Peloton Guide monitors your training at home with movement tracking
Peloton has unveiled a camera system that tracks and scores your exercise when following its streamed home fitness classes.
US start-up Peloton proved popular during the pandemic, providing its bespoke exercise bikes linked to live and recorded classes as a home based fitness solution. It was important exercise for many stuck at home in lockdown.
At the same time it also offered general exercise classes not centred around its bikes, but they lacked interactivity and feedback from the trainer.
The New York exercise firm’s answer is an ‘artificial intelligence’ based solution with a camera that you link to your TV. It tracks your exercise movements and scores you accordingly.
It’s called Peloton Guide and you are scored whether the class is live or recorded.
I have been trialling Guide doing body weight strength training classes, and the feedback offered by the Guide’s movement tracker offers involvement, motivation and a sense of achievement.
There are two major components to Peloton Guide: the camera hardware and the exercise regime that accompanies it.
The Guide unit is an oval-shaped camera that you place on your TV cabinet or secure on top of your TV with the supplied magnet.
Connecting is easy, it’s like installing a set-top box. You run the supplied HDMI cable between the camera and one of your TV’s HDMI ports, and plug in the power. Peloton recommends a 4K or 1080p TV.
You fire up the Guide with the supplied remote, go through the formalities of checking for updates, adding a Peloton account and your credit card details and then calibrating your movement.
Calibration can be tricky if you have limited space. Peloton recommends at least 1.37mx1.83m which is the size of two yoga mats, with the long side facing the camera.
My living room space in front of the TV is already cluttered with other training gear but eventually I positioned the camera so that I fitted within the Guide’s frame whether standing or lying on a floor mat. Placing the camera a bit higher helps, just don’t angle it too much downwards. In the end, tracking worked.
I was now ready to do workouts chosen from the menu. I gravitated towards strength classes specifically made for the movement tracker and there were about 150 on offer during my trial. Fortunately Peloton let me filter classes by length, language, instructor, subtitle availability, body activity, difficulty, music and class type.
I found difficulty and body activity the most useful filters, choosing beginner over intermediate and advanced, and classes that concentrated on biceps, triceps, forearms and shoulders. If your anatomical knowledge is rusty, don’t worry. Your chosen muscle groups are depicted visually as you go.
My filtering brought up three classes. Of these, two also required getting down on the mat and exercising the core and lower back muscles. That was testing for me with a muscle injury at present.
Peloton says classes will more finely target requested muscle groups in time.
One great feature is the ability to practice each exercise in a class before it starts. Clicking on a class and selecting the class plan brings up video clips of each exercise that you can emulate and perfect one-at-a-time. I could watch a demo and practice a bicep curl, front raise and tricep kickback separately as many times as I wanted before the class began.
Click on the images below to enlarge them.
The movement tracker kicked in while performing these exercises during the class. A little blue tear would show on the screen and would slowly become solid with each repetition. You’d get a point once the tear was completely solid. Your total score comprised the number of these segments you completed successfully.
I got a few gold badges for classes where I completed all movements.
I then tested how accurately my movements were tracked by deliberately doing all exercises incorrectly, for example lifting weights with my arms at 45 degrees or doing the wrong exercise altogether.
At the time of launch, the movement tracker did not mind how well I carried out movements, indeed whether I was doing the correct exercise. It seemed to just track reps.
Peloton acknowledges the tracker doesn’t critique your movements for now, rather it counts them.
However, the company plans more sophisticated functionality for Peloton Guide and its new movement tracker.
While the implementation of movement tracking is rudimentary for now, the potential is enormous. Once movement tracking can tell you if you are lifting weights correctly or not, and you’re exercising the correct group of muscles, the system will be a winner as you’ll be able to perfect your execution of those exercises.
That Peloton breaks down classes into targeted muscle groups means you can be the boss as to what you exercise by carefully choosing classes – to some extent.
I can see the potential for this to go further, allowing a user to build an individual workout by cobbling together individual exercises and practising each individually, before exercising them as a group and getting feedback. It would be a digital version of following a gym exercise card.
Of course you lack the sophisticated equipment found in a gym, but for those training at home, it would offer even more choice. That’s my idea rather than Peloton’s, of course.
But there’s plenty to go on with in the meantime. Classes using the made for movement tracker already exist and are built around 70 base exercises with 200 variations and modifications.
New options include a “floor bootcamp” which brings together cardio and strength exercise, and a split program where you use heavier weights to build muscle. Both programs use the movement tracker.
Peloton is working on voice commands so that you can say “OK, Peloton, start the workout” and stop, rewind or fast forward through content using voice. But it’s in early Beta at this stage.
The Peloton Guide camera system costs $445 outright. If you need weights and a mat, Peloton has a package deal of the Guide camera, three weights from 5 to 30lbs (2.3 to 13.6kg), and a Peloton floor mat.
Guide users pay $35 per month to access the company’s live and on-demand library for now. The monthly cost reverts to $59 in January 2023.