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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The 1970s are known for being the golden era of fitness. “There was the birth of exercise science,” Danielle Friedman recalled about the decade during a January 2025 episode of NPR’s news and politics podcast, “All Things Considered.” But that’s not all, according to the journalist; there was also a move toward self-improvement. “The 1970s — the writer Tom Wolfe famously dubbed it the Me Decade,” she explained. “After the kind of activism of the ’60s, Americans and baby boomers in particular were turning toward themselves, were sort of, in many cases, shifting away from trying to save the world to trying to improve themselves.”
Naturally, many exercise aficionados led the charge, pioneering the movement with fitness regimens that were far ahead of their time. From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s affinity for bodybuilding to Farrah Fawcett’s love of jogging to Jane Fonda’s ballet barre workouts and even Judi Sheppard Missett’s creation of Jazzercise, these exercise icons blazed a path and put some of the world’s most popular workouts on the map!
While it’s clear that Arnold Schwarzenegger is no stranger to controversy and scandal, it’s hard to deny that he was on to something way back in the 1970s with his intense weightlifting regimen. As you may recall, Schwarzenegger practically became a celebrity overnight with the release of “Pumping Iron,” a 1977 bodybuilding documentary that followed him and his rival, Lou Ferrigno, as they prepared to compete in the Mr. Olympia competition. Spoiler alert: Schwarzenegger comes out victorious in the end. But, perhaps even more noteworthy, was the way he drew many other people to weightlifting, too.
Fast forward many years later, and we now know that strength training can improve 13 health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even depression and anxiety. And, according to a study using mice and published in The FASEB Journal in May 2021, weight lifting every day may also shrink fat cells.
While it may be hard to believe, there was a time long ago when people were judged, ridiculed, and even bullied for jogging. No, really. “Cars would go by, windows would roll down and either taunts or empty beer cans would come flying out,” the 1968 Boston Marathon winner, Amby Burfoot, recalled during an interview with The New York Times in January 2025. “There was no respect,” Burfott added.
Thankfully, that all changed once the famous “Charlie’s Angels” actress Farrah Fawcett came on the scene and made jogging cool. Per Vogue, Fawcett’s daily exercise routine wasn’t complete without a one-mile jog, followed by time in the sauna and jacuzzi. “The only way I can release my day’s tensions is not with a drink or a visit to some Beverly Hills shrink, but with something so taxing to my muscles that I fall asleep from body exhaustion instead of a mental wipeout,” she was quoted as saying. “You’d be surprised; after you push your body to its fullest, your daily problems hardly have time to affect you,” she added.
And as it turns out, Fawcett was on to something. According to a study conducted by Professor Larry Tucker of the Department of Exercise Sciences at Brigham Young and published in 2017 in Preventive Medicine, routine running habits can help slow down the aging process.
Dare we say Jane Fonda was the OG ballet barre workout enthusiast?! Fonda first started working on her famous ballet-inspired workout routines way back in the 1970s. “People respond differently to various types of movement, to different workout speeds, even to different kinds of music. I like ballet and what it does for me — the slowness, the rigor, the sense of creativity while I move,” she told Vogue in 1979. Later, Fonda went on to open her very own gym and release workout videos. And, well, the rest is simply history. “I remember thinking, Oh, God, wouldn’t it be great if I could sell 25,000 [tapes]? Three million tapes later, we created an industry,” she declared during a 1987 interview for “Good Morning America” (via Analog Indulgence).
Today, ballet barre classes are still all the rage. “Barre requires you to keep your core engaged at all times. So that means while you are working your arms, legs, and booty, your abs are working as well,” Bergen Wheeler, the national director of Core Fusion talent development and senior teacher at Exhale Spa, explained during a 2017 interview with Self about what happens when you do barre workouts every day.
We would be absolutely remiss not to discuss famous Jazzercise creator Judi Sheppard Missett while talking about 1970s exercise icons who were light-years ahead of their time. According to Sheppard Misset, she first came up with the idea for the workout in 1969. “I had been at Northwestern University, working professionally as a dancer, and teaching dance class, and lo and behold, I came up with an idea that I thought would be great, and 50 years later, here we are. That idea was Jazzercise, and we pioneered a whole industry, the fitness industry,” Sheppard Misett recalled in a video on the company’s YouTube account.
