Peloton, stay in your lane
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The camera zooms in on two well-formed cheeks clad in white shorts. These buns of steel belong to one Hudson Williams, star of the steamy hockey romance Heated Rivalry. As the camera pans up, a bead of sweat drips down his chin toward his clavicle. Sweaty abs are shown. The music swells. Hollywood’s mega-hunk of the moment is swaying his chiseled visage back and forth, semi-gyrating on… a Peloton treadmill. A $6,695 Tread Plus, to be exact.
Cue a funky dance sequence set to David Bowie’s “Fame,” where Williams starts dumbbell squatting with popular Peloton instructor Tunde Oyeneyin. The camera lingers as Williams planks, shadow boxes, pumps iron, runs on the treadmill, and oozes the effortless charm of that guy she told you not to worry about.
Aw yeah. Veteran Peloton observers know what this means. New celebrity ambassador commercial? A rebrand is underway, baby.
It might seem weird to read Peloton’s tea leaves in a horny commercial. But I’d argue that viral Peloton commercials tend to bookend specific eras in the company’s history. Four years ago, previous CEO Barry McCarthy tried to shift the company’s focus away from expensive hardware toward subscriptions. For that era, the company put out an ad starring the surprisingly buff Christopher Meloni extolling the virtues of the app while working out… in the buff.
Likewise, take that infamous holiday commercial. It was tone-deaf in 2019 to see a husband gift a wife an exercise bike, but the commercial itself said a lot about how Peloton viewed itself — a company for internet-savvy, young, affluent people who’d view a premium exercise bike as a status symbol in their perfect West Elm homes. What followed was Peloton’s pandemic-fueled fever dream, a wild, bumpy ride of skyrocketing demand, business gaffes, recalls, and dubious product placements culminating in Mr. Big dying on his Peloton in the premiere of And Just Like That…. Again, that was followed by a cheeky Peloton commercial starring Chris Noth, the actor who portrays Mr. Big. That 2021 campaign ended up backfiring, as Noth was subsequently canceled over sexual harassment claims. Weeks later, Peloton’s bombastic CEO John Foley stepped down.
Given that history, it’s worth noting that in the latest Williams commercial, a Peloton Bike is nowhere to be seen. Williams is instead doing multiple kinds of workouts, and crucially, he’s not in a well-furnished home. He’s in a spacious gym.
Beat for beat, this all corresponds to the business machinations of Peloton’s third CEO, Peter Stern, a former Ford executive and one of the cofounders behind Apple Fitness Plus. Stern’s arrival has come with a sweeping hardware refresh that increased fees and introduced AI — or Peloton IQ, as they call it — to the Peloton platform. (Plus two layoffs, although at this point, I’ve lost count of how many layoffs Peloton’s had.) In earnings calls, Stern has also stated he no longer views Peloton as a fitness company. It’s a wellness company now, and in his words, that means expanding into “strength, stress management, sleep, and nutrition.” A recent Bloomberg report posits that Peloton IQ may play a bigger role in the platform beyond strength training, utilizing wearable data to suggest personalized plans. It also notes that Stern plans to appeal to GLP-1 users “seeking additional fitness options,” to take Peloton beyond the home by partnering with gyms and lifestyle brands, and to prioritize treadmills — not bikes — going forward.
Coincidence? I think not.
I used to joke that Peloton was the company most likely to send me to an early grave. From 2020 to 2023, it felt like there was a new Peloton debacle every few weeks. Every time news dropped, my blood pressure spiked as I puzzled over how the company could keep shooting itself in the foot when it had such a solid product and a ridiculously loyal fan base. Things have calmed down quite a bit since then, but the struggle to make Peloton thrive persists.
The Peloton Paradox is one I’ve been mulling over for the last three months while testing the new Cross Training series’ Bike Plus. On the one hand, not much has changed about the product. The “cushier” bike seat still hurts my butt on longer rides. The instructors are still inhumanely peppy. I like the new phone stand, and the built-in fan is even more useful. There’s a camera now for when I do strength training workouts; sometimes it counts my reps properly, and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve tried AI-generating a few strength programs, and it can be handy at times. But for all the hoopla around Peloton IQ, the thing I’ve liked most is a tiny indicator above new workouts that tells me whether it’s harder, the same, or easier than what I typically do.
