So this blog is a little different, a little bit more personal here. I was describing the design process to some of our marketing team and they were surprised that this particular client was asking me so many questions about what I would get.
And I mentioned that a lot of our clients over the long term..some of them for 25 years... understand that I've helped design/advise on equipment design for over a dozen manufacturers, some of them a lot of their equipment. And I've been designing people's gyms and working with personal trainers for 2 and 1/2 decades. I've designed thousands and thousands of workout spaces at this point, and people, once they work with me, they're normally my client for life.
And so with a lot of these clients after years of working together, they often ask me what what I would get. Because in this act in the play of life, I'm a 56-year-old, very fit, ex athlete, with a number of injuries. So I have a lot of in common with my clients and frankly I understand what equipment really does and really doesn't do.
My own personal workout for cardio is the Cybex arc trainer first or an Octane XT-One, and the Octane Lateral acts second. The Arc trainer is one of the best non-impact solutions, with huge workout potential and minimal knee stress. But the Lateral x is my suggestion for everybody's second piece of equipment, though it's a commercial piece and not inexpensive. But every other piece of cardio equipment is linear. Every single treadmill, every elliptical, every rower, every bike works in a frontal plane. The Lateral x works the muscles differently, being an adjustable lateral elliptical machine. It works the hips, the glutes, and the lateral stabilizers completely differently, and frankly so many of our injuries are actually based on the weakness we have in our lateral stabilizers. ACL, MCL, ankle injuries, hip injuries are all based on the atrophy of those lateral stabilizers compared to the strength of the overused linear muscles. Or, how I often put it is "we train in a linear fashion most of the time so we get injured in lateral actions".
And frankly, everybody's different, but in terms of the metabolic effect, as well as a muscular effect, the Arc trainer and the Lateral X are among the most efficient and frankly provide a much more rounded workout and almost anybody ever gets.
For third piece of cardio, I like something with upper body cardio, because we don't do a lot of that, and the elliptical machines still primarily work the lower body, so either a rowing machine or the octane recumbent elliptical is my preferred third cardio piece.
When we're talking about strength equipment, there are a lot of good multi gems, and there's a lot of other good equipment. And I always tell everybody to start every damn gym with a good bench and a good set of dumbbells. But if I just had to pick two pieces of strength equipment, getting a good complex functional trainer with linear and lateral adjustability would be the first choice, and the second choice would be a high quality leg press, like a squat press, or the true fitness palladium or hoist fitness rock leg press. Why?
The leg press was actually one of the best read articles I ever created years ago, as the best second strength piece to get. And it is simple logic much like the lateral elliptical above. There's a lot of good ways to hit the upper body, but the only piece that works every one of those leg muscles is the leg press. You can use it hit quads, hamstrings, adductors, abductors, calfs, hips, glutes... If you're doing a small area and trying to be as effective as possible, get a complex cable machine and a leg press and you're able to hit every single muscle group in your body, except maybe your tongue or forehead.
So there's the opinion from this expert. Your mileage may vary because you have your own injuries and your own goals and your own preferences. And that's what matters when I design a gym. But, there's a lot of fake information out there and these basic ideas of adding lateral motion, and hitting upper and lower body strength, is pretty much ironclad logic.
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