• 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.