Peloton’s Commands Feature Is Surprisingly Good at Motivating Me to Exercise

I teach spin classes at a gym, so maybe I sound biased when I say that in-person fitness classes offer undeniable advantages over working out at home, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Going to a gym has a lot of built-in factors that keep you accountable, from monthly membership fees to social pressure or group exercise. When you work out at home, you have more flexibility, but you may end up hunched over and not working out 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 of the reasons for that is that the company does a great job of finding ways to keep users on track even when they’re working out alone. Today, I hit the 100-day mark for Peloton Streak workouts, and while Streak workouts are effective at motivating my lizard brain, Peloton offers so much more, including a feature called Teams that lets you compete with or against friends or other Peloton users. I’ve been testing it out in recent weeks and have found that Teams is really effective at creating that same feeling of motivation at the gym.

How the Peloton Team Works

With Teams, you can work out with friends (or even like-minded strangers), either working together toward a predetermined goal (like collectively cycling 100 hours in a month) or competing head-to-head. Your “team” is a group of people united by whatever you decide — it could be your group of friends or a group of people who share a common identity, like being in a certain geographic 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 Create a Peloton Team

To set up a Peloton team, launch the Peloton app on your phone . In the bottom menu on the home screen, you’ll see the Home and Classes icons, an icon that lets you track your activity on the fly, a Community icon, and a Profile icon. Tap the Community icon (it looks like three silhouettes of people standing together), and on the next screen you’ll be given three options : Teams , Feed , and Challenges. Under Teams, you’ll see all the teams you’re a part of, as well as the option to create one.

When you click Create a Team , you’ll be asked to name it, provide a description, pick a color to represent the group, and select the activities everyone will focus on. You can choose from strength training, yoga, meditation, cardio, and more — or choose “everything.” Next, choose where the team is based from a list of major cities, or choose “anywhere.” Finally, decide whether the team is public or private. Public teams have activity data that anyone can view, and anyone can join. Private teams are more, well, private, and their progress is only visible to members. Team admins determine who is allowed to join a private team.

Once you’ve completed the basic setup, you’ll be taken to a page that shows your team details across five tabs: Overview , Feed , Challenges , Weekly Stats , and Teammates . There are a few ways to add teammates — tap the icon at the top with the silhouette and plus sign, or the button that says Invite Friends in the Overview and Teammates tabs. Tapping either will take you to a list of people who follow you on Peloton, and you’ll see an Invite button next to their name. You can also share an invite link with people you’re not connected to in the app, so you can send 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 start at $12.99 per month if you just use the app for yoga and stretching, up to $44 per month if you have Peloton hardware (like a Bike, Bike+, Tread, or Row) and want access to classes, games, and other features.

I have an All Access membership, which lets me do everything from follow guided walks on my phone to play a rhythm game on my bike called Lanebreak . I recently started testing the Bike+ , an upgraded indoor stationary bike, and I set up my boyfriend on an All Access membership to use it on my old bike so we could test out features like shared classes . We formed a team on day one, though we could have done it without two Pelotons, since app-only members can also participate.

What do you do when you create a team?

Once you’ve invited your teammates, it’s time to set up some challenges and competitions. Your team will be a permanent participant, but challenges and competitions are time-limited. Let’s say you set up a weekly challenge where everyone works to complete a total of 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 when one expires.

When creating an action, there are two options:

• Challenges create a “common goal” that everyone is working towards, such as completing a certain amount of exercise, covering a certain distance, or spending a certain amount of time exercising.

• Competitions allow you to set the same goals, whether it’s training or time, but you’re all competing against each other to see who can do the most in a set amount of time.

You can check your progress on your challenges and competitions in the Overview tab, and get a more detailed overview by checking the Challenges and Weekly Stats tabs. The Feed tab shows everyone’s workouts. You can also send virtual high fives to your teammates through the app to stay motivated.

Find a team to join

If you don’t have a group of Peloton-owning friends, you can join Teams with strangers. From the Community tab in the app, tap the Discover button. There, you’ll find popular teams and featured public teams across a wide range of categories — Pregnant Pelo Mamas, TeamEverySingleDay, MenoPosse, Peloton Digital App Users, etc. — that you can join. There’s also a search bar, so you can search for Teams to join based on activity type, location, or interests .

You may not actually know these people, but they can motivate you to exercise the same way strangers at the gym do: simply by being in your space, even if it’s virtual.

How Peloton Teams Helps Me Move

I usually keep my Peloton profile private because I shared my username on Instagram Stories when I first got my bike, and as a result, I have a lot of strangers on my friends list on the app, and I don’t think they need to see a feed of how often I use my bike. For this reason, it felt a little weird to share the details of my workout schedule with anyone, even though my first team was just me and my boyfriend. But after just a day or two of working toward a shared goal of completing 10 workouts in total, I started to feel a motivational itch: If I didn’t get on my bike, my boyfriend would find out — and I’d let our team down!

Just knowing that using the bike in a timely manner could help us reach our overall goal kept me active and motivated to train. I’m also a very competitive person, and even though we were doing a goal challenge rather than a head-to-head race, it still gave me a little dopamine rush when I checked my stats and found that I had actually outperformed him, contributing more to our goal over the course of the week-long challenge.

Conclusion

Anything that motivates people to exercise 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, since you don’t have to work out at the same time. All you have to do is click a few buttons, invite your teammates, and get started.

I wasn’t sure if this would work for me, considering I’m usually the one who motivates myself when it comes to my workouts, but I quickly discovered that it ignited a fire in me like no other solo workout schedule ever could. I’ve already started a new challenge for my boyfriend and myself. I’m counting on winning.

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