Aviron made a splash—so to speak—a few years ago with a high-end rowing machine that distracts you from the arduous chore of rowing with a library of fun and entertaining games. The brand that gamifies exercise has been growing ever since, and the new Aviron Fit Bike now hopes to do for cycling what it has already done for virtual kayaking. I sweated my way through this Aviron Fit Bike review for a couple of months to deliver this verdict: This is the most enjoyable indoor exercise bike I’ve ever tested or owned—and I’ve been through a lot of them. If you are serious about working out but need to be distracted from the pain in your glutes, there are few better bikes than the Aviron Fit Bike.
The Aviron Fit Bike tries to compel you to exercise with a universe of games and interactive ... [+]
The Aviron Fit Bike isn’t perfect, and it’s not the right indoor exercise bike for everyone. But it definitely hits most of the right notes. With a reinforced steel frame, it’s built like a tank, yet it’s still easy enough to move around the house. It has a gorgeous 22-inch touchscreen, and Aviron makes especially good use of it. Read on to learn everything you need to know if you are considering investing in the Aviron Fit Bike.
Aviron Fit Bike Design
At first glance, the Aviron Fit Bike looks a lot like any other indoor exercise bike, though there are some notable differences because this is not, in fact, a spin bike. Spin bikes have a large flywheel in front, for example, but the Fit has a smaller one in back. There’s a lot to unpack there, so we’ll get back to that in a moment.
Thanks to its modest footprint, you can fit the Fit Bike in a relatively small workout space, and it has wheels to help move it around (by default they’re in the back, but you can reconfigure the frame to put them in front). The star of the show is an adjustable 22-inch HD touchscreen which you can pivot up and down. You also get a pair of 10-watt speakers, two water bottle holders and a pair of 3-pound dumbbells with holders behind the seat.
By default, there are toe cages on the pedals—which I prefer, since I can slip my running shoes right into position—or you can swap in SPD pedals as well.
The Fit Bike is built around a free-spinning flywheel and electromagnetic resistance.
I also found the Fit to be very comfy to ride, with more adjustment points than you’ll typically find in most exercise bikes. The seat goes up and down as well as forward and back, to be expected, while the handlebar goes up and down, forward and back, and pivots at an angle. All that’s great, but I was especially pleased to see Aviron include a brief tutorial in the instructor-led-class section on the touchscreen to show you exactly how to adjust the seat and handles for the best ride. If you ever wondered whether you should slide the seat forward or back for optimum performance and comfort, now you can find out.
The Aviron Fit Bike is highly adjustable, including three ways to position the handlebars.
The steel frame seems ruggedly built for the long haul, and Aviron’s 10-year frame warranty suggests it won’t fail anytime soon. It’s designed for heights from five-feet-one inch to six-feet-eight-inches. I’m five-feet-ten inches, and it fit me like a glove. It also accommodates larger users, with a robust 350-pound weight capacity.
About That Flywheel
As I mentioned, the Fit places a somewhat small flywheel in back. Traditional spin bikes sync a giant flywheel to the pedals, which means the pedals spin up and down slowly. Aviron instead builds the bike around a smaller rear “freewheel”—you can start and stop pedaling on a dime while the freewheel maintains momentum to do its own thing. That means you can coast, like you would with a real bike, without feeling sudden deceleration on the pedals.
The Aviron Fit Bike has nice styling flourishes, such as the angular frame encasing the flywheel.
Personally, I love the rear placement of the freewheel, since I have a history of sweating all over the front flywheel on other bikes, which inevitably causes rust and gunk to accumulate.
Moreover, the Fit Bike uses electromagnetic resistance, which allows for more or less instantaneous changes in resistance—you can use the arrow buttons on the control panel or directly tap a number on the touchscreen to dial in one of the 16 levels of resistance (which Aviron labels onscreen as 10-160). This is in contrast to the magnetic resistance found in most spin bikes, which has moving parts (the magnets need to change their distance from the flywheel to vary the resistance) and the change in resistance lags behind when you make your selection.
