day I don’t think it’s really off the mark to call these things issues with Zwift.
The first shortcoming that becomes obvious is that there is no braking in Zwift. I think there’s a keyboard key for slowing down, but practically speaking there’s no braking. That’s not nearly as big a problem in the virtual world as it would be in the real one, because Zwift has no collision detection so there is no chance of colliding with your fellow riders or obstacles, and there is no chance of you not being able to make a corner due to excessive speed. Still, drafting is a thing in Zwift (and some opine that it’s an even greater force there than IRL) and it can be tricky to tuck in behind another rider when you can’t actually tap the brakes. Complicating things is the subtle latency between the trainer and the app, and positioning yourself for drafting becomes an art form.
Along the same lines there is no steering in Zwift. You can make route-level decisions such as turning left to go to the volcano or turning right to climb a mountain, but that’s as far as that goes. As I mentioned, there are no collisions in Zwift, so you don’t have to worry about steering all that much (in fact, sitting in the middle of a pack of fifty riders is no big deal in Zwift!) but as Zwift is trying to expand into dirt and gravel simulations, the lack of steering is a barrier to having any sort of technical riding. For road riding, I don’t find it a big deal.
Another shortcoming, and the one I still notice on a daily basis, is that the feel of the bike isn’t the same, particularly when pedaling hard. Because my bike is locked into the trainer, it has none of the natural rocking from side to side that is part of pedaling. This isn’t so noticeable at pace speed, but when sprinting or climbing it feels very restrictive.
Speaking of climbing, that, too, is somewhat unnatural. While I appreciate the Climb’s ability to raise the front fork of my bike to change the geometry for climbing, if I get out of the saddle to make it up a particularly steep grade the whole assembly gets to be a bit unbalanced, and sometimes the rear end lifts a little. It’s not terrible, but it’s not “normal”, either, and inhibits all-out efforts at climbing.
As I said before, these things could easily be called shortcomings of the trainer rather than of Zwift, but since they’re part of the Zwift experience I think it’s fair to include them. Wahoo has recently released their own Wahoo bike (which, at over $3000, is more expensive than my road bike!) and Saris (among other companies) have introduced wooden “bike surfboards” to allow for more natural motion, so it’s clear that the issues are known and people are hard at work trying to find solutions. Indeed, it seems to be a badly kept secret that Zwift is working on it’s own trainers, if for no other reason than to standardize a feature set. As of this writing, though, there is still work to do.
So, with those gripes out the way I have to say that I do love riding on Zwift. It doesn’t take the place of riding outdoors, but it’s a fun diversion. Zwift races are fun, and Zwift group rides (which everyone just understands are races, too) are great. I even did a “meetup” with about a half-dozen of friends from the cycling club and we ran one of the courses together (using discord to chat). It’s a great way to spend a couple of hours, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the platform grow over time.
Even though I’m really enjoying Zwifting, that doesn’t mean I’ve turned my back on the Peloton. In fact, in recent weeks I’ve been spending even more time on the Peloton than on the Zwift. I’ll explain below…
Why Zwift is better than Peloton
Zwift is more fun. I think I can say that without reservation. On Zwift you climb mountains (including a faithful reproduction of the Alpe D’Huez, which is close to an hour and half of unremitting uphill), ride underwater (through a see-thru tunnel, though I suppose in the game even that isn’t needed), past dinosaurs and volcanos. There is visual interest in the landscape, and it doesn’t get boring any more than your local outdoor rides do.
The summit of the Alpe du Zwift. There is nothing on the Peloton as satisfying as reaching the top of a Zwift mountain.
I also think that I work a bit harder in Zwift. On the Peloton, I may be asked to pedal for thirty more seconds at a high resistance, but on the Zwift I know I’m pedaling hard because I’m near the top of a hill — I can even see the mountain goats hanging out at the summit. On the Peloton, I may be chasing the person above me on the leaderboard, but it’s really just by following a number (the number of kilojoules they’ve output as compared with me) which is dry to say the least. In fact, Peloton very deliberately de-emphasizes competition while in Zwift even the group rides are races. And when you’re chasing someone in Zwift you literally see them up the road, and you can viscerally feel the gap closing or widening. Dropping a friend in Zwift is every bit as satisfying as dropping them in the real world.
So, if Zwift is more fun and I get a better workout, why ever go back to the Peloton? Well, Peloton does have its own strengths.
Why Peloton is better than Zwift
I find the consistency of the Peloton workouts to be an advantage. Although there are different types of rides (tabata, hills, intervals, etc), one forty-five minute class seems to me to be much like another, so I can compare outputs and distances across rides much more evenly. By contrast, on the Zwift, I might be trying to compare a thirty-minute climb of Mt. Zwift this week to an hour on the desert flats last week and really have no idea how they match up. On the Peloton bike, I find that the consistency of the challenge makes it easier for me to gauge my efforts and to track my progress.
