Full disclosure: It is an exaggeration, but not by much, to say that Peloton saved me in the early days of the pandemic. As schools closed, offices shut down, and routines were upended, the workouts I found inside Peloton’s $12-per-month app offered me an affordable, convenient escape.

The app worked on my iPhone and iPad. I could throw down a yoga mat in my bedroom, quickly pick a 20-minute bodyweight or yoga routine, and lock the door. The songs were irresistible, a constant stream of catchy throwbacks. The exercises were intense but engaging—as were the Peloton instructors, many of whom became celebrities in their own right.

I know that Peloton tries to project a premium image (with off-and-on success) and that the Bike+ and the Tread+ are not cheap. But personally, being a Peloton subscriber feels like buying Ferrero Rocher in bulk at Costco—it’s nice but accessible. $12 per month for a workout app is very reasonable, and I don’t even have to wear shoes!

Now there's a new way to Peloton. The Guide is a $295 set-top device with a movement-tracking camera in it, and it's brought to life by a $39-per-month all-inclusive subscription (the introductory price is $24 per month) that unlocks a whole library of camera-powered workouts. The Guide watches you do your reps, noting your form and helping you keep count, and then uses the data it collects to recommend other workouts you can do to improve your fitness. 

Yes, it's another piece of pricey hardware from the already premium-aligned Peloton. But the Guide and its subscription fee still costs less than many gym memberships. And unlike its similar competitor—Apple's Fitness+ service—you can sweat through Guide workouts even if you don't own an Apple Watch.

The Guide itself is a little fabric-wrapped pill that’s about 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall. The manual explains that you can set it down on your TV stand or mount it on top of your television. Mounting it on top of the TV is probably the better move, because the Guide needs to see both you and your mat on the floor. You can angle the camera slightly, but the Guide can’t see you properly if it’s positioned too low to the ground or if you’re set up too close to it.

The manual warns you to not backlight yourself, but my TV faces a wall of windows and the Guide's camera didn’t have trouble tracking me with a wall of sunlight blasting into the room behind me. In that respect, it’s much more effective than my laptop camera is during Zoom meetings.

The box plugs into your TV with an HDMI cable, which may be annoying if you already have things like a Chromecast, an Apple TV, or a gaming PC plugged in. The good news is that the image quality is decent. The Guide's 12-megapixel camera streams in 4K and looks great on my Vizio 4K OLED. There is a barely perceptible lag as the Guide tracks your routine and displays what it sees in the corner of the screen, which you would probably only notice if you, too, were someone who prides themselves on slavishly following workout routines with gamer-trained eyes.  I could see myself clearly from six feet away on a 65-inch TV, but it might be harder to see yourself if your set is smaller.

Like all of Peloton’s products, the Guide is remarkably easy to set up. It took only a few minutes to calibrate the Guide's movement-tracking feature by performing some body movements, and just a few minutes more to set up the onboard mics to accept my voice controls.

It also comes with a dedicated remote. The squishy, waterproof buttons work fine, but the remote is not a pleasure to use. Also, the Guide's volume control didn't work for me, so you may have to keep your television remote on hand as well.

With a Guide subscription, you'll see a list of strength workouts that take advantage of Peloton's Movement Tracker, a feature that's exclusive to this hardware. These workouts display the Movement Tracker logo, which lets you know that the session is enhanced by the Guide's camera and its computer vision powers. (Guide workouts are all strength training sessions for now, but the company plans to expand to other categories like yoga or Pilates later.)

What, you may ask, is the difference between working out with the help of the Movement Tracker and doing the workouts on one's own? Well, lots of people cheat. Even the most scrupulous ones. It’s not on purpose, but I arch my back during overhead tricep dips, instead of standing up straight. I poke my butt into the air during pushups. (“This is not a butt museum!” chided instructor Jess Sims.) Being able to see yourself makes it easier to check your form.

As you do each set of reps, a little bit more of the Movement Tracker graphic gets filled in until you hear a ding, and the set is completed. At the end of each workout, Guide also shows you the parts of the body you just worked. As I checked my cumulative workout summary, I discovered something else that I hadn’t known in over two years of using the Peloton app: I always pick full-body workouts, but those focus much more on my core and glutes. Seeing the imbalance after about a week made me start prioritizing my chest and arms.

As I was testing the Guide, my 4-year-old was on spring break. Both he and my dog find my workouts irresistible, dancing in front of me to the music (the dog) or rolling on my mat and trying to lick my face (my son.) The Guide and its Movement Tracker software managed this chaos remarkably well. Out of a dozen sets, the system only counted one or two as incomplete, even though my companions were moving around in the frame the entire time. Voice recognition also worked well. Guide heard me shout “OK PELOTON PAUSE!” over barking and the Encanto soundtrack playing right next to it.

As my colleague Lauren Goode explained in her in-depth look at the Guide, Peloton is taking privacy into account with this release. All of the movement-tracking data gets crunched on the device itself instead of on a cloud server, so images and audio of your body and your home are kept off the internet. You can slide the front cover over the camera lens when the Guide is not in use, and use an onscreen toggle option to disable the microphones. However, Peloton's privacy policy notes that in the future, the company may use the Guide's camera to collect biometric data about you, including facial scans. Of course, you can always unplug it when you’re not using it.

Peloton spokesperson Amelise Lane noted that, in the last quarter, Peloton had 2.77 million Connected Fitness subscribers (people who owned a Bike+ or a Tread+) and 862,000 digital-only subscribers (people who use the app to work out with their own equipment). As a member of that latter group, I’m in the minority. But it's a significant minority.

In a world full of workout devices that are trying to keep you addicted to healthy habits, Peloton’s special sauce, as Goode puts it, has always been its software—not only the company's engaging exercises, the great music choices, and the personal magnetism of its instructors, but also how well Peloton's apps are organized. Out of all the apps I’ve tried, only Peloton’s seems to understand how busy, ordinary people lead their lives.

Guide appeals squarely to that demographic. I prefer running and biking outside, and I’m probably never going back to a gym or taking another in-person exercise class ever again. But I do need reminders to work out my arms and keep my elbows in to my sides during pushups. It's a little annoying that the Guide hardware makes working out less convenient than just using the Peloton Digital app, in that it keeps me tied to my living room instead of, say, my bedroom where the door locks. And the exclusive Movement Tracker workouts are available only on whatever screen the Guide is plugged into; I can't access those workouts on my phone or iPad.  

Still, those are relatively minor inconveniences. $295 isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper, smaller, and less ostentatious than a stationary bike. If you think a $200 fitness tracker or a $50-per-month gym membership is a reasonable expense—and if you’re also a Peloton addict, of course—you will probably want to check out the Guide. Or, more accurately, let it check you out.