- Apple Fitness Plus.

It's the 10 bucks a month subscription service

with a bunch of exercise videos

that integrate with and actually require your Apple Watch

and you probably know it's been out for a few months now

but a bunch of us at the verge have been using it

for a couple of months to review it.

- Okay. So I'm about to do

my first Apple Fitness Plus workout.

- This is gonna be my first ever experience

with Apple Fitness Plus.

- We've been totally, absolutely being really, really good

at daily exercise and closing those rings

with a subscription service that we totally pay for

every month making it worth our money.

Yup.

- Speak for yourself.

I took it pretty seriously.

- Yes. Yes we did actually try.

- I took it kind of seriously.

- Look, I've never exercised regularly in my entire life.

I've never held on to a gym membership for more than a year.

I mean, I'm not a total slug, but I'm slug adjacent.

So I wanted to know if Fitness Plus could turn that around

for me and we'll get to that,

but first I think it's more important to hear from people

who actually do exercise on a regular basis

and who can compare Apple Fitness Plus

to other similar services.

Apple Fitness Plus has a bunch of different,

prerecorded exercise videos with three trainers

in each of them.

Two of them are offering accommodations

on the main exercise.

These videos can vary in length from 10 minutes

to up to 45 minutes.

It also has integration with Apple Music,

so you can listen to real actual music

that you'd actually wanna listen to

while you're working out.

Now, there are a few different categories of exercise.

There's Hitt and Yoga and Core and Dance

and this thing called Mindful Cooldown

which is basically just stretching with meditation.

But there are also exercise videos that require you

to have specific equipment,

so you might need dumbbells for strength,

there's cycling, there's treadmill and there's also rowing.

There's one more piece of equipment

that is absolutely required for all of the videos,

an Apple Watch and then also something

to watch the videos on,

so that would be an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV

or you can stream it to your TV via Airplay.

Sometimes with reviews, the only important question is,

is it good?

And for what it is, yeah.

Apple Fitness Plus is pretty good.

So for this review

I think a better question is who is it good for?

(upbeat music)

- So right off the bat, I loved using Apple Fitness Plus.

For someone who's already plugged into the Apple ecosystem

and is just getting started out with fitness,

I think it's a great program.

So I started using a Peloton bike last year.

I haven't loved Peloton, but it's the closest I can get

to my pre COVID fitness classes.

On paper, the cardio offerings from Peloton

and Fitness Plus look pretty similar.

In both programs, you can choose classes

with different lengths, playlists and levels of intensity.

There's a variety of instructors,

although not as many as Peloton

and Apple's workouts have an added emphasis on mental health

and general wellness in addition to physical health.

There's a lot more of a like throw away your cares,

throw away your worries,

how can we be better people today attitude

that you don't see across all the Peloton rides.

- [Instructor] Me, you and your Fitness Plus trainer team.

Let's start to add some resistance.

- [Monica] This instructor is excited

about being on a bike ride, it make me excited too.

But it's newer than Peloton's program

and that shows in a couple of ways.

First, there just aren't as many teachers to choose from.

There are only six Apple cycling instructors as of now

and Peloton has 23 to choose from.

Current playlist offerings are more generic as well.

So with Peloton, I've done everything from Hamilton rides

to Bon Jovi rides whereas Apple's rides

are still mostly like hip hop or rock.

But the one thing that bothered me the most

is that the workout lengths are more limited.

With Peloton, you can ride for up to 90 minutes.

Apple's cycling rides max out at 45 minutes

so I often found myself stringing multiple Apple workouts

together to get the workout lengths that I wanted.

These things are all functions of Apple Fitness Plus

being fairly new and there'll be easy to fix,

but some other things won't be.

For example, on Peloton the instructors

can give you an exact range to put your resistance at,

whereas on Apple Fitness Plus

because you know, everyone's using different bikes,

they can only be pretty general,

so easy or moderate or hard and that makes it more difficult

to know whether you're at the intensity

that you're supposed to be at.

Okay. In the cool-down now.

I've actually loved that.

I thought that was so much fun.

The instructor was great.

The music was great.

I burnt 195 calories.

So you know, for 20 minutes of biking that's not bad at all.

This was a lot of fun.

- So I'm already a committed Peloton user

and I wasn't willing to give up my bike time.

I decided to keep using the bike for my cardio workouts

and then use Fitness Plus for my Cooldown

and Strength classes.

Immediately, I noticed Apple's choice in instructors.

