Tired of Peloton? Now what?

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So Peloton has gone downhill. As everybody knows or most people know, Peloton is a bike and treadmill company where you can purchase a bike, you can purchase a treadmill, and they have subscription services to some basic workouts that you can do most anywhere.

They got really popular during the pandemic because everybody had to stay at home and they just caught fire. They had the right marketing, the right messaging, everything shut down. Boom, it blew up. Everybody went out and got a bike, but now everybody’s selling their bikes and canceling memberships. Now there’s a lot of business reasons why. I’m not going to go into that. I want to talk about the exercise reason why people are selling their Peloton bikes and getting rid of their memberships.

If this is your first time watching one of my videos and we haven’t met yet, greetings, my name is Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. It’s a therapy and fitness company where we offer online services and also in-house services, and I’ve been in this field for I think almost 30 years now, and I’ve been a Soma trainer and Soma therapist, which is under the osteopathic medical discipline for, I don’t know, 17, 18, 19, 20 years, something like that. I don’t remember exactly, but I’ve seen a lot in my time.

And so I had to go through and talk about topics I find interesting relative to health and fitness. I believe in a holistic fitness model. You can even say holistic health and fitness model because that’s how we’re designed, so it’s best that we find out how best to train our bodies in this grand design. So stay tuned for more videos and if you like them, please give me a thumbs up, share them with your friends and subscribe.

I find it’s good to look at the original intention of something as to where it would fit into my life. So I’ve dedicated myself to being in this osteopathic model to be a therapist, to be a trainer because the initial goal way back in the day with Andrew Taylor Still was to balance the body so it functioned its best. The thought process is the body can heal itself, which it can, so if I put it in the most advantageous position, it’ll heal itself. It’ll work in terms of movement and thinking and internal organs. It’ll work its best if the body’s balanced.

So every stretch, exercise, therapy, routine, whatever it is, that’s the goal, right? So I can get behind that goal because that’s what I believe in. Peloton’s goal from John Foley back in around January 2012, his main goal was to not have to drive to the gym and to be able to work out at home. Totally admirable. You don’t need to go to a gym. You can see here in my studio, it’s not fancy, it’s basic. Look, I got basic stuff here. I’m sorry if it’s a little rocky.

It’s about 2,500 square feet and then I got a studio room back there. In my humble opinion, I don’t think you need any more than that. So if you can sit something in your home, in your garage or wherever your living room that’s similar for just you, sure, why not? I mean, in my online program, you don’t even need that. You need enough space that your body can move and not touch anything. Maybe a mat, maybe some lightweights, and you can totally work your body if you know how to train the way its designed.

But his second motivation was that he didn’t like the time driving from home to the gym. He didn’t like driving because his motivation waned from the time, from driving from home to gym. That I have a problem with. I respect the fact that your motivation is waning going from home to gym, but that means that just shows you that motivation is fleeting. A goal is what you need to be motivated to work out, not for some external source to motivate you.

So when he developed Peloton, that’s his main goal. I want to work out at home and I want to be entertained. I want somebody else or that class, whatever to motivate me to keep moving. We all need support, but I think internal motivation, internal motivation, internal goal setting I should say is a much more sustainable way to approach health and fitness than having an instructor do what they do to motivate you to keep going.

So because their motivation was to one, work at home and two to feel motivated still to work at home, that’s how they design their product. So after you buy the bike or the treadmill, they have a membership subscription which you join. It’s like $40 bucks, $30 bucks, I don’t know exactly. I haven’t done this. I’m going to be truthfully honest. I haven’t used Peloton’s classes. I don’t need to. I kind of know what’s already in there. It’s the basic stuff that’ve been doing for decades now, just in the format of Peloton.

But when they designed it said, “Okay, how do we motivate people? Let’s get some really high energy instructors to keep us motivated. Let’s play this awesome music to keep us motivated.” Both totally fine things. You want to listen to good music, go for it. You want to feel that high energy, go for it, but it doesn’t make a whole program. Then they also did things like on a screen you’re running through the beach or through the mountains on the screen as a way to motivate you.

