Back in 2019, the rise of home workouts felt like a nice thought that lacked urgency: why, exactly, were we supposed to do bodyweight sessions at home when we had perfectly good gyms? With weights? Why were we going to do yoga in the living room when we have a studio down the road? Why, for goodness sake, were some people doing spin classes in the lounge when you could go to a class and oh, I don’t know, have someone else clean your towels and supply you with a nice body wash?
Enter: 2020. Although in late July our gyms and studios are welcoming us back with open arms, for many people this might not feel safe for several more months. What at first felt like a brief spell of home fitness – where people were willing to pause longer fitness goals in the name of national health – now feels slightly harder to maintain. For some people the absence of heavy weights is killer and for others, like me, not being able to spin or mix up my cardio has been hell.
But the home spin bike has long had a bit of a renaissance: a way of zhuzhing up your exercise regime from the comfort of your own home, lockdown has only accelerated the rise of Peloton and Technogym. After all, you may have to wash your own towel, but offering you a professionally guided workout with all the health benefits and none of the commute? Woof. Echelon has now also joined the (very static) race to change the way spin fanatics work out at a fraction of the price. It’s sturdy, competent and could change the way you view working out at home, but it’s not without a few weaknesses.
It might surprise you to know that the Echelon is exceptionally heavy, although, let’s be honest, no spin bikes were going to be easy to get into your home. After trying to heave the box up in one, my boyfriend and I settled for unpacking the whole thing at the bottom of the stairs (our building has no lift and we live on the top floor) and taking it up in parts. Construction was easy, even if the instructions were vague, but one part that continued to give us extended grief was the seat: for some reason that I’m sure is important for someone other than me, the seat has the ability to fully tilt forward and back. This was something that took a lot of time to get it to stop doing, and let me tell you, classes in which you can’t sit down without tipping forward like you’re in a go-kart are a challenge. In a bad way. When it was fixed, however, the bike fundamentally had everything you need. There were, however, some vital features that I’ve become accustomed to in the real world that I missed: handlebars you can move backwards and forwards, or a water bottle canister nearer the handles for easier grabbing.
While the bike is streamlined and minimalist, the app is a very busy place. It’s hard to search for classes by anything other than category (which is fine and prioritises trying new things rather than falling on old favourites), but it does make it hard to find classics. There’s a lot going on here too: nutrition, workouts for you to do outside of spin and, of course, a variety of different types of classes to do on the bike. For me, personally, I found a lot of this unnecessary: I have no reason to rely on them for recipes and I already have apps I use for a more diverse pool of workouts on my gym mat. Within the cycle class variants as well, I found a few of them well-intentioned but largely unnecessary for me. But the variety of times, difficulties and focuses in the spin classes was appealing and means you could keep doing new classes every single time you got onto the seat.
Among the alternatives to the classic spin broadcast are virtual rides, which allow you to move at your own speed and resistance as you travel around a recording of an international location – Singapore, Sydney Harbour, the wild expanses of continental Europe. These are all lovely, I’m sure, but not what I was here for. The setup of the bike absolutely implies you should be using a tablet or iPad to broadcast your classes, which is an improvement in many ways to having a tablet built into the bike: you can watch whatever you want and connect it to using any headphones you fancy. But I have no tablet at all and so used to my phone; a panorama of a beautiful city was much less immersive or interesting than it might normally be on a larger screen. For my boyfriend, however, just getting on the bike as one might on a gym floor, whether that be with these virtual tours or by putting on Netflix, was a pleasure.
The fact I was using my phone – not the bike’s fault, just worth flagging – also meant the screen in classes themselves was very busy: you’ve got your resistance level, RPM (or “cadence” as they call it) and output of watts at the bottom, monitored by Bluetooth. Then you have the leadership board on the left and other details that run the risk of clogging a small screen around the instructor. The leadership board is a gripe for me: you can remove it, but the instructor will talk about it all throughout, congratulating the people at the top. Inevitably, you will think about it all the time, and as I tended to prefer doing recorded classes, rather than the live ones in which you’re actively participating, it also felt like a bit of a Quixotic dream to try to achieve the heights of some of the people at the top. For me, competitive exercise drives me absolutely spare: the only competition I want is with my past self. However, it is undeniable this is a huge draw for many people and it’s done well for those who want it.
