You've made the same New Year resolution every year, and you're already tempted to throw in the towel. But the possibility of losing weight this year—say, 10 pounds by June—is within your grasp. And with tech on your side (such as the Best Smart Home Gym Equipment), you can do it in a minimal amount of space. Since the pandemic started, sales of this kind of equipment have grown 170 percent.
But which high-tech sweat-producer is going to help you the most, in the least amount of time? Let me set aside my ice cream for a moment and tell you: The research has been done for us by Lifesum, the nutrition app. It evaluated most of the leading smart-gym equipment, as well as an on-demand home yoga class, to see how many hours you'd need to spend each per month to burn 6,000 calories. That's the magic number the average person needs to shed that 10 pounds in six months. Lifesum also calculated monthly costs, factoring in equipment and subscription fees (see the full infographic below).
Note: Our fitness guru at PCMag, analyst Angela Moscaritolo, says, "People should take all of these calorie-burn estimates with a grain of salt. It's hard to generalize, because it depends on so many different factors, including body composition and workout intensity."
The research also doesn't point out what kind of workout is being done on all of these systems. Some, like Mirror, offer a multitude of workout options. So expect a lot of variation for your own calorie burn.
That said, the most efficient equipment for burning calories is the NordicTrack Treadmill, which is one of our Editors' Choice smart-gym products. Use that for 8.78 hours, and you've burned the fat at an average of 683 calories per hour. It's one of the cheaper ways to go, costing about $82 per month (that's for the $3,000 hardware and a free iFit pass that lasts one year).
Now, let's assume you don't want to spend 3 grand on equipment, even with financing, when many of our other favorite products cost just a little over half that. Take the Mirror, for example, which is a private mirror/LCD wall full of fitness classes. All you need is somewhere to hang it and enough floor space in front to work out. The Mirror costs $1,495, with an additional subscription of $39 per month—definitely the most expensive of the monthly costs, at $164. But, with the right workout, Mirror helps you shed the 6,000 calories in 10.26 hours each month, just behind the NordicTrack Treadmill.
FightCamp is probably the most fun option—it's an at-home boxing gym with a column you can punch. It's $1,219, but that still almost a third the price of the NordicTrack and costs $39 per month (a total of $90 per month) to burn the 6K calories in 13.14 hours. That's on par with a Peloton bike or Tempo Studio Strength Training, give or take a couple hours per month.
That said, if you want real calorie-burning efficiency, join a IRL class for Crossfit or HIIT. You'll burn 810 calories per hour, so you'll work off those calories in merely 7.4 hours. That said, you'll spend around $160 a month to do so, double what you pay monthly for NordicTrack's iFit. The upside of Crossfit is that it has no upfront cost (besides cute gym clothes). And you get to talk about Crossfit. (Another option: Apple Fitness+, and a number of other workout streaming services, offer at-home HIIT classes.)
On the other end of the cost-and-calorie-burn spectrum is CorePower On-Demand Yoga. Its classes are very cheap, at $19.99 per month for unlimited access (for now). But you'd need to spend 20 hours and 8 minutes per month doing your downward dogs and planks to burn the same number of calories (just 298 per hour).
Read all the details in the Lifesum research below, then grab the Lifesum app for iOS or Android to assist in hitting some weight goals ($4.17 per month for a subscription to start).