They're diverse and interesting

and I wanted to try their classes, which is a good sign.

I also appreciated that the Strength classes

offered three different levels.

One person demoed the regular exercise.

Another modified it to make it accessible for anyone

with injuries or needing to go easier on their bodies

and the third person made the movement more advanced.

Peloton doesn't do this and it's Strength classes

and I find it super frustrating,

especially as someone with chronic lower back pain

and like others have mentioned,

I really appreciated the deep integration

with the Apple Watch, even if it's super Apple like behavior

to make it mandatory.

I did however, like having my rings as a constant reminder

in the corner of the screen.

It motivated me, especially considering

that when I use my Peloton, my heart rate

only shows up on the screen and nothing else.

Otherwise though, Apple Fitness Plus didn't hook me.

I like to strength train specific parts of my body.

Usually my arms, because the bike works my lower body.

The app doesn't allow you to filter by workout type.

So to find an upper body Strength class,

I had to read through all the Strength class descriptions.

Filters feel like they should be table stakes

for a fitness app

and here's another potential barrier to entry.

I don't own an iPad or an Apple TV.

So I had to stream my workouts from my phone,

which was terrible.

The screen is small and especially terrible

when switching from Peloton's behemoth bike display

to my iPhone 11 Pro.

I don't understand why Apple wouldn't make Fitness Plus

available through a Mac Book.

How many Apple products do I need

to make this program work well?

As for the classes themselves, they were fine.

I didn't love or hate them.

The Strength classes were about what you'd expect from

any Strength class

and the Cooldowns were a little bit different,

in that they incorporated mindfulness into them

which I liked, but might be annoying

if you wanna just do your stretches and get in and out.

(upbeat music)

- Working out in one space has always been a struggle

for me.

I just get bored and uninterested

when I'm not actively going somewhere

or physically achieving something,

that's why I usually get my workouts on my bike.

Taking loops off in the park

or slack lining behind some trees or going for a jog.

So the at-home workouts within Apple Fitness Plus,

well they weren't really of interest to me.

That is until a few weeks ago though,

when Apple rolled out the Time to Walk feature

within Apple Fitness Plus.

That's something in theory, I can get behind.

Time to Walk pairs inspirational monologues,

music and photos from famous musicians, athletes,

notable people with Apple Watch's Exercise Tracking

to create a more engaging way to take a walk.

Now, there are only a couple of differences

between Time to Walk and a more traditional podcast.

Most notably about twice an episode, your watch will buzz

and a photo will appear on your watch

that relates to what the host is talking about.

It's cool.

It's not game changing.

And then secondly, the hosts are either also on a walk

or they're talking about what walking means to them

and this, I actually appreciated a bit more.

Ruby Bridges has a slow, calm pace you can hear

as she strolls through a park in New Orleans.

- [Ruby] Right now we are in Audubon park,

here in New Orleans.

- Well Dream on Greens, Heavier Foot on a Gravel Path

and Malibu is accompanied by the sounds of distant waves.

- [Instructor 2] I try to go on a walk

maybe once every couple of weeks.

Its your time to lose yourself in nature.

- Huge shout out to the audio engineers that worked on these

because it really makes it sound like

you're walking next to somebody

or in a different place entirely.

Now my big issues with Apple Fitness Plus at large

is just needing to be in the Apple ecosystem

and this definitely affects Time to Walk,

because if you're not using Apple's headphones,

it's just kind of a pain to have to manually connect

your Bluetooth headphones to your watch,

and then say you get a phone call on your iPhone

while you're walking, you have to manually your headphones

to your iPhone and then back to your watch

when you're done with your call to continue your walk.

I just found it a big pain

and navigating the 40 millimeter Apple watch screen

to do all of this is not easy either,

but if you can put all of that aside

and maybe you're already all within this ecosystem anyway,

Time to Walk is really a great feature and every Monday,

the new mystery slab shows up on your watch face.

And that's something I actually started to look forward to.

(upbeat music)

- So I went all out for this review because one thing

I've learned in my life is that buying stuff

like exercise equipment

means that you're totally gonna use it, right?

So I got this trainer for my bike.

I also bought this here, yoga mat

and I also even bought these pants from Lululemon that,

I am never wearing these in public, these are hideous.

Now, I have to admit for an absolute beginner like me,

Apple's Fitness Plus classes

are kind of right at the perfect level.

I can start with the really easy stuff

and then I can see the slightly more difficult classes

just waiting there as a kind of a goal to step up to

and if what I'm doing is too difficult,