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I teach spin classes in a gym setting, so I probably sound biased when I say that in-person exercise classes offer indisputable benefits over at-home workouts—but I don’t think I’m overstating things. Going to a gym involves multiple baked-in factors to keep you accountable, from the monthly membership fee to the social pressure of working out in a group setting. When you work out at home, you have more flexibility, but you can flex yourself right into not exercising at all.
That’s not to say I’m against working out at home. I love my Peloton Bike and ride it every day, and I think one reason for that is the company does a great job of finding ways to make users want to stay on track, even when exercising solo. Today, I hit the milestone of a 100-day Peloton workout streak, and while streaks are effective at motivating my lizard brain, Peloton offers much more than that—including a feature called Teams that lets you compete with or against your friends or other Peloton users. In recent weeks, I’ve been testing it out, and I’ve discovered that Teams is truly effective at creating that in-gym feeling of motivation.
How Peloton Teams works
Using Teams, you can work out with friends (or even like-minded strangers), either working jointly toward a pre-determined goal (say, a collective 100 hours of cycling in a month) or competing head-to-head. Your “team” is a group united by whatever you decide—it can be your friend group, for instance, or a group of people who share a common identifier, like being from a certain geographical area or getting back into exercise after giving birth. In short, the feature creates a sense of community in a virtual landscape that can sometimes feel isolating, and it’s easy to access from the Peloton app.
How to set up a Peloton Team
To set up a Peloton Team, start in the Peloton app on your phone. Along the bottom menu on the home screen, you’ll see icons for Home and Classes, an icon that lets you Track an activity on the fly, a Community icon, and a Profile icon. Tap the Community icon (it looks like three silhouetted people standing together) and the next screen will give you three options: Teams, Feed, and Challenges. Under Teams, you’ll see any Teams you’re on, plus the option to Create one.
When you tap Create a Team, you’ll be asked to name it, give it a description, select a color to represent the group, and pick activities for everyone to focus on. You can choose from strength, yoga, meditation, cardio, and more—or you can pick “all.” Then, indicate where the Team is based from a list of major cities, or select “anywhere.” Finally, decide if the Team is public or private. Public Teams have activity data available for view by anyone, and anyone can join them. Private Teams are more, well, private, with progress only visible to members. Team admins determine who is allowed to join a private Team.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
Once you’re done with the basic setup, you’ll be taken to a page that shows you the details of the team across five tabs: Overview, Feed, Challenges, Weekly stats, and Teammates. There are a couple of ways to add teammates: Tap the icon at the top with a silhouette and a plus sign, or the button that says Invite friends on the Overview and Teammates tabs. Tapping any of those brings you to a list of the people who follow you on Peloton, and you’ll see an Invite button next to their name. You can also share the invite link to people with whom you aren’t connected on the app, so you can text it to a friend or post it in a forum.
Who can be on your Peloton Team
Anyone with a Peloton membership can be on your Peloton Team. Memberships range from $12.99 per month (if you’re just using the app to do things like yoga and stretching) to $44 per month if you have Peloton equipment (like a Bike, Bike+, Tread, or Row) and want to access classes, games, and other features. To me, paying that fee every month has a similar motivational effect to paying a gym membership, but until I discovered Teams, it was still lacking the all-important element of social pressure.
I have the All Access membership, which enables me to do everything from follow along with guided walks on my phone to playing a beat-based game on my Bike called Lanebreak. I recently began testing out a Bike+, and I set up my boyfriend with an All Access membership to use on my old Bike so we could test out features like taking classes together while I simultaneously got busy identifying differences between the Bike and Bike+. We formed a Team on the first day, though we could have done so even without owning two Pelotons, as app-only members can also participate by logging walks, stretches, and even non-Peloton cycling rides.
What you do once you’ve made a Team
After you’ve invited your teammates, it’s time to set up some challenges and competitions. Your team is a permanent fixture, but the challenges and competitions are timed. Say you set a week-long challenge where everyone works to complete a combined 25 workouts: After a week, that challenge will disappear, but the team itself will remain. You can do more than one challenge at a time and add new ones whenever one expires.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
There are two options when creating a team activity:
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Challenges create a “shared target goal” that everyone works toward, like the completion of a set number of workouts, a set distance traveled, or a set amount of time spent exercising.
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Competitions allow you to set those same workout- or time-based goals, but you’re all competing against one another to see who can do the most in a fixed amount of time.
You can check progress on your challenges and competitions from the Overview tab, and get a more detailed view by checking the Challenges and Weekly Stats tabs. The Feed tab shows you everyone’s workouts. You can send virtual high-fives to your teammates through the app, too, to keep everyone motivated.
Peloton recently rolled out a new addition to the features within Teams, too. As of July, you can share class recommendations directly to your team. Prior to the implementation of this upgrade, you could see teammates’ progress in the feed, but you couldn’t post in the feed; all you could do was add a high-five reaction or a comment after someone completed a workout. Because you can now add messages and comments to go along with class recommendations in that feed section, the teams feature became even more social and got one step closer to more accurately replicating the in-gym experience.
Find a Team to join
If you don’t have a group of Peloton-using friends, you can join Teams with strangers. From the Community tab in the app, tap the Discover button. There, you’ll find trending teams and featured public teams across a wide variety of classifications—Pregnant Pelo Mamas, TeamEverySingleDay, MenoPosse, Peloton Digital App Users, etc.—any of which you can join. There’s also a search bar, and you can search for Teams to join by activity type, location, or interest.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
You may not know these people, but they can motivate you to exercise the same way strangers at the gym do: just by existing in your space, even your virtual one.
How Peloton Teams keeps me moving
I usually keep my Peloton profile set to private. I shared my username on my Instagram Stories when I first got my Bike and, as a result, I have a lot of strangers on my in-app friends list. I don’t think they need to see a feed of how often I’m using my machine. For this reason, it felt a little unusual for me to share the details of my workout schedule with someone, even though my first Team consisted only of myself and my boyfriend. But after a day or two of us working on a shared-goal challenge of completing 10 workouts, I started feeling the motivating itch: If I didn’t hop on my Bike, my beau would know—and I’d be letting our team down!
I am also a deeply competitive person, and though we were doing a shared-goal challenge, not a head-to-head competition, it still delivered me a little dopamine boost to check my stats and discover that I did, in fact, beat him by contributing more to our goal over the course of the week-long challenge.
The bottom line
Anything that motivates a person to work out is a good thing in my book, but Peloton Teams is especially useful because it’s so easy to set up and so well integrated with the app you’re probably already using. You don’t have to coordinate schedules with anyone, like you do when you take classes together, since you don’t have to be working out at the same time. All you need to do is tap a few buttons, invite teammates, and get going.
I wasn’t sure it would be for me, given I’m generally self-motivating when it comes to my workouts, but I quickly discovered it lit a fire under me like no solo routine schedule could. I’ve already launched a new challenge for my boyfriend and myself. I expect to win.
