If you’re looking for a smart home gym machine and already have a pretty good grasp on how you want to work out, the Speediance Gym Monster 2 (starting at $3,749) is worth checking out. It’s much less expensive than the Tonal 2 ($4,295, plus accessories and membership fees), doesn’t require a subscription, and is freestanding, so you don’t need to worry about installing it on a wall. These advantages come with some significant trade-offs, though, as the Gym Monster 2’s presentation and overall experience feel rougher and more stripped-down than Tonal's. It doesn’t have any live classes, can’t provide nearly as much useful form feedback, and switching between exercise configurations is much more clunky. The Tonal 2 is a better, though pricier, choice for beginners who are looking for an easy, encouraging, and safe way to build muscle and burn fat at home, and remains our Editors’ Choice for smart strength training.

Design: Freestanding and Functional

The Gym Monster 2 comes in four different bundles: Basic ($3,749), Works ($3,949), Works Plus ($4,099), and Family Plus ($4,499). Basic includes the machine, Bluetooth ring, ring clip, an adjustable barbell, a set of barbell hooks, a pair of handles, a pair of handle extenders, a pair of ankle straps, and a triceps rope. Works adds a flat bench, and Works Plus upgrades the bench to an adjustable version capable of multiple angles from flat to seated upright. Family Plus has all of those parts, plus a rowing bench. Speediance sent me the Works Plus bundle for testing.

Even without a weight stack or attached handles, the Gym Monster 2 unmistakably looks like a home exercise machine. It stands 73 by 28 by 15 inches folded (HWD), with a U-shaped frame and a rectangular flip-down mat both rising above a heavy base. The machine’s large, tablet-like control panel is mounted on an arm that descends from the top of the frame, with a hinge that lets it tilt slightly up and down. That tablet houses most of the Gym Monster 2’s electronics, while the base holds the power supply and magnetic motors.

The motors and power supply account for most of the Gym Monster 2’s 172-pound weight, so it’s quite bottom-heavy. To make it easier to move around, there are two wheels on the front edge of the base, behind where the mat flips down. With the machine folded, you can roll it around the room by gripping the frame and tilting it toward you so it rises up on the wheels, then pushing it around like a hand cart. The wheelable base and free-standing design are the Gym Monster 2’s biggest advantages over the Tonal 2: If you have the space, you can put this machine down anywhere, while the Tonal 2 requires professional wall-mounting that makes it more expensive to set up and simply unfeasible in some homes. 

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

If you’re willing to deal with free weights and use your own TV and iPhone instead of a full machine, the Tempo Move is an excellent alternative for smart strength training. It offers the classes and form feedback that the Gym Monster 2 lacks for a fraction of the price (starting at $708 for the first year to cover both the subscription and equipment, and $39 per month thereafter for the subscription).

The Gym Monster 2’s mat is a large black slab that folds down to the floor, with rubber feet on the bottom and a gray foam rubber pad on the top. The pad has enough traction to stay in place and can be removed and hand-washed when necessary. Unfolded, the mat expands the machine’s footprint to 28 by 48 inches (WD). When not in use, the mat folds vertically against the frame and stays locked in place until you press a button on the base to release it. Two short metal bars sit against the base and fold down onto the mat to lock it in the open position and keep the main body of the machine steady when in use; without the bars in place, the Gym Monster 2 can wobble and tilt forward when you use it.

Two thin cables run from the sides of the base to ball-shaped clips that the different handles snap into. These provide the resistance for many of the Gym Monster 2’s exercises. The cables run through pulleys on small metal brackets that slide into rails on the machine’s frame and mat. The rail mounts on the frame can be locked at several different heights, while the mat’s rail is fixed at the midpoints of its left and right edges. This setup enables resistance from multiple directions: Most pressing and curling exercises will use the mat points, while other moves like axe chop and chest fly may use the frame points at different heights.

Moving the pulleys to different positions on the machine isn’t as quick and smooth as adjusting the moving arms on the Tonal 2. Switching between a frame mounting point and the mat’s mount requires unlocking and removing each pulley and sliding it into place. Adjusting the height between two different frame points is easier, with a pull-knob lock similar to the bench adjustments of conventional weight machines. The Tonal 2, by contrast, has two arms you move into different positions with a simple button or lever, without physically unclipping the end of the cable mechanisms and clipping them elsewhere.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

At least changing handles is easy, if just slightly more mechanically complicated than on Tonal machines. Metal balls on the ends of the cables have long slots that the different handles' clips click into, and large buttons that release the locks on those slots. I had little problem quickly removing and reattaching the different accessories to these balls, and they never accidentally came loose once locked. Tonal, by contrast, uses a twist-and-lock system without a button. Both seem equally quick and reliable.

The included handles are basic and functional. There are the standard individual handles, which are sturdy plastic tubes threaded on nylon ropes for individual arm exercises like curls. The barbell is a steel bar with movable clips that can be set at different points, whether your exercise uses a wide or narrow grip. The Gym Monster 2 also works with a pair of padded cuffs that wrap around your ankles for leg exercises. Lastly, there’s a rope, featuring a Y-shaped section capped with two large plastic knobs, used for tricep extensions. Any of these handles can be paired with the two extension straps, which add 16.3 inches of wide, padded strips to the cables. The extension straps are helpful for exercises where the movements can make the cables rub against you.   

How It Works: Tap the Screen and Spin the Ring

The Gym Monster 2’s 21-inch touch screen is its control panel and the main method of doing anything with the machine. It’s a portrait-oriented 1080p (1,080 by 1,920 pixels) display, and won’t wow you with its picture quality. The system interface and video guides are clear enough to use while working out, but low contrast and mediocre colors make it look a bit cheap. The built-in speakers are also purely utilitarian, making voice prompts easy to understand but not doing any service to music that plays through them.

