Such a great purchase

This Christmas, we went big and purchased ourselves a Tonal Gym. I have always been one to workout and do what I can to stay in shape, but a combination of Covid, injuries, and other life circumstances, I have not been able to stay in the shape that I wanted to. And now that I am going to be 40 years old in about two months, and most likely will be a grandfather within the next couple years, it was about time that I started to get serious about my health.

Now, the Tonal is not cheap and comes with a price tag of almost $4000 and a monthly subscription fee of $50, but I do not regret this purchase at all. I have never had a workout program or machine that has been able to give us results as fast as the Tonal has.

Over the past month, I have seen some pretty huge strength increases. When you first start with Tonal, you do a quick workout that measures your strength and gives you a base strength score. The Tonal takes that initial strength score and programs it into every workout program and exercise that the machine can do, and it automatically adjusts as you change the reps or get stronger. That alone is pretty amazing.

Over the past month, I have been able to increase my strength and score and now it is higher than 90% of everyone using the Tonal. Leaderboards are a cool way to keep you motivated and gives a good sense of competition within the community of people that use the Tonal.

My daughter likes to keep track of her position on the leaderboard. She is quite higher than I am on this leaderboard that tracks the total time you have spent working out for the month. Since my daughter injured her knee and was no longer able to take part in wrestling this year, she was pretty bummed because she was starting to see some great results from working out everyday at wrestling practice, but now she is able to use the Tonal and do programs that are tailored to her and she is seeing better results than she was when she was wrestling.

She is looking forward to February first because she should be able to do full workouts again and slowly begin to incorporate doing some more lower body exercises. We have been keeping a close eye on her knee and making sure she isn't doing anything to overdo it right now while it continues to heal. She is really looking forward to next wrestling season because she feels that she will be in the best shape of her life by the start of next season because of the workouts that she is doing.

Another cool thing about the Tonal is how they have incorporated some gamification elements. It is always cool to get a new badge for the work you are putting in or to get a cool animation on screen when you hit a new personal best with the different weights.

I had recently finished the first workout program and yesterday, I started a new one called Go Big or Go Home, and man, that workout was so hard. The first workout program that we all started was called 20-In-20: Ignite and it was a program set up to introduce you to how the Tonal works and get your muscles ready for the longer workout programs.

The 20-In-20 was just a series of 20 workouts that can be completed in 20 minutes, but Go Big or Go Home is all about moving lots of weight and doing a lot of reps. With the first program, I think I averaged about 4000 to 7000 pounds lifted during each workout, but this first workout with Go Big was over 16,000 pounds lifted and over twice the workout time.

The first workout was chest and back, and I almost puked during the sixth set of bench press. Those sets of 15 are killers.

The Tonal team has really refined their app and it has so many different ways you can keep track of your progress and see the different muscle groups that you are using during each workout. You can even customize your own workouts and search by muscle groups and the Tonal keeps track of when you last used those muscles and shows a fatigue level to help you make sure you aren't over training certain muscle groups and neglecting others.

Overall, we are all loving the workouts with the Tonal and we have all begun to see progress. Each year at the beginning of the year, we all choose a word for the year and mine is health. I have realized that I had been neglecting my health, but now with the Tonal, it is so much easier to get in shape and we don't even need to leave the house to get some amazing results.