I also find the Peloton experience a bit more civilized than the Zwift experience. Of course, my choice of bike and Wahoo trainer is not Zwift’s doing, but since I’m using the preferred setup I think a comparison can be made. The Peloton bike is heavy and sturdy, easily adjustable for things like seat height and handlebar height, and nearly silent in operation due to its belt-driven mechanism. By contrast, my Zwift setup seems exceedingly cramped and noisy. It’s my own bike that I selected and set up, so you’d think that’d be perfect for me, but because it is clamped into the Wahoo trainer it feels unnaturally rigid. The chain and derailleurs are considerably more noisy than the Peloton’s belt, and that noise is amplified by the indoor setting — I never thought of the bike as noisy when it was outdoors.
Another big advantage that the Peloton has over the Zwift is that there is less involved at the start of each workout. Even if I have to adjust the bike after my wife’s used it (sharing a bike is not really even an option in the Zwift world unless both riders are exactly the same size) I can jump on the bike and be ready to start a workout within a minute or so. With Zwift I need to turn on the TV, turn on the Apple TV, choose the Zwift app, launch the Zwift companion on my phone (because of the limited Bluetooth connections on the Apple TV), start my Kickr and Climb, pair the bike to the companion app, and choose a ride using the horrible Apple TV remote (which is a lot like dialing your phone from five feet away using a pool cue). It takes several minutes. And, because every Zwift “event” is a race, I’d better be good and warmed up well before the official start! What it all comes down to is that when I have limited time it is far easier for me to grab my chest strap and my shoes and jump on the Peloton. Sometimes, there is something to be said for freedom from choice.
So, Peloton or Zwift?
Not many people are going to want to invest in both Peloton and Zwift. After all, you are getting the same sort of exercise with each, and you obviously can’t ride both at the same time. I’m going to answer this question with an “it depends”, which feels like a bit of a cop-out, but I’ll try to explain myself.
The Pelotoner wants to work out. It’s a pure workout machine. It may not be as much fun as the Zwift, but there is an enthusiastic instructor and (hopefully) good music, and as long as you challenge yourself you can get the best bang for your buck for the time you have to spend riding.
The Zwifter is the cyclist, who is driven indoors either by weather or expediency. The workouts are quite varied, and some can be much more challenging than a typical Peloton class (and Zwift does have a “workout” mode with intervals pegged to different power zones), but it’s a little more difficult to do a Zwift workout if you have a hard stop at the other end (most Zwift rides are distance-bound, rather than time-bound).
So, if I had to choose, which one would be my pick? Because I ride outdoors during the season (and whenever I can), I think I’d pick the Peloton. It helps me maintain my fitness, and because the classes are all time-bound I can more easily fit the workout into my schedule. If, for some reason, I somehow found myself unable ride in the real world (which is what got me into all this in the first place), I’d pick the Zwift as the platform that can hold my interest better.
Final Thoughts
After I finished this blog post, I realized that there was one angle I really hadn’t discussed, and that is, which of these two platforms can best simulate the other? The answer, I think, is clearly Zwift. There is a training mode in Zwift which lays outs an exercise plan based on power zones, just like the Peloton Power Zone rides. There is an FTP test and then the zones are used for the training courses. In fact, the Zwift training courses have a cool feature where, if you are doing a multiple-workout course, after finishing one the next might not be available for a day or two, forcing you to rest (or at least encouraging it). There is also a limit to how long you can wait to do the next workout, so not only do you have to rest but you can’t rest too long and still complete the course as it’s prescribed.
By contrast, the Peloton doesn’t have anything that really simulates an actual bike ride, and because it’s up to you to set the resistance, it never will. It’s just not baked into the DNA. I am still a big Peloton fan, but the fact is it rather unapologetically does just one thing. If that one thing is the one thing you want, then there’s your answer to whether Peloton or Zwift is the right pick.
Among the metrics displayed on your Peloton screen is “speed”, presented in MPH with no explanation. I have been a daily Peloton rider for years, and I have always wondered how that speed is calculated. Recently, I though it would be nice to know how many watts I’d have to produce during a workout to cover a certain distance, and in order to do that I knew I would have to crack the speed code. Following is a rather lengthy examination of Peloton bike speed and a formula for calculating speed from output.
Speed is not simply how fast the wheel spins
My first thought when considering the Peloton concept of speed is that the speed of the bike should be calculable using the circumference of the flywheel multiplied by the RPMs, divided by time. It was pretty much immediately obvious that this was not correct. If it were, then resistance would have no bearing at all on speed; speed would be purely a function of cadence (a minute on the bike will be enough for you to see that it is not).
Speed is NOT simply the circumference of the wheel x RPMs / time.
Conceptually, it’s important to understand that your Peloton bike is not simulating a fixed gear (“fixie“) bike, with resistance a substitute for hills. Looking at it, you’d be forgiven for likening the flywheel to the drive wheel on a bicycle, but that’s not the case. You can think of the flywheel as the chainring instead (even though the bike already has a chainring, er, “beltring”). The flywheel and the chainring are locked and move at the same relative speeds, so although when you look at the bike it seems logical that the flywheel is the drive wheel, if you can get your head around the idea that it’s the chainring, the rest makes sense. The flywheel is the chainring, and the resistor magnet is the rear derailleur. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. You don’t really need to be able to conceptualize this if you will trust me that the flywheel speed is not the bike speed. So, let’s get on with it.
