Review: 12 weeks of strength training with the x3 bar variable resistance system

Lifting, but not weights

The x3 barbell, ground plate, and variable resistance bands (https://www.jaquishbiomedical.com/products/x3-bar/)

I’ve just completed the 12 week introductory program that comes with the x3 bar variable resistance training system. (Not an affiliate link, but I think it’s a great product.)

I thought I’d write down my thoughts and experience with it.

First, some backstory. I was not an athletic kid. Usually got picked last for sports. Hated all forms of exercise or movement. Spent all day in front of books or the computer.

In college, that kind of changed. I got into boxing for a while. Then CrossFit.

CrossFit

I did CrossFit religiously for about a year in my early 20s. I tracked attendance and averaged 4.2 days/wk including holidays and sick days.

I got way fitter, and I’m sure I put on a little bit of muscle, but I didn’t lose any meaningful amount of weight. I started around 210lbs and maybe I finished the year at 205lbs. I’m sure there was a little bit of recomp, i.e. I gained some muscle and lost a bit of fat.

But it wasn’t enough to budge my clothing size.

In CrossFit you do a bunch of lifting of weights, but it’s not exactly strength-first or muscle building-first. CrossFit is “functional,” which means the goal is to perform repetitions in less time or more often, with a big focus on mechanical efficiency. Mechanical efficiency is practically the opposite of muscle building.

I did learn to squat, bench press, floor press, overhead press, and many more exercises, but we never really went that heavy. These classical powerlifting movements were typically incorporated in high volume, but at relatively low weight.

That made me pretty happy because the few times we did lift heavy, I could feel my knees and elbows were not doing so well. This was in my early 20s - it would not get better with age.

Starting Strength

In my early 30s I got it into my head that I wanted to become serious about lifting and strength. I bought a squat rack, a bench, a barbell, a bunch of weights, and set up a garage gym.

There were 2 basic beginner plans floating around, Starting Strength and StrongLifts 5x5. They looked very similar. I chose Starting Strength because it seemed to have more “real world” and not just internet cred.

My experience with Starting Strength was quite bad, and I don’t know if StrongLifts would’ve been any better.

The first month or so went great: the workouts took only maybe half an hour, I progressed a lot (Starting Strength has you begin with an empty bar), I had fun.

Then I stalled. When you stall, you reset your weight a little bit and try again.

I stalled again.

When I looked online what I should do, the recommendation was to eat more. But I was doing this to lose weight, not to gain weight, and I was already up 10lbs the first month.

And it wasn’t 10lbs of muscle either - I had to buy new pants because my old pants wouldn’t fit any more.

The workouts left me ravenous, and I followed the recommendations of eating lots of protein, mostly in the form of ground beef. I must’ve eaten 2lbs/day of ground beef or more.

Despite gaining a ton of fat, mostly around my belly, I didn’t meaningfully progress. I stalled and stalled and stalled. I needed to increase my rest time between sets until the workouts would take 2 hours.

Doing this for about 3 months, I went from just sub-230lbs body weight to just under 250lbs.

20lbs, mostly fat, gained in 3 months of lifting weights. Great.

One reason for plateauing over and over was that my knees and elbows just never felt great under heavy load. Maybe it’s because I was never athletic as a kid, and didn’t built the requisite joint strength. Or maybe I just have shitty knees and elbows.

Every time I squatted heavy, it felt like my knee caps were popping. My knees would get hot and feel “grindy,” like they had sand in them and would give any second. Sometimes, acute, piercing knee pain.

My elbows didn’t like bench presses, and as I got to heavier weights there, I tweaked my left elbow and had to pause for a while.

I wasn’t in very heavy territory in absolute terms; this was just what the Starting Strength progression gets to after 1-2 months. For an experienced weight lifter, these would still be considered beginner weights.

Whenever I tell this story to people who lift, they tell me I must’ve been doing it wrong:

• I gained fat because I was overeating, obviously.