Aviron Fit Bike Display
The bike itself looks great and features innovative design flourishes like the freewheel and electromagnetic resistance, but the star of the show is probably what’s happening on the 22-inch HD display.
In short, the bike comes chock full of experiences designed to distract you from the fact that you’re exercising. And there are a lot of options here: games, streaming video apps, music, interactive scenic rides and instructor-led classes. I didn’t think I’d be especially interested in most of this; I typically set my iPad on my bike’s media tray and just watch Netflix while I work out. And you can certainly zone out to TV on the Fit Bike, as it includes all the major streaming channels like YouTube, YouTube TV, Netflix, Max, Hulu and others—even TikTok and Kindle, so you can read books from your Kindle library while working out if you like.
The Aviron Fit Bike's display is chock full of experiences, from streaming apps to games to a "time ... [+]
But I was surprised by how much fun and how completely engaging the games turned out to be. There’s Skyquest, in which you get to fly around the sky, varying your pedal speed to go through rings at different altitudes. There are games in which you go fishing, fight pirate ships, shoot at aliens, play the classic brick-breaking game Breakout (the paddle shrinks or grows in response to your pedaling speed) and much more. Even better, you can play some of these games in multiplayer mode, and all the games have their own levels and leaderboards. In short, every time you return to a game, there’s a new challenge, even within games you’ve been playing a while.
These games also explain why Aviron built the bike around a freewheel and electromagnetic resistance. Says Inessa Karlinsky, CMO and co-founder of Aviron, “if you are playing an actual game, you want to shoot that bug, get that point. You're going to want to speed up or slow down and change your cadence so that you have full control over your machine, which is essentially your game controller.”
The bike itself—and specifically your pedaling speed—is the controller that lets you play a wide ... [+]
And while the games are surprisingly engaging, there’s so much more. Aviron offers you dozens of scenic rides to choose from all around the world. And there are a slew of classes you can take as well. Temper your expectations here: Classes aren’t live or interactive, but there’s a decently sized library of them and I found that they made for a great change of pace from blasting aliens. You can race against other people or AI, and even against older versions of yourself.
One game mode that’s coming soon—Pros Vs Joes—let’s you compete against actual professional cyclers. Karlinsky says this game’s arrival (described as “coming soon” on the bike’s display) is imminent (probably by the time you read this review), and she adds that Aviron’s development cycle means “there will always be fresh things to come back to. We usually release three or so games per year; we have a huge development team that does all the games from scratch and we're always looking to expand that experience.”
If you prefer to listen to your own music while you play, that’s also an option. You can connect to your Spotify or Apple Music account and stream your favorite music atop whatever activity you’ve chosen, whether it’s games, classes or scenic rides.
Tying all this together is the fact that Aviron awards you experience points for your time on the bike, no matter what you’re doing. Points add up whether you’re playing Skyquest or watching the British Baking Show on Netflix, and those points can be applied to enhancing your experience on the bike (such as by “buying” custom avatars).
Aviron Fit Bike Workout Experience
All that adds up to a superb workout experience. Every time I climb on the bike, I can have a different ride—I can catch up on my favorite streaming show, play a game or take a class (among a bevy of other options). You can even just tap the Quick Start option and start pedaling right away while blasting a Spotify playlist.
The bike is comfy to ride and super configurable, but because of the chain drive, it’s also noticeably louder than any standard magnetic-resistance spin bike I’ve ever ridden before. I wasn’t expecting the sound the very first time I climbed on and worried something was actually wrong with the machine, but now that I know what to expect, it’s honestly not that bad. And Aviron believes that the sound of the chain is outweighed by its virtues: “It gives you much better traction, so you don't have belt slippage if you're going up to higher resistance levels. And it really gives you that on the road feel that we're trying to mimic,” Karlinsky told me.
In any event, the audio from the speakers easily masks the sound. I also love that the bike includes Bluetooth audio, so I can wear my noise-cancelling AirPods Pro as well.
