The Weider Crossbow home gym is a good mid level piece of equipment that is relatively cheap compared to its competitors. Here you can find a completely objective, thorough evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses.

Exercises and Features

The company says it has 65+ exercises, but I never really believe that marketing hype as most of the so called exercises will be derivations of the classics. From what I can see it does have most of the favourites as well as a few isolation exercises.

• Lat Pull Down - Works the shoulders and back. An all round great exercise that you would find in any public gym.
• Bench Press – Works the chest, triceps and shoulders. An all time favourite of anyone looking got great pecs.
• Shoulder Press – Works the shoulders, chest and back. Great for developing the curved contours of your deltoids.
• Rows – Works the back, shoulders, chest and biceps. An excellent compound exercise, recommended to intermediates and above.
• Leg Extension - Works the legs. Not a great exercise in my opinion, because it isolates the legs, making your total body workout last longer.
• Leg Curls – Works the hamstrings. Not a great exercise in my opinion, because it isolates the hamstrings, making your total body workout last longer.
• Leg Press – A good compound leg exercise the works the entire leg as well as your abdominals, which help to stabilise the body during your workout.

The difference with this gym is that it has no weight stacks. It uses bows (rods) which have a certain amount of resistance. There are 2x10lb, 1x20lb, 1x40lb and 2x80lb bows making up a complete certified weight of 110kg or 240lbs.

It is a small to medium sized home gym measuring in at 1.52m in height, 1.93m in length and 1.68m in width (60 inches in height, 76 inches in length and 66 inches in width).

Strengths and Weaknesses

It is much cheaper compared to its main competitor Bowflex, with a similar quality. However the Weider Crossbow home gym has been discontinued by Weider and so you will have to go look for it on auction sites such eBay to get one.

It has a respectable amount of weight, which will last you some time to go through and it does not have iron weights, which of course makes it much lighter.

Its main weakness is that the gym had a 5 year guarantee on it, but since the gym is no longer manufactured and the gym you buy will have been used, there is a likelihood that it may break and you will not be able to get replacement parts.

Conclusion?

In spite of this, if you can get one that has not been used that would be great and you would have a relatively cheap high quality compact gym. On the other hand, if you are looking for something a bit newer, albeit a lot more expensive, try the Bowflex home gym system (which some say is the company that Weider stole the crossbow concept from).

Overall, I’d give the Weider Crossbow home gym 3 stars out of 5. If you can find one get one, you don’t get gyms of this calibre that cheap anymore!

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