• I was plateauing because I wasn’t eating enough, obviously.

• I had knee and elbow pain because I had upped the weights too fast, obviously.

• I was being a little bitch for not pushing through the acute, piercing joint pain, obviously.

Starting Strength was clearly not working for me, and I abandoned it and just gave up lifting.

In retrospect, I think one thing I could’ve tried was reducing training volume. Starting Strength has you lift 3x/wk, so you have 4 days of rest between heavy squats/deadlifts/bench presses.

Maybe I should’ve gone to only lift 2x/wk and give myself more time for recovery? I didn’t see this recommendation at the time, and I didn’t know much or have an intuition for lifting, so it didn’t occur to me.

Attempts at building a variable resistance system

Years before I learned of the x3 bar, I had actually tried to build something like it myself. I had read somewhere on the internet that one could simply take a metal broomstick, put some stretch bands around it, put a piece of plywood on the ground, and deadlift off of that.

I purchased an aluminum broomstick and a bunch of stretchy bands in the sporting goods section of my local supermarket, and got plywood somewhere.

Obviously, the aluminum broomstick broke at the very first attempt to deadlift. Snapped in half and I nearly cut myself.

I abandoned the idea.

John Jaquish, inventor of x3 if you can’t tell from his shirt

This is kind of funny in retrospect, since John Jaquish, the guy behind the x3 bar, mentions this type of thing in his book Weightlifting is a Waste of Time. Apparently people come up to him all the time saying “Why should I give you my money? I can just build this with a broomstick and some cheap bands!”

I tried. And it broke at the very first attempt to pull.

So I gave Jaquish my money.

What is x3?

The x3 bar system is basically 3 pieces:

• A metal plate you stand on

• A bar you push/pull on

• A latex band from a selection of different strengths (it comes with 4 different ones) that provides resistance

x3 can replicate many or most powerlifting movements like squats, presses, or deadlifts - instead of pushing/pulling against weights and gravity, you push/pull against the resistance of the latex bands.

You slide the band into 2 hooks on the bar ends, wrap it under the ground plate or sometimes your shoulders/back (depending on the exercise), and then you can push/pull against the band.

Bands

The bands are freaking strong. The highest one that comes in the box is rated for over 300lbs, and you can buy an extra strong one that can do 500-600lbs. I haven’t even gotten to the 300lbs one after 3 months, but then I hadn’t lifted in years.

Bar

The bar is super well made, rotates like an olympic barbell, and feels very premium. One of the best bars I’ve ever touched. It’s very heavy duty, has good but not painful knurling, the hooks are very sturdy, and I’ve never had a band slip.

It’s important that the bar rotate independently of the hooks/bands, just as an olympic barbell does - when you move against heavy resistance, you don’t want your wrists to get into an awkward position. It’s a bad idea to put heavy pressure on a compromised wrist. Because the bar rotates, your wrists will always be in the correct and stable position if you lock them while lifting.

Some people online think the bar should be wider, but I found I don’t even use the entire width as it is. An advantage of its shorter length is that you can put it into your suitcase for traveling.

Plate

The ground plate is a bit meh, it’s just a metal plate with rubber feet. It’s not bad or wobbly, but it just doesn’t feel quite as premium and nice and polished as the bar. If I had one criticism of the hardware of x3, it’s that the ground plate is a bit plain compared to the bar. That said, it’s very sturdy.

Travel

One of the advantages over free weights or machines: you can travel with the x3. It’s a bit bulky and you probably can’t take it as carry-on luggage (I haven’t tried). But the ground plate and bar both easily fit into a carry-on sized suitcase. They also sell a travel case that you can check in separately if you don’t want the x3 to take up all the space in your suitcase.

This allows you to bring your full gym with you wherever you travel, which is a pretty cool bonus.

x3 methodology and program

The x3 bar comes with a suggested methodology and beginner program, although you can, of course, use it however you like.

