Last year I ventured into building my own workout area at the house, and it all started with a $400 investment to put together a DIY spin bike. It has been 9 months and over 150 rides of my Sunny SF-B1002 Bike and moofit cadence sensor. They continue to go strong and I love them. Looking back, I did a lot of research up front about what bike to get, how heavy the fly wheel should be, and what type of resistance. The Sunny bike seemed like a great fit as it has leather resistance, a 49 lbs. fly wheel, and super sturdy.

Since then, the Yosuda bikes have continued to rise to the top of the charts with a felt pad and 35 lbs. flywheel coming in at just $230! So, I thought to myself how does this bike stack up and could I have saved an additional $100? Well, the good folks over at Yosuda sent me a bike! The YBOO1 that offers these features and has a 270 LBS capacity. Best of all they are giving everyone free shipping and an extra 5% off with coupon code MOTZ at yosudabikes.com. The bike arrived this week, and I gave it a full breakdown. Here we go!

Construction & Build

This bike comes with everything you need to assemble it. I have built a bike before, but I am still impressed that it took me only 20 minutes to put together.

The bike and the 35lbs fly wheel doesn't feel that heavy picking it up and wheeling it around. The bike overall is a good build, which is impressive. I am 5 foot 9 inches and 165 lbs., and I felt simply fine standing on it riding. More on my thoughts later, but let's get to the features.

Features

Let's talk features of this bike! Just like my Sunny bike it has the essentials and not necessarily more.

Adjustability of the seats and handlebars is notch based, which means that it isn't fine grain control over, but I did fine the height simply fine for me.

The cage pedals are just that, nothing fancy, but work and can always be upgraded to an SPD if you wanted to. The bottle holder has an interesting placement in the center of the bike that is more like my real bike that I ride. If you have a large water bottle then it may get in your way a little bit when adjusting the resistance, but it will hold your water fine.

There is a Digital Monitor that will read out the time, distance, speed, calories, and an odometer.

However, the real thing that you will want is a small cadence sensor (such as the moofit) to attach to the crank arm and then have the RPM read back with Peloton or my free app My Cadence!

As you can see an additional perk over the Sunny bike is that it has a tablet holder built right in. I have a smaller and older iPad that I have been using exclusively for spin classes on my Sunny and it fits simply fine and is overall sturdy. The holder is optional though and does get a bit in the way of the handlebar, however you can remove it and get a different holder if you wanted to, but it is there and included!

Lastly the bike seat is a nice large seat and I like it! Seats are always preference, but you can always adjust this and put a different seat on.

Overview

Now that I had the bike together it was time to give it a spin...literally :). My first impression of this bike is "alright". I am so used to the 49 lbs. fly wheel of the sunny bike that this one feels exceptionally light. The felt pad is physical resistance, which means you can make it extremely tough to pedal the bike. The fine grain control over how much resistance doesn't really seem to exist on this bike. It feels like it is either free spinning, in the middle, or extremely hard to pedal. The leather pad on the Sunny seems to have many more turns and more levels of resistance overall.

That said, the bike still felt sturdy to get on. Going up and down between sitting and standing position felt fine, but I was not a fan of the handlebars. They are just too close together when you are in standing position and when you are sitting down the tablet stand gets in the way of your hand position. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but I wish the handlebars were different.

So, who is this bike for? This bike is not for someone that is going to do intense spin classes on Peloton or Apple Fitness+. It is for the casual rider that just wants to ride a bike inside. You will get resistance, you will sweat, and you can totally do spin classes, but don't expect that fine grain control. For $230 it is a good deal, and we will totally use it in the house to ride bikes side by side each other in the garage, but I will still be sticky with my Sunny for my main spin classes.

More Yosuda Bikes

Yosuda keeps their offerings simple with the YBOO1 offering a 270 lbs. capacity, 35 lbs. fly wheel and felt pad. The YB007A is a bit larger with a 330 lbs. capacity, a 40 lbs. fly wheel, and overall is a bit larger, yet coming in only at $280. Not to mention that 5% off and free shipping with coupon code MOTZ at yosudabikes.com. Of course, they do offer bikes on Amazon, but their site has some great deals and my exclusive coupon code. Feel free to reach out with questions on Twitter.

As winter approaches and the pandemic rages on and on I know I will be indoors even more than ever. Even though I am excited for cross-country skiing, I know I will miss the day (which is already here) that I am not going to be able to hop on my bike and go for a ride outside. I have always loved spin classes and pre-pandemic I used to go several times a month to in person classes for exercise. I have always thought about going all in on a Peloton, however I couldn't justify the price. However, now seems like a great time to bring spin classes to the home. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that I decided to go a different route and build my own spin bike for under $400. I got all the goods last week and put it together!