This structural malaise isn’t unique to Peloton. I wrote about it in last week’s Optimizer, but there’s a tendency these days for health tech companies (if that’s what Peloton is now) to glom onto overarching wellness trends to inform their latest features and products. There’s nothing wrong with studying trends, especially if it aligns with your core business. The danger is when you fall into a spiraling hype cycle in which the product you started with becomes increasingly unrecognizable in a few short years.
Despite all its turmoil, Peloton has so far, at its core, remained the same. But I’ll admit, some of my experience testing the Cross Training Bike Plus, combined with the tidbits from the Bloomberg article, made my eye twitch.
For one, I’ve been prescribed a GLP-1 as part of a treatment plan for my metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease that I reported on in my recent CGM feature. On paper, Bloomberg’s assertion that Peloton is eager to target GLP-1 users makes absolute sense. That market is booming, so everyone in wellness and fitness adjacent industries is doing it — including viral gummy bears. Strength training is hugely important for GLP-1 users, as the prolonged appetite suppression can contribute to muscle loss. Marketing yourself as an easy way to pick up strength training in the comfort of your own home is smart, as gyms can be incredibly intimidating. I, for one, don’t like competing for weights or equipment.
But I’m highly suspicious about the reality of “personalized” plans built with wearable data and AI. In all my testing thus far, I’ve yet to see an AI-wearable combo that is actually able to personalize a platform to my specific needs.
Let me be crystal clear: It’s been doo-doo dogshit. AI coaching? Terrible for accountability because they’re so easily bullied. AI nutrition features? Can’t tell when I’ve made healthy swaps, and they make logging so tedious I’d rather just not eat. (Which is counterproductive!) AI workout insights? Regurgitated book reports of things I already know. Peloton has yet to incorporate all these features, but these are the areas that Stern himself has indicated the company is looking at next. As for what is currently available, the Peloton IQ instructorless, fully AI-generated strength plans are quick to create, but often fall short of what I need and what my current health allows. I generally end up having to swap out several movements, leading me to wonder why I didn’t just write my own program or take a class to begin with.
For me, true fitness personalization would be the ability to say, “Hey, I recently started these medications and experienced XYZ side effects. I fear that what I’ve lost is muscle mass. My ultimate goal is to get back to running at least a 5K. In the past, I trained for half-marathons, but now I get nauseous after a mile of walk-running. I used to work out five to six days a week, with a mix of endurance running and strength. Now I walk daily, and try to strength train at least once a week, energy allowing. Here’s my wearable data, in which you can see all the ways my cardiovascular fitness has worsened and my sleep is heavily disrupted. So honestly, what’s a realistic, sustainable, and adaptable four-week plan for me, given my new medications have made me food-averse to animal protein, chronically dehydrated, and prone to dizzy spells?” and get a plan.
Spoiler: I can’t get a good answer for this. Most wearable and fitness AI chatbot attempts to answer this prompt have followed the same trend. Okay-ish recovery plans that I have to manually write down, peppered with regurgitated data trends and some basic suggestions I could’ve googled. The strength recommendations were summed up as “light strength workouts.” Whoop’s AI came the closest to an actual, structured plan, but it was still too ambitious for where I’m currently at right now.
I would love for Peloton not to fall down this trendy rabbit hole. Precisely because there were several times in the past three months when testing the Bike Plus benefited me. It wasn’t any of the new features, however. It was the ability to have the classes and some instructor-led motivation in the privacy of my own home. I get that Peloton is exploring gyms to draw in new users. I understand that treadmills are a faster-growing segment than bikes. But the core Peloton product is how these classes and instructors make people feel. That’s the primary reason that a dozen diehard Peloton fans shared with me when I did an in-depth report on Peloton’s business back in 2024.
Ultimately, I have no idea how this latest Peloton pivot will land. I stopped trying to predict the company’s fortunes a long time ago. But for as long as I’ve been following Peloton, its greatest successes have come from leaning into what people already like about it. Pressures to be bigger, grow faster, and do more seem to continually blow up in its face. Would it truly be so bad if Peloton were “just” a fitness company?
