My Review Of The Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym - For Every Muscle, an Exercise

by Rhian Hunt

A Tool for Every Job

Throughout all fields of human activity, however varied they may be – from brain surgery to composing sacred music, from exploring the deep sea to painting a portrait, from building a nuclear warhead to exercising specific sets of muscles – there is one common thread: the need for tools capable of providing the help required to reach our goals. The composer cannot compose without musical notation to describe his creations and instruments to bring them to life; the engineer needs his slide rules, calculus, and charts.

In making tools, two approaches seem to be possible. One is to make a separate, specialized tool for every situation which the user may encounter. The other is to attempt the creation of a multipurpose tool, like a Swiss army knife, which can deal with dozens of different tasks in place of dozens of separate tools. Some of these attempts at multipurpose tools are whimsical failures, while others prove to be highly useful, combining many functions in a single compact package.

These two approaches to tool-making are seen among exercise machines as well. There are many specialized machines that provide a certain type of exercise – treadmills, rowing machines, stair climbers, exercise bikes, and so on – and these often provide a robust workout. Such machines are limited in their approach, however – it is impossible to row on a treadmill, or to run on a rowing machine, for example. Home gym systems, on the other hand, are the Swiss army knives of exercise and weight loss – the strength of such systems as the Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym is that they offer a huge array of different exercise techniques to the user, providing a different workout to meet different needs without requiring a room full of separate equipment.

Why It Can Offer You A Complete Body Workout

The Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym is an impressive-looking device, bristling with handgrips, levers, rods, cables, footrests, pulleys, and other features that seem to promise an endless  exercise list. Although the number of different exercises it is possible to do on the Bowflex is not infinite, and there are some specialized exercises which cannot be adequately reproduced on a generalized machine like the Home Gym, the possibilities for fitness training, healthful exercise, and weight loss on the PR3000 are extremely varied and offer something for nearly every physique and need. There is certainly a large enough variety of exercises possible on the Bowflex to exercise each major muscle group in several different ways – and I think it is true to say that the Bowflex PR3000 is not only a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of many of them.

The list of features included in the Home Gym is impressive in itself. For upper-body exercise, there are Bowflex Power Rods that provide a resistance of 210 pounds, which can be upgraded to 310 pounds. The handgrips suspended above the seat can be used for lateral pulldowns. Vertical bench presses can be performed on the Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym, while the roller cushions in the leg area allow both leg extensions and curls. There is even a rowing station for those who want to do light rowing in place of the rowing-only exercise offered by a rowing machine.

With so many different features built in (with most of them requiring little or no manual adjustment to use), the range of exercises that can be carried out with the Bowflex PR3000 is astonishing – over fifty different types, including three different kinds of pulldowns, reverse and triceps pushdowns, seated abdominal crunches, bench presses, seated shoulder presses, shoulder rotator cuffs – both external and internal, standing hip abductions, hip flexion, leg curls, leg extensions, standing calf raises, triceps kickbacks, squats, standing calf raises, leg lifts, standing low back extensions, wrist extension, wrist curls, seated oblique abdominal crunches, leg kickbacks, dead lifts, and many others.

Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym Dimensions

• Height: 83 inches (211 cm)
  
• Length 64 inches (163 cm)
  
• Width 41 inches (104 cm)
  
• Shipping Weight: 173.6 pounds

Bowflex Power Rods – A Feature I Would Like To Tell You More About

The Bowflex Power Resistance Rods are simultaneously one of the Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym’s most interesting features and the one which requires a more detailed explanation. The Power Rods, a Bowflex patent, are intended to provide the opportunity to do weightlifting exercises without using actual weights. The advantage to this method is that the inertia and the tendency of free weights to stress the joints are avoided, while the system still provides all the benefits of weightlifting.

The PR3000 ensures that the Power Rods are convenient to use for an array of different ‘simulated weightlifting exercises’ by connecting the pulleys to all available grips – meaning that the user does not need to reconnect the pulleys every time they want to change from one kind of weightlifting to another. The resistance can be varied from 5 pounds to 210 pounds depending on how many rods the user chooses to connect to the pulley system at one time.

It should be understood, however, that the Power Rods only apply the full ‘weight’ at the point of maximum effort during each repetition. In other words, using the Power Rod at 100 pounds resistance is not the same as lifting, for example, a one-hundred pound weight. It is like lifting a weight whose weight shifts from 0 pounds to 100 pounds to 0 pounds over the course of each repetition. This means, in turn, that the weight ‘lifted’ is, on average, only half of the rated weight – so a 210 pound workout actually averages out to a 105 pound workout.

My opinion is that this feature, once understood, is quite adequate for the average exerciser. Most home users will find lifting an average of 105 pounds to be quite an ample workout – since it is the equivalent of using one’s arms and shoulders to lift a small person entirely off the ground. Two additional rods can also be fitted, raising the maximum resistance to 310 pounds (and the average resistance to 155 pounds). The Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym, in short, cannot replace free weights for intensive weightlifting, but it can certainly deliver a good weightlifting workout to those who want to include a bit of inertia-free weightlifting in a larger, well-rounded fitness session.

What Else Do You Need To Know

The Bowflex PR3000, besides offering a rainbow assortment of different exercises, has several other features that add to its value to those who are trying to maintain their physique, increase their fitness and cardiac health, or lose weight. The machine is built sturdily out of all-metal parts, although all handles are plastic-coated to prevent sweaty hands from slipping on them. With the generally sturdy construction of this machine, and the avoidance of easily-breakable plastic parts, most PR3000s will probably remain in working condition far beyond the 5-year term of their warranty. There is also a 60-day guarantee of satisfaction which provides a 100% refund if the customer is not satisfied with the results they see during the first two months of use. The Bowflex is easy to assemble and, although it requires a fairly large area of 100 by 78 inches to use, it can be folded into a smaller form for storage.

All in all, the Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym is one of the best home gym systems available on the market today, combining a huge versatility that allows users to custom-tailor their full-body workouts with 50 different exercises on one machine, with sturdy construction, straightforward design, and a robust backup of guarantees and warranties. Among the Swiss army knives of exercise, this system is the one which not only includes a range of different tools for working out, but does so with efficiency and style.

Where Can you Get The Best Price (Discount)

The Bowflex PR3000 Home Gym is offered at several different places on the web, and although some of these also offer a discount off the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, none of these are better than the price offered on Amazon.