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The Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series Adjustable Bench forms part of the popular SelectTech range, featuring a variety of features that have been designed to help make your workouts as enjoyable, effective, and safe as possible.
Comfort and stability
If you are considering buying a new weights bench to use in your home gym, two of the most important design aspects are comfort and stability.
Whether you are performing seated dumbbell presses, incline bench press, or decline crunches, you need to be in a comfortable position to ensure you can focus entirely on completing your required reps and sets.
The Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series Bench provides a thick padded seat and tapering back support to ensure you are as comfortable as possible, without restricting your movement on the pressing exercises.
The back support is wider towards the seat to provide additional support to your lower back, but tapers towards the top to allow greater range of motion in your shoulders and traps.
This is crucial for being able to perform pressing exercises and especially dumbbell flyes with the required range of motion to make the exercise as effective as possible.
The base stabilizing bars are curved to keep more of the bench in contact with the floor, spreading the weight to allow more to be lifted in your exercises without the bench tipping or becoming unstable.
Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 bench – Features Summary
- Transform any space into a personal free weight fitness center
- Adjusts to four different positions for over 30 different exercises
- Comes with a removable leg hold-down brace for added decline position support
- Corrects posture and stabilizes positioning for a safe, muscle-building free-weight workout
- 15-Year warranty on frame, one-year warranty on upholstery
Strength and versatility
Whenever you are deciding on any new piece of workout equipment to buy, you want to be sure of getting the most features and quality for your money.
While many weights benches offer a very limited range of positions, the Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series bench can switch between decline, flat, 45 degree, and vertical positions.
This versatility enables you to work your muscles in a way that just isn’t possible with a fixed position bench.
A set of padded rollers is also supplied with the bench to keep your legs fixed in position. This helps to prevent you from sliding off the bench when performing any of the decline exercises, such as situps or decline dumbbell press.
Exercise options
As with any weights bench, the range of exercises you can perform using the bench on its own is fairly limited. Combine this bench with a good quality dumbbell set though and you have a bench that Bowflex claim provides a base for over 30 different exercises.
Although these will mostly be focussed around training your upper body, there are still a variety of lower body exercise options that are possible with the Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series Bench.
The following list is just a few of the options:
- Seated shoulder press
- Seated side lateral raises
- Incline dumbbell curls
- Incline dumbbell flys
- Bench dips
- Lunges
- Flat dumbbell press
- Dumbbell pullovers
- Lying tricep extensions
- Decline situps
Fitness and health benefits
As with buying any new piece of fitness equipment, one of the best ways to check if the Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series Bench actually measures up to its claims is by checking through the customer reviews.
There are currently over 200 customer reviews on Amazon alone for this particular bench, making it one of the most popular available.
With nearly 95% of these reviews rated at either 4 or 5 stars, this also makes it one of the highest rated fitness products designed for use in your own home gym.
Review Overview
Overall Rating
4.5 / 5
Offering four different positions for improved workout versatility, the Bowflex SelectTech 3.1 Series Adjustable Bench is an excellent choice for performing over 30 different exercises. It enables you to do more exercises to get the body you want and ensures proper posture so that you can maximize your results.
Although this is the next model down from the SelectTech 5.1 Series, if you are willing to sacrifice a couple of back support positions then what you get is still the same high level of build quality and comfort we have come to expect from Bowflex.
It's built-strong to last with heavy-duty commercial quality steel and durable upholstery. The removable leg hold-down brace is also a useful addition for added decline position support. If you're worried about storing the bench between workouts, the transport wheels allow for easy transport and storage.
Product dimensions: 142.25 L x 66 W x 51 H cm Product weight: 51 lbs Weight limit on bench: 300 lbs
USA Home Gym gives in-depth insights into gym equipment, supplements, and fitness training methods. The motivation behind USA Home Gym is to provide you with information that goes beyond what you can find in any user manual, customer review, or other online review sites.
We go to great lengths to ensure that our reviews are completely comprehensive, usually covering everything from the design features to the warranty coverage and exercise options. This is all to help guide you towards the home gym equipment that’s best suited to your goals and budget, whilst also being the highest quality option in your chosen price range.
