iFit Coach is a shameless way to suck money and provide mediocre functionalityiFit is really a disappointment on a number of levels ( % -55.00) Aside from the exorbitant cost, which they claim as similar to the cost of a gym membership (which is total BS, because a gym membership includes equipment, staff, building, etc), the iFit workouts are not intuitive or realistic, your “personal trainer” is just a recording, and it would appear that Proform, Nordictrac, and other brands that make iFit the brains of their machines are really more interested in long term sucking from your wallet than building functionality into the equipment they designed ( % 9.27) This really comes home to roost when you see offers like getting a treadmill "free" when you sign up for years of iFit Coach - umm ( % 23.33) ( % 0.00) ( % 0.00) do the math - years of iFit Coach is about the cost of a nice, new treadmill ( % 36.82) ( % 0.00) ( % 0.00) So it's pretty clear that their goal is to hook you - but don't be duped - iFit is really not worth it, and when my "free" year is up, I'll be running on my "dumb" treadmill wondering why I spent $ for a dumb treadmill ( % -3.57) ( % 0.00) ( % 0.00)
I'm going to address a number of issues here, starting with the lack of control over your workout time: My wife and I allocate min for a workout each morning, alternating between our iFit enabled treadmill, and our older technology elliptical ( % 8.33) Focusing here on iFit Coach and my iFit account only (i ( % 0.00) e ( % 0.00) , I'm not reviewing the machines - this is about iFit, although the machines are far too dependent on iFit)…
WORKOUT TIME: The iFit library does not provide a search capability (that I can find) that will let me search for minute workouts on either the treadmill screen or online - instead, I have to scroll through hundreds of "suggested" workouts and try to find one that is close to minutes ( % 10.00) Why does this matter to me? By the time I’ve found a workout, my wife (who is on the elliptical), has already started her workout (we workout together) ( % 0.00) It wastes my time trying to find a workout, because the search tools are both non-existent and SLOW (I'll talk more about how SLOW the interface is later) ( % -6.00) I do have the option to create my own minute workout, but that is a manual process (which should be inherent in the machine, but it’s not) ( % 60.00) I'll talk more about creating workouts next ( % 25.00)
MAKING YOUR OWN WORKOUT: I have a large screen computer monitor in my office, so creating a time-based workout on my iFit account ought to be easy, right? Wrong! The user interface is cumbersome, doesn’t consider the limitations of your machine, and the font is tiny ( % 15.14) My treadmill inclines between - and + degrees ( % 0.00) The slider on the web page used to create a workout goes from - to + degrees, but the font size and small graph creation area make it very difficult to see and manipulate the graph ( % -45.00) My iFit account should know what machines I have and should tailor the user interface to my machine (or at least give me the option to do that) ( % -30.00) The graphical interface lets me move graph lines around, but the graph area itself is only inches tall on my large screen, and since my treadmill only covers an degree incline range, and the website covers a degree incline range, the actual graph area I can use is less than one third of this – or only /” tall – so picking your desired data point has to have a lot more mouse precision than it should require ( % 6.85) You can move the graph lines above and below the usable range of the treadmill, but the treadmill can’t go there ( % 0.00) So you really have to spend TOO MUCH TIME creating a workout because you are trying to put a bunch of data points within a small band ( % 5.00)
CANNOT EDIT A WORKOUT YOU CREATED: OK, the ability to create a workout lacks good user interface, but once it’s created, you’re stuck with it! Even though you have to give the workout a name – once created, there is no tool to pull it back up and modify it, or copy it and create a variant of it ( % 45.83) Seriously??? So if I decide my workout is too hard, or too light, I can’t revisit it and change it – I have to start over! What sort of user interface is that? Since I can’t easily find minute workouts on iFit, at least let me create my own library of them and allow me to edit/copy them! And a bonus bonehead feature – once you create your workout, FINDING it isn’t easy either – you have to find the workout you created by searching in your iFit workout calendar ( % 17.02) Seriously? Why don’t they give me a library of workouts I created and then let me (from the treadmill) just touch which workout I want, rather than make me scroll through my calendar for “scheduled” workouts ( % -33.33)