Speed and output are very highly correlated
Although Peloton has not shared with me the secret speed formula, my data suggests strongly that speed is a function of output alone. Basically, the harder you’re working, the faster you’re going. You can spin fast with a light resistance, or crank down on the resistance and pedal slower, but if you’re generating the same output, you’re going to be traveling at more or less the same speed.
Body weight’s role in calculating Peloton speed
It would seem that body weight, gender, resistance and cadence are not direct factors in the speed calculation. I mean, some are part of the calculation, because they factor into the output calculation, but it would seem that output is the only variable in the speed calculation.
The Data
I have put together more than a hundred data points (Peloton rides) from five riders of both genders, ages between 17 and 53. Observed wattages fell in the range of 20 – 281. The R2 value of over .99 indicates that the formula very accurately describes the relationship between output and speed for all of these rides.
The Formula
Working backward from a set of data points correlating average output with average speed, the formula for finding speed is:
V = 2.1w0.44
Where V is the speed in mph and w is the output wattage (the wattage at the moment of measurement, not the total output).
This is not a prank, this is actually what my data tells me. If you think this looks needlessly complicated, I totally agree with you. That said, the data correlates very strongly with this formula (R2 > 0.99).
Output (X-axis) vs. Speed (Y-axis)
Almostperfect
As I mentioned above, the data fits the formula very well, so it would seem like I can wish everyone happy riding and close this post. I have to confess, though, that I’m not entirely satisfied with the equation I’ve posted above. It’s just so messy! For one thing, those are some odd number to use (I’m rounding as it is), and for another, even with an R2 value as high as it is it still seems odd to me that the data points to map even more exactly to the trend line. This is an equation with only one variable… I would expect the points to be absolutely spot on, and they’re not, and I don’t really have a good explanation as to why. Perhaps the sampling frequency plays into it. I have also noticed that the Strava data for the rides varies slightly as to total output and average speed, so the whole data collection may be a little less precise than it seems like it should be.
If and when time permits, I plan to create a handy chart mapping output and speed, similar to the Watts/kJ charts that I’ve done. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or information to share on the topic of output and speed, please share. Thanks!
Following up on my post about the Peloton display numbers (and a little arithmetic regarding Output), a visitor to the site asked about METs, so I thought I’d post a follow-up….
Calculating METs is unfortunately considerably more difficult than calculating output in kilojoules. Well, it’s not that it’s so difficult, it’s that the level of precision is much less. METs are fundamentally different from metrics like power and output. Power is power, regardless of who you are. Lifting a ten pound dumbbell a foot in one second takes about 13 watts, and it doesn’t matter who you are. Find any person or machine that can output more than about 13 watts, and it can lift the dumbbell. (More about power and output in my post about the Peloton metrics.)
Metabolic Equivalents, or METs, on the other hand, is a measurement of the amount of energy exerted, a more complex topic than merely work done. Remember when you first got your Peloton bike and you PR’d almost every ride? Part of that could be explained by a quick elevation of your fitness level (you ex-couch potato, you), but a lot of it had to do with your improved efficiency. You learned the bike and, as you got more efficient you could do more work with the same amount of effort (or, you were able to do the same amount of work with less effort.)
How to Measure METs
To really measure METs the way they were intended to be measured, you’d need to know how much oxygen you are consuming during the exercise. If you don’t have access to a lab, that’s not something you can measure directly. In that case, there are other MET calculators that substitute other metrics that can be used as proxies for oxygen consumption, such as calories burned (don’t get me started on calorie calculations! If I ever have enough free time I’ll do a blog post on that.)
I personally am skeptical about the ability to use METs for something like a stationary bicycle. Since body weight is a factor in the calculation, it would seem to me that heavier athletes have an easier time of things on a stationary bike as opposed to an actual bike. I’d suggest you stick with watts and kilojoules, which are much easier to measure accurately (if your bike’s resistance is calibrated, of course, which it’s probably not… but that’s my next post’s topic).
Formula for METs
I don’t want you to go away empty-handed, though, so I will offer a MET calculator that uses something that Peloton does give you to work with: Watts. It may not be as accurate a calculation as one that actually measures oxygen consumption, but it’ll work well enough if your goal is to try to track your fitness gains over time.
The calculation for (approximate) METs, then, is:
METs = 1.163 * watts / kg
(Kg being body weight in kilograms)
For the arithmetic-challenged, I offer this handy online form:
I’m not entirely sure how useful all of this was, but hopefully if you are really into METs and a Peloton rider, it’ll give you want you were looking for. Cheers!
Update: After this blog post was created, Peloton introduced their “Strive Score“, a metric that attempts to measure individual effort (as opposed to output). Check it out.
In this post, I’ll explain what all those numbers are at the bottom of your Peloton bike’s screen. Well, partly to share my zeal for the Peloton bike, but partly to draw attention to my fundraising for homeless animals. If you like this post, please consider a donation to Main Line Animal Rescue. Thanks!
