Bowflex Xtreme Se Gym Review

I am sure all, or most of you have seen the Bowflex TV commercial, about an overweight person loosing a ton of weight and getting a 6-pack in no-time. Thats Bull! Well, maybe possible if you can dedicate atleast 6 hours of your day to workingout with the Bowflex. Well i cant do that, I have a life.

I bought the Bowflex extreme SE earlier this year. I was just browsing around to see what I can add to my home gym and i noticed that bowflex was having a % off and free shipping sale that was to end in approx. 2 hours and 12 mins. I took the bait and ordered the Bowflex. It was not untill next morning that i realized that Bowflex resets their sale time counter back to 24 hours at the end of the previous "24 Hour ONLY" sale period. So if you for some reason cant make the current sale period, dont sweat. There will be another one soon.

In all honesty, i did get a pretty sweet deal on the Bowflex. It took me about 4 hours by myself, to assemble this one. I have been working out on this, for the last 6 months, atleast 30 mins a day, a minimum of 3 days a week, with some exceptions of travel and workload increase. I am yet to get my 6-pack, but i did burn a bit of fat and put on some serious muscle. I am 5.9 and weighed about 180 lbs when i started working out on the bowflex and now i still 5.9, but i weigh about 185 lbs, the extra weight offcourse coz, muscle is heavier than fat!

This is a very good piece of workout equipment, it is built to last, you can try all you can but you will not be able to trash this one up. The only pain is changing the cables. there are other pieces where you dont need to change the cable, but they are more expensive and most importantly have a bigger footprint. The Extreme has a fairly smaller footprint of 5' X 6'.

The resistance rods, not quite as revolutionary as bowflex claims...basic physics. Yes, I am an engineer and very critical of such advertising claims. The lbs on the rods are not quite the same as the lbs on the regular plate loaded exercise machine. I can bench 210 lbs on my bowflex, but on a regular weight machine, i cant bench more than 140 lbs. Resistance is not quite the same as mass X gravity. I tried, but failed to derive a scale conversion factor for resistance. So if you are using resistance rods you are actually only lifting 66.66% of the weight. For e.g., 100 lbs using resistance =  67 lbs of good old regular weights.

A word of caution, when changing (i.e. adding or decreasing) the resistance rods do not, i repeat, DO NOT bend over the rods, coz if your hands are sweaty and slippery and if by chance the rods slip from your hand, you will be picking pieces of your nose from the floor. I found that out the hard way, it dint break my nose coz it was only a 20lb rod and thank god for the 66% weight conversion, however, i did see some very bright stars in my gym room at about 3 PM in the afternoon.

Bottomline: Bowflex is way better than any other home-gym weight machine thats on the market currently. If you are serious about working out, i would suggest, get a bowflex extreme for about $1200. There are substitutes available on the market for half the price but dont last a 10th of the life of bowflex. Moreover, bowflex comes with an unbeatable life time warranty on the frame. No other equipment comes close to the bowflex on durability and qulity of construction.