Bowflex PR1000 Home Gym Review

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With more than 30 exercise options for upper and lower body workouts, the Bowflex PR1000 Home Gym helps to increase your strength and muscle tone through an innovative Power Rod resistance system.

Our review aims to provide you with all the information needed to decide if the PR1000 is the best home gym equipment your own home workouts. From the design features and resistance system, to summarising a wide range of customer reviews.

Design features

If you are thinking about buying a new weights bench, one of the most common features to check for is the range of back support positions it offers.

Equally important when choosing a multi gym is being able to perform as many exercise variations as possible, preferably with both a high and low cable pulley.

Combining these two important features into one piece of strength and fitness equipment is just part of what makes the Bowflex PR1000 so unique and popular.

With the bench fitted to the main sliding track, this makes it quick and easy to switch between the different positions of flat, 45 degree incline, and even free-sliding if you want to remove the main back support.

Removing the back support to leave just the seat provides you with all the extra space you need to perform even more exercises, particularly the standing bicep curls and upright rows.

Another clever design feature that makes storage much easier when not in use is the foldable seat rail. By simply lifting the rail up at the front, the bench and rail can be folded vertically and locked in place at the seat rail bracket, reducing the amount of floor space required.

Power Rod resistance system

One of the greatest differences between the Bowflex PR1000 home gym and the cable machines you will usually find in commercial gyms, is the way the resistance for the exercises is controlled.

While most multi gyms will use a single stack of weighted plates and series of cable pulleys to create the resistance, this particular design uses a combination of Power Rods to create higher or lower levels of resistance depending on how many you choose to use.

To prevent the need for many different rods to match the weight increments you would find on a weight stack, these rods can be grouped together in combination to create the resistance you need.

For example, although there are only 5 Power Rods on each side of the bench (50 lb, 30 lb, 10 lb, 10 lb, 5 lb), if you wanted to use 45 lb of resistance on each side you could simply group together one 30 lb, one 10 lb, and one 5 lb rod.

Chest and tricep exercises

Part of what makes the Bowflex PR1000 so effective for such a wide range of exercises is the different cable attachments that are provided, although even using just the single handgrips is enough to put together an effective chest and tricep workout.

With the back support set at its incline position, simply by changing the direction you are pressing with your arms will affect whether you are focussing on developing the upper, middle, or even lower portion of your chest muscles.

Triceps exercises can be performed by using either the upper or lower cable positions, with the high cable pulley ideal for tricep pushdowns, and the low cable pulley better suited to lying tricep extensions and kickbacks.

Back and bicep workouts

With your back being such a large collection of muscles, it’s important to make sure that any home gym you buy provides enough cable pulley positions to work the muscle group from a variety of angles.

This is an area where the Bowflex PR1000 excels, with the two high and two low cable pulleys allowing you to perform both one arm and two arm grip variations.

The following is a list of a few of the most effective back exercises that are possible:

Although these exercises will also work your biceps to some degree, the Bowflex PR1000 also features a range of exercise options that allow you to properly isolate the muscle.

These include standing single arm curls, high cable curls, lying cable curls, and incline bicep curls.

Abs and lower body workouts

An important part of developing a well balanced physique is your core and lower body training. Not only will training these muscle groups help burn more calories and increase your metabolism, the strength you gain can often carry over into many of your upper body exercises.

Although there appears to be no leg press attachment like you would expect to see on many standard multi gyms, the Bowflex PR1000 does provide a padded belt which you can wear around the lower arch of the spine. With the belt clipped onto both lower cable pulleys you can then perform the leg press exercise on the sliding seat.

Aside from the leg press there are still a good number of leg and core exercises that can be performed thanks to the versatility of the cables and their attachments. The most popular of these are:

Customer reviews

Despite being manufactured by one of the leading names in fitness and strength training equipment, it can still be useful to know what other people who have purchased the Bowflex PR1000 think of its features and overall quality.

With a combination of customer reviews and customers responding to interested buyer’s questions, Amazon represents one of the best sources for this type of information.

Currently positioned in the top 10 most popular multi gyms, this also means there is a large number of reviews to read through (over 250 at the time of writing this product article).

After reading through a large number of these reviews, the following list is a collection of some of the most common positives and negatives for the Bowflex PR1000.

Pros:

Cons: