Bowflex PR1000

Bowflex PR1000

Retailing around $600, the Bowflex PR1000 is one of the the most stripped-down Bowflex home gyms currently available. With its small footprint, comparatively low price, and exercises for the arms, shoulders, back, legs, chest, and abdominal muscles, it’s a good starter home gym. The main drawback for heavy lifters is that the 210 pounds of maximum resistance can’t be upgraded.

Body-Solid EXM1500S

Body-Solid EXM 1500S

The Body-Solid EXM1500S, which retails for around $850, provides a full body weight training workout with a machine that owners love for its quality construction and thoughtful ergonomic features. Of particular note is the off-to-the-side placement of the low pulley station, which reduces the machine footprint and allows you to quickly change your weight setting while performing exercises with the low pulley. Unfortunately for power users, you won’t be able to upgrade the 160-pound weight stack at this machine.

Body-Solid G4I

Body-Solid G4I

Moving into the over-$1000 price range, you’ll find the Body-Solid G4I, which retails for around $1,500. This machine’s Iso-Flex Press Arms provide multiple planes of motion for each exercise so you can develop your targeted muscles as well as your supporting muscles, as you would with free weights, and you can move from exercise to exercise without changing the machine setup. Like all Body-Solid machines, the G4I is notable for its high quality construction and lifetime warranty. Though users love this machine once it’s set up, initial assembly can be a bit of a pain, so you might want to consider springing for assembly help if your retailer provides it.

Bowflex Xtreme 2

Retailing around $1,600, the Bowflex Xtreme 2 provides a fast, complete workout with a compact footprint. This machine lacks a leg press station but makes up for it by allowing a full range of motion for squat exercises. Users like the full range of motion that the adjustable pulleys allow, as well as the fact that you can move from exercise to exercise without changing the cable setup. With resistance upgradeable from 210 pounds to 310 or 410 pounds, you are unlikely to max out the weight on this machine.

Body-Solid G6B

Retailing around $1,900, the Body-Solid G6B has a press arm that gives you multiple planes of motion while applying resistance in two directions, meaning this machine does an amazing job simulating free weight exercises and maximizing the intensity of each exercise rep. As with the previous Body-Solid machines mentioned, the G6B is notable for its high quality construction and lifetime warranty.

Bodycraft Xpress Pro

For those with the budget to afford the roughly $2,200 price tag of the Bodycraft Xpress Pro, there’s nothing that can beat the range of exercises possible with this machine. Add the $550 leg press attachment for an even more complete workout. Of particular note is the adjustable cable arm station with free range of motion handles that allows you to simulate free weights, as well as the doubling cable that allows you to increase the effective machine resistance from the 200-pound weight stack up to 400 pounds. This machine also provides maximum adjustability features for ergonomics and safety.

We hope these quick overviews of high-quality home gyms available at different price points helps you on your way to choosing the right weight training equipment for your budget and workout needs!

Doorway Pull Up Bars

Doorway pull up bars include both telescoping bars that fit inside the doorway and multi-grip bars that hang or mount from the top of the doorframe moulding. These types of bars tend to be less expensive than the other categories of pull up bars. Check out our helpful doorway pull up bar guide to learn how to find the right doorway pull up bar for your home gym.

Free Standing Pull Up Bars

Free standing pull up bars, also called pull up towers or pull up stands, include products at the higher end of the price range for home pull up equipment. If you have the space and the budget for a free standing pull up bar machine, you’ll be able to perform pull ups, chin ups, and dips with a greater range of motion than is possible with most other home pull up bars.

Wall Mounted Pull Up Bars and Ceiling Mounted Pull Up Bars

Wall mounted pull up bars drill into solid load-bearing surfaces (such as cement walls or solid wood beams or joists) to provide a permanent pull up station. Bars in this category often can support more weight than products in the doorway pull up bar category, but they require a strong wall and cannot be set up and taken down down for each workout.

Similar to wall mounted pull up bars, ceiling mounted pull up bars attach to solid load-bearing ceiling surfaces, like rafters, to provide a permanent pull up station.

• Although buying online may not be the best option for some types of weight training equipment, such as higher-end home gyms, if you are in the early stages of evaluating equipment options or are planning to buy simpler equipment, Amazon is a great place to start looking for weight training equipment and read buyer reviews.
• Consumer Search does a great job aggregating both buyer and expert reviews about home gyms and providing a summary of top picks for certain types of home gyms. Unlike most other product review sites, Consumer Search also provides a relatively detailed report summarizing the sources they drew from, the credibility of those sources, and the most pertinent or interesting information they found after reading loads of expert and buyer reviews. Unfortunately, Consumer Search provides no coverage of reviews for free weights, benches, or other forms of weight training equipment other than home gyms.
• Many retailers (such as Sears, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Overstock.com) gather buyer reviews on their websites, but searching through the separate websites of multiple retailers to get a complete picture of what buyers are saying is awfully tedious. Buzzillions helps to solve this problem by aggregating buyer reviews from a large number of retailers and providing a number of convenient filtering and sorting options that allow you to use buyer reviews to narrow down a list of potential products based on keywords in the buyers’ reviews, like “Easy setup” and “Quiet operation.” Buzzillions covers product reviews for multiple types of weight training equipment, not just home gyms.

Some other sites that may be worth visiting if you still can’t find a buyer review for the equipment you’re interested in are Viewpoints and Epinions. Viewpoints has a somewhat limited weight training products listing compared to many other product review sites, but the reviews themselves are generally helpful. Epinions has a staggeringly large weight training products listing, but not every product listed has associated product reviews, so I would suggest you visit Epinions only to do a final check for any useful buyer reviews for a specific product after you’ve narrowed down your shopping list using the resources mentioned above.