Before I begin, a little disclaimer: I am not a Peloton employee, spokesperson or programmer. I am a computer programmer (for whatever that’s worth), and a total nerd. If I had any inside information into Peloton I would also have agreed in the past not to disclose or discuss it.
THE PELOTON DATA DISPLAY
Understanding the various numbers on your Peloton bike display is key to understanding how well you’re doing. You really can’t compare your numbers to someone else for various reasons (mostly having to do with the sticky issue of Peloton bike calibration), but you absolutely can compare your numbers to your own past numbers (assuming you’re on the same bike, again because of calibration.)
Since you’re reading this post, I’ll skip over the part where I tell you why I think it’s important to understand these numbers, and instead dive right in. I’ll go through the numbers in rows, left-to-right within each row.
CADENCE (the big number on the left)
Cadence is how fast the pedals are turning. It’s not a measurement of how fast the flywheel is turning (which is irrelevant.) A cadence of 90 rpm means that you’re turning the crank in a full 360° circle 90 times in one minute. Cadence in Peloton classes will never go over 120 (their lawyers don’t want you tipping over the bike!) or below 50 or so. (As an aside, it’s extremely uncommon to exceed 120rpm riding out in the real world.)
BEST CADENCE
“Best cadence” is how fast you were turning the crank at the instant you were fastest. It is not a particularly useful metric (IMHO), so it’s shown smaller than the current cadence.
AVG CADENCE
“Average cadence” is (as the name says) your average cadence over the entire ride. This number gives you a good idea about how fast you’re pedaling (more on the speed metric below). Note that some rides, such as interval rides, will have a higher average cadence that others (such as climb rides). Cadence by itself is not really a measure of fitness, but on the real road it’s good to be able to pedal fast, and as you spend more time on the Peloton bike you’ll probably see your average cadence increase across similar rides. The Peloton screen also sometimes shows green or red triangles to show if your average cadence is rising or falling over time (not over the entire ride, but rather the past few seconds).
OUTPUT (the big number in the center)
The “Output” calculation indicates how hard you’re working at the moment. It’s computed based on your cadence and your resistance (described below) and is measured in watts. Output is a measure of power, not work. Those two things may sound like the same thing, but they’re definitely not. When we speak of power, we’re talking about how hard you’re working at any given moment. When we talk about work, we are talking about how much you’ve done, total.
Output, here, is measured in watts, and is an instantaneous measure of how hard you’re working at the moment. To see how much work you’ve done since you started the ride, you have to look lower on the display. In the world of Peloton, work is what determines where you are on the leaderboard, and is reflected in Total Output. We’ll get to that (or just click the link and be done with all this preamble).
BEST OUTPUT and AVG OUTPUT
Just as with cadence, the screen shows you the peak and average power over the ride. Peak power might give you bragging rights in your family, but it’s not very meaningful for the Peloton rider. Average output is directly related to your leaderboard, but it’s easier to use Total Output for that purpose (the relationship between the two is detailed in the Total Output section below). As with average cadence, the screen will show green or red triangles to show you how your average output is rising or falling over the short term.
This is probably the least scientific metric on the board. Resistance reflects how hard it is to turn the crank. It is measured in percent, with 100% being the maximum. Theoretically, you should not be able to pedal at 100% resistance, but due to the magic of badly calibrated bikes, some people can put up huge output numbers doing just that. As I said before, you can track your progress over time, but you need to be on the same bike to do it (and the reason being the wildly varying resistance of each bike).
From a practical perspective, it’s pretty simple. A larger resistance for a given cadence requires more power, and that is reflected in the output numbers.
BEST RESISTANCE and AVG RESISTANCE
Similar to best and average cadence and output. Not much more to be said about this. Fun fact: if you push down on the big orange knob to stop your bike, you’ll also see your “best resistance” turn to 100.
SPEED
This number reflects an approximate speed over land if you were riding a road bike. You will see that it’s not merely a reflection of your cadence, but rather a combination of cadence and resistance. Just as you could put your road bike into a high (easy) gear and pedal your butt off without going too fast, or switch to a low (difficult) gear and go much faster while pedaling slowly, the speed metric here takes resistance into account. It’s approximate. (Anecdotally, many road riders (including yours truly) report that the Peloton’s reported speed –and, by extension, distance, are a little higher than expected.)
Although I have not nailed down the exact formula to my satisfaction yet, I’ve spent more than a little time contemplating and investigating how the peloton bike calculates speed.
DISTANCE
Shown in miles, and is a computed field reflecting speed x time. Straightforward, but only as accurate as your speed measurement.
TOTAL OUTPUT
Finally! This is the number that determines your leaderboard status. If there is a metric to track over time, it’s this one. Total output is the Peloton measurement of how much work you have done on your ride. For many people, this is the only number that matters.
HOW PELOTON CALCULATES OUTPUT
Where the big “Output” number in the middle of the screen shows your power at a moment in time, “Total Output” shows work. Work is power x time. Let’s dig into this (warning: light arithmetic ahead!) …
Your Total Output is shown in kilojoules. A kilojoule (“kj”) is 1000 joules. A joule is one watt in one second. So if you pedal consistently and have an average output of 100 watts, you will do 100 joules in one second.
