Mixed review
Written: Dec 27 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent full body workout, wide range of exercises, smooth operation, looks cool
Cons: Effective leg press requires modification to machine, poor exercise documentation, wobbly bench
The Bottom Line: Very nice machine, with some problems
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| dana412's Full Review: Bowflex Revolution Home Gym |
Excellent machine, but not without problems.
Biggest issue: effective leg-presses require modification to the machine, which no doubt voids the warranty. To achieve resistance through a nice wide range of leg-press motion, machine arms need to be roughly parallel to floor (position 5 or 6). With arms in this position, cables cut into plastic housing below seat, fraying the cables and interfering with exercise. My remedy: remove the housing, cut away the front portion of the housing, drill holes in the seat carriage, install eye-bolts (pulleys would work better, but couldn't find any at my hardware store that would work--still looking), then reinstall the plastic housing. This keeps the cables against bench beam further out from the seat. Leg-presses work great with this modification.
Next issue: exercise manual is poor. There are typos, mixed up exercise pictures and text, redundancies, not very clear exercises and it just doesn't seem to have as many exercises as it could have. The DVD helps, but its not very useful in the middle of a workout. A $3000 piece of equipment ought to have better printed exercise documentation. My guess is that Bowflex wants to sell their training software.
Another issue: don't insert the leg raise cables into the hole under the bench beam as recommended. The inside of the beam has burrs (at least mine did) which will snag and fray/cut the cables. I have ordered replacement cables twice. The first time, they sent the wrong replacements. It's been almost a month since my second order, and I still haven't received them. In the meantime, my frayed/cut cables just are just laying on the floor or dangling when the machine is folded up.
Last, but not least: the bench is wobbly when laying flat. My wife fell off the bench and hit her head on the lower leg-press pedals. Now that we're aware of the wobble, it's not a problem, but beware. I'm not sure how to fix it--maybe some rubber pads on the sides of the bench bracket so it wedges tightly on the bench beam?
All that said, I'd still recommend the Revolution, but I think you'll find that you'll need to work around these issues too.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dana412
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Reviews written: 1
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