It looks like any home exercise bike. You know, the kind that’s compact enough to fit at home, sturdy enough for vigorous workouts, and with a screen out front for streaming video classes. Unlike the current crop of connected spin bikes, though, the Carol isn’t meant provide a Peloton-like experience, instead delivering a uniquely efficient workout you can’t get from other exercise bikes in the market.
An AI-powered exercise bike, the name is actually an acronym for “CARdiovascular Optimization Logic,” which hints at the kind of smarts it brings to your regular workouts. Specifically, the bike uses your biometric data to customize a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout that’s designed to get your desired results, with no need to join classes, keep up with instructors, or endure long riding sessions.
The Carol looks like any standard stationary bike, with a large flywheel on the rear, an adjustable saddle, and an adjustable handlebar, so you can tailor the fit to accommodate your individual proportions. It records all your metrics, too, from cadence and power to heart rate and more, so it’s able to collect a good load of information to help track your progress. While it’s not mentioned on the product page, we imagine you can use it like any offline exercise bike when not connected online, so you should be able to mount the bike, adjust the resistance, and hit the pedals while starting at an empty screen.
Of course, the whole point of the device is to use the onboard AI to make your workouts more efficient. As such, when you first use it, it will prompt you answer a round of questions and have you go through a series of brief sessions, essentially allowing it to get a good read of your overall fitness level. From there, it will design a workout that lasts just 8 minutes and 40 seconds, with the device handling all resistance adjustments on the fly. Instead of standard HIIT workouts, by the way, they created their own under the name REHIT, which stands for Reduced Exertion High-intensity Interval Training.
The Carol’s workouts are all meant to last that same time duration, by the way, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re out of shape, in good shape, or endowed with the body of a Greek god – it only requires you to exercise for 8 minutes and 40 seconds each session. It achieves this by varying the intensity of the workouts, so more advanced users will be asked to perform more intense sequences. According to the outfit, the AI designs the workouts so precisely that using it three times a week for just eight weeks will increase your cardiorespiratory fitness by 12 percent, reduce your risk of Type 2 diabetes by 62 percent, and add another two years of health to your lifespan.
How does working out less than 10 minutes a day get you those results? The outfit claims their REHIT workouts are very effective at triggering the afterburn effect, essentially boosting your metabolism much higher compared to traditional workouts. Specifically, those 8 minutes and 40 seconds of cardio are supposed to effectively give you the same benefits as a 45 minute run.
How much does an AI-powered workout cost? Quite a bit, apparent, as pricing for the Carol starts at $2,395, with an additional $12 monthly subscription fee after the first three months. They do offer a trial period, so you can field test it before making a longer-term commitment.