100 watts x 1 second = 100 joules
A little simple arithmetic shows that you’ll do 1kj of work in ten seconds pedaling with 100 watts of power:
100 watts x 10 seconds = 1000 joules = 1 kilojoule (also written 1kj)
Double your power to 200 watts, and you’ll get that 1kj in only five seconds:
200 watts x 5 seconds = 1000 joules = 1 kj
So, you see, the work you do (the kj) is directly related to both how hard you’re working (your wattage, computed by your cadence and resistance) and how long you are working. You can increase your total output by working harder, working longer, or both. The Total Output number is shown both here and also on the leaderboard, and this is what determines your leaderboard position. (Note that the leaderboard value may lag just a bit from the number on the bottom of the screen, but that’s just because the leaderboard is refreshed less often).
CALORIES
Of course you want to know how many calories you’re burning! Well, good luck figuring out how this one is calculated. There is a special sauce here known only to the Peloton programmers, but they have told us that it includes (and I quote them): your age, height, weight, gender, and heart rate (if you use a heart rate monitor).
If you were a Pelotoner before October 2017, you’ll remember the good old days when you could burn massive numbers of calories on the bike. Early adopters soon realized that the Peloton calorie counter didn’t agree with people’s fit bits, Apple watches, etc., and Peloton felt compelled to change their secret formula to bring their numbers more in line. How accurate is it? I have no idea.
One important thing to know about calories is that your body weight is one of the factors in the calculation, so if you lose more than a couple of pounds while using the bike, you have to periodically go into your profile and update your weight there.
So, that’s it! Everything you wanted to know about all those numbers on the bottom of your Peloton screen.
Thanks, keep Pelotoning, and throw me a high-five if you see me out there!
Broken Peloton Pedals: freak accidents, or the start of “Pedalgate?”
UPDATE (May, 2023): Several years on, Peloton is now doing more to alert customers to the need to periodically replace the pedals, with reminders now within the application itself and more information on the website (including this handy “Peloton pedal setup guide” that covers both replacing pedals and setting the tension of the clips). While one might be tempted to conclude that this new emphasis on pedal maintenance suggests that Peloton knew there was a problem, that is not a good assumption. Companies should always be encourage to make their products as safe as possible, and if new safety measures are viewed as admission that products had been unsafe, that would obviously create a chilling effect on those efforts.
Recently, a Peloton rider posted an emergency room photo of a painful-looking laceration to her ankle, which she blamed on a broken Peloton pedal. She reported that one of the pedals on her Peloton bike had sheared off while she was riding. Soon there were literally a thousand comments to this social media post, with some other riders telling stories of broken pedals, and the question was in the air: are Peloton pedals dangerously defective?
This week, Peloton responded with a post that said, in part:
We have no reason to believe that the recent issues flagged in this group were caused by a product defect. Every model of pedal ever included with a Peloton Bike has been tested and certified as compliant…. That said, pedals on any stationary bike need to be replaced on regular basis…
This is where I started to get interested. Is that true that pedals need to be replaced on a regular basis? Most bicycling resources do not list pedals as wear items (like brake pads, tires, or even chains). Do they need to be replaced? Did the fact that Peloton specifically mentioned “stationary bikes” mean that they’re different in this regard?
Before I attempt to provide my thoughts on the subject, let me state firmly that I claim no special knowledge or expertise, and you should not consider calling me as an expert witness at your product liability trial. This is armchair analysis, but hopefully thoughtful armchair analysis.
The Defense’s Argument: Peloton has exercised due care to minimize broken pedals
Email from Peloton regarding pedal failures
So, let me start with the most obvious question, whether or not one should expect a bicycle pedal to break and whether or not they should be considered “lifetime” components of a bike. The answer is that if you ride your bike enough, eventually your pedals will break. This is pretty basic materials science. What you have, in the pedals, is a metal rod that is subjected to a shearing force repeatedly (once per RPM, and maybe even twice if you want to consider the effect of the “upstroke”). Man has not created a material that will last through an infinite number of cycles of stress. Pedals break, as do crank arms and any other component that is stressed when you ride.
So, if pedals don’t last forever, we’re left to ponder the expression “regular basis,” as in, “pedals on any stationary bike need to be replaced on a regular basis.” Peloton didn’t exactly specify what they mean by “regular basis”, but elsewhere on the site they recommend replacing them every 12 months. I did a bit of digging to see if any OEM bike or pedal manufacturer has a recommended interval for replacing pedals, and while I did see other notices that pedals do suffer from stress fatigue, there is very little in the way of guidance as to what the right interval is. In fact, I found only one (bicycle) manufacturer who even ventured to give a number, and theirs was 5,000 miles. 5,000 miles in 12 months is not a completely unreasonable number (I’m on track to do that myself this year), particularly for a bike that is shared.
So, my informal investigation seems to lead to the conclusion that Peloton is probably OK here. They say that their pedals have been tested and certified, meaning that they meet the minimum acceptable standards, and that should be enough to protect them in court. Whether they did enough to educate their users that pedals need to be changed out occasionally is something for the lawyers to argue.