People like to tweak it, and its creator Jaquish likes to get mad at those people for ruining his program. Personally, I’ve had to tweak it after 3 weeks due to overtraining, and I’ll tweak it more now that I’ve finished the 12 week introduction phase. But more on that later.

Exercise selection

The suggested workout plan consists of 8 exercises, separated into a “push” and a “pull” workout.

Push workout:

• Chest press (~=bench press)

• Triceps press

• Overhead press

• Squat

Pull workout:

• Deadlift

• Bent row

• Biceps curl

• Calf raise

Coming from the functional/CrossFit world, I had never done biceps curls, triceps presses, or calf raises. I expected not to like them, but I ended up liking them fine - especially the triceps press.

12 week program

The 12 week program suggested when you first buy x3 has you starting out at 4 workouts per week, alternating between the push and pull workouts. This means you train every movement 2x per week, with 3 or 4 days of rest in between.

After 4 weeks, Jaquish has you go up to 6 workouts/wk and only Sunday as rest day. This means only 2 days rest between the same movements, and 3 for Sunday.

I followed the 4x/wk program for 3 weeks, when I began gaining a lot of weight (probably water weight?) and actually getting worse in my lifting performance.

It was very similar to my Starting Strength experience, except I never felt any joint pain. But clearly something wasn’t right.

So instead of going up to 6x/wk at the 4 week mark, I actually went down to 2x/wk. This meant I was only doing each movement 1 time per week, push day on Mondays and pull day on Thursdays.

This gave me a full 7 days of rest in between the same movements, and I saw my weight go down rapidly and my lifting performance improve.

I should mention that I was/am eating very low protein - probably not ideal for building muscle. This might’ve been a factor in my plateau after only 3 weeks. But then again I plateaued not much later eating 2lbs or more of ground beef per day on Starting Strength.

In any case, I think going down to 2x/wk was the right choice. I might go up higher in the future.

Methodology: HIT

There are various philosophies as to how one might most effectively or efficiently lift weights to gain the most strength or muscle. High volume, high reps, low reps, lots of rest, lifting slowly, free weights, machines..

One of these methods is called High Intensity Training, or HIT for short. Not to be confused with HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) like CrossFit, which is pretty much the opposite of HIT.

Whereas HIIT often switches between sets of high-rep, low-weight (or even body weight) exercises, HIT usually only involves a single set per exercise per workout, done in near-slow motion to make it more difficult.

In a sense, HIT is an attempt to perform the movement in question as inefficiently as possible. The goal is not to move the weight, the goal is to fatigue muscles. The more inefficient we can make the movement, the better - no momentum, no added swinging, do it all in slow motion until you physically can’t perform another rep, go to failure every time.

Mike Mentzer

HIT was practiced by some old-timey bodybuilders like Mike Mentzer. There are interesting clips of Mentzer on YouTube, if you’re interested, where he explains his ideas.

Another big proponent of HIT was Arthur Jones, the inventor of the Nautilus exercise machines. While Mentzer and other bodybuilders used HIT to gain as much muscle as possible on the bodybuilding stage, Jones also had an eye on hobbyists, or people who just wanted to stay fit for health reasons. The idea for exercising with machines was that it would be easier and safer for non-professionals, who didn’t have the will or experience to learn how to perform movements safely with free weights.

A third important figure in HIT is Doug McGuff, who wrote the popular book Body by Science.

Body by Science (popularly abbreviated as BBS) advocates a version of HIT purely aimed at efficiently maximizing health benefits while minimizing effort, time commitment, and injury risk.

McGuff recommends doing only 1 workout per week, comprised of 5 “big” compound exercises, using machines if possible because they’re safer and easier to use than free weights.

I had actually considered giving BBS and machines a try, and committing to a gym membership, when I first heard about x3.

x3: the Jaquish take on HIT + variable resistance

In a way, x3 is a direct spiritual successor to HIT programs like BBS, although the focus is a bit more on bodybuilding/looking good naked, not just health.