Spin Bike Built!! https://t.co/t8w7QGNBMk #ref #SunnyBike pic.twitter.com/sM0L5S1HMT

— James Montemagno (@JamesMontemagno) December 3, 2020

In addition to the Sunny SF-B1002 spin bike (300) I also picked up a cadence sensor from Moofit ($20), a seat cover ($15), and an iPad holder ($13). All of this comes together and enables me to have a drop-dead simple spin bike with great resistance with the ability to see my cadence (rotations per minute).

What is really cool is that you can use all sorts of different apps to get spin classes at home and Peloton for sure is the top. For $13 a month you can subscribe to Peloton Digital and get live and recorded classes. A full peloton bike has all sorts of sensors, but if you have your own bike and use the app it can connect to a cadence sensor and a heart rate monitor to give you more data.

If you use an Apple Watch + Apple Fitness the Peloton app can synchronize your workouts after your rides directly to your Health app and they will show up in your Fitness app. This is awesome, but now you must decide... synchronize the data from Peloton or manually start and stop a workout each ride. I like numbers and I like accuracy, so I did some experiments to see what stats are better and more accurate. So, I took the same 20 minute ride setting the cadence as close as I could to see what the numbers would shake out to, and the results were interesting.

Peloton App + Cadence Sensor

The benefit of using the Peloton app is that you can connect a cadence sensor, which gives the app additional data as to how your ride went. If you don't own a separate heart rate monitor this may be your default option that you use and is what I did right away. My 20 minute ride went great, but I was shocked when it said I only burned 129 calories!

At this point the Peloton app has my age/sex/height/weight, so I figured it would be relatively accurate. However, while I was doing this ride, I was also ran an "indoor cycling" workout on my Apple Watch and it gave vastly different results...

Apple Watch Fitness (Indoor Cycling)

I track about everything I do on my Apple Watch and have really enjoyed the statistics that it provides. One advantage of tracking an indoor cycling activity on the Apple Watch is that it has a plethora data that you provide and sensors including your heart rate. When I did the ride above, I also started an indoor cycling activity and as you can see it was vastly different tracking 270 active calories and 303 total calories.

One thing you will note here is that the ride was 1 minute and 18 seconds longer than what the Peloton app says. The Peloton app does not consider any warmup or cool down you do before the ride starts. If it is a 20-minute ride you will have a read out of 20 minutes.

I was surprised that the calorie count was so different, I mean it is more than double! I did feel that the calorie count of 270 from the Apple Watch was more accurate, but seeing they were so different I didn't know what to believe. While, I could never provide the Apple Watch with my cadence, I could provide the Peloton app with my Heart Rate... so I did one more test.

Peloton App + Cadence + Heart Rate Monitor

I don't own a separate heart rate monitor, but I do own an Apple Watch.... which has a heart rate monitor which I just talked about. A problem is that you can't "cast" your heart rate directly to another device "out of the box". It didn't take me long to find an app on the App Store that would allow me to "cast" my watch from my phone to the Peloton app on my iPad. The brilliant HeartCast app is completely free with no ads and simply JUST WORKS! It is amazing! One thing to note is that only one app can have direct access to your heart rate at a time on the Apple Watch. That means you have to decide to cast your heart rate to the Peloton app or do an indoor cycling activity in the fitness app. You can't do both at the same time, which is fine, because I am looking for a single source of stats for my rides.

So, with HeartCast streaming my heart rate and my cadence sensor going to town I set off on my ride. And what would you know my calorie burn completely changed and clocked in at 296 burned!

Again, the Peloton ride is only 20 minutes, so it didn't take into consideration my warmup and cool down, but it is very comparable to my Apple Fitness activity that I did. One bonus that you do get with this method is that the Peloton app will show your "heart rate zones" over your ride:

Wrap-up... what to use?!?

So, what does this all mean and what should you use to track your ride? The conclusion that you should not use the Health app sync from Peloton unless you have a heart rate monitor. The stats are very generic and not accurate to the number of calories that you are truly burning.

If you have an Apple Watch I feel as though it is just easier to track your rides directly on the fitness app by starting an indoor cycling activity. The stats are similar, and it has the advantage of tracking your warmup and cool down activity.

While I do find it easy to cast your heart rate to your iPad with HeartCast it is another step between you and your ride. That being said... if you are really really into your stats and want the data to be the same between your Peloton app and your Apple Fitness app then you should ensure you use a heart rate monitor (or HeartCast) to use with the app. The extra bonus is that you get those zones for your heart rate.

I hope that you found this pretty interesting and I would be curious what your experience is and how you track your rides. Hit me up on Twitter @JamesMontemagno.

Hero photo by Humphrey Muleba via Unsplash

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