Now that I’ve concluded that, based on the currently available evidence, that “Pedalgate” is not a thing, let me argue the other side for just a minute. If I were the prosecutor, my case would be based on the following…
The Prosecution’s Argument: Peloton could have done more to avoid broken pedals
Peloton pedals may be certified as meeting at least the minimum performance standards required, but consider this: Peloton knows (or can know) with astounding detail exactly how much stress is being put on those pedals. Every RPM is counted, and the power being applied to the pedals is calculated at least as frequently as every RPM. Peloton should be able to tell you precisely how many stress cycles your pedals have been through, the magnitude of the stress, and how many more they should withstand. For all intents and purposes, the Peloton world is one giant laboratory for such things. With the sort of data they collect, Peloton could alert customers that it is time to change their pedals, just as your car reminds you to change your oil periodically. With the sort of data at hand, one could argue that there should never be a pedal failure, because there are no unknown variables. Any pedal that fails in the field is presumably not a pedal that would have passed the certification tests, and by that logic Peloton would have some responsibility in selecting pedals that they know (or should know) cannot withstand the workload.
I’ll update this post if there are any noteworthy developments. Until then, be warned that Peloton expects your pedals will last about 12 months. In the past, they have offered free replacements after the first 12 months of ownership, but it is unclear if that policy will continue.
Can I change my Peloton pedals myself?
Yes, you can. Changing out the pedals on your Peloton bike is no more difficult than changing the pedals on your road bike. For the Peloton pedals (at least, the ones on my own bike), you need a 15mm wrench. [UPDATE: It seems that since this original post Peloton may also be using pedals that fasten using an Allen wrench (probably 4mm), so you will have to examine your pedals to determine which you have.] Other pedals will go on with a 15mm crescent wrench or possibly a large Allen wrench, depending on the manufacturer. Remember that the left side pedal is threaded opposite the right pedal. The reason for this is because the designers don’t want your pedaling motion to be the same motion that unscrews the pedals. In the unusual case in which your pedaling transfers right to the post, you’d want your pedaling to tighten the pedal instead. Be sure to apply some grease to the threads so you can unfasten them a year from now (particularly if you put your bike on your lanai or the deck of your yacht where it’s exposed to the elements).
Your local bike store might be the best place for an inexpensive set of decent quality pedals. I don’t know what Peloton will charge to sell pedals to you, but I wouldn’t expect that to be cheap! (To be fair, Peloton has been good to me regarding broken parts including a buckle on a shoe and the somewhat dubiously designed water bottle holder.) If you change from the stock Peloton pedals, be prepared to change your cleats, too, even if your new pedals are made for delta cleats. My aftermarket pedals didn’t quite fit the Peloton-supplied delta cleats. Anyway, none of this is particularly expensive or difficult to change.
Update: April 2020
I have seen a number of anecdotes, both here and elsewhere, that suggest that pedal problems still remains an issue for Peloton. It’s difficult to know how widespread the problems are because, of course, everyone who doesn’t have a problem is not online tweeting that everything is fine.
I have noticed that the accounts of pedal failure that I’ve encountered since my original post seem to involve pedals that were incorrectly installed as opposed to pedals that may have a defect in manufacturing. It’s possible that these pedals were simply cross-threaded during installation, and if that were to happen the pedal could fairly easily work its way loose from the crank arm (and it would not be possible to reattach it due to bad threads either on the crank arm, pedal or both). Another cause might be over-tightening of the pedal at the factory, which could damage threads. A third (in my opinion) less likely scenario is substandard metals used in the crank arm and/or pedal.
EVERY 3 TO 5 RIDES: Tighten any loose pedal with the included 15 mm wrench. Pedals should be tightened to 25 lb-ft of torque. Turn clockwise to tighten the right pedal and counterclockwise to tighten the left pedal.
— PELOTON owner’s manual
On the other hand, I have not heard recently of pedals that literally break off, as in the case(s) that started “pedalgate”, which I think is a good sign. It’s not that you can’t be injured by a pedal that comes away from the crank arm in any event, but at least without the fracture there would not be the sharp edges that apparently caused some of the lacerations that were reported early on.
Last week, fitness startup Peloton (you’ve seen their commercials) announced their second product, an Internet-connected treadmill called “Peloton Tread”. This is a pretty dramatic step (no pun intended) for the company, but (pun intended this time) are they putting their best foot forward?
I’m not an expert in the fitness industry, and I’m not even much of an athlete. That said, I’m an active (bordering on fanatical) Peloton rider and I’ve been following the company closely. I’ve become a big fan of the Peloton bike in the past six months since I worked it into my daily schedule. I’ve seen some big gains in my fitness (my doctor was very impressed) and on many days the 45 minutes I spend on the bike are the best 45 minutes of the day. The $2K cost of the bike plus the $39/month subscription, while extravagant by my tastes, has been worth every penny.
So, I’m definitely a fan, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every move Peloton makes. And I’m not all that enthused about the Tread, at least not yet.
