Speediance 2S Modes Explained and a Smarter Warm-Up Strategy

If you own a Speediance 2S, there’s a good chance you’ve stared at the workout setup screen and thought: What exactly am I telling this machine to do? You’re not alone. The naming is not especially intuitive, and once you start mixing presets, custom workouts, dynamic weight modes, and one-rep max calculations, it gets confusing fast.

This post is the simplified explanation I wish existed when I first started using the machine. It’s also my answer to a common question from YouTube: how do the different modes affect your workouts, your warm-ups, and your stored strength data?

The short version: the Speediance 2S is more interconnected than it first appears. Your movement settings, your personal records, and the machine’s dynamic weight calculations all feed into each other. That’s powerful when it works correctly—but it also means the wrong setup choice can create a headache.

The Core Idea: Everything Flows Through Your Strength Data

At the center of the system is your estimated strength for each movement. The machine appears to rely on either:

• your PR values for that specific movement, or
• your broader strength assessment if no movement-specific PR exists yet.

That matters because the preset training modes—Gain Muscle, Stamina, and Strength—aren’t just generic labels. They’re ways of telling the machine how to calculate your working weight from that underlying strength profile.

Then you also have the dynamic weight modes:

• Standard
• Chain
• Eccentric

Those modes change how the resistance behaves, but they still sit on top of your stored strength values.

So if your numbers are right, the machine can feel smart. If your numbers are wrong, the entire experience can drift out of alignment.

Why “Customize” Seems to Cause Problems

The biggest practical takeaway from my testing is simple: I would avoid the Customize option for warm-up sets.

Why? Because there are reports that manually entering a low weight in Customize can affect what the machine thinks you’re capable of on that movement. In one example, a user entered a light weight for dumbbell curls as a warm-up, then expected the machine to return to a much heavier dynamic working weight afterward. Instead, the working sets stayed low.

My suspicion is that if the machine doesn’t have a strong enough prior reference point—especially if the strength assessment wasn’t done first—it may treat that manually entered value as meaningful strength data when it shouldn’t.

To be clear, I can’t say this happens every time. It may be a bug. It may only happen in certain cases. But if a feature can potentially interfere with your stored movement strength, I’d rather work around it than trust it blindly.

The Smarter Workaround: Use Stamina for Dynamic Warm-Ups

Instead of using Customize to create light warm-up sets, I prefer using Stamina mode in a very deliberate way.

This is the trick: I set a rep-max target that is well below my actual capability, then perform fewer reps than that target allows. In practice, that gives me a warm-up set that is light enough to move well, but heavy enough to wake the muscle up.

For example, I’ll often use something like:

• Weight target: 20RM
• Actual reps performed: 13

That creates a dynamic warm-up set based on my real strength profile, without forcing the machine to interpret a manually typed low weight as my new normal. It also scales with me. As I get stronger, those warm-up sets still make sense.

This is the key difference: Customize gives the machine an absolute number. Stamina gives the machine a relative instruction.

That relative instruction is much safer if your goal is simply to warm up.

How I Build Workouts on the Speediance 2S

My current approach is pretty simple:

• first set = lighter Stamina-based warm-up
• second set = heavier working set
• often use Eccentric mode for the main work

I’ll frequently duplicate the same movement in sequence so I can go from a warm-up version directly into a more demanding version. That makes custom programming much faster and keeps everything anchored to the movement’s actual strength profile.

One nice feature here is that the machine tends to remember how I last used a movement. If I typically run that movement with maxed-out eccentric loading, it often carries that preference forward. That can be helpful—but it’s also another reason I’m cautious about Customize. The system remembers more than you think.

What Standard, Chain, and Eccentric Actually Change

These three dynamic weight modes aren’t just cosmetic. They change the feel of the lift significantly.

Standard

This is the straightforward version. Resistance behaves the way most users expect. It’s usually the best default choice when you’re still learning how the machine responds.

Chain

This changes the resistance curve to mimic the feel of chains or accommodating resistance. Depending on the movement, it can make the top portion feel different from the bottom. That can be useful, but it also means you should not compare it directly to a standard set and assume the same weight will feel identical.

Eccentric

This is the mode I use most. The machine adds more load on the lowering phase, so you resist more weight on the way down than you lift on the way up. For hypertrophy and overall muscle stimulus, I think this is one of the most interesting features the machine offers.

It also changes your effective lifting capacity. If your original strength assessment was done without eccentric loading, and then you crank eccentric up later, your “normal” working weight may suddenly feel too heavy. That’s not the machine being wrong—it’s a different demand.

In my own training, I’ve actually had to back off some weights because the added eccentric load changes the whole lift.

How Program Workouts Seem to Use Your Data

Another common question is whether these settings affect only custom workouts or also the built-in programs.

From what I can tell, they absolutely carry over.

Each movement appears to have its own underlying 1RM-style value, and the machine uses that movement-level data in both custom sessions and many program workouts. So if your curl value gets pushed too low or too high, that can influence how curls behave elsewhere in the ecosystem.

The one exception seems to be warm-ups inside some built-in programs. In several cases, those “warm-up” entries appear to use either minimum resistance or fixed low values rather than dynamic calculations. Once the workout shifts into actual training sets, that’s where your personal strength data seems to matter more.

Why I Like Stamina More Than Gain Muscle

This surprised me, because on paper I would have assumed Gain Muscle would be my default mode.

But for how I train, Stamina is more flexible.

Gain Muscle pushes you too close to failure too quickly if you’re also trying to engineer warm-up sets inside the same structure. Stamina gives me more room to create lighter opening sets while still keeping everything dynamic and tied to my actual capabilities.

It also lets me keep rep counts more consistent across the workout, which I prefer. I like knowing what the rhythm of the session is going to be, and Stamina makes that easier for me to manage.

One More Important Point: The Machine Is Calculating, Not Guessing

When you exceed a rep target, it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get a new max score. That’s because the machine is likely recalculating your estimated one-rep max from the performance, then rounding in a conservative way.

So if you do 16 reps on a 15RM target, you may feel like you clearly beat the number—but when the machine converts that back into a one-rep-max estimate, it may not be enough to register as a meaningful increase.

That actually makes sense. It’s safer, and it prevents your profile from changing too aggressively based on tiny performance differences.

My Recommendation

If you want the simplest practical advice, here it is:

• Do the strength assessment early.
• Use preset training modes rather than relying on Customize.
• Use Stamina to create dynamic warm-up sets.
• Use Eccentric deliberately, knowing it changes your real working capacity.
• If a movement feels too light or too heavy, correct it during a proper dynamic set so the machine can learn from meaningful effort.

The Speediance 2S is a very capable machine, but it asks the user to understand more of the logic than it probably should. Once you do understand it, though, the system starts to make sense: everything is built around movement-specific strength data, and your best results come from feeding that system clean information.

If you’re frustrated by the menu design, I get it. I think the machine would be easier to use if it explained these values more clearly and leaned less on labels like “training” without context. But underneath the awkward interface, there’s a solid engine.

Use it carefully, avoid the traps, and it becomes a much smarter training partner.