Can Peloton’s Scenic Workouts Compete with iFIT’s?

I was excited to see an email from Peloton recently advertising that they were improving their scenic workout experience. That had long been my biggest complaint about Peloton. Their selection of scenic runs and rides were limited to a collection of what felt like stock videos over bad, free domain music.

Peloton’s scenic workouts were so lacking that I ended up getting an iFIT membership over a year ago. Their main selling feature is their scenic rides. Now with the new scenic workouts on Peloton, I was eager to give it a try and see how they measured up to iFIT.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to do my best to avoid doing a comparison of the equipment or interface. That’s best served for a different article and I want to make all things equal by it being just about the scenic workouts themselves. I’m also not going to penalize Peloton for having a small library because they are new to the scene. So, on to the comparison!

What are the Peloton scenic workouts like?

Peloton has their workouts broken out on the Tread into 3 categories, Guided, Distance and Time. Guided is similar to what iFIT has been doing where they have one of their instructors running along with you on the scenic video. They call out what pace (jog, run, etc.) you should be at and approximate inclines for when they are going up hills. Distance is a cool feature that’s different from anything on iFIT. You pick a distance that you want to run (e.g. a 5k) and the video will go along with your pace. If you speed up, so does the video footage. The video gets a little choppy as you do it, but I imagine they’ll work the bugs out on that and I appreciate the innovation. Finally, time is just like the old scenic workouts. You pick a location for a time interval and it’s scenic footage for that amount of time.

What I don’t like about the Peloton scenic workouts

To do an apples to apples comparison, I’m going to focus just on the guided workouts. I see those as what most people (including myself) will be doing. My first observation was a negative to me, but may be a positive for some. The Peloton workouts are really produced. They feel like you’re watching a movie because you’ll run with the instructor for a minute, then they’ll cut away to…