Credit:
Reviewed / Tim Renzi
An excercise bike designed to take on Peloton.
The S22i is one of NordicTrack’s most popular exercise bike models. Like other connected exercise bikes, the S22i features a touchscreen to stream cycling classes from its exercise programming platform, iFit. The S22i’s 22-inch HD touchscreen tilts and rotates 360 degrees for easy viewing during off-bike exercise classes.
During cycling classes, you can use the auto-follow setting to match your instructor’s incline and resistance automatically or set your own levels. (Unlike other stationary bikes, the S22i has both incline and decline settings for a more immersive workout experience.) The S22i ranges from a 20% incline to a 10% decline and it has 24 levels of resistance. You can use it with or without cleats and it comes with two 3-pound dumbbells that you occasionally use during iFit classes.
It’s 61 inches long, 22 inches wide, and 58 inches tall, about average for an exercise bike. It weighs 205 pounds and has a 350-pound weight limit—one of the better weight capacities among bikes we’ve tested.
The S22i costs $1,999, and you get a 30-day free trial of iFit. After your trial period, an iFit membership costs $39 a month, or you can pay upfront for an extended plan and save some money. A year-long membership costs $396 ($33 a month), a two-year membership costs $699 ($29 a month), and a three-year membership costs $899 ($25 a month).
Shipping is free, but you can upgrade to room-of-choice delivery and assembly for $199.
It’s less than our favorite exercise bike, the Peloton Bike+, which costs $2,495 plus a $44 monthly membership fee. However, our best “basic” bike, the Schwinn IC4, costs only $999—though, you won’t have a touchscreen to stream exercise classes on.
Credit:
Reviewed / Tim Renzi
You can do training regiments with iFit, as well as take off-bike courses for strength and other exercises.
The S22i made it easy to get my heart pumping and legs working. I just hopped on the seat, started a class, and let the bike do the rest. The auto-follow setting makes it easy to focus on your instructor and your feet as the bike automatically adjusts to various inclines and resistance levels.
iFit offers thousands of classes spanning all expert levels and durations. I enjoyed taking classes anywhere from 30-45 minutes at the intermediate level. I don’t cycle often, but these classes didn’t feel too challenging or overwhelming. I was able to push myself and get my heart rate up without worrying about injuring myself or feeling too fatigued to finish class.
You can still adjust the difficulty to your liking when using the auto-follow setting. When you adjust the incline or resistance, iFit modifies the rest of your session accordingly. This made it easy to adjust the difficulty without having to start over and find a whole new class.
While I love cycling for a low-impact cardio workout, I enjoy switching up my routine with strength training and yoga sessions for a more well-rounded exercise regimen. iFit offers all sorts of workout classes, and the S22i’s swivel screen makes it easy to follow your instructor during off-bike sessions.
I enjoy iFit’s strength, yoga, and Pilates classes just as much as its cycling programming. The instructors are equally as fun and informative, and there are hundreds of classes to choose from based on your experience level, desired duration, and goals.
Though spin bikes aren’t necessarily known for being as noisy as treadmills or rowers, I was pleasantly surprised at how quiet this bike is. Its electromagnetic resistance is near silent, even when the incline and resistance levels adjust.
The bike’s almost silent operation makes it easy to hear your music and instructor, and you don’t have to worry about disturbing neighbors during early-morning workouts.
Credit:
Reviewed / Tim Renzi
The seat can be a bit stiff.
The seat is too stiff for my liking and gets uncomfortable during bike rides longer than 30 minutes. After a handful of rides, it started to wear in and now feels more bearable, but I would still recommend a good seat cover to make your workouts more pleasant.
The S22i has a 4.8-star rating on NordicTrack’s website from more than 100 reviews. Many reviewers love the quality of the bike and iFit’s workout classes.
“We have really enjoyed the bike so after a couple of months,” one reviewer says. “The variety of rides and trainers is great. Trainers are top notch and the exercise regimen is challenging but flexible enough to adapt to your level of fitness. Highly recommend!”
