How the Speediance Gym Monster 2 Unlocked My Deadlift Goals

I filmed a quick clip the other day about deadlifts on the Speediance Gym Monster 2, and it was barely thirty seconds long. But when I watched it back, I realized I had accidentally summed up something I'd been circling for months. So I'm going to expand on what I meant, because if you're stuck on a piece of home equipment that simply won't let you go heavy on compound lifts, this might be the nudge you need.

The honest truth about my old setup

For a long stretch, my home gym was a smart treadmill and a pair of adjustable dumbbells. That's a great combo for a lot of things. I could walk, I could jog, I could hammer out upper-body accessory work, I could do goblet squats and split squats, I could do core work until my abs staged a protest. What I could not reliably do was load up a true deadlift.

Deadlifts aren't just another exercise in the rotation. They're the kind of lift where the bar wants to move a lot of weight, your spine wants to stay neutral under that load, and your body wants a stable floor, a real bar, and room to hinge. On a treadmill platform, in a tight living room corner, with a pair of dumbbells that max out well below the load you actually need to grow, the lift turns into a compromise. You start cheating the range of motion. You start reducing the weight. You start telling yourself that the bodyweight RDL you can do in a square meter of floor space "counts."

It kind of counts. It also kind of doesn't.

There were specific movements I had mentally written off for home training. The heavy conventional deadlift was one of them. Trap-bar pulls were another. Anything where the resistance needed to actually meet me at the floor and let me stand it up with authority, I had filed under "gym-only." I accepted that hitting my poundage goal was going to be slow, because it was going to be limited to the days I could make it to a real facility.

What changed when the Gym Monster 2 arrived

Then I started training on the Speediance Gym Monster 2, and the math changed. Not because the machine did something magical, but because it removed a specific constraint I had been treating as permanent.

The deadlift on this thing works. That's the whole point of what I was trying to say in that quick clip. With the Gym Monster 2, I can actually do deadlifts. The platform is solid. The resistance is real. The machine gives me a way to load the pattern at meaningful weight, hinge through a full range of motion, and stand up out of it the way the lift is supposed to be done. There is no longer a ceiling I have to apologize to every time I walk past it.

What I noticed almost immediately is that the machine seems to follow my movement perfectly. I don't mean that in a clinical sense—I mean it in the practical sense of how the resistance shows up under a heavy hinge. The load tracks the movement. It stays with me as I drive up. It doesn't disappear at lockout, and it doesn't spike at the bottom. That tracking is what makes the lift feel like a deadlift instead of like a weird variation of something else.

And because of that, I can actually work my body on these heavy lifts at home. That's the sentence I keep coming back to. "Work my body" sounds simple, but it means I can train the posterior chain under load, train the grip and the trunk to stabilize under load, and accumulate volume on a true hinge pattern without driving across town.

Why hitting the poundage goal suddenly feels closer

I have a number in my head. I won't put it in this post because it isn't yours, but if you train, you have one too. There's a weight on the deadlift that represents the version of you you're trying to build. For most of the last year, that number has felt like it was on a slow drip—a few kilos added per month, with some weeks where the equipment at home simply couldn't host the attempt at all.

The Gym Monster 2 flipped that from a drip to something closer to a steady pour.

Here's why. Progress on a heavy compound lift is mostly a function of two things: how often you can train it, and how much quality work you can put into it each time you do. When your home gym cannot host the lift, your frequency collapses. You might deadlift once every ten days, twice if you're lucky, and one of those sessions is probably going to be a warm-up session because your legs are still wrecked from the previous session. Frequency down, intensity down, progress down.

When the lift lives at home, the frequency problem disappears. I can train the hinge pattern three, four, sometimes five times a week. Not every one of those is a max-effort day—most are technique days, tempo days, volume days at a moderate load—but the pattern gets touched, the nervous system gets reminded, the movement stays grooved. The max-effort days have something to build on top of.

Add the fact that the machine actually works my body on heavy lifts, and you get the compound effect I was trying to describe in that short clip. The work I can do at home is now the same work I'd be doing in a commercial gym, just without the commute and without the wait for a platform. So the gap between where I am and where I want to be closes faster.

The part I didn't say out loud in the clip

In the original clip I referenced "the workouts that I just said I'm not going to do on the treadmill." That was me being honest in real time. There were movements I had quietly given up on at home. The heavy deadlift was the headline of that list, but it wasn't the only entry. Trap-bar variations, heavy Romanian work, even some loaded carries were all things I'd mentally filed under "save it for the gym day."

I'm still not going to pretend a smart home machine is a substitute for everything. There are days I want to load a barbell in a power rack with a crowd of people around me and put on a playlist that isn't coming out of my phone speakers. That's a different experience, and it has value. But the gap between "gym-only" and "home-capable" has shrunk a lot more than I expected when I unboxed the Gym Monster 2.

The short version of what that thirty-second clip was trying to say: I had a goal on my deadlift that felt like it was stuck behind a piece of equipment. The Speediance Gym Monster 2 changed what my home gym can host, which changed how often I can train, which changed how fast the goal comes in.

Practical takeaways if you're in a similar spot

If you're staring at your own home setup right now and wondering whether it's the bottleneck, here are the questions I asked myself that helped me decide to make the switch.

• Can your current setup actually load the lift? Not "kind of." Not "I can sort of do a version of it." If the answer is genuinely yes and you're still not progressing, the bottleneck isn't the equipment. If the answer is no, the equipment is part of the problem.
• How often are you realistically training the lift? Be honest. If it's once a week or less, and your goal is to add weight to the bar, frequency is probably the bigger lever than any program tweak.
• What movements have you quietly written off? Write them down. Those are your hidden ceiling. Whatever's on that list is probably the next thing your home gym needs to grow into.
• Does the resistance feel like the lift, or like a different exercise? A deadlift should feel like a deadlift. If your setup is forcing you into a variation just to get any kind of load, you're training the variation, not the lift.

None of this means everyone needs a Gym Monster 2. It means everyone deserves to be honest about whether their current setup is helping them chase the goal or quietly capping it. For me, the answer turned out to be the second one, and the Speediance was the change that opened it up.

Where I go from here

The goal hasn't changed. The path to it just got shorter. I'm going to keep training the deadlift at home, with frequency I couldn't access before, on a machine that actually supports the lift instead of forcing me to work around it. I'll log the sessions, I'll watch the numbers, and I'll check back in when the poundage goal is closer to being a number I can stop chasing and start celebrating.

Until then, the clip was right. I can do deadlifts now. And that changes everything.