Working out at home is rarely an ideal situation. Unless you're an MLB superstar, Hollywood mega-mogul or tech billionaire, you likely don't have an entire gym's worth of equipment in your house; most of us lack the space, the money or both. But making your way down to the health club on a regular basis can be tricky for many of us, as we constantly juggle the responsibilities of work, family, friends and, well, just about everything else that gets between us and making our way down to Equinox or Crunch.
Which is where the home gym system can come in handy. These multi-role exercise machines are hardly a new idea — Bowflex has been around nearly 40 years — but they've taken on new life with the advent of the smartphone, Bluetooth, Wifi and the Internet of Things.
One of the latest additions to the realm of smart home gym equipment is Speediance's Gym Pal. The foundation of the device is a black-and-white platform that looks a little like a wheel-less Segway, packing a pair of resistance motors; this platform is paired with a variety of accessories such as handles, benches and barbells, which combine to enable you to perform hundreds of different exercises. It's significantly cheaper than options like Tempo and Tonal, whose home gym setups start at $2,915 and $3,995, respectively.
Sounds great, in theory. But how does that play out in practice? To find out, DPReview senior editor Eric Limer took one home for a test; here's what he thought.
Speediance Gym Pal: What We Think
The Gym Pal makes for a comparatively stylish, very versatile home exercise solution. Its high-tech features are complex enough to give it a bit of a learning curve, and its accessories make storage a bit trickier than you might think based on the website, but overall, this is a good fit for anyone who needs a comprehensive way to work out without leaving the comforts of home.
To learn more about our testing methodology and how we evaluate products, head here.
The Gym Pal isn't huge, but it's bigger than you might expect
The Gym Pal is small in theory, but larger in practice. While you can tuck it away into a closet, additional but essential components like the weight bench and various accessories require additional space to store and additional time to collect, pull out and set up. If your plan is to put the Gym Pal “away” between every single workout, think twice about how dedicated you are. If I didn’t leave mine set up in the basement, I’d use it way less.
The Bluetooth Ring accessory is clever and extremely useful
One of the key differentiators of the Gym Pal is its Ring, which lives on your hand and connects via Bluetooth to control the machine. It has a button you can press to start a given set and a wheel you can use to adjust weight. I found it invaluable for getting in position for a bench press, for example, and then pressing the button against my chest to get started. The downside is that you have to pair it to your phone — and keep the accessory charged.
The brushless motors offer a nice feel
The resistance is nice and smooth, and it’s relatively similar to lifting actual weights. It’s at its weirdest when you’re using the barbell, because if you aren't lifting the bar perfectly parallel to the floor, you’ll start to feel a little slack on one side or the other. But it’s not a big problem.
The accessories are easy to swap in and out
Not only are they simple to use, but it's a snap to detach and attach them when changing up the exercise. The attachment points feel very solid, and the mechanism is easy to operate and feels secure. I’m not reluctant to do a workout that involves swapping the accessories around. (I am, by contrast, a little reluctant to do a workout that involves moving the bench around.)
The Speediance app is … a lot
There's a reason why the website artistically displays the app's screens as giant floating holograms: the screens are packed with data, options and small text. It’s a little overwhelming. As a professional tech nerd, I was able to navigate them fairly smoothly, but a normal person (i.e. my wife) needed a little help to find, start and run the workouts.
There's a bounty of different ways to exercise
Speaking of workouts, there are tons of them. It can cause a bit of "analysis paralysis," but it’s nice that there are multi-week programs filterable by difficulty level, frequency and overall length. Each individual workout has video of a real human performing the exercises from multiple angles, which I found extremely helpful, as well as some spoken reminders that play out of the Gym Pal’s speakers. It was very useful to me as someone who can benefit from reminders to breathe.
The app also tracks your workouts for you because it (obviously) knows how much you’re lifting and how many times. I have always been terrible at keeping a workout log, so this is incredibly useful. It extends beyond just the use of the Gym Pal; there are full bodyweight workouts in the app that don’t use the machine at all.
A few quality control issues raised their heads
There are a lot of fit-and-finish issues with the app, mostly translation issues. You’ll see loading bars with captions like “workout progresses” and confirmations that say things like “successful connect.” Exercise descriptions have grammatical errors. It doesn’t make it any less good of a workout app, but it does make me start thinking about things like “will this equipment still be operational in any way if and when this app disappears, be that in 1, 5, or 15 years?" For the moment, however, the overall package delivers.