OVERUSE OF INCLINE MOTOR ON GOOGLE STREET WORKOUTS: Google street view workout looks pretty, but clearly, the incline and the street views shown are unrelated, or weakly related, at best: I thought I’d program in a run I do sometimes in the “real world” in my neighborhood ( % 31.00) That was very easy to do, but there are a number of unrealistic things going on that make no sense, and detract from the workout ( % 3.17) First, the treadmill is constantly going up and down MUCH more than the real world ( % 15.89) I know the real world route, and there are long, gradual uphill sections that I know well, but the treadmill is going up and down as if the ground does that – which is distracting, but more sinister than that, I can tell you as an engineer that the incline motor is probably the weakest part of any treadmill, and it’s being needlessly overworked (maybe that is done on purpose so they can get even more money from you for repair or your next treadmill) ( % -0.07) The bottom line here is that most real world runs don’t have constantly changing inclines – certainly not to the degree going on here ( % 14.82) Another dumb thing about the street view runs is that in the real world if I run faster I complete the distance faster, but in the Google view, it didn’t seem to matter if I was walking at mph or running at mph, the workout still took minutes ( % -2.50) How does that make any sense? For the cost of iFit, you would think they could hire someone to do the math to show that a mile course doesn't take the same time when walking or running ( % 0.00)
The canned workouts you can choose from the iFit library are a mix of videos and still images ( % 0.00) I was hoping for more videos while running, but most appeared to be canned still images as you run ( % 50.00) I can live with that, but again, running faster doesn’t change how fast you see images, and as with the Google street runs, the treadmill is constantly going up and down, even though the terrain in the photo looks flat ( % 3.12)
REALLY SLOW ELECTRONICS!!!!! Despite the high cost for my Proform treadmill, the electronics and response time is pretty poor ( % -22.64) We keep the treadmill on / because to turn it off (switch at the base) it takes NINETY SECONDS to just boot up to where I can BEGIN to make selections ( % -80.00) Once it is finally on, then I have to change the user (assuming my wife last used the treadmill), and then there is another delay while my iFit account boots up ( % 0.00) THEN I have to find my workout (in the calendar, as noted above), it has to load, and FINALLY I can start working out ( % 0.00) By this time my wife, who is doing a minute workout on the elliptical beside me, is probably in her rd or th minutes of her workout… So we now leave the treadmill on all the time to at least cut out the boot delay – but now I’m wasting electricity, and I have a screen lighting the room all night ( % -30.00) Some of the slow response is probably because it is syncing to my iFit account over wifi, but honestly, I have a LOT of gadgets in my life that sync over wifi, and they are ALL a lot faster and more responsive ( % 26.67) The electronics built into the treadmill must have been designed in and are running on a clock speed of that vintage ( % 0.00)
IFit is plain and simple, a blatant money-making activity by Proform and NordicTrack to continue to make money after the machine is purchased – and to add insult to injury, you pay more for an iFit enabled machine ( % -5.36) Yes, most iFit enabled machines will work in manual mode even if you don’t have an iFit account, but what really irks me is that a machine with a computer inside won’t let me create/save my own workout, unless I pay an ungodly amount for a subscription to a nd rate membership that provides rd rate functionality and th rate speed ( % 43.33)
Here are some concerns about the future… I plan to ditch iFit once my “free one year” is up, but once it’s gone, I’ll just have a very expensive, but dumb, treadmill ( % -20.83) Clearly, Proform and Nordictrack (made by the same company) don’t focus on the functionality of their hardware, they want to sell you iFit, and make it painful to leave ( % -20.00) Yes, I will be able to manually control my treadmill later, and I’m told that there are workouts loaded into the treadmill itself (most of which are nowhere near my minute goal, or just are not my sort of run), but my ability to create my own minute workout will be gone (which is insane, because I should be able to save workouts I create without an iFit account!) ( % 18.93) So I might as well have bought a dumb treadmill at a much lower cost, and would have been happier with it ( % -8.75) The main reason I got the ProForm was that it goes to - degrees when running downhill, but once I ditch iFit, to use that incline I’ll have to hit the incline and speed buttons manually (while I’m running) – since there won’t be any way to pre-program that ( % 16.67) Have you ever been running at or miles an hour and attempted to hit a button while your hand was bobbing all around? Not easy, so I’ll probably not even change the incline much after starting a run ( % -0.56) On my old machine I hit degree incline and mph, and stayed there ( % 10.00)
Oh, and did I mention tiny font on the treadmill? I have to run with reading glasses on if I want to see anything! For a touch-screen display with letters the size of pencil tips, that is ridiculous!
My advice – do yourself a favor and buy a dumb treadmill – it costs less, and the electronics don’t tie to iFit’s limitations and speed ( % -23.96) I wish someone had written a reviewDate of experience: November , ( % 0.00)