The following features of x3 are simply HIT:

• Only 1 set per exercise per workout

• Going to absolute failure during that 1 set

• Moving very slowly, taking 2 seconds up and down on each movement

What Jaquish added:

• Variable resistance using bands instead of machines/weights

• Much higher workout volume suggested (4x/6x per week)

Jaquish has actually written a book detailing all his ideas and thoughts about x3, in which he cites plenty of papers and studies. I’ll admit I checked almost none of the references, but what he says largely matches what HIT people have been saying, and pretty much everything from BBS as well.

The book is called Weightlifting is a Waste of Time and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in x3. I read it before buying x3 just to make sure this guy was actually onto something, and was able to back up his claims.

In fact, this is such a spiritual successor to BBS that you could almost call it the next evolution. I read Jaquish’s book before BBS, and not only had I learned almost everything in BBS in Jaquish’s book, or at least a summary, but McGuff complains about some things in BBS that Jaquish solved with x3.

For example, McGuff thinks it’s quite important that the machines you use for strength training use a specially shaped cam to match the force curve of your musculature. This curve can be different for each muscle or exercise.

The aforementioned Arthur Jones of Nautilus machines apparently designed the original Nautilus machines with this in mind, creating special cams that matched human musculature very well.

Unfortunately for us, he seems to have patented these, so none of the many copy cats were able to use correct force curves. It also seems most of them didn’t understand the idea behind the cam shapes, and so they just made the cams random other shapes that weren’t patented.

According to McGuff, even the newer Nautilus machines don’t have the original, optimized cam shapes.

Variable resistance from bands completely solves this issue: the bands stretch as you push/pull them, increasing resistance. This means that the resistance is much more variable than even the perfect cam shape could produce.

Bands have an exponential force curve, which matches almost all exercises very well. The only exercise included that doesn’t quite match is the bent row, because it’s a combination of biceps/lats - we’re stronger in the middle of the movement than at the final range of motion.

Saving the joints

One thing Jaquish keeps coming back to in his book is that, with weights, you have the same resistance in the weakest and the strongest part of any lift.

In fact, it’s a point of pride and “correct technique” for most powerlifters to squat all the way to the ground (“ass to the grass”) and lower the bar all the way onto your chest in the bench press.

What this means, though, is that you’re only ever lifting as much as you can lift in your weakest position - by definition - and you also load your joints at their weakest position much more than is useful or necessary.

When you squat with 200lbs of weights on the bar, the bar weighs 200lbs at the very top and the very bottom.

When you squat with an x3 resistance band, the band is very loose at the bottom, providing maybe only 30lbs of resistance or so. At the top, it is stretched out and provides much more resistance, say equivalent to 210lbs.

This way, variable resistance allows you to stress your joints minimally and still train with extremely heavy resistance at the stronger ranges of motion.

And, in my experience so far, the joint part is true. I got a tiny knee tingle the very first 2-3 squat workouts, but never felt anything since. Similarly, there is one weird point in the range of motion for the bent row where my elbow tingles a bit, but if I don’t pull quite all the way up to my stomach, I don’t feel a thing.

This is already much better than I’ve ever been able to lift with free weights, where I could never squat or bench to failure due to joint pain.

Using x3: Impressions

Here are some random notes I took during the 12 weeks.

1st workout

Smoked immediately, maybe 5-10 minutes!
Barely made the minimum of 15 reps with the lightest band in most exercises!
Wow! Arms very sore for 2-3h, legs only got lightly sore a few hours later

Immediately thinking of changing the workout around, lol, like Jaquish says not to

Day after, +2lbs water weight

Short workout duration is an awesome feature of x3, or HIT in general. Since you only do 1 set per exercise, the workouts are VERY brief. Here are some sample workout durations: 7:52, 8:11, 6:42, 7:02.

