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Once you start investing in a home gym, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. While the appeal of working out at home is hard to deny—and perhaps even more affordable than going to a gym in the long run—the truth is you may find yourself needing more equipment and accessories than you’d expect to get the most out of your workouts and achieve your fitness goals. You may start with a few 10-pound dumbbells, a colorful yoga mat, and an inflatable exercise ball, but before you know it, you might be buying a $1,000 spin bike, a $1,000 treadmill, a bulky bench press, and other pricey, heavy pieces of equipment to achieve a well-rounded, home-based workout.
Though there’s certainly nothing wrong with customizing an extensive home gym to fit your needs, there’s something to be said for investing in an innovative piece of equipment that condenses countless pieces of equipment into one package that does it all and then some. Enter: the Vitruvian Trainer+: a resistance-based, cutting-edge exercise machine that is more advanced than you could possibly imagine. While the Vitruvian Trainer+ may look simplistic at first glance with its 80-pound aluminum and carbon fiber shell platform, the magic of this smart fitness machine is in the software that it’s engineered with. The training machine uses AI technology to adjust and adapt its resistance based on your strength output –i.e., how much force and exertion you put into each exercise.
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Once you’ve got your system set up, you can dive into exercises you’re familiar with, like bicep curls, calf raises, crunches, deadlifts, lunges, lateral raises, and exercises you may not be all that familiar with. In fact, I was amazed at how many different customized exercises there were to try, and with up to 440 pounds of resistance there to challenge me at every movement and rep, I got a lot out of this machine without overexerting or exhausting myself in the end. This feature, for me, is indeed the best reason to purchase the Vitruvian Trainer+: you won’t find yourself using too much or not enough weight from movement to movement since the machine is tracking and recognizing precisely what you need to see results, adding or taking away weight as needed.
How does this work exactly? Well, by connecting the Vitruvian Trainer+ to the Vitruvian app on your phone or tablet, you’ll have the opportunity to choose from video classes, customize your own workouts, or choose specific exercises that are tailored to your own fitness goals with choices like beginner basics, glutes and core, upper body burn, and many more. Anything you want to get the most out of your daily workouts is available at the tap of a finger for beginners and hardcore gym rats alike.
For instance, if you’re moving through an exercise too easily, the Vitruvian Trainer+ may add on some weight to challenge you. Or are you struggling to finish rep to rep? The machine will take away some of that difficult resistance to stop you from burning out too soon. Once you start your exercise on the Vitruvian Trainer+, the machine uses your first three reps of each exercise to determine the best resistance to apply and knows exactly when to let up or add more weight as you go on.
The Vitruvian app, which is where the data and progress behind your workouts is stored, has three tabs that I utilized the most: activity, coaching, and workout. The activity tab summarizes the exercises you have completed, from bicep curls to overhead presses, the reps you’ve done, and your progress on each of your completed exercises (i.e., weight increases over time). The app’s coaching tab gives you access to over 300 classes, like strength and conditioning, beginner basics, and glutes. If having access to that many class options sounds overwhelming to start with, the good news is you can filter these classes based on things like how long you want to work out for (five minutes to 25+), what muscle groups you want to work on, and by specific trainers as well as you get to know them and their styles.
The workout tab is handy for people who want to build their own workouts or don’t want to follow a specific program or video class. Here you can choose from over 200 specific exercises, as well as the reps and weight you’ll be working against. As someone who isn’t too accustomed to designing my own workouts, I didn’t use this tab too much, but if you’re comfortable in the gym and know exactly what exercises you want to do, like shoulder presses and bicep curls and beyond, this is a great resource at your fingertips if you know how to use it.
My main struggle in using the Vitruvian Trainer+ and the Vitruvian app was that it wasn’t necessarily intuitive initially and took some education and patience to fully understand how it all works and how to use it to my benefit. For instance, I struggled to understand the difference between the system’s four training modes: old school, eccentric only, time under tension, and pump. I had to look at descriptions of each of them in the app to choose which ones worked best for me from workout to workout, and it took me some time to understand the differences between these modes. Unless you’re someone who consistently does weight training, it will probably take some time, education, and trial and error to navigate your way through the whole system.
The basic Vitruvian Trainer+ system comes with lightweight handles and ankle straps to clip in and out of the platform. While you can certainly get a great workout with just those basics, it’s worth considering purchasing either the entry kit or the pro kit to go with the Vitruvian Trainer+ as well. The entry kit includes a long bar, tricep rope, premium handles, workout mat, and safety cables for $300, while the pro kit, $500, includes a long bar, short bar, a bench, belt, rope, premium handles, a workout mat, and safety cables.
Whether you’re looking for a one-and-done piece of equipment to challenge you and deliver incredible, trackable results or access to an innovative fitness machine that knows exactly what your body needs movement to movement, the Vitruvian Trainer+ isn’t just a basic piece of equipment. It’s a leading-edge personal training system that will transform and adapt your workouts every step of the way.
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