The New York Times wrote a very good article (What a $4,000 Treadmill Means for the Future of Gadgets) that captured many of the reservations I have, and it’s worth a read. They discuss the price ($4,000) and some of the ways in which the treadmill is different from the bike and therefore might not expect the same level of success.
On top of these observations, I would add one more. When the Peloton bike came to market, they had a model to emulate: the spin class. The Peloton bike faithfully reproduces the spin class experience (so much so that the rider of the Peloton bike is expected to set his or her own resistance via a large plastic knob, where exercise bikes costing much less will do so automatically). You can capture the Peloton bike experience in a sentence: it’s a spin class you don’t have to leave home for. For someone like me, that’s the difference between spinning and not spinning.
Is there an analog for running? Although I am not (nor have I ever been) current on exercise trends, I don’t think there are running classes, where a room full of people come together to run on treadmills, led by an instructor. My own experience with the row of treadmills at health clubs and fitness rooms is that it’s a solitary activity. Each runner has his or her earphones in and is usually watching Headline News on TV, as far as I can tell.
Peloton seems to recognize this, and even in the very first paragraph of their email announcing the Tread to current Peloton members the company asks us to look at it as more than a treadmill:
Peloton Members,
On behalf of the entire Peloton team, I am incredibly proud and honored to announce the launch of our second-ever product, the Peloton Tread™. While we believe it is absolutely the best treadmill ever created, its name and looks are a bit deceiving. Similar to the Peloton Bike™ being #morethanabike, the Peloton Tread is much, much more than a treadmill.
(continues …)
The plan, as it’s been variously described, is that a Peloton Tread workout will be more than running on a treadmill. It will be weights, isometrics as well, so that the workout is not just lower body and cardio (which the Peloton already covers as well). Even the first promotional video, seen on the Peloton website, has as many scenes of our fitness model working out OFF the treadmill. The photo accompanying this article is striking to me because the model isn’t even on the treadmill, instead using it as a $4000 monitor stand.
I am having a hard time getting my head around it: the pitch for the super-expensive treadmill contains the assurance —up front and center— that you will be doing lots of things other than running on the treadmill. It’s a big piece of equipment to be used as a video monitor. And speaking of that, I find it somewhat inconvenient to use my Peloton bike for the “beyond the ride” (off-bike stretches and dumbbell) exercises because the bike itself is often in the way. It’s hard to lie on the floor and try to follow the instructor’s lesson when there’s a large exercise bike in the way. I don’t see that situation being much improved with the Tread.
I hope I’m wrong about that. The “beyond the ride” feature is very compelling and I hope that the new Tread workouts spill over to bike users as well. In the meantime, I am going to be following the rollout of the Tread with some trepidation. Peloton is a quick-growing company with an exciting product in the bike and a lot of potential, and this is a major step that I’m not sure is in the direction that I think they should be going.
What direction do I think they should be going in? I’m glad you asked. If you read my post from last week, Analytics vs. Analysis, you may already know where I’m going. If you haven’t read it, well, you should. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Remember to click on the ad at the bottom and buy whatever they’re selling you, too. Thanks.
To me, the thing that is missing from the Peloton experience is connection. Despite the fact that I’m watching live video, and competing on the leaderboard against real people, I am essentially on my own in pursuing my fitness goals. While the instructors occasionally shout out the usernames of some riders (“Looking good, CrunchyFrog!”), they are really not in a position, with five hundred or more people in the class, to give personalized advice to anyone (even if a spot check of a rider’s stats would be enough to go on). This, I believe, is the next frontier in at-home fitness classes, and it’s going to be a hard one to cross.
What would make this such a challenge is that giving personalized advice is not something that I’ve seen any computer algorithms do well. My Apple Watch sets a calorie goal for me, and if I meet the goal, it suggests a higher goal. That’s not intelligent advice; it’s a five line computer program from programming 101. As I mention in my post from last week, it’s easy to report that I ran 1.71 miles today, but is 1.71 miles good? Will it improve my fitness? Depending on my physical condition 1.71 might be a monumental accomplishment or it might not be noteworthy at all.
Despite all of the metrics and connectivity that the 21st century affords, in the end I am still my own coach (not to mention nutritionist and medic, but one thing at a time…). It is still up to me to understand what all the analytics tell me, to assess my progress toward my goals and to create and refine my plan for getting there. This is where Peloton could really change the game.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that providing these sorts of services would require a lot of manpower. It would be necessary for someone at Peloton (not necessarily the class instructor, but someone) to actually know who I am, what my fitness history and goals are as well as information such as injuries and other limiting factors. My personal coach would also need to be qualified to give me advice, which seems obvious but in practical terms means that the company would not only need to hire people but that these people have special training. I don’t know how many people it takes to produce one segment of Peloton programming, but once the studio is set up I can’t imagine it requires more than two or three. So whether there’s 100 or 10,000 people taking the ride, the investment is fixed (and low). The sort of involvement I’m talking about would require maybe one person for everyone twenty or thirty members, so the more riders you have, the more staff you need. It is not a great equation for making money.
