Tonal is a full advanced gym and personal coach, that aesthetically fits in most homes, and it'll change your life.
Tonal makes sure that the only hard thing about weight training is moving the weight around. No overhead of going to the gym, building a program, keeping track of your limits and pushing you to safe personal bests. Tonal achieves that with the footprint of a mirror that can fit in almost any home. By solving for everything else, it increases the chance of forming great habits and being consistent.
There are four main benefit categories:
⏱️ Removes any overheads leading up to your workout or during it.
🏋️ It's a versatile, world-class piece of equipment with cutting edge techniques that are hard to replicate in a regular gym.
📢 Tonal is a great personal coach that helps achieve your goals.
🏠 It has an extremely small and aesthetic footprint and can actually fit in most homes.
⏱️ Zero overhead
Going to the gym takes considerable extra time, that seems insignificant, but adds up. Most people have to drive to the gym, and even if it's 7-8 minutes, like it was the case for me, it's already 15 mins round trip, or 25% overhead of a one hour session. You can also look at it as an extra hour a week. This is even without considering parking that's not always trivial, occasional road work or other holdbacks, making sure the car is available, and so forth. You're going out in public, which means doing anything from minimal effort to full dress-up on the presentability scale.
The overhead extends to the gym itself - if your responsibilities restrict you to rush hour, you'll often have to wait for machines to free up. If you're working with barbells, smith machines and others that need loading plates, those times can add up too.
Finally, coming up with a program, or refreshing it and keeping track of your exact weight limits per exercise is also an overhead, either at the gym, or outside of it when planning. I often came to workouts doing the same exercises over and over, limiting my progress and just being boring.
Tonal is always just there, ready for you whenever you're ready. No need to get out of the house or get dressed, with the next workout a click away. It remembers your weights per exercise, will count repetitions, sets, total weight and time under tension for you, while also remembering which muscle groups are ready or strained from previous sessions. Oh, and changing exercises amounts to switching out the handles for a barbell or rope and moving the lever arms to a new position.
🏋️ Versatile world class equipment with advanced techniques
Gym equipment should be safe, first and foremost, which means good quality hardware that's well maintained and often also requires supervision from a trained spotter when working with free weights.
A home gym also needs to be versatile. While you can get to most muscle groups with a few exercises, that usually still means a rather large footprint that will take up considerable space and are often relegated to a garage or basement. Having too little versatility means being less effective and potentially getting bored and quitting more easily.
Finally, as you become more proficient, you will want to isolate muscle groups, try a wide variety of moments and even advanced techniques that load you up more on sections of your movement (the very end for example, or on the eccentric direction). Achieving those in the gym might require a coach or partner, or complex setups with chains, bands and so on.
Tonal takes care of most of these for you seamlessly:
Tonal is essentially a functional trainer or an advanced cable machine and it can do most of the exercises you can think of. Is that exactly the same as a full gym? No, not exactly, but good enough... I've felt the need to add a bit of "real" metal to my training regime after 2.5 years of exclusively working out with Tonal. I'd say that's pretty good, and Tonal still consists of the vast majority of my workout time.
The Tonal is extremely well made. I've had it for over 2.5 years without it needing maintenance even once. To the team's credit, when my friend encountered issues with his after a few years, maintenance and replacements were fast and efficient.
Tonal has built in spotter functionality, which means you can load up on your weights and set those PRs knowing the machine will drop the weight either at the click of a button, or when it automatically senses you need help.
Advanced training techniques - most people won't necessarily care, but the more you get into training the more you start understanding nuances and optimizing.
For example - chains. Imagine a bench press exercise. You have quite a few levers to make it affect your muscles differently - you can change the weight on the bar, the number of repetitions and sets you do, your grip on the bar, and the angle of the bench. For most folks it's more than enough, but you can do advanced variations like adding heavy chains connected to your barbell. The trick here is that part of the chain is resting coiled on the floor in the barbell's bottom position, so you don't feel their weight. The higher you lift the bar, the more of the chain comes off the ground, making your barbell heavier and hence the exercise more difficult at the end of the motion.
Another example would be an eccentric mode - you've probably encountered this while doing an exercise you couldn't do on your own, like your very first pull up. Someone would help you get to the top (or you'd jump there, use a band, etc.) and your job would be to get down in control and as slowly as possible. This mode is based on the principle that if I gave you a pair of slightly-heavier-than -you-can-lift dumbbells, you'd still be able to lower them down with control, getting you some muscular benefits (aka gains!). Doing this in the gym is doable, but very cumbersome. You'd usually need a partner, and / or load and unload weights... with digital weights that can detect tension on the cable and understand when it's the end of your movement, then change the weight instantly and automatically.
