Body Solid EXM1500S Home Gym Review

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If you want to train a wide range of muscle groups at home, but are faced with limited workout space, the Body Solid EXM1500S Home Gym could be an excellent choice.

You don’t get the same leg press and pec fly stations as their upgraded EXM3000LPS model, the 5 workout stations that you do have include leg extension / leg curl, chest press, and the mid, high, and low pulleys.

In this review we’ll be taking a look at the features that have made this one of the most popular selectorized home gyms in the country. It also featured as one of the best home gyms on the market in our recent buying guide.

Design features

One of the most difficult things about choosing a new home gym is finding the balance between the size of the frame and the range of exercise options.

Although the Body Solid EXM1500S uses just a single weight stack, with 4 different pulley points and the main pressing arms, you are still able to train every major muscle group.

Whereas most single tower home gyms offer just the high cable pulley, having the lower and mid range pulleys makes it a lot easier to put together effective workouts for your entire upper body.

Upper body workouts

The main pressing arms have been biomechanically designed to follow a range of motion that focuses mainly on developing your chest, without overloading your shoulders.

Training your chest

Although your triceps and shoulders certainly assist in the chest press, the different handle positions allow you to switch between how much you focus on each of these muscle groups when performing this exercise.

Variety of back exercises

Equally as important as a good chest workout is an effective back workout. With your back being such a large and complex group of muscles, it’s important to find a home gym that allows you to perform exercises from a variety of angles.

Fortunately the Body-Solid EXM1500S has both a high and low cable pulley. The high cable pulley is ideal for the different variations of lat pulldown, while the low cable is better suited for seated and barbell rows.

The wide grip pulldowns will help build your back wider, while the seated and bent cable rows will build depth in the middle back and train the hard-to-reach lower lats. You can even use the low cable with a straight bar attachment for upright rows or shrugs if you want to train your traps as well.

Strengthen and tone your arms

Although a free weight dumbbell workout is an excellent foundation for an arms workout, it can be much easier to start adding momentum into the exercises.

By keeping a more consistent tension on the muscles, the high and low cable pulleys can help to better isolate your triceps and biceps.

Sculpt and define your abs

The mid range cable pulley, positioned just above the back support pad, is ideally placed for performing a variety of seated crunch variations.

The padded leg developer rollers help to prevent your lower body from moving during the exercises, allowing you to focus more on each rep.

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Lower body workouts

Although there is no leg press or hack squat station provided with the Body-Solid EXM1500s, you can still perform some effective lower body exercises for your quads, glutes, hamstrings, and even calves.

The leg developer uses its own low pulley to transfer the resistance from the weight stack to the padded rollers, which you can position your feet behind when you want to perform leg extensions.

Leg curls are another popular choice for isolating your hamstrings, and while you can’t perform these lying down the same way as on a weights bench, you can still do them standing up.

Using one leg at a time you can choose to position your ankle behind the lower set of padded rollers and curl your leg up. This is also possible using the lower cable pulley when combined with the ankle attachment.

Multi gym attachment options

One of the great benefits of buying the Body Solid EXM1500S is its versatility. Despite being provided with some of the most popular cable attachments straight out of the box, including the low row bar and utility strap, there is still a range of attachment options you can buy separately.

Pro-Grip Multi Purpose Bar – The deeper chest clearance of the handles allows you to get a better contraction in your back, as well as benefitting from a wider range of motion than a standard lat pulldown bar.

Both grip positions are also rubber coated to make the bar easier to grip.

Pro-Grip Lat Bar Pro – Another of the attachments designed for lat pulldowns, this can also be used for seated rows to help develop width in your lats.

Ab Crunch Harness – An ideal attachment for the mid-range cable pulley, the harness can be wrapped over your shoulders, with sections to grip for performing seated crunches.

The extra wide padding helps to protect your neck, shoulders, back, and chest while you concentrate on ab and oblique exercises.

Professional home gym assembly services

When ordering a new home gym system, you might be wondering how easy will it be to setup? Most will include some form of manual, but the quality of assembly instructions can differ greatly between the different models and manufacturers.

This can be especially true with single station home gyms like the Body Solid EXM1500S, where you have multiple pivot points and a complex multi-position cable system.

One option is to hire a professional – someone who has experience setting up this type of home fitness equipment. So who can you trust to get the job done?

Amazon have recently introduced a number of home assembly services, for ellipticals, treadmills, and now home gyms. Simply enter your zip code in the form above to check the options for your location.

You can even find hundreds of highly rated reviews from customers who have already taken advantage of Amazon’s professional home gym assembly service.

With all the necessary tools and experience, and a typical assembly time of just 3 hours, it’s often the quickest way to get started with your new weight training workouts.

Customer reviews

Although it’s usually much more difficult to find customer reviews for weightlifting equipment than fitness equipment, we were surprised at how many reviews were available on Amazon for the Body Solid EXM1500S.

With user reviews being such a useful way to develop an overall and honest impression of a product, we’ve put together a summary of the pros and cons that were mentioned most often.

Pros:

Cons:

• 160 lb weight stack cannot be expanded
• Mixed reviews of how easy to understand the instructions are

The fact that it was difficult to find reviews rating this equipment under 4 stars is testament to the build quality and effectiveness of the Body Solid EXM1500S home gym.

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