The main complaints users have about the S22i is that it can be difficult to figure out how to set up and adjust, and that iFit can be difficult to navigate.
“The screen is somewhat insensitive to touch,” one reviewer says. “Sometimes you really have to pound on it to get it to respond. It is also a little too far away to reach easily when riding. As far as getting started with the bike, the manual is not all that great. It is hard to figure out basic settings at first, like how to adjust volume for the trainer and music. The ‘follow the trainer’ auto-adjust is confusing and [getting] to the settings and toggles is not very obvious.”
NordicTrack offers one of the better warranties compared to those offered by competing brands we’ve tested—10 years on the frame, two years on parts, and one year on labor.
You can purchase a three-year extended warranty for parts and labor for $200, or a three-year maintenance plan which extends the parts and labor warranties to three years each and includes an annual fifteen-point maintenance check.
Credit:
Reviewed / Tim Renzi
It’s a good alternative to Peloton.
I love using the S22i. iFit’s classes are fun and challenging and it’s easy to adjust the workouts to your abilities and goals. The bike is quiet and its 350-pound weight limit means people with many different body types can use it.
My only complaint is the seat isn’t very comfortable, especially on longer rides. However, it started to break in after a few sessions, and if it’s still stiff, this can easily be solved with a good seat cover.
S22i
The S22i is a great exercise bike and iFit’s classes are some of the best we’ve tried.
Esther Bell
Senior Staff Writer, Health and Fitness
Esther is a writer at Reviewed covering all things health and fitness.
See all of Esther Bell’s reviews
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When your daily routines are disrupted, finding the motivation to exercise can be a challenge. The key is to build a new structure that works for you. Schedule your workouts as you would any important appointment to create commitment and turn intention into action.
Focus on consistency rather than intensity, especially when adapting to a new environment. Setting small, achievable goals—like a 20-minute walk or a short bodyweight circuit—can build momentum. Remember that any movement is better than none, and establishing a regular habit is the most important first step.
You don’t need a fully equipped gym to maintain your fitness. Many effective workouts can be done with minimal or no equipment, either in your home or safely outdoors.
A recent study examined data from 50,000 WHOOP members between January 1 and May 15, including over 4.9 million workouts. This comparison captured exercise behaviors before and during social distancing, using March 9 as the cutoff—the week the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic and the US declared a national state of emergency.
The study tracked the six most popular exercises: running, functional fitness, weightlifting, cycling, swimming, and walking. It measured the relative frequency of each activity on a daily basis. As you can see in the graphic below, there was a significant uptick in running, cycling, and walking once social distancing began.
QUARANTINE EXERCISE MODALITIES WITH BIGGEST INCREASE
Walking took the biggest jump, followed by running and cycling. The spikes on the graph show increased participation in all three activities on weekends, which continued during quarantine. However, with running in particular, the frequency of weekday and weekend participation became more similar—a lack of commuting gave runners more opportunity to get outside during the week.
The three activities people started doing more of are all individual forms of exercise that happen outdoors—a needed break from being stuck inside. Functional fitness, which for many members was already a solo at-home workout, saw little change. Weightlifting and swimming saw significant decreases, coinciding with the closures of gyms and athletic facilities.
The sample of 50,000 WHOOP members exercised 1.1% more often once quarantine began. With many social activities unavailable, people turned to working out to pass the time. Exercise modalities like running and cycling require a high cardiovascular load, and members spent 1.8% more time working out in their three highest heart rate zones during quarantine.
The study also discovered improvements in several key physiological markers that WHOOP tracks, including sleep, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.
Adapting your fitness routine is the first step. Understanding how your body responds to those changes is the next. Are your new workouts building fitness without compromising recovery, and are you getting enough sleep to support your efforts?
WHOOP quantifies the impact of your daily behaviors on your body. By monitoring your Sleep, daily Strain, and Recovery, you get personalized insights to help you train smarter, recover faster, and build healthier habits.
Regular, moderate exercise can support your immune system. Physical activity helps promote good circulation, which allows the cells and substances of the immune system to move through the body freely and do their job efficiently. However, it’s important to balance activity with recovery, as overtraining can place stress on the body.