Finally the last technique is burnout. For any weight you lift, you'll hit the point where you can't make another repetition. Your only option then is to stop. You can decide to rest and do another set, or you can also try to lower the weight quickly and then try to continue immediately. Many claim that this is the best way to get muscle growth. Taking a dip as an example, you can start with regular dips and when you cannot do another one, you can add a band to help you do a few more (effectively lowering your body weight) and when that fails you can use a prop to climb and start from the top position of the dip and lower yourself slowly, until you can't even do that. I've once had a coach that told me to close my eyes as I was nearing failure on a bench press (with a smith machine, which means the bar is following a rail, making it safer and impossible to imbalance) and asked me to always do "1 more rep", which I miraculously was always able to do despite it feeling like each was the last I could do ... what I couldn't see was that he was taking weights off with each rep, ending up with a completely empty bar that I was barely able to lift with the last rep. Again here Tonal offers you that technique for free and without you even having to think about it... it's the decision of the coach.
📢 Personal Coach
The best way to get in shape and improve your workouts is with a personal coach - they keep you accountable to keep showing up, they observe and correct your form so you don't get hurt and become more efficient (they will also spot you), they keep track of your max weights and push you to new PRs in a safe way.
Their only drawback is that it's a personalized and hence expensive service.
Tonal manages to serve as a great personal coach that's always with you at a fraction of the cost (and you can always tap a live coach to set up a custom program or get more help). Here's how it does it:
First is the vast library of workouts and programs that Tonal offers, that fit every single goal, intensity and timeframe you have. You can share your goals, like increasing strength, getting lean, etc. as well as how much time you prefer your workouts to be and it'll show you all the options (and there are a lot of other options to filter by).
As we know decisions are always hard, so the great thing about choosing a program is that you're all set for the next 4 weeks and the only thing you need to do is turn the Tonal on and the next workout is just there for you.
Like a super diligent coach it remembers exactly how much you lift per exercise, keep track of trends, and can adjust a one-time "recovery mode" if you're extra tired. Since it also senses how difficult the current weight is for you, it can either assist or slightly increase the weight for you. Since I refused to use a notebook and keep track of my weights, I would always guess, spend some reps at the wrong weight and just not move forward.
Form feedback is also super useful - simply through its internal sensors it can make suggestions about your range of motion, speed, balance between sides, etc. Every motion has a coaching demoing while you do yours to allow you to follow it easily. You can also connect your phone to Tonal and position it to the side for example, and you'll see your live camera view from your phone on Tonal's screen, being able to adjust. Lastly, Tonal has an amazing community on Facebook where members can share questions and you can often see "please give me feedback on my form" posts.
Here's an example of a split squat exercise I did, showing the power output over the reps, the range of motion for each leg, and I can also see the difference between the sets if I cycle through them.
To cap it off, as you'd expect Tonal has very tasteful and subtle gaming mechanics that encourage consistency:
It counts your cumulative pounds lifted (I'm getting close to 6 million pounds and am very excited about it),
It maintains your streak - I'm currently at a 138 weeks streak, which means that ever since I got my Tonal about 2.5 years ago, I have worked out at least once a week (often every day). This pushed me to work out when I didn't feel great and would have opted out otherwise, and it got me to use their app to do off-Tonal workouts while traveling for business or pleasure for more than a week.
There's a strength score that tracks your progress (I'm close to 200% stronger than when I started), a workouts count (it also knows to include other workouts you might have done like running, biking, etc.), movement count, etc.
Special occasions grant you badges ("Icing on the Cake" is the one for those who don't miss a workout on their birthdays)
Connectivity to other apps, like Strava, increase social sharing and notifications make sure you don't forget your favorite workouts.
🏠 Extremely small and aesthetic footprint
Home gyms are really great, but they do require a lot of space. Unless you're absolutely obsessed with working out (or very rich) and can dedicate a room in your house for a home gym, you'll be relegated to a garage or a basement, and often be restricted there too.
The Tonal can aesthetically fit and take up zero space in your home. It goes on your wall and protrudes only a couple of inches. While working out you do need a free square of space around it (officially about 7'x7', and I personally have a bit less and still haven't encountered an exercise I can't do) but that's easily manageable.
Mine is my home office and so every time I get up or sit down, it's staring me in the face and in my mind it asks "have you worked out today?". This technique of positioning good choices in your daily routine is a well know hack to create the habits and behaviors you want. For example, by placing a bowl of apples on a highly trafficked section of your kitchen counter, your family is likely to eat more apples, rather than having to intentionally have to search and get a chair to bring that sweet bar from the top shelf.
The bottom line is that Tonal removes any and all excuses for not working out. There's no overhead, no intervening circumstances like weather, opening hours and traffic to hold you back, the plan of what to do and the right weights are already locked it, so you can just go.
Note: this is not a sponsored post, the links to Tonal are my personal referral code that provide you with a discount and me with a few months of free membership.