Review: NordicTrack X22i

Call it Alpenfreude: It is a very specific kind of painful pleasure, to be running on a treadmill in a dim garage while a gray, drizzly, Pacific Northwestern spring marches on interminably outside. As I ran, my husband peeped in the doorway, his interest piqued by the sounds piping in off the screen.

“Sean!” I puffed. “I want...to go...to Zell am See! It’s been...populated...since Roman times. Monastery…monks!”

He peeped over my shoulder at NordicTrack’s X22i’s screen, where a tall, blonde, trainer ran on the scenic banks of Lake Zell, reminding me to maintain my form while dropping in factoids about this important tourist hub in the Austrian Alps. Then he—my husband, not the trainer—looked at me, shook his head, and walked away.

I don’t care. Working out with the iFit trainer on the NordicTrack X22i is the most fun I’ve had by myself in my garage in a long time.

No one was more surprised than I was when indoor cycling became a craze. The stationary bike has always seemed the most noncommittal piece of exercise equipment, something that you ride while reading, eating chips, and waiting for your roommate to finish her capoeira class, not that anyone would ever do that. But suddenly, everyone was hooting and hollering in dimly lit rooms, wearing specialized sportwear. It was puzzling.

Peloton capitalized on the fad spectacularly, with a high-end piece of studio equipment that came with a $39/month streaming subscription so that you didn’t even have to leave your house. This year, they stand to replicate the bike’s success with the Tread, an equally addictive treadmill, which will come with a similar streaming service.

If nothing else, Peloton has shown that there is still a demand for in-home fitness equipment. But what about the rest of us, for whom the idea of listening to someone shout at you while you’re trapped in a dark room, staring at other sweaty strangers, sounds like your own personal version of Hell? There is the NordicTrack X22i treadmill, which is now bundled with an iFit Coach subscription for one year.

Make no mistake—while it’s nearly a grand less than the Peloton Tread, the X22i still costs a lot of money. And it's big. And heavy. As a petite woman, I would not buy a product like this without the assembly service. Even the delivery people struggled with getting the 410-pound box into my house.

“Do you think you could ask the manufacturers to make it a little lighter?” one of them joked, when I told them why I was testing it. Just one more expert opinion to consider, NordicTrack.

But once it is assembled, it is a beautiful machine, almost luxurious to run on. The belt is 22 inches wide, a few inches wider than the treadmills I run on at the gym, with sleek, heavy metal arms and curved supports for the display. It's also 60 inches long, which is more than enough length for most runners.

The belt rises to a 40-percent incline and a 6-percent decline. 40-percent is unbelievably high, too high to walk or run on without gripping the arm supports. And I’ve never run on a treadmill that allows you to simulate the ease of running downhill.

The X22i can support users of up to 300 pounds. I am nowhere near that heavy, but the SMART-response drive did seem to have considerable sound- and vibration-dampening capabilities. The X22i didn’t shake or rattle at all, even when I was sprinting at top speed, and it was quiet enough to not bother my family playing in the next room over.

It has an embedded fan with adjustable intensity, which I ended up using a lot. It also comes with a Bluetooth-enabled chest heart-rate monitor, as well as a wildly inaccurate EKG hand-grip heart-rate monitor on the arms. My Garmin measured my heart rate at a sweaty 150-160 bpm, but the X22i's hand monitor never registered my heart rate as anything above a calm, pleasant 73 bpm.

Two tinny digitally-amplified speakers pipe in music and your trainer’s coaching, and it also has an auxiliary music port in case you’d like to use them to listen to your own tunes.

Most importantly, the X22i has a 22-inch interactive touchscreen (other models have a less-immersive 7-inch or 10-inch touchscreen). I loved the big screen, which had satisfying haptic feedback, 1080p and HD-streaming.