These all include time for setup/reading instructions. Each of these workouts included 4 entire exercises.

I ended up not racing the clock after a month or so, instead resting for 30-120 seconds between the different movements. I do think that it helps with the next movement to take a short break. This is HIT, not HIIT, after all.

Week 2

Felt size L t-shirts tighten around shoulders/arms
Could just be the pump

Rapid initial improvement likely just "getting back into lifting" and getting used to the modality/feel/technique of x3

Different "sore," feels like only half the soreness I remember from weights?
No joint soreness/micro tears from variable resistance, like he says in the book?

This was pretty cool. Like Jaquish promises in the book, while I did often get sore from x3, it felt less bad than from weights most of the time. It really does seem like you recover much faster from the variable resistance, maybe because there’s less stress on the joints.

Week 4

Size L t-shirts feel much tighter around chest, back (!), shoulders, and arms
Profound soreness in week 4 from deadlifts, whole posterior chain for 2 days

Chest and overhead press in the same workout isn't great
1 is always pre-fatigued by the other, cutting reps roughly in half

This is the same issue with some other weightlifting programs I've seen. I believe StrongLifts does this as well. If you do a chest press and then overhead press, or the other way around, you’re fatiguing the pressing muscles (triceps/back/shoulders I suppose) and the second exercise will be way worse than if you’d done it fresh

I sometimes swapped from chest->OHP to OHP->chest after 2 weeks because I wanted to give the OHP (overhead press) a fair shot as well. And, as predicted, I could do way more reps in the OHP if it came before the chest press, and the chest press suffered in return. These should just be on 2 different days.

After 4 weeks

x3 wants you to go up to 6 workouts/wk
I went down to 2x
Felt overtrained, underrecovered, sore
2x/wk is logistically stupid, now I have to remember to work out on the specific days instead of “most days”

Pattern: new record in one exercise, the rest of that workout afterwards all suck

That last part is true to this day - sometimes I’ll way do way more reps than last time in the first movement of a workout, and then be way worse in all or most of the following ones. This seems particularly true if I deadlift first. Seems the deadlift is very taxing on everything.

Week 7

Nearly blacked out during overhead press after super intense 3 other exercises, had to stop

This was during my chocolate truffle fat fast, meaning I was only eating around 20g of protein per day instead of my usual 45g. I suspect that I was getting very low blood glucose during that time, and my body didn’t have enough reserves to quickly ramp it up during exercise. I clocked around 50mg/dL blood glucose and ketones in the 6.3mmol/L range several times during the fat fast, so strenuous resistance exercise could easily get me into hypoglycemic territory, I suppose.

The blacking out didn’t happen once I went back up to 45g protein/day, which usually puts me into the 75-85mg/dL blood glucose range at rest, seemingly enough to buffer the glucose dip from strength training.

I also noticed that my reps went up in pretty much every movement after going up from 20g to 45g of protein per day. I suspect the extra protein allowed my body to store more glycogen in my muscles, so I was able to squeeze out more reps.

Band progressions so far

The x3 bar comes with 4 bands included, and you can buy an extra strong one if that’s not enough for you:

1. White

2. Light grey

3. Dark grey

4. Black

5. Orange “Elite” band (costs $100 extra, I didn’t buy this)

As recommended, I started with lightest (white) band for every exercise. The rule is that you should be able to do at least 15 good, clean, slow reps or the band you’re using is too strong. If you can do 40 or more good, clean, slow reps, you should go up to the next band when you next do this exercise.

Here’s my progress so far:

• Chest press: -> light grey @ week 2

• Calf raises: -> light grey @ week 2

• Triceps press: -> light grey @ week 3

• Calf raises: -> dark grey @ week 4, but didn't do it until week 7

• Chest press: -> dark grey @ week 7

• Deadlift: -> light grey @ week 9

• Triceps press: -> dark grey @ week 9

Overall I haven’t graduated to the black (level 4) band in any exercise yet.