Sadly, Jazzercise is one of many fitness trends that have completely disappeared. But that certainly doesn’t negate the wonderful health benefits of the workout routine. Emily Jones says she lost a whopping 90 pounds doing Jazzercise while gaining so much more. “I was kind of apprehensive, because with the history of Jazzercise, you tend to think of leg warmers, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that,” Jones told “TODAY” in March 2021. But Jones claimed that after just one session, she was hooked. “I walked in and I was like yeah, this is it, I love it,” she recalled. In fact, she loved it so much that she decided to become a Jazzercise instructor herself. “It’s so fulfilling. We’re not clique-y and ‘all about me,’ but it’s just genuinely our own little family (at our location),” Jones explained about the community aspect. “I’ve taught a woman in her 80s, and she’s brought me cookies and held my children.”
Of all the exercise techniques I use when training clients (and myself), slowing down the movements is one of my favorites. And I’m not the only fan.
“Tempo training is excellent because it increases time under tension,” says Steven Chung, physical therapist at VSI Spine Solutions in Reston, Virginia.
“Slowing down your reps—especially during the eccentric lowering phase—forces your muscles to work longer per rep, which is a major driver of muscle growth (hypertrophy) and strength.”
Chung explains that this approach also helps to improve technique and control. “Intentionally slowing down means you can’t rely on momentum to do the move,” he tells Fit&Well.
“This exposes your weak points, and it also forces you to maintain good positioning, ultimately cleaning up movement quality.”
It is also an effective way to strengthen weak spots in the body. “Tempo training puts the emphasis on the hardest part of a movement—for example, the bottom of a squat—which helps to build strength where you’re typically weakest,” adds Chung.
Does that sound appealing? Chung suggests starting with the following five exercises and explains how to incorporate tempo training when doing them.
Chung has chosen “compound, functional movements that we perform on a day-to-day basis.” You will need dumbbells for some of the moves. The five exercises are:
“Squatting mimics daily tasks like sitting, standing and lifting heavy objects. The push-up and dumbbell floor press target the chest, shoulders, triceps and core, which mimics daily tasks like pushing doors open.
“Split squats mimic the unilateral (single-sided) nature of running, sprinting and jumping, helping people improve performance in these areas. They also mimic the daily task of kneeling down to tie your shoe or to get to a lower cabinet.
“Romanian deadlifts require proper hip-hinge movement, which improves the mechanics and efficiency when lifting heavy items.”
Chung suggests employing a 3-2-1 tempo. To put that into practice:
Chung suggests aiming for between three and five sets, with six to eight reps in each set, and a one to two minute rest break between sets.
Start at the lowest end of the range, then gradually add more reps or sets over subsequent workouts as you get stronger.
Sets: 3-5 Reps: 6-8 Rest: 1-2min
Sets: 3-5 Reps: 6-8 Rest: 1-2min
Sets: 3-5 Reps: 6-8 Rest: 1-2min
Sets: 3-5 Reps: 6-8 Rest: 1-2min
Sets: 3-5 Reps: 6-8 Rest: 1-2min
Exercise should be a vital part of all of our lives, particularly young people.
There are a host of benefits that it can provide, including improved physical health, better mental wellbeing, increased confidence, stronger social connections, improved focus and discipline, and the development of healthy lifelong habits.
Exercise can also help to reduce crime rates by giving young people better structure, a clear routine and a sense of purpose.
All in all, it helps create positive outlets for energy, builds responsibility and encourages stronger community connections.
That’s where Snap Fitness in Grid House, St Michael’s Road Sittingbourne comes in.
The gym offers memberships for young people aged 16 and above.
It also works closely with local youth groups and sports teams that use the gym, including Sports Connect, Westlands Secondary School, Sittingbourne FC youth teams, Iwade Herons FC and Faversham Strike Force, supporting the community and providing youngsters with the opportunity to stay active.
Jack Smith of JS Performance Training and Alex Palmerton of Palmo Fitness also work with younger children from the age of five upwards.
Some simply want to improve their overall fitness, while others are focused on improving performance in their chosen sports. Between them, they support academy footballers, professional and amateur boxers, basketball, cricket and rugby players, helping young athletes build strength, confidence and discipline from an early age.
Personal training sessions are available with both Jack and Alex, and they take clients aged under 16. Both are DBS checked, which provides reassurance for parents and highlights Snap Fitness’s commitment to creating a safe and supportive environment for younger members.
For more information, call 01795 599598, email sittingbourne@snapfitness.co.uk or visit www.snapfitness.com/uk/gyms/sittingbourne.
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