Spotlight: Total Gym Weight Bar

One of the many things I love about the Total Gym is its versatility. And what makes the Total Gym even more versatile are all the attachments that the brilliant engineers at Total Gym are constantly inventing. Today I’d like to highlight an attachment that can truly turn up the volume on your Total Gym workout: The Total Gym Weight Bar.

The most important thing I teach my clients and group classes is that intensity is often the key to reaping vast benefits from your resistance training workouts. Well, you might ask, what are these benefits? Here are my favorite three:

Increased Strength

Keeping your muscles strong will improve anything you do in life

Bumping up your Metabolism

“If you don’t use it you lose it”. This means if you are not properly using and engaging your muscles they will actually atrophy and your metabolism will plummet. Let’s keep that furnace hot!

Increased Joint Stability

Your muscles are connected to tendons and ligaments that surround your joints. When you strengthen the muscles, you’ll also see improved joint stability that can help you prevent injuries.

A strong contending benefit is aesthetics. Let’s face it, tight lean muscles are much more appealing than flabby, jiggly muscles!

I keep it very simple, so I call it the rule of 10. Whichever exercise you’re doing, choose a level of resistance you’re comfortable with, but difficult enough to feel fatigued after around 10 repetitions. Please don’t misconstrue this to mean you should just count to 10 and stop! On every exercise, always perform repetitions to failure, meaning you aren’t able to do anymore repetitions with good form. Let’s say you’re doing an exercise and your rep to failure doesn’t happen until 20 repetitions in. Guess what? You need more resistance to reap those powerful benefits. Conversely, if you hit the wall (fatigue) at only six repetitions you may need to lighten up the resistance. If your goals are power and adding muscle mass as many aspire to do, then hitting fatigue at 5 or 6 reps with higher weight would be appropriate.

The beauty of the Total Gym is that you can easily dial this in just by changing the level on the tower. But in my 14 years of experience working on the Total Gym, there are certain exercises where even at the highest level you’re still able to do many more repetitions past 10. This is where the Total Gym Weight Bar comes in. The weight bar allows you to continue to get the aforementioned benefits from your resistance training workout, building muscle that would make Chuck Norris proud!

Watch the video as I will demonstrate how easy it is to attach and use the Total Gym Weight Bar. as well as five common exercises where it might be necessary to bump up your resistance intensity.