The exercises vary tremendously in range of motion and so it’s hard to compare bands between them. For example, the chest press and triceps press have a very limited range of motion, even if the band is doubled over behind your shoulders. The band is stretched maybe 8-10 inches.

The overhead press has a very extreme range of motion, with the band stretching from below your feet to above your outstretched arms, over your head. Your height also plays into it, someone who’s 6ft tall will have to stretch the band 1ft further than someone who’s 5ft tall.

It feels like the 4 bands included with x3 are plenty for me, and will be for a while. If you’re coming to x3 from a background of lifting a lot, and you’re quite strong, maybe spring for the orange “Elite” band right away.

A friend of mine, who’s lifted consistently for years, has already graduated to the black band in some exercises, even though he started after me. He might have to get the orange band soon.

The orange band can give you up to 600lbs of resistance, so if you outgrow that.. you might just be done with strength training. Or I suppose you could use 2 bands at the same time or something.

Changes going forward

The only real change I’ve made to the x3 program so far was reducing training volume to 2 workouts per week.

I’d thought about cutting out some of the supplemental exercises like calf raise or biceps curl. Then again, what would I save? 2 minutes per week? The x3 workout is so ridiculously brief that it doesn’t even make sense to cut out exercises, unless maybe overall volume got too high again.

But I really dislike the pre-fatiguing effect of similar exercises in the same workout. E.g. the “push day” concept has 3 presses in one workout: chest press, overhead press, triceps press. And everything after the deadlift is pre-fatigued, or that’s what it feels like.

So I’ll start splitting the workouts much smaller, and do something like work out every day, but only do 1 exercise a day (doubling up 2 on one of the days because there are only 7 days in a week, but 8 exercises).

That way I’ll still have 7 days of rest before the same exercise comes around again, but I’ll be fresh every day.

From what I’ve read from more mainstream bodybuilding sources, there shouldn’t be a downside - if anything, maybe an upside since you’re fresh every workout.

This would of course be impractical if I had to commute to a gym, but with x3, I don’t. I could work out 36x a week if I wanted to.

Is x3 worth it?

x3 gets a surprising amount of hate online, lol. Maybe cause Jaquish is a bit of a troll/provocateur?

He titled his book “Weightlifting is a Waste of Time” and he openly says that his opinion of the fitness industry is that they’re mostly scammers, and gyms are useless for most people.

So he likes to stir the pot and ruffle some feathers, if you catch my drift.

He makes a lot of big claims for x3 - for example, it’s called x3 because he says it’ll give you “3x the gains” that you’d get from lifting weights.

Jaquish lives in quantum-expected-value-space for me, meaning I’ve yet to collapse the wave function on some of his claims, but I think it paid off to place a bet on x3 and see how it turned out.

I read his book twice, and almost everything at least makes sense. Much of it is what I’ve heard from various other fitness professionals/gurus, so he’s rarely making an outrageous claim that I’ve never heard of.

Price

Some people complain that x3 is too expensive. The MSRP on the website is $550. But there’s always (I mean, literally always) a $50 off coupon from any of the many affiliates. Easy to find if you just search for “x3 bar” on YouTube and watch some reviews, they typically have affiliate links with this coupon.

During most major U.S. holidays, x3 is $100 off (total, not on top of the $50), bringing it down to $450. This is what I paid.

For Black Friday, it was actually $150 off, and a friend bought it for $400.

That said, I think even $550 isn’t a crazy price if you amortize it and compare it to an annual gym membership. I’ve paid $200-250/mo for a CrossFit membership, and many serious “strength & conditioning facilities” (vs. Globo Gyms) cost about as much.

So you get your money’s worth in just 2-3 months compared to a fancy, bespoke fitness/strength place.

But $400-550 spread over 12 months is only $33-45/mo. And that’s if you only use it for one year. God forbid it actually works and lasts a while, you might easily use it for 2-3 years or longer.