Okay, I get that. You want to have different forms of stimulus. Again, all these forms of stimulus are outside of you, they’re not within you. So this is the first problem, and I already alluded to it, is that to be successful, you can’t have external motivation. You can have internal motivation as a goal, and then if that goal encompasses using a bike or treadmill, whatever the case may be, great, but you’re not waiting for somebody to do it for you. You’re seeking out and doing it for yourself.

Working out can give you a lot of different benefits and you can have a lot of different goals in relation to working out. Your body can do a lot of different things, and if the body is improved by training it, exercising it, then you can extrapolate that and say, okay, there’s a lot of different ways to train the body to get a total holistic total body workout.

When you look at Peloton, if you’re looking from just an exercise standpoint, you’re kind of getting mainly one aspect, cardio, different forms of cardio, steady state, more long endurance cardio and some high intensity or they call it HIIT workout, but basically cardio and the workouts aren’t progressive, so it’s just cardio.

Yes, they may throw in some weight, but it stays generally a circuit format, which for the most part is still cardio. Either long form or HIIT, so you’re getting cardio. While there’s ways to train your body for strength, endurance, functional strength, maximal strength, there’s a bunch of different ways, different levels for your heart rate to move up and down, peloton is not addressing very much those, addressing a couple.

So if you’re not getting total body workout intrinsically in your body, you’re going to know. It’s going to come out in you as probably boredom. You’re bored of the workout. I would be completely bored if I did those workouts too. If I did traditional workouts like Peloton or just went to the gym and did what traditional people did back when I did when I first started, I would get bored. I would get bored because it’s not integrated enough. There’s nothing to really work on. It’s just me moving around randomly and okay, like a check mark. It’s like a participation trophy.

If you want to feel good about just participating and just moving, then this is for you. There’s no judgment whatsoever. If your main goal is just to move and this allows you just to move, you don’t care about much other else, okay, go for it. That doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for a lot of other people. You have people like myself who want more out of exercise.

They want to use it as a tool to a better life, and you have people who are just getting into working out and dipping their toe in. Well, to throw them into a Peloton thing could be a little too much. In fact, physiologically, it is way too much, and now maybe you scare them off. So you have to understand the different facets that you can do from training and understand that Peloton gives you one-ish, let’s say maybe two, but it’s not a lot.

A third exercise reason why Peloton is going downhill and people aren’t using anymore is because it’s not specific to what you need in your body. Again, kind of like what I just talked about a second ago, you don’t have the depth of knowledge, I’m assuming to understand what your body needs, but you’ll kind of feel it. If your body’s not being challenged, getting different things that it needs, you’re not going to feel as good. You’re also not going to have as much drive to continue to work on what you need to work on.

Just because you’re using the body part doesn’t mean you’re giving the body part what it needs. In fact, by using that body part, you need to give it more what it needs. I’ll explain a little bit more. So in Peloton, I’m sitting down, I’m biking or I’m on a treadmill, walking, running. I’m mainly using my legs. That doesn’t mean I’m training my legs. I’m training myself in biking and treadmill by using my legs.

If I wanted to train my legs, training meaning I’m exercising it or stretching it or giving it therapy to make it better somehow, then you need to do a specific program for whatever you need for your legs, and if I use my legs more by biking and treadmill and Peloton, that means I’m going to need more type of work to work on my legs because when I use something, I degraded a bit.

I use it in one way so I can get overuse injuries or I can get imbalances of the body. So I want to train my legs to not be so overused, to be more balanced and neutral to train the other aspects that don’t get trained because if it’s basically one plane of motion, one type of activity, I want to be more specific.

So when you’re going through your program, you want to make sure like, “Okay, what is it that I need for my body? What is it do I want?” Just saying you want to get fit is not enough. That’s what leads to just doing things like jumping on a bandwagon on Peloton or they got SoulCycle now or the bungee workout. I mean, there’s so many different, they’re call popular, right? Popular workouts you can jump into, but they’re not going to give what you want. They’re just going to entertain you.

I’ve even heard it called “exertainment”. I not for that at all, but if that’s what you want, go for it. But if you’re looking for a full routine, you need to go through your body and go, “Okay, this is why I need to go move better.” That’s what’s going to motivate you, seeing results, working on something, getting better, incorporating into your body. The goal is not just to move and to do different things for your body. The goal in life is to decrease you as a human being. It means going through challenges, realizing you’re more than what you are, which means putting yourself into a program that challenges yourself to become more than who you are.