Unfortunately, the drive leads to one limitation I didn’t love. Because the pedals are not synchronized to the flywheel, I found it essentially impossible to ride standing up, which I like to do when pushing myself on a spin bike. Is it possible to ride out of the saddle? I’m not sure, but I am certainly not able to pull it off. As soon as I stand up, the pedals bottom out and I can’t restart without sitting down. Maybe this is more about my lack of coordination, but I found the Fit to be entirely too awkward and uncomfortable out of the saddle. I asked Karlinsky about this, and she told me that it’s largely a question of resistance. “When you have the resistance up a little bit higher, that's when you can really get up out of the saddle and it feels a little bit more natural.” Perhaps, but it didn’t really work for me.
That said, getting nearly instantaneous changes in resistance by tapping the controls on-screen is cool and feels so much more responsive than spinning the resistance dial on my old exercise bike. I was initially disappointed by the lack of any resistance controls on the handlebars—the touchscreen was the only way to change resistance. But recently, Aviron released the optional Bike Quick Adjust Remote which attaches to the handlebars, giving you the ability to tweak resistance without leaning in to the touchscreen. It’s a welcome addition for $99.
Aviron Fit Bike Final Verdict
After weeks of riding the Fit, it’s definitely earned its keep in my modest home gym. I love riding a bike for low-impact cardio on days when I don’t go to the gym, and the Aviron Fit makes that fun and comfortable, with a seemingly endless array of entertainment options to distract me from the fact that I’m working out.
Moreover, Aviron should be applauded for keeping the inevitable subscription program much more affordable than many of its competitors. Unlike Peleton’s $44 monthly subscription, for example, Aviron charges just $29 per month ($24/month if you are billed annually), and that includes unlimited profiles for everyone in the family. Need to pause or cancel your membership? You’ll lose access to the games and other entertainment features, but you can still set the resistance level, view your workout metrics and history, and more.
It’s hard for me to envision using the Fit Bike without the subscription, though; what makes this bike come alive is all the content and entertainment options. And if you’re on board with that, and can live with the unique challenge that the Fit poses for out-of-saddle-riding, then like me, I think you’ll love this bike.
How I Tested The Aviron Fit Bike
I used the Aviron FitBbike several days a week for two months, riding it as my main form of low-impact cardio on days when I didn’t go to the gym (I work out six days a week overall).
Each of my sessions with the Fit tended to last 20-30 minutes, conducted either before or after a weight training session. During each session I explored a different workout experience, including the Fit’s streaming apps, games, scenic rides and instructor-led training sessions. I came back to many of these on subsequent days to see what level progression and repeat visits were like.
Before all that, though, I followed the instructions in the setup video to configure the seat and handlebar positioning for an optimum exercise experience. I also set up the Fit Bike with both Apple AirPods Pro and Bose Ultra Open Bluetooth earbuds, and I used the built-in speakers. I signed into a number of streaming apps with my personal accounts to make sure the experience of streaming video on the bike was roughly analogous to using similar apps on my iPad or TV.
Through all of this, I took notes on the quality of the apps and games, the user experience of getting set up and using the bike day-to-day, along with comfort, ease of use and the quality of the actual workout.
My Expertise
Not only have I been a technology journalist since the 1990s, racking up hundreds of published feature articles and hands-on product reviews at publications like CNET, PCWorld, TechHive and Insider, but I am very serious about my personal fitness and have maintained a home gym for years, building it as my weight training and cardio needs have evolved.
As the executive editor at Forbes Vetted, I have the opportunity to write about products and categories in which I have particular interest, experience and expertise. I have reviewed home fitness products like the Tempo Studio and Fiture “workout mirrors,” for example, and have also evaluated the best workout mirrors overall. That’s not all; I’ve also rounded up the best spin bikes on my hunt for the best indoor exercise bike. I also cover outdoor gear, such as my frequently updated best electric bike roundup.
When I am not writing about fitness products, I work with all of the site’s category editors, including Cam Vigliotta, editor of the gear section, to ensure our content is high quality, accurate and useful for readers. (And I make time to write about some of my other passions, like the best pizza ovens.)
