At the beginning of the pandemic, someone asked me if I would be getting a Tonal Home Gym. I hadn’t heard of it. I had heard of the Mirror, as I am being constantly bombarded by ads from them, but I had not heard of the Tonal. I knew that the Mirror didn’t interest me at all. I am happy with my garage gym that has a Rogue rig and free weights for strength training and Crossfit workouts. These days I get almost all my cardio on the Peloton Bike and occasional runs on the Peloton Tread (see Quarantine Fitness Part 1 for more about the Peloton!). When I did a quick search for the Tonal though, my interest was peaked enough to schedule an in-home online demo with a salesperson (no in-person demos right now, of course). The Tonal is NOTHING like the Mirror except they have the same look - a big rectangular touch screen, that looks like a flat screen tv on its side, attached to a wall. While I imagine the Mirror is great for bootcamp and bodyweight workouts, the Tonal is mainly (but not only) for strength training. Tonal programming covers everything from old-school body building and strength moves to bootcamp, yoga, meditation and beyond. It even has some Theragun content for mobility. The best part about the Tonal is that it takes very little space, and is the only equipment you need to have an efficient workout. It is much more efficient than a traditional garage or gym workout and just as versatile!

What is the Tonal?

It is a smart and compact way to train almost any exercise you would do at the gym using digital weight. The tonal arms house a highly advanced cable system that uses magnets and electricity to set a digital weight that can be adjusted to as low as 5lbs to as high as 200lbs resistance. (Note this is resistance weight, so 200 lbs is more like 350lbs if you were to compare to a normal load in the gym. More on that later). The Tonal is a tall rectangular touch screen attached to the wall (like the Mirror) but unlike the Mirror, it has arms on either side that slide up and down, and rotate to different angles, allowing you to perform almost any movement you desire. The Tonal library has 175 movements (and continues to add more). There are Smart Attachments that come with your Tonal: two handles, a rope, and a bar that can be hooked onto the arms for different exercises. Once you have placed your order, and get approval for the location by the install team, you will be assigned your delivery and install date. We chose our garage, since we live in California and the weather is mild. Sometimes I wish we had it in the house, but we just didn’t have the wall space for it. If you are at all interested or think you will end up getting one, you should order now as the wait time is currently two to three months long. Installation (at least in our area of Northern California) is fast and professional. Once installed, you have a 30 day trial period and you can get a full refund if you decide you don’t like it.

The Assessment: you allow the machine learn your strength through an assessment workout. On the screen the coach shows you the movement, and tells you how many reps to do with a few tips on speed. During the reps, the Tonal will digitally add weight as you perform a movement. You want to apply quick but smooth pressure - if you go to slowly, the Tonal will think you aren’t strong enough and will not add weight. You can always adjust manually up or down as well. After this 20 minute assessment, the machine will know how strong you are and it will suggest weights for subsequent workouts. Coaches teach the movements to you as you go, and show you what position to put the arms. You can click on the little info button for any movement if you need more in depth instruction. For example, if the movement is a barbell lat pulldown, it will guide you to place the bench in the center, adjust the arms to the highest position and attach the barbell. There is a “smart” bluetooth button on the barbell to turn the weight on and off so that you can easily get into position.

The Workouts: Once the assessment is complete you are ready to go. What kind of workout and which coach you choose is your personal choice. You can pick a stand alone class, like a 30 or 45 minute full body workout, upper body workout, or a fat burning workout etc., or you can embark on one of the 4 to 6 week programs of 3-4 days a week. If the silly comments by the coaches annoy you and you don’t need or want their tips, you can turn the volume of the instructor off and turn your choice of music up (they have an option to link your Apple Music, otherwise a choice of music genres. If you are a gym geek and have a program you already love, you can use the Tonal without the streaming content, and create your own program. For me, I don’t have the time or creativity right now to create my own and I am trying to give the Tonal programs and coaches a chance. So far I have done one four week program with Coach Nicolette, as I was just starting out with the Tonal, and one six-week program with Coach Jackson, called Go Big Or Go Home, that was excellent. It was hard and it made me sweat! I know it is working because the computer tracks my PRs and metrics and gives me a progress report and a Strength Score, but also because I feel sore on a regular basis (a good sore). Now I am working through another strength program, again with Coach Nicolette, that I am liking. Sometimes I do have to adjust the weight up or down but otherwise the Tonal seems to know me pretty well! I am sticking with pure strength programs and not doing any of the cardio fat burning since I get my cardio on the bike.

How is the Tonal BETTER than a gym?

SAFER It is definitely safer than working out on your own. It has built-in mechanisms to detect failure and will release the weight if it detects something unusual. Of course during Covid, working out in your own home without a mask is as safe as you can be.

SMARTER The Tonal uses technology to make the movements even more effective than a simple forward and back motion. You can set it to eccentric mode (weight is added automatically on the eccentric stage of the movement), chains mode (this is like the effect of adding heavy metal chains to the end of the barbells on a back squat or bench press), and spotter mode - for example for a heavy bench press, it can give you a tiny bit of help, like a spotter would, so you can still achieve muscle failure. The constant adjustment by the computer means you always have resistance on your pushing and pulling.

