WIRED Heads To Chile On The S22i With iFit

Adrienne So and her spouse dream of spending their 10^th wedding anniversary mountain biking around Scotland. For now, though, Adrienne regales her spouse with tales of her adventures biking around Norway and other exotic locations – on her NordicTrack S22i bike with iFit®. Adrienne So is a senior writer for WIRED® and reviews consumer technology, so she knows a thing or two about innovative equipment.

Like many of us, Adrienne enjoys the benefits of a good workout, but she doesn’t always have the time to head to the gym. She doesn’t particularly care for the gym experience either, and dislikes the idea of working out in front of others. She’s not alone – research conducted by OnePoll® shows that about half of all Americans have “gymtimidation,” which is that feeling of inadequacy that surges when working out in public or near someone who is in good shape.

Between her busy schedule and shyness in the gym, Adrienne used to get most of her exercise outside. Unfortunately, Adrienne currently resides in Portland, OR, where the weather is not always conducive to outdoor activities. And considering our current quarantine situation, she’s limited even more so now.

“I like working out, and I appreciate an in-home cycle’s convenience. I have a job, I have toddlers, and I live in a rainy city, so I can understand that getting outside for 30 minutes a day isn’t always as easy as I’d like to be. But I cannot understand how staring at other people and being yelled at would make exercise more appealing. I would rather push my hand into a meat grinder than have an instructor bark at me (in public!) that I need to up my cadence.”

Like the rest of us, she gets bored exercising all by herself. She was thrilled when she tried the NordicTrack S22i and found that it gives users a chance to ride with their favorite trainers. “The iFit bike workouts on the NordicTrack S22i are super fun. You don’t often get to pedal crazily behind a world-class mountain biker as she cycles pell-mell over pump tracks, swings around banked turns, and takes jumps in one of the best mountain bike parks in the world.”

Having a S22i bike at home has made exercising easy for Adrienne. The S22i footprint of 55 inches by 29.1 inches makes for an easy fit, with room to spare, in her garage. And the bike’s two front-mounted wheels make it easy for her to relocate her bike around her home.

Keep in mind, if you live in an area where temperatures can reach extremes—high humidity, below freezing, triple digits heat, etc.—and your garage has not been converted into a full time exercise room, then the garage may not be the best home for your equipment. See our storage ideas for other suitable options considering your location and available home space.

The adjustable seat and handlebars allows Adrienne to adjust the bike to fit her 5-foot-2 legs and torso. Also, the incline and decline system provides a challenging workout, with steeper inclines than she grinds through when biking around town.

The S22i has on-demand, streaming pre-recorded studio workouts featuring trainer auto-adjustments to the incline and resistance, as well as continuous encouragement.

The NordicTrack S22i gives her access to pre-recorded studio classes, which allows her to do these classes on her time, rather than trying to change her schedule to attend the classes. Adrienne describes the bike workouts, which are filmed all over the world, as “irresistible.” She also appreciated making a personal connection with all sorts of trainers. Adrienne’s personal favorite is Ashleigh McIvor, who brought home the first gold medal winner in women’s ski cross at the 2010 Olympics.

“As she pedaled through strength and interval training sessions in Chile and Norway, I learned that she is also a mom, and has also recovered from ACL tears. It is disconcerting how powerfully you can empathize with someone when all you can really see is the back of their helmet. I even picked up a few parenting tips while hammering it out on roads, gravel, and trails.”

“At one point, the iFit cameraman paused in trepidation as trainer Ashleigh McIvor dove, whooping, into a steep gully in Matanzas, Chile. It made me laugh out loud. I was pedaling at 90 revolutions per minute and S22i’s flywheel was spinning like crazy, and I looked like an insane person. I didn’t care.”

As well as being entertaining, the S22i touch screen makes it easy to keep track of your max watts, cadence, speed and other statistics, as well as a calendar of past workouts and creating custom rides with Google Maps™. This allows each rider to always know where they started, what kind of progress they have made, and what areas they could use more work in.

Adrienne will likely exercise outdoors too, especially as the weather warms up, but she says, “…for now, riding through the fjords is satiating my appetite for Scotland. I need to get in shape beforehand, anyway.”