I hope the Tread is a success for Peloton. I hope that the “beyond the ride” offerings continue to evolve and that they’re able to provide a complete home fitness solution. In my humble opinion, it’s going to require offering personalized guidance to their customers, and that’s an expensive proposition. When I see the Tread, I can’t help but feel that they’re avoiding this inconvenient truth and instead attempting to recreate their bike success with a treadmill. Time will tell if this is enough to keep them going.
UPDATE: Entrepreneur Magazine posted an interesting article about the future of Peloton, and the Tread’s place in it. It’s worth a read.
Here’s my background on the subject of this essay, so you can decide how much credence you want to put into the opinions I present.
I am not an expert in the area of physical fitness, and I have no inside information on this company. I don’t have a gym membership, and generally don’t buy really expensive things. However, I do own a Peloton bike and have been a Peloton member for about half a year. I’ve been following the company closely, and have read most everything I can find published about Peloton. Am I right about the Tread? Time will tell.
I am something of a Peloton fanatic. You can find me (by my nom du guerre “LeftShark”) somewhere on a leaderboard every single morning. Coincidentally, I’m also an analytics junkie, and one of my favorite parts of a workout is afterward, when I crunch the numbers to see how I’m doing. Peloton provides all sorts of graphs and metrics, and it’s great to be able to wade through and see my progress over the weeks and months. As a bonus, after the first week of the month, Peloton emails me a review of the prior month.
At the beginning of December, I received my November report. It told me that I had worked out thirty days in November. Below the calendar that had every day filled in, there was a one-sentence commentary on my performance:
This is 1 less day than last month
If you’re thinking: “It should be 1 fewer day”, I applaud your grammar. Still, my point in bringing this up is that October has 31 days, and November only 30. So if I work out every single day for both months, it is inescapable that I will work out one fewer day in November.
When I first read this attempt at insight, it made me laugh, but it also disappointed me a little, because it’s a glaring example of a modern-day problem, that of Analytics vs. Analysis, and is a reminder that we have plenty of the former and far too little of the latter.
For most of human history, a lack of sufficient information was a huge impediment to decision making and planning. By contrast, today we often find ourselves with far more data than we can manage. Pages and pages of data. The problem is no longer that we don’t have enough information, it’s that we have so much information that we don’t know what to make of it. The of-used but suitable metaphor for the attempt to gain insights from a flood of data is “drinking from the firehose.” The providers of the data often try to do some number crunching for us, to help us draw conclusions and help plan, which is where “data” leaves off and “analytics” begins.
This year I played Yahoo’s Fantasy Football. After each week’s games, Yahoo would send me a recap of my team’s performance. At first, I was really delighted with the analysis, because it was written in a dramatic, sports-page style: “Jay Ajayi destroyed the competition with 15 runs for 100 yards,” and such. For the first couple of weeks, I looked forward to this recap, but after a couple of weeks, I started to spot patterns in the report. By the middle of the season, I had stopped reading. Most of the “analysis” given was actually very superficial, based on perhaps one number, using canned phrases that more often than not didn’t reflect reality in any meaningful. Some players were alternately praised and criticized in the same report depending on which statistic the algorithm was comparing at that moment.
Of course, I never thought for a minute that there was an actual human being at Yahoo covering my fantasy football team, and I don’t think that anyone at Peloton is reviewing my performance data and writing my monthly report. But the superficiality of this so-called “analysis” shows me how far we still have to go. With the power of computers, analytics are easy. Analytics is just sums and averages and plotting changes over time. It’s the analysis that’s hard, and the part that no one seems to be able to automate.
Professionally, I see this all the time, when dealing with website analytics. Say a web page has a “bounce rate” of 80%. (“Bounce rate” is how frequently a visitor to the web page leaves the site without visiting any other pages). Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Conventional wisdom is that it’s a bad thing — your visitor is leaving! But what if the visitor found the information they’re looking for? A bounce rate that high might indicate that your web page is perfect. So, it’s either terrible or terrific, and the analytics is not going to tell you which. For that you still need a human, who can take into account the intent of the web page and nuances that would help understand the dynamics of a high bounce rate.
Algorithm-based analysis has gotten better over the years, to be sure, and a carefully written algorithm can lead to insights, even without human intervention. Indeed, a lot of the tasks involved in human-powered analysis are the sorts of things that computers are good at (comparing trends, etc) and it is only a matter of time until the computer-generated analysis become much more valuable. Until then, we need to not confuse analytics with analysis, and we must not content ourselves with the former when we really need the latter, despite the cool charts and infographics that companies are always trying to use to impress us.
I appreciate the analytics. More analysis, please.
Here’s my background on the subject of this essay, so you can decide how much credence you want to put into the opinions I present.
I have about twenty years or so experience working on the web, from back before the days of web analytics (and Google, for that matter). Somewhere in my file cabinet is the Google Analytics IQ certification. I have also spent at least one Saturday poring over my stats from Peloton and Strava, and for better or worse, can tell you on any given day how I’m doing against my weekly and yearly goals.
Recently, a Peloton rider posted an 
