Peloton has announced that it’s finally added a pause button for its on-demand classes for its Bike and Bike Plus devices, allowing users to temporarily pause workouts in the middle of a class and then resume them.
It’s a feature that bewilderingly hasn’t been available until today — and, technically, still isn’t even available on all of Peloton’s products, as the pause button is only rolling out to its cycling bikes for now. The Tread treadmill is set to get a similar update sometime “in the future” — but for now, you’ll have to do your runs all at once.
While it’s easy to joke at Peloton’s expense for the outsized deal the company is making over adding so small a feature, it is worth noting that adding a pause button to Peloton classes does involve a bit more thought behind it than simply just pausing and resuming the class.
That’s largely because of Peloton’s popular leaderboard and ranking system, which let customers compare how they’re doing in a particular workout against fellow Peloton users. Adding a pause button could sully the integrity of those metrics, allowing unscrupulous users to pause, catch a quick breather, and then resume the workout at maximum effort to skew their ranking.
Pausing a workout, however, will automatically cause users to lose their rank on the leaderboard (although all the other usual metrics, challenges, achievements, and personal records will still be unchanged). Paused users will still appear on the “Here Now” list in the app and receive high fives from other Peloton users, too.
Obviously, the new pause button only works for on-demand Peloton classes and not for live classes — Peloton is a powerful force, but freezing the forward motion of temporal space and reversing the entropic march toward the universe’s inevitable heath death remain beyond its capabilities. At least, for now.