Can you get a gym membership for <$45/mo? Yes, but it’s not going to be amazing. Those places give you those prices because they do volume and sell you an annual membership up front, and they know 80% of people don’t come back after the week of January 1st is over. At least you can sell your x3 bar if you end up not using it.

And what if we compare it to a regular garage gym? You’d need a squat rack, a bench (or I suppose you could floor press), a barbell, weights, probably rubber mats for flooring if you’re going to drop the weights..

All that is going to set you back way more than the x3 system. In fact, you could probably buy it 2-3 times if you’re going for comparable quality.

Olympic barbells seem to start around $265 at Rogue Fitness, and the plates will set you back a few hundred more. Squat racks are $400 and up.

Yes, you get more stuff. But you can do pretty much the same exercises with x3, and I’d wager you’ll get pretty much the same out of it in terms of muscle growth.

Results

Maybe the most important thing is, does it work? After only 12 weeks I can’t claim I look as jacked as Jaquish does in his promo pics. But then it took him at least a year to get big results, too.

I definitely feel and look a bit more muscular, I’d say. Especially my shoulders and triceps.

DEXA hasn’t revealed any insane mass gains, but I’ve also lost over 10lbs in the 12 weeks since I started using it, which likely came with at least some lean mass loss, and I was on a hyper low protein fat fast for 4 of those weeks.

In addition, I only trained 4x/wk for the first 4 weeks and then downgraded to 2x/wk.

If anyone ever tells you he couldn’t get a good workout in with resistance bands, he hasn’t tried the x3 bands. They’re nuts. I typically work up a sweat and begin panting during the first exercise, and by the end my heart is racing and my muscles are messed up. x3 has you go to failure and beyond via partial repetitions, every single movement, every single time.

Are you doing 40+ reps @ 600lbs? If so, x3 might not be enough for you. For all of us normal people, the x3 bands are probably good enough for a lifetime.

Doing the exercises (squat, deadlift, overhead press, chest press) with x3 feels pretty much exactly the same as when I did them with free weights. My muscles get hot and burn and shiver and then I can’t move the bar any more.

So, going by that, it’s just as effective as weights. Is it 3x as effective? No clue.

Travel

Oh hey, I was able to stick my gym into my suitcase and train at my destination. It requires so little space, you could probably work out in a closet. This is an awesome bonus on top.

Joints

And finally: well, I didn’t actually ever get great results with free weights, did I. So x3 is enabling me to train hard, which I couldn’t do with free weights.

I’d never squatted or benched to failure in my life due to joint pain.

With x3, that’s no issue whatsoever. I squat to failure and deadlift to failure and chest press to failure all the time. Not only does it not hurt in the moment, I also don’t have joint pain the next 3 days.

It seems to me that the discussion of “if x3 works as well as free weights” is immaterial to me personally, because free weights never actually worked. So it works way better!

Overall

I’m not trying to be an x3 used car salesman here or anything, but I’m really impressed with the thing. It just kind of … solves resistance training.

Similar to how ex150 solves eating for me, working out really hard has become a thing that takes 10 minutes 2x/wk, and which I can do in my bedroom in boxers.

No more gym clothes, gym bag, gym shoes, driving to the gym, checking into the gym, waiting for machines/racks to free up, increasing weights, lowering weights, changing back, driving back, washing gym clothes, rinse, repeat.

Often times I throw in a quick workout before I cook lunch. It only takes 10 minutes!

In my personal expected value calculation, x3 would’ve been a success if it worked just as well as a gym, at the same price, just for the convenience and money savings. If it also helps reduce joint pain, enables me to lift heavier by eliminating knee/elbow issues, takes less time, and I can travel with it, perfect!

Any one of those make it better than a regular gym membership or free weights in my garage, even if it didn’t give the same results. Should it give me the same or 2x or 3x the gainz, that’s just icing on the cake.