The relationship between exercise and COVID-19 recovery is complex and depends on the individual. Some research suggests that light physical activity during and after the illness may help with certain symptoms, particularly mental and neurological ones. It is critical to listen to your body, avoid strenuous activity while sick, and consult with a healthcare professional before resuming exercise after an infection.
WHOOP measures the intensity of your activities by analyzing your heart rate. The Strain score quantifies the total cardiovascular load you experience throughout the day, whether from a specific workout or other daily stressors. By tracking how much time you spend in elevated heart rate zones, WHOOP gives you a clear picture of how hard your body is working.
Lou Mudge is a Health Writer at Future Plc, working across Fit&Well and Coach. She previously worked for Live Science, and regularly writes for Space.com and Pet’s Radar. Based in Bath, UK, she has a passion for food, nutrition and health and is eager to demystify diet culture in order to make health and fitness accessible to everybody.
Multiple diagnoses in her early twenties sparked an interest in the gut-brain axis and the impact that diet and exercise can have on both physical and mental health. She was put on the FODMAP elimination diet during this time and learned to adapt recipes to fit these parameters, while retaining core flavors and textures, and now enjoys cooking for gut health.
Wondering how much weight you should be lifting in the gym to build strength? Dr Stacy Sims says that not going heavy enough could be the biggest mistake women are making in their workouts.
What strength training looks like might differ (for example, some prefer callisthenics over classic weight training) for some, but one thing is clear – it needs to be a challenge.
This is something exercise scientist Dr Stacy Sims was keen to emphasise to journalist Clare Johnston on a recent episode of her podcast, The Honest Channel. The pair discussed why intensity really matters for women when they’re strength training, rather than just doing the same exercise for as many sets or reps as possible.
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Dr Sims says she believes many women don’t push themselves enough when working out, which is why we might not see results as quickly as we want. “There’s an inherent difference between building muscle and building strength. So we know that again, one of the first things that will come is strength, but how are we actually maximising that for women?” she says.
Dr Sims recommends lifting a weight you can complete for a maximum of six to eight repetitions, leaving just one or two in reserve. As she says in her video on perimenopause and resistance training: if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.
Doing lots of repetitions with lighter dumbbells or other weights won’t have the same effect, she warns. Doing many reps over time improves your muscles’ endurance, but not how fibres within the muscle are working and how tightly they’re contracting, which is what you need to build strength – especially in perimenopause.
“When we start having changes in oestrogen, one of the first things that goes is pure power and strength because oestrogen affects our contractile proteins actin and myosin,” she says. She explains that adding load (lifting heavier) means actin and myosin “hold onto each other a lot harder and to have a very strong and tight contraction – that’s what strength and power are”. This means that if you’re not challenging your muscles to work harder through progressive overload, you won’t see the results you may be aiming for, because the proteins in your muscles are only ever contracting lightly.
“It’s not just about building lean mass, it’s about how strong that muscle is as we go about building it. How do we go about preserving strength and fast-twitch fibres and all the things women need to conserve as we get older to have a really good health span,” Dr Sims explains.
Fast-twitch muscle fibres are needed for heavy weight lifting, sprinting and reaction ability, but they can fatigue quickly and reduce in size and number as we age. This is because of the fall in oestrogen we experience as we enter perimenopause. Men don’t have this problem because their testosterone levels stay more stable throughout their lives.
Taking supplements like creatine, alongside regular exercise, has been shown to improve this as well.
Dr Sims says lifting heavy weights and doing plyometric exercises – explosive, high-intensity exercises such as jumping or hopping – helps women increase and maintain their fast-twitch muscle fibres. She says if we focus on lifting heavy weights for fewer reps, there’s no need to be in the gym for hours every week – welcome news for all of us.
As for how often you should lift weights, she suggests at least three sessions every week with active recovery days between them. This should include mobility exercises and zone 2 exercise, such as a walking workout.
If you’re new to strength training, remember to speak to a trained professional first to ensure you avoid injury.
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