Echelon Strength Home review: The slick, high-tech home gym your life may be missing (but that comes at a price)

Working out at home has its perks — you can crank up your favorite playlist, skip the equipment lines and train on your own schedule. But if you don’t have the space for dumbbells, barbells, weight plates or a squat rack, making meaningful gains at home becomes a challenge — especially as you get stronger. That’s where the Echelon Strength Home comes in. This sleek, all-in-one system is designed to provide a full gym experience at home — and it absolutely delivers.

As a personal trainer and product reviewer, I’ve tested my fair share of fitness equipment, but nothing quite like the Echelon Strength Home. At $3,000 it’s a sizable investment, but one that comes loaded with features you don’t typically get even with professional resistance machines, including eccentric and isokinetic resistance modes and a large HD touchscreen. The digital cable system is oh-so-smooth and eliminates the hassle of weight plates or stacks with finicky pins. Granted, the Strength Home does have some limitations, but for an all-in-one home gym, it’s a worthwhile investment for beginner to intermediate lifters who are short on space and ready to level up from dumbbells and resistance bands.

Grab a friend for assembly, it’s easy but heavy

It’s 290 pounds, so you’ll need a strong friend, or possibly two, to help you move the machine to your workout space. Two wheels on the base make moving the unit around much easier, but if you have any tight spaces or stairs in your path, then be prepared for a challenge — remember, always lift with your legs. Echelon also offers white glove delivery for an additional $300 if you’d rather skip the hassle.

Once you’ve got the Echelon Strength Home in place, however, the assembly process is straightforward — it took me and my partner about 45 minutes using the included hardware kit. One slight inconvenience was the lack of a physical manual. Instead, there’s a QR code to scan that takes you to a PDF containing the assembly instructions, which were easy to follow. A hydraulic folding mechanism lowers the platform to the floor with the help of a kickplate. I was nervous the first time I did this, given the mirror surface, but the glass is well-protected by rubber bumpers, and the dual locking mechanisms keep everything secure and stable during use.

It’s sleek, space-efficient and functional

Once it was fully assembled, I was impressed by just how well designed this piece of equipment is — fitting easily into nearly any size home gym. When the platform is folded, the Echelon Strength Home has a footprint of just 5.5 square feet. A unique feature of the gym is that it folds into a full-length mirror, making it functional rather than just a hunk of metal sitting in the corner of the room. Hooks behind the touchscreen further aid in the aesthetic by keeping the accessories neatly tucked away when not in use.

The platform itself is roomy enough for almost any movement you can think of and can accommodate a shorter exercise bench. Unfortunately, my bench was too long, so certain moves, like a bench press or seated row, were off the table. That said, there aren’t many exercises you can’t do with the Echelon Strength Home, at least in some variation. Cable heights can adjust independently at multiple levels, and the platform cleverly features a pair of pop-out flywheels for added versatility.

With the cables set to the lowest position, you can pull them out and fit them around flywheels on the platform. This changes the angles to accommodate a greater range of movements, such as bent-over rows, shoulder presses and squats. It’s a great feature that enhances the versatility of this machine without taking up any extra real estate in your home.

Echelon Strength Home: Its key features

A responsive 24-inch HD touchscreen is your home base for training, whether you use the built-in classes, design your own session or choose to freestyle your way through a workout.

Adjusting the resistance on the touchscreen is easy and can be done in increments of plus or minus 1, 5 or 10 pounds. One of the most useful features is a real-time chart that plots your lifting power and time per rep, which helps ensure a steady tempo when lifting. I made it into a game by seeing if I could nail each rep in exactly the same amount of time. The cables glide smoothly thanks to rope design technology that minimizes friction while enhancing durability and kink resistance. Made from a tough nylon-polymer matrix, the cables feel solid and perform far better than the traditional cable system in my home gym.

The included ankle strap and rope grips are similar to what you’d find in any gym, but the handgrips and barbell have extra tech built in. Each handgrip has a button on one end that pauses your workout, while the barbell includes multiple controls — pause, start and plus/minus buttons for adjusting resistance. However, resistance changes from the barbell are limited to 1-pound increments, which can make larger adjustments feel a bit tedious.