The rides are all – from my experience over two or three weeks – live classes recorded and then offered to people who want a bit more flexibility. I respect the focus on live rides – Echelon makes no secret of the fact it is interested in building community and has an active Facebook page for its members – but it’s not what I come to spin for. Spin, for me, is a time to step into a pitch-dark room and work on myself with the passive tutelage of a deified instructor. Much of this particular brand of spin is impossible in a home workout environment, so I understand the focus, but if that’s something you really want from a spin class, that’s something to note. That being said, the instructors are pleasant people, who often pick some really interesting and unusual soundtracks: a full Donna Summer class is exactly the kind of weird, niche musical soundtrack an instructor at a major gym simply would never be allowed to gamble on, and, similarly, one brilliant class in which a Daft Punk-inspired DJ did a full mix was genuinely really enjoyable.
By being live recordings kept on the app, however, this means some of the stock classes are oddly chopped together. Some classes, while described as 45 minutes, have six or so minutes of placeholder “this class will start soon” detailing, which you cannot skip because – understandably – you shouldn’t be allowed to just jump to the end of a class. It also means that the instructors are talkative – very talkative – because they’re engaging with the audience and building a sense of collaboration. Spin instructors I know at gyms are warded against this kind of chattiness, but it makes sense in the context. It does, however, mean that it’s almost impossible to discern every instruction amongst the blather: they also have their own way of describing fast portions or exercises that, in five years of attending every spin class in London, I have literally never heard used.
This might be because their way of spinning is very different from the sort of metropolitan spin class I have perhaps become accustomed to. There are no push-ups, no choreography, few instructors use weights (though this is a welcome change considering trying to get a dumbbell at the moment is like trying to get sugar during The Blitz). The focus is really on a type of studio cycling: there are long sections where you’re told to build your speed or resistance and often this will carry between two tracks, often with very different BPMs, which can be jarring. Studio cycling, rather than spin, is also far more suited for leaderboards and competition, which are a vital part of how they’re building engagement and community, so this focus makes sense. But, again, if you’re missing 1Rebel or Psycle, this isn’t quite what you might expect.
There are lots of things I miss about working out in a studio that a home bike can never provide: the ambience, nice shower products I’d never buy myself, the way the darkness and the instructor trap you in there to put yourself first and it almost becoming a meditative experience. Echelon was never going to be able to provide these things. There are other parts of a workout, however, that Echelon ignores: there is no built-in warm-up or cooldown, both things that heavily behoove having an expert guide you through them. Echelon is not the only home workout offering to eschew them, but the expectation that these fall to people who might be working out independently for the first time feels odd.
You might read this and think I am deeply displeased with my Echelon experience: not so. Is it the kind of spin I like? Not at all. Is it perfect or elegantly done? Absolutely not, and it has a long way to go before it feels as sleek as some of its competitors. But what Echelon does well is provide a much more interesting way to do your home cardio. There are only so many 25-minute sessions of exhausting drills you can do, and the chance to go longer, harder and have some equipment for novelty is a complete relief. My boyfriend, who used the bike just as much as me, has always preferred spin over any form of workout and has really taken to Echelon. For someone like him – for whom spin is the crux and everything else sort of comes in after – the broad church of offerings on the Echelon is perfect (though other bikes have also expanded into offering a full, holistic workout offering via their apps). He’s transformed from someone who has been a bit paralysed by the idea of working out at home to someone who regularly books into our spare room to work out on the bike – and I can’t thank Echelon enough for helping to change his approach to working out around the house. It has been a huge boon for me too and rejuvenated my love of cardio: after months of workouts that I dreaded in between strength sessions, having this as a way of mixing it up is hugely beneficial and something I’ve genuinely loved working into my week.
But all the above critiques still stand. It’s a very specific way of working, and while you can choose to work out the way you want – for any length and with any focus – I found myself often finding the same flaws with every class. I still enjoyed them and got a great sweat on, and it’s wildly improved my workout regimen, especially at this stage in lockdown. Consider a spin bike by all means and consider an Echelon for sure. It’s affordable and effective in many ways, but don’t expect your living room to turn into SoulCycle’s latest London studio.
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