A Tonal demo review

I tried out Tonal back in November 2019 at their SF flagship showroom. Tonal is a wall-mounted cable resistance system, touting itself as “the world’s most intelligent home gym and personal trainer.” It gets installed onto a wall in your house and comes with some optional accessories (bench, bar, etc.). Note that this store, on Union Street in SF, is temporarily closed for sign ups due to COVID-19. Back when I visited, the store’s associates and atmosphere were lively and welcoming, offering water, towel, and friendly chit chat.

My key takeaways were:

• The content library was rich, with a large amount of supported exercises. Every exercise I wanted was on there! And I have big respect for the diversity and quality of coaches they seem to have on the platform.

• Tonal met the expected value prop of being a compact resistance training equipment. It was slim on the wall and easily configurable to do a variety of different exercises. I tried front squats, bench, overhead press, and rows onsite, and they all felt like using a cable system that I’d find in a regular gym, like this Precor one.

• I was delighted at an unexpected value prop: it can replace a training partner in terms of spotting and variable resistance. 
  • Lifters often use training partners to “spot” – help safely re-rack the weight if you lift to failure. The Tonal system can do this for you!
  • Lifters sometimes execute a “drop set”, where you decrease the weight when you hit failure at a heavier weight. For example, maybe I’d do 10 bicep curls at 20lb, then without rest do 5 more curls at 10lb. When you do this by yourself in a gym, it can be difficult to switch weights or take plates off a barbell quickly. Sometimes, your training partner helps you without needing to change the weights on the bar, for example by exerting gentle upward pressure on the bar during a bench press. Tonal can do drop sets for you!
  • Lifters may do “negative” sets, where you overload the eccentric part of an exercise, often “cheating” the concentric part of the rep to get that overload. For example, let’s say I can only bicep curl 20lb. I may hold a 25lb in my right hand, and use my left hand to assist getting the weight into the “curled” / top position. Then, I’d let down the weight using my right hand only, as slowly as possible. Again, it’s usually easiest to do this with a training partner as the assist, or confining yourself to one-armed exercises. Tonal can do these negative sets for you! Here’s a pic of me enjoying the Tonal negative reps on the bench press:

• The biggest issue for me was the experience of “turning on” the weights. You were supposed to press a button at the end of the handles (or press something on the screen) to turn the resistance on. This was incredibly difficult — getting my thumb to the side of the handle also unbalanced the handle in my hand and made me unprepared for the sudden increase of resistance. It felt a little dangerous, especially at heavier weights. I’d love to see Tonal make usage of voice commands to turn resistance on and off and control overall aspects of the experience. Here’s an image of the handles, with side button, from the Tonal website:

• In the end, the price point ($3000 plus $49/mo content membership), unwieldy method to turn on the resistance, and need to mount it onto the wall (I currently rent), were dealbreakers for me in terms of purchasing a unit. Nevertheless, Tonal is a huge step towards a future where everyone has access to convenient, personalized strength training. And until I can have one myself, I’d gladly use it at a corporate, hotel, or other gym.