CHEAPER In terms of the cost of equipment alone, for the number of movements and the range of weight, even with the Tonal’s big price tag, it is still cheaper than buying all the dumbbells, barbells and weights (and takes 1/10th of the space). While a workout with a streaming coach doesn’t qualify as a personal training session, you will still get some of the benefits, like programming, weight recommendations and instruction, for less than $5 a workout.

EFFICIENCY - If you follow the Tonal programming you can be done with your workout in under an hour. Set up is a breeze and transitions from one movement to another is only a matter of seconds. There is no downtime. You don’t waste time sliding of plates on and off the bar or the storage rack. Another bonus - since you are not dropping weights you won’t ruin your garage floor or bother your neighbors.

How is the Gym Better than the Tonal?

COACHING - since the coaches on the screen cannot see you (and it is not a live workout), if you’re doing a movement with improper form, you will not know. This could lead to inefficiency or possibly injury. The Tonal does know if you are standing too close, or performing the movement too quickly or from the wrong angle, and it will give you those corrections and some others related to your form, but it can not “see” if your back is rounded or if you are not keeping your elbows in. For this reason, I would suggest that Tonal is for people who have already got some good experience in the gym with coaching or for someone who is very good at visual learning. Another note about coaching - since these are not live streamed workouts, it often comes off as canned and robotic, even though they are trying to crack jokes and be human. It just comes off as a little flat.

COMMUNITY - though there is a group on Facebook, and there is a Leaderboard, it cannot compare to the very active Peloton community. Partly I think this is because the Tonal coaches do not have the star quality nor the charisma that the Peloton coaches have. There is no personal interaction, since you are not doing the workout live, and you won’t be getting virtual high fives. Of course the biggest drawback is that you don’t have other humans to workout with, to give each other encouragement, and even to meet new people. These days we can’t do that easily anyways and of course, some people prefer to work out solo.

THE FEEL - if you absolutely love the sound of crashing weights and the rattle of the barbell bearings, you will miss that with Tonal. There is something exhilarating about a successful snatch and a smooth clean and jerk. You won’t get that feeling with Tonal workouts. These are cables and they just feel different than the cool handle of a dumbbell. I had high hopes to continue my Olympic lifting and use Tonal for pure strength building and accessory work but that hasn’t happened. The Tonal workouts are hard and have me sweating and I am also doing the Power Zone Challenge on the Peloton. I have decided to leave the Oly lifting for now, focus on my Tonal lifts and then likely go back to a Olympic lifting phase in January.

WEIGHT and MOVEMENT LIMITATIONS - like I described above, the Tonal is digital weight. There is an upper limit of about 200 lbs. This might not seem like enough for a guy who benches 350lbs or back squats even more. However, I have noticed that a digital pound feels nothing like a real pound and frankly there doesn’t seem to be any correlation. On a good day in the gym I could front squat about 145 lbs for a few reps. On the Tonal, its really hard at 50lbs. From comments I have read on the FB group, even really strong guys cannot reach their limit on the Tonal. Another limit is that some movements just won’t work. You can’t really do a back squat safely, but you can do a front squat (which is arguably a better lift). You can’t do pull-ups (you could try but it might break the machine) but you can do seated lat pulldowns. Other than those two movements, and the Olympic lifts, almost any movement you can do with a barbell or a dumbbell you can find a way to do on the Tonal.

Should you Invest in the Tonal?

Go for it and order now if:

• You are a gym rat -you love to workout already, and you miss the gym but you don’t mind working out on your own.

• You are already very motivated to work out and you know your way around most strength movements.

• You have limited space for a home gym.

• You have multiple family members who would use it.

• You have some injuries and limitations - Tonal has great options to sub movements and exercises, and you can stay light on the weight, only adding incrementally.

• You enjoy strength training but you need a little bit of hand holding and some instruction. Maybe you’re one of those people who wanders around the gym, not knowing what exercise to do but not wanting to fork out the bucks for a personal trainer.

• You own a Peloton and you want to diversify and do real strength training (not just boot camp and body weight stuff that Peloton offers)

• You are an early adopter!

Think about it a bit longer if:

• You aren’t very motivated to workout. You don’t really enjoy it. Sorry to say this, but Tonal isn’t going to get you off your bum (Peloton DOES do that, in my opinion, read my blog post about Peloton to learn more.)

• You have never done any form of strength training and you don’t have good body awareness (I recommend a personal trainer if you can afford it to get you going and learn proper form).

• Financially you have to choose between the Peloton and the Tonal. Go with the Peloton first… maybe you can get the Tonal later!

• You don’t have the right space for it (check the specs - you need a certain kind of wall with a minimum ceiling height.

• Maybe you just want to wait and see - it is still early and the Tonal will surely have some new version at some point. There is a remote chance Peloton would acquire them, or come out with their own, though most analysis I have read do not think this is imminent.

Let me know if you have the Tonal and what you think? Of course, feel free to send any questions my way to napanista@me.com. Up next…. Quarantine Fitness Part 3 - My Crossfit Journey