I found the screen to be the most pleasant way to interact with iFit. You can look at workout stats like time, incline, and calories burned, or you can switch the view to check how much of the workout you have left to complete. You can sync your iFit app to a proprietary iFit wearable to track sleep and steps counted, check your step counts and calories burned, set goals and schedule workouts. You can also export iFit’s data to Strava and other apps.

iFit also has a social media platform, which I promptly set to private, and a library of mobile workouts, like as a yoga series in Thailand or a strength series in Italy.

The TV does have an HDMI port, if you’d like to watch it on another television in your room. You might want to consider this. While the screen does rotate to accommodate to users of different heights, at 5’2”, it was still a little tall for me. I liked the convenience of being able to place the machine wherever I wanted, but the screen angle did end up blowing out a few of the beautiful location shots in the pre-recorded iFit Coach training sessions.

NordicTrack also offers several warranties, including a frame, motor, and deck warranty, a 6-year parts and electronics warranty, and a 3-year labor warranty—all of them important for a machine this expensive. If I wouldn’t assemble it myself, I definitely wouldn’t try to fix it myself.

As Peloton discovered, with indoor fitness equipment, the software just might be more important than the hardware. No matter how nice the machine is, it’s just another dust-gatherer and clothes-hanger if there isn’t a compelling reason to get on it, day after day after day.

For many, that reason is addictive studio classes. But for misanthropic hermits such as myself, there needs to be another reason—and that is iFit’s prerecorded workouts, filmed with world-class trainers all over this beautiful planet of ours.

It must have been expensive to send these people to all these locations, even though for $15/month it must be considerably less than streaming multiple live classes a day. The recorded sessions are undeniably compelling. There are 1,400 of them and counting, filmed in locations all over Europe, North and South America, all over Asia.

iFit Coach does offer multiple training series, set in one place, to give you some continuity while achieving your fitness goals. You can also sort by preference, like if you need a HIIT workout, a studio class, or a running or hiking series. That said, in the weeks that I ran on the X22i, I just ended up scrolling through the workout library to find beautiful locations that fit my time requirements.

These are often unintentionally hilarious. Many of the most scenic places in the world are not workout-friendly. A trainer gets death stares from tourists strolling along the Cinque Terre; another dodges backpackers hiking on narrow cliffside trails to Macchu Picchu. One trainer fell into an elephant wallow. On a causeway to Antelope Island, the trainer admitted that she was doing a series of fartleks in 90-degree heat, through bugs that were so dense that I could see them splattering on the camera lens.

But personally, I found these mini-travelogues to be much better motivation than a class. I ran through a palace! Apparently, I would love Austria. Who knew? iFit also offers a mapping feature that uses Google Street View, but these are much less effective as they only compile stills, rather than video. I’ve always wanted to run the Dipsea Race, but the pre-programmed Google View trail run was boring and disorienting.

It’s annoying that iFit can’t sync to a wearable that I’m already, ugh, wearing. My Garmin is spendy enough without having to buy yet another proprietary wearable with an already-expensive piece of fitness equipment. At 70.2 inches long and 39.6 inches wide, the X22i also takes up an enormous amount of space in my house.

The search function in iFit’s workout library could stand to be improved. If I have forty free minutes in the day, I don’t want to spend ten of them scrolling through different workouts, searching for a run that is under thirty minutes.

And of course, a treadmill can’t replace the experience of running outside. After running on a treadmill for a month, my Achilles’ tendons have started to become pretty tight. Your form changes when you’re moving on a belt instead of running on solid ground.

It’s hard to tell if a NordicTrack/iFit bundle really will be effective at making people work out regularly. Many fitness trackers end up in junk drawers, and many pieces of in-home fitness equipment, no matter how nice, end up as displays for kid artwork. Even though the iFit Coach subscription is relatively affordable, I don't know if I'll still find the workouts as compelling in a year or two, which is how long it might take (optimistically!) to pay off an expensive machine like this.

But for me, once I found a workout series and a location that I liked (shout out again to lovely Austria!), beautiful videos and hilarious trainers made for a compelling incentive to hop on the treadmill—at least until the sun comes out.