Review: Aviron Victory Treadmill

My daughter recently asked me what these white flecks were on the Aviron Victory Treadmill in her playroom. Dried oobleck, I told her—a corn starch slurry mixed with water. One of the neighborhood kids had hopped on to play a walking game on the treadmill while also playing with oobleck, and I didn't chase him off in time.

Can you imagine a treadmill that’s so easy to use and accessible that a 10-year-old might come over and beg to work out, for fun? That’s what the Aviron Victory Treadmill is. It reduces the barriers to entry for exercising, in one sense literally, because the deck is just 4 inches off the ground. It’s so easy to step on and off, and the games are so accessible, that I have trouble keeping kids off it, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Get Low

The whole purpose of getting an Aviron treadmill is to access the Aviron gamified workout universe, so let’s go over the membership first. It costs $29 per month, or $288 per year. Without the membership, you can still do basic things like see your metrics, create unlimited profiles, add friends, and access the MyAviron app (iOS, Android). However, an Aviron treadmill without a membership is like a Peloton machine without a membership. The draw is the content.

The sheer breadth of Aviron’s content is boggling when you first log in to the screen. You can do scenic routes, like walking around Coron in the Philippines or jogging through Ribeauville, France, in twilight. There’s live competition and streaming classes, coached classes, games, and something called Skyquest, where you use your speed and incline to control a little car driving through rings in the sky. You can scroll on TikTok, watch Netflix, or read your Kindle. Aviron adds new content constantly, like a program called Pros vs. Joes that wasn’t available at the time of publication, or a new Cardio Boot Camp strength-training program, for which you’ll need the company’s new loadable weight set ($299).

To watch that content, you’ll need to log in to the treadmill’s 22-inch HD touchscreen. It’s basically a big Android tablet you can pivot for the right viewing angle. It’s bright and looks mostly fine, but the color and detail aren’t as precise as our Vizio OLED—there are facial shadows in night scenes in Interview with a Vampire that make it look like the actors have perma-boogers.

Besides being 4 inches off the ground, the deck has what Aviron calls Cloud Stride—six shock absorbers intended to feel very natural. It can go up to 12 mph, which is about a 5-minute pace—plenty fast for nonprofessional runners—at a 12 percent incline, and has a weight capacity of 400 pounds.

We’re used to seeing treadmills around, at home and in gyms, but as the parent of two kids and two dogs, I worry that treadmills are pretty dangerous. My kids are not permitted to touch or play with the treadmill when I’m not in the room, but I am also reassured by the fact that even if they did jump on and fall, they don’t have far to go.

Beginner’s Luck

An Aviron game called Skyquest and a pirate game called Rags to Riches were particular favorites among the 10-year-old cohort currently messing up my stats. You change the incline and speed to drive a car in the sky or shoot a cannon at enemy ships. I love video games and am extremely competitive. It was often hard for me to play Aviron’s games because I kept toggling everything up way too fast or getting distracted from running by playing. The buttons to change speed and incline are responsive, but not as much as a game controller. To have fun, you need to stay at lower speeds.

Even at the medium difficulty level, the Cardio Boot Camp classes last around 30 minutes, which is not that long. To test the classes, I used Aviron’s 25-pound set, which has two bars, four collars, four 1-pound plates, four 2.5-pound plates, and four 5-pound plates; the company also sells a 45-pound set. This is not an outrageous price for two adjustable dumbbells, and the bright colors are also unique.

I normally use the Peloton Strength+ app, which I like because you can review each exercise and make sure you’re set up before you start your circuits. Even on the easy-to-adjust dumbbells, it stretches the length of the workout a bit farther beyond 30 minutes when you have to tap the screen to pause it and adjust weights between sets. Eric, the class’s coach, also doesn’t have the same charisma and unhinged asides as a Peloton instructor. However, I liked the UI with timers and rep countdowns on the screen, which were ever-present reminders that shortly this painful exercise interlude would be over.

One reminder that the Aviron treadmill is designed primarily for entry-level exercisers is the fact that it lacks a fan. This is not a problem if you’re jogging to stay on the Skyquest leaderboard, but when I tried to stick to my suggested Garmin running coach workouts, I noticed the lack. (An hour is a long time to be running on a treadmill without a fan.)

There are also no metal plates to spot-check your heart rate if you’re not wearing a fitness tracker, although you can connect a heart rate monitor or workout headphones via Bluetooth. I like that there's plenty of storage for my glasses, phone, and water bottle under the screen.

As my colleague Kristin Canning has pointed out, movement begets more movement, and having a treadmill in your house makes it so easy to squeeze a workout into your day. The Aviron is low to the ground, easy and stable to run on, and remarkably quiet. Even on those days when I had just put my kids to bed and couldn’t handle the idea of walking three blocks to the gym, it was super easy to hop on for 20 minutes to my favorite Aviron workout program, Netflix and Run, and watch 20 minutes of Band of Brothers while pretending to run Currahee.

If you’re a more advanced runner trying to keep up with your winter training program in your basement, then you’ll probably want a treadmill with a fan. But if you need every incentive possible to get moving, and you want something that doesn’t feel dangerous to have around your kids and dogs, then the Victory Treadmill is a great option.