Did you jump onto the Peloton craze? So when everything’s shut down, did you go out and buy a Peloton bike and were all in, but now you want to sell it and stop your membership? I’d love to know why. Just put it in the comments.

Through the eyes of an exercise program. Let’s go do a quick recap on why Peloton is now being, now it’s going downhill. Why people are selling their bikes and getting rid of their membership. First is the motivation component. People are relying on external motivation from the music, from their classes to motivate them to keep working. That only lasts so long. Eventually your motivation needs to come from goals. Your goals need to come from what is it you want in your life and then what you want in your life comes out in what type of exercises, health activities you do in your life, not by somebody else yelling at you or playing some music that you like to keep you going.

The second is that basically Peloton is a bike and treadmill with a little bit of working out. That’s been around for a long time. A bike and treadmill will give you what a bike and treadmill will basically give you, which is basically endurance. That’s not a whole program. There’s a lot of things you can get through exercise. It’s one will be nice, say maybe two aspects, so people are going to realize that and start to get bored in their workouts because it’s the same thing over and over again, but again goes back to goal setting because they don’t have a goal.

The third is it’s not specific to you. We’re all individual people. Yes, we have the same basic framework, but how our body responds and what it needs for exercise is different for each person. That requires you to want to have goals and do a deep dive into what is it my body needs? Why do you want to be strong? Why do you want to have endurance? Why do you want to balance your body? Why do you want to correct injuries? Why do you want to prevent? Why, why, why, why, why, why? Keep asking why, and then start to dive in deeper as to what you need.

The surface layer of things you see with exercise is just that surface layer. It’s just there to, sorry to say it, but basically make money. If they can get you in, if they can get you pain, if they can keep you “exertained”, they’re going to keep spending money with them, but that for you, that’s not good. This is why we have such a high rate of injuries and people with back pain because they’re only doing these things to get these superficial aspects of working out and not diving deeper. Look, if you want a bike, go bike, but Peloton average, it’s $2,000 plus you have to do the membership. That’s an S load of money. I would never pay that.

The bike you saw me at the beginning was an Airdyne. That’s about a thousand dollars and it doesn’t have all those fancy gadgets. I have a basic thing I put my music on and I go. In the example of my studio, you saw I had an elliptical trainer. I have some weights, but I go outside. I run, walk, hike, I bike outside. You don’t need a screen to show you what it’s like to bike outside. Buy a bike and go outside.

You can buy a bike for let’s say $1,500 bucks. You can get those low stands you can put in your house to put your bike on, and now with two purchases, you have an indoor and outdoor bike for much less. Your motivation is going to be because you want to do it for cardio and you want to use that. You can buy very minimal equipment to keep yourself going. In fact, you don’t need equipment like I said before, but it’s going to come down to your goals and what you want.

After hearing this if you’re kind of getting a paying deep inside, something’s resonated with you and you like the information I’ve talked about, till you want to find out more than I’ve got a great resource for you. It’s an interactive resource to have a free Facebook group. It’s SolCore Fitness – Strength, Mobility and Flexibility for Active People.

The idea here is that you’re active already and you’re tired of just doing random acts of movement, like jumping on Peloton or whatever craze is happening. You know that exercise can do more for you and you want more from yourself. Well, in this group, we interact, we talk about stuff like that, so I choose topics and I do mini trainings. Quick little one to two minute videos that you can watch and comment on.

I interact with members when they asks questions. We do masterclasses where I take topics and really delve into it and interact with you as I give a presentation. And then we also do challenges, which is for three to five days. We pick a topic, we talk about the topic, I give you the reason why, and then we actually go through and show you stretches, exercises, and routines relative to that topic. This will start to give you a really good idea of how to holistically train your body, which is the way the body wants to be trained, and then you can start to feel the improvements your body’s making.

So the descriptions going to be in the… the information’s going to be a description. Had it reverse, and you can just go on there, click on it, answer three questions, agree to the terms, poof you’re in and you can start interacting. Please don’t forget to give me a thumbs up if you like this content, share this with your friends who might find it beneficial and then subscribe to the channel. By liking your telling YouTube, “Hey, this is a good information,” and allows other people like yourself to find me and find my information. I appreciate your support.