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(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Touching the screen mid-exercise is difficult (or outright dangerous if you’re in the middle of a motion), which is why the Gym Monster 2 comes with a Bluetooth control ring. It’s a thimble-sized plastic device with an elastic band that lets you slip it around your finger, or attach it to a clamp that can fit on some of the machine’s handles. A clickable wheel on the tip of the ring toggles resistance on and off with a press and adjusts the simulated weight with a turn when the resistance is disengaged. The ring is rechargeable, reliably connects to the machine, and generally works exactly as it should. The wheel is a bit overly sensitive, though, and I’ve accidentally nudged the weight up or down slightly when trying to start a workout.

Workout Selection: No Subscription Needed, But No Live Classes

Unlike Tempo and Tonal machines, the Gym Monster 2 doesn’t require a subscription and is fully functional without one. You can access the machine’s hundreds of workouts, all with video guidance, at no extra cost. You can also build your own custom workouts, picking and choosing from over a hundred individual exercises and setting the weight, number of reps, and number of sets. If you want to go even more basic, you can manually set the weight and resistance pattern and simply perform whatever exercise you want. The machine requires a Wi-Fi connection even to use that simple mode, though.

You can get more features for detailed fitness tracking with a Wellness+ subscription for $19.99 per month or $119.88 per year. It offers AI-powered coaching with goal-based workout plans customized to your needs, and detailed progress tracking. It’s worthwhile if you’re new to weight training and aren’t sure how to best design your workouts, and it’s much, much cheaper than the $59.95 monthly subscription Tonal requires for at least one year with its machines. However, you get what you pay for, and the automated features I mentioned are pretty much all you get with Wellness+. 

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Smart exercise machine manufacturers like Tempo and Tonal often distinguish themselves with their presentation and the variety of trainers you can access. Tempo and Tonal, with memberships, both offer live and on-demand classes that provide full, guided workouts with AI-powered feedback. Speediance offers almost 200 fully guided workouts in that class format, though there are no live classes. These are the most engaging workouts you can do on the Gym Monster 2, with a natural flow and high energy level through each class. They can be found in the Fully Guided section of the machine's workout list.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Outside of the class-like workouts, there are hundreds more that are basically playlists of prerecorded videos of individual, isolated exercises. Speediance's coaches Michael Pistilli and Will Hutcheson guide you through many of the workouts. They're both energetic, and their guidance is useful for getting started. 

Then there are the exercises that the human trainers don’t coach you through. For those exercises, you get an AI voice that gives the most sterile and least helpful directions. It’s lifeless and much colder than even the less effusive of the human trainers, whose stoic presentation at least has a modicum of personality to it. The AI voice sometimes even mispronounces words: It has directed me to “breath” rather than “breathe” during several workouts. It's very jarring, and the least pleasant of the possible choices.

Besides basic directions in the guided exercises, the Gym Monster 2 offers very little feedback to ensure you maintain proper form. Unlike the Tonal 2, which uses a camera, sensor data, and machine learning technology to offer guidance based on your stance and movements, the Gym Monster only has the motors to evaluate you. It monitors the speed, range of movement, and force applied to each motor, letting you know if you aren’t moving enough or if you’re unbalanced. It’s better than nothing and can record detailed information about your workouts like total weight moved and calories burned, but it won’t give you much more than that. I also found its balance measurements inconsistent, and it would often say I was off-balance or using uneven force with the barbell when it appeared to me that I was moving it consistently and keeping it level.

The Experience: The Weights Work Well

In terms of actually exercising with the Gym Monster 2, it works as well as any cable-driven weight machine should. Each motor can provide up to 110 pounds of resistance for the equivalent of a 220-pound stack on a conventional weight machine. It’s slightly less than the Tonal 2’s 125 pounds per arm/250 pounds total maximum resistance, but not by much. Both machines provide enough simulated weight for most users’ workout needs. If you want much more weight than that, you’ll probably have to get a heavier-duty conventional machine with weight stacks like the Rep Fitness Arcadia Functional Trainer (170 pounds per arm/340 pounds total for $2,199.99, upgradable to 220 pounds per arm/440 pounds total for an additional $324.99).

I am not a bodybuilder or Strongman, but I try to work out regularly, and I found the Gym Monster 2 functional enough for that. It let me do bench presses, curls, squats, and all sorts of other exercises, with resistance. The trainer-led workouts weren’t much more helpful than traditional fitness videos, though chimes as I performed each motion let me know my progress, and the screen let me keep an eye on my range of motion.

The exercise tracking made the Gym Monster 2 feel more useful than a non-smart weight machine. Even ignoring the trainers, just displaying the numbers of reps and sets, and showing me my range of motion and balance (despite that feature feeling very finicky), provided helpful information. After my workouts, I could see how many of each exercise I performed, and when I was wobbly or didn’t give it my all. 

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

I tried out Wellness+, and while the custom workout plan it provided seemed to fit my needs, it was ultimately just an AI-generated collection of the exercises available on the machine without the subscription. The hundreds of premade workouts and the ability to manually craft my own made it feel even less useful. The limited-to-nonexistent trainer interaction already required me to actively understand the exercises and watch my own form as I performed them. With a little more research (or the guidance of a weightlifting friend), I'd probably be able to put together my own fitness plan without the subscription. Without the engagement of live classes or AI checking my form, there’s little reason to get Wellness+, and I found the machine just as useful after the trial period was over.