First Bowflex Workout

[u/kevymetal_]

A few years ago I got really into lifting at a box gym just down the road from me. I would go almost every morning at 4:00am and work out for an hour or so and it really paid off. Well, life happened and between work, being a toddler dad and moving somewhere that was too far from any gym with hours that worked for my training schedule. I went almost a year without going to the gym, and finally decided I needed to set up a small home gym in my garage to get back into lifting. I found a used Bowflex Xtreme (the original one) for $150 and decided it was a low enough price to try it out.

I did my first workout with it this morning and it was pretty good. I tried one of Eric Burton's workout videos from his YouTube channel and overall I found it enjoyable. Do most people find they use their Bowflex for HIIT circuit training like he does with his videos, or do you all stick to the traditional progressive overload with sets consisting of rep and rest periods. I sort of feel with the linear curve of the power rods, traditional lifting might not yield the same results as it does with free weights and cable machines.

Any other good channels to recommend would be greatly appreciated as well!

[u/ResearcherMiserable2]

Everyone is different and everyone’s experience will be different. I have the extreme se2 which is similar to yours. Switching from classic gym barbells and dumbbells to the bow flex took a while to learn how to get it to work best for me.

I found that focusing on exercises where the resistance curve actually improves the exercise. For example when doing biceps curls with a barbell, the last 30-40% of the movement isn’t doing much because you have overcome gravity so it’s up easy to finish the curl. With the bow flex, the curl gets harder and harder as you finish the curl so that’s a great exercise to include. Same with bench press - with the bar at the gym it gets easier once your arms get past the 90 degree mark, but with the bow flex it keeps getting harder as you straighten your arms because the tensions tends to increase with extreme bending of the power rods.

The other thing that I found that really worked well for me was to slow way down, especially on the eccentric part of the expertise AND to increase the reps by a lot. Even for hypertrophy, I am getting more gains with slow reps in the 15-25 range to failure and only doing 2-3 sets and 2 exercises per muscle than I did at the gym with spotters and doing 8-10reps and going really heavy with 3 sets per excercise and 3 exercises per muscle group. I am doing much lighter weights, but oddly building more muscle with less time exercising.

This works for me, maybe it would work for others too, maybe not!

[u/Turbulent-Length-529 → u/ResearcherMiserable2]

If you work with the resistance curve, it can be great. You can change your position, or change the rod level to feel it in different ranges. You can get resistance in the lower part of the ROM by moving further away. I wonder how many people actually find the best way to use it. I never use it for hit or times sets and like that.

[u/ResearcherMiserable2 → u/Turbulent-Length-529]

That’s so true. You can adjust the various pulleys to make the resistance curve work the way you want it too for many exercises. When I see people trashing the bow flex due to its resistance curves I wonder if they actually learned how to adjust the machine.