Woodway Treadmill: How This $14,000 Machine Became the Ultimate Gym Status Symbol

By Bill Bradley

In the late 1980s, a small, family-owned manufacturing firm in suburban Milwaukee was looking to diversify its portfolio of filtration systems and industrial tools. On the hunt for a new product to bring to market, the company found something no one thought existed, practically a contradiction in terms: a truly great treadmill design.

About a decade earlier, a German man named Willi Schoenberger had been in charge of building out a new fitness center and found himself disillusioned with the treadmill options. They were not mechanically sound. They were hard on the joints. Running on one messed with your form. Simply put: they kind of sucked. So Schoenberger built his own—what would become the Woodway.

Working with the German Sports University in Cologne, he designed a treadmill to be gentle on the knees and ankles. Durable. As close to real-deal running as possible. The standard treadmill design is a single rubber belt—it can be loud, it's harsh, it does not feel like running outdoors. He replaced this with eerily-quiet rubberized slats that help absorb the pounding of running. A regular treadmill looks like a conveyor belt—Schoenberger's surface looked kind of like tank treads.

When the Wisconsin firm licensed the design for the Woodway in 1988, there was no way they could have predicted what this uncompromising piece of German engineering would would come to mean to fitness nuts across the globe. It has gone from a tool beloved by professional athletes and personal trainers to a totem for chiseled Zoomers on TikTok.

It also costs $13,995 for the flagship model, the 4Front—or more, up to $18,000, depending on the features you order. (That's roughly quadruple what you'll pay for Peloton's extremely high-end treadmill.) In spite—or because of—the price tag, heavy-duty engineering and being in all the right gyms have made it a powerful status-symbol among the fitness-obsessed.

"The visual aesthetic of it is striking," says Kyle Bergman, the coach and general manager of New York's Mile High Run Club, a boutique treadmill studio that uses Woodways. "I think everyone finds it attractive because it almost looks like some sort of running Batmobile."

The first time I ran on a Woodway was at Mile High in 2015. I was skeptical of the whole scene: a treadmill studio? I’m a lifelong runner, but I had run on the so-called dreadmill maybe a dozen times in my life. I grew up in Northern Michigan, where we wore ski goggles and ran before school when it was five below zero. But I immediately enjoyed the design of the treads, which is soft and bouncy and the closest thing to running outdoors you’ll get on a machine. I also appreciated the sleek look of the thing. But it was what the Woodway wasn't doing that was most impressive: the entire interface was focused on running rather than entertainment. You could switch speeds with the simple press of a button—no hammering the screen to get up to speed for an interval. It was simply an extremely nice treadmill that was not trying to be anything else.

I was not the only runner to appreciate this simplicity. "All these other companies seem to be so focused on taking people outside of themselves while they're running, instead of letting them just run," Chris Black, host of the podcast How Long Gone and a Woodway fan, says. "I don't need a 30-inch TV screen. That innovation is just not the right innovation! It's like when they released a refrigerator with a TV in the door."

The Bayerlain family—who runs Woodway—started building and selling across North America out of their Waukesha, Wisconsin, factory in 1990, two years after they were granted the license. In the years since the family has slowly gone from licensee to partnership to outright owner. Woodway is a Waukesha brand now, though they still maintain an operation in Germany.

The Dallas Cowboys caught wind of the Woodway during their early ‘90s run of dominance. You know those teams: Troy Aikman under center, Emmitt Smith running behind a punishing offensive line. Nate Newton was a dominant piece that, as an offensive guard, paved the way for Smith and protected Aikman, but he had struggled to stay at his 350-pound playing weight. A treadmill was the answer, but a man of Newton's strength and stature would destroy any off-the-rack machine. So the Cowboys enlisted Woodway, and it wasn't long before just about every professional sports team in America came calling. Now, every single team in the MLB, NBA, and NFL uses Woodways. Over half the NHL, a smattering of international soccer teams, and a host of military training facilities do too. Real runners, the most crotchety and treadmill-averse athletes on the planet, love it: Mo Farah, the decorated Olympic track star, even trains on one.

But over the last decade the Woodway has gone from one of the most trusted tools for the world's best athletes to a gym status symbol. It started with Barry's Bootcamp.

Barry's, which has since dropped the "Bootcamp," was at the forefront of the 2010s studio fitness craze with their grueling HIIT classes and thumping EDM. In 2011, Barry's Bootcamp CEO Joey Gonzalez was getting a tour of his friend Justin Timberlake's house. When they got to the gym, Timberlake showed him the Woodway. Gonzalez had never even heard of it.

"I don't know how you don't know what this is, given what you do," Timberlake, who has no affiliation with Woodway, told him. "But Woodway is the absolute Rolls Royce of treadmills."

Barry's was at an inflection point. They were opening their first New York location in Chelsea and trying to establish themselves as a premium studio with high-end facilities to match the grueling classes. Gonzalez knew they needed Woodways.

"Going from what we were paying, under $2,000 to upwards of 12 grand, it was definitely a jagged pill to swallow," Gonzalez told me. "It was challenging for everybody to get behind it. But one of my partners was really gung ho. And so we all decided to pull the trigger. It's an investment. But to me, it says it's an establishment that cares about its users."

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The New York expansion was the start of the L.A. fitness studio's transformation into a global powerhouse, with studios around the world. And it brought Woodway to the masses. ("I only discovered them because of Barry's," Black told me.)

The rise of Barry's changed Woodway's cachet in the world. "It's become synonymous with a white glove, high quality experience," Bergman says. David Perry, a former Division 1 NCAA runner and founder of his eponymous line of jewelry for athletes, uses a Woodway at Undefeated in Los Angeles, every certified Cool Guy's favorite boutique L.A. gym.

"It's the Jaguar of treads," Perry, who swears by the Woodway, told me. "It's clean, chic, and powerful. Everything you could want in a tool."

Woodway has done all of this without trying to turn itself into some multi-platform content operation. There's no blog on their website called, like, The Tread. They don't offer streaming classes or sell merch. The family, per Weber, is "not too much for worrying about headlines." When I asked the gregarious and steadfastly Midwestern Weber, who has been at Woodway for nearly two decades, how the company has managed to steer clear of content and programming in an industry saturated with it he was very matter of fact. "I think we’d suck at it," he said, with a laugh. "I don't need to give you a lecture about what your intervals should be or what your tempo runs should be—that's not our area."

Woodway continues to tinker with their design, incorporating feedback from all the professional athletes and trainers that use their product. But it's the simplicity and utility, like a pair of well-worn Levi's, that make it so familiar. If you see that a gym or a hotel has a Woodway, you know. You know it's going to be nice, and you know you’ll be able to get an insane workout in. "It's like a warm hug when you walk into those places," Black says. "It's so simple, but that's why it's the best product in the market."

And Woodway isn't planning on changing that familiar simplicity and engineering anytime soon. "The most creative thing we’ve added to our treadmill," Weber says. "Is a beer bottle opener."