Echelon Strength Home: Easy to customize your workouts

Ready to sweat? Luckily, getting started with the Echelon Strength Home was simple and intuitive. After setting up my account and logging in, I was presented with a menu of predesigned workout categories organized by body part. Selecting one opened a list of workouts led by onscreen instructors. There was a solid variety for each muscle group, with many marked as “beginner” or “intermediate.” However, experienced lifters may find the selection of “advanced” workouts limited. The attachments you’ll need for each workout are also listed. This is the key to the compact versatility of the Strength Home, as simply switching out an attachment allows for a different set of movements. For example, a workout may have you start with the handles for bicep curls and triceps kickbacks and then have you swap in the rope for face pulls and overhead triceps extensions.

For my inaugural training session, I opted for an instructor-led abdominal workout. I was immediately impressed by the clear audio and ease of following the onscreen regimen. The Echelon Fit app, which has on-demand and live class programming, wasn’t accessible to me on the machine, but I was told by a customer service representative that new classes and an AI-led workout programming feature are coming soon.

In the Custom tab, you’ll find a huge selection of “By Echelon” workouts to choose from, which aren’t instructor-led but instead feature looped videos showing athletes performing each movement with proper form and technique — these workouts allow you to work at your own pace rather than feeling tied to the onscreen instructor. I used these to test out the various resistance modes — a feature that I was particularly curious about when researching the Strength Home. There are five resistance modes available:

• Normal: Resistance is the same throughout the movement.

• Concentric: Extra resistance is applied through the concentric (lifting or pushing) portion of the movement.

• Eccentric: Extra resistance is applied through the eccentric (lowering or pulling) portion of the movement.

• Isokinetic: Pushing/pulling speed is constant, but the resistance changes depending on the speed of the movement.

• Elastic band: The further into the lift, the more resistance is applied.

I lean toward muscle hypertrophy training (a type of training that focuses on increasing muscle mass and size using specific techniques), and these lifting modes are an exciting new way to enhance the most muscle-stimulating portions of my lifts. Research shows that overloading the lowering phase of a movement (eccentric) can increase strength and muscle mass more effectively. The Strength Home’s eccentric mode adds 25% more load to the lowering phase of a movement, which is tricky to accomplish with regular free weights. Being able to do bicep curls with extra eccentric resistance at the press of a button? Yes, please.

Isokinetic movements, on the other hand, are ideal for improving strength through a full range of motion, especially after injury. It’s also a good function to use if you want to increase your athletic performance in sports like rowing, which the Echelon Strength Home can simulate using its adjustable free-moving pulleys.

The Custom tab also allows you to design your own workouts. You can build a custom workout by choosing your movements, sets and rep scheme, or you can perform as many reps as possible of each movement for a set period of time. The machine will log your reps, sets and total volume, as well as track your rests, and videos demonstrate proper form and technique for each lift. I did run into some bugs with custom workout creation, such as exercises not saving when attempting to program different rep schemes for each set, but a future software update might take care of that issue.

If you don’t want to take the time to design a workout, there’s a Freestyle option that lets you just plug and play. Simply begin a movement, do the number of sets you want, rest, then add another set or choose to begin a new exercise. You’ll still get an overall breakdown of your effort, time and workout progress.

Echelon Strength Home: It has its limitations

While there are plenty of exciting ways to use the Echelon Strength Home, there are some limitations. Using the barbell across your shoulders for movements like squats is tricky, and you’ll be capped at the amount of resistance you can lift to get the bar over your head and in place, which is far less than what most people would use for a squat. And while the platform accommodates many movements, larger people might have trouble with positioning comfortably to perform movements with proper form.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of any Echelon apparatus is that you need an Echelon Fit membership to get the most out of it, and with a Premier membership costing an additional $400 per year, it’s an expensive investment on top of an already pricey machine.

Without the $400 Premier membership, your access to classes is limited, though there should be more added in the future, according to the reps I spoke with. With the membership, there are on-demand classes for the machine, plus off-equipment workouts like yoga, stretching, meditation and HIIT.

Echelon Strength Home: Should you buy it?

Although I didn’t have access to what are likely the best classes through the app and Premier membership, the Strength Home could be a solid investment for people looking for an all-in-one strength training machine, especially those with limited space. As a digital machine, it seems durable, and its high-tech features, such as the different resistance modes, make it stand out more than a simple mechanical gym setup.

If you are a more advanced lifter or have a tight budget, I’d say to skip the Echelon Strength Home. Its limitations in resistance and use of the barbell for compound lifts like squats make it less appealing to those who can lift more weight. That said, if you plan to use it to squeak in more training at home when trying to build muscle or for rehabilitation purposes (with your doctor’s permission), then it could be a great accompaniment to a regular gym routine if you have the budget to spare.

Our health content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as professional medical advice. Consult a medical professional on questions about your health.

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