📝 Transcript

Title: Is Tonal a scam!
Date: 2025-08-26
Video ID: iOYPjqDTdas
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOYPjqDTdas
Source: auto-captions

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and I wanted to talk about the tone of the device and also tone of the company, right? So, if I go into my profile, um, you can see, you know, this device, by the way, has a black piece of tape over it, so I think you can guess where this review is going. Um, and obviously my membership is turned off right now. Um, so tonal the device, let's first talk about that. So, I transformed my body from over 250 pounds the whole way down to 180 pounds. Right now, I'm sitting at around 196 195. So, um to give you an idea, I've made a massive transformation. All of my strength training was done on this device for that transformation. So, is the device phenomenal? Absolutely. And you can see if you go into my profile that before I turned off my membership I lift 8 thou 8 million 8,000 800,44 you know pounds. So, this is, you know, and I've lifted over 9,000 pounds or 9 million pounds now that I have the membership turned off um total or counting, you know, my non-membership because of course none of that counts now and that's what I wanted to talk to you about. So, the tonal device is phenomenal. It it is a great device, but I'm making a giant change and moving over to speeds. Now, what's it been like to be a Tonal owner? By the way, that's the real question. Honestly, absolutely awful. Tonal, the company, has been the worst company I've ever bought a product for. And um one of the biggest interactions early earlier on, right after my warranty expired, like you know, two and a half, three years in, u my bar control module, which I'm going over right now to pick it up. So this is the barbell, right? And this bar control module, this stopped working. That means when I'm bench pressing, I'm pushing up. All of a sudden, this thing is unreliable. It wasn't completely unworking. It was working, I don't know, every third time you went to turn it off, which tonal also has a Bartell mode, so it's not the biggest deal if you remember that the Bartail mode exists. Um, but it's not something that I was used to because I had lifted for again two and a half years expecting to be able to turn this off when I hit failure. This is what kept me safe. So, I have my own home gym also and I was constantly getting injured in the home gym. And when I moved over to this device, the injuries went away. I do jiu-jitsu. I do a bunch of other stuff. I run. So, I was just constantly injuring myself strength training. And what would happen is I would go to failure and tweak something, pull something, and then I would be and then I'd go to jiu-jitsu already injured and I would just I'd have injury after injury. This fixed it all. However, I really felt like I was going to injure myself with this bar control module not working. So, I expected to call them. I mean, look at this. Look at what I'm actually holding up here. So, you can see this is like a little wee Bluetooth dongle. And I know Foxcon makes all of their stuff, right? So, I was expecting when I called them, considering I spend $63 a month on a membership to use the device I paid for, you pay over $5,000 device and then originally it was $49 something a month and uh they upped the price and they said they were only upping at $10. They were lying. This is consistent with all of Tonal's history. Uh they consistently lie to you. Everything they put in promotional medial has lies in it. Um, and I'll go over individual instances, but this is one of the the big ones. They launched a thing that they said, "Oh, we're only upping at $10 a month. Everything's up with inflation. $10 a month." Well, no, it wasn't $10. It was $10 a month plus now they're adding sales tax. So, depending on where you live, that's actually $15 a month. And in where I live, it's, you know, it was $4 a month extra on top of the 10. So, it it's it's just one of those little lies that Tonal tells. And this bar control module, I called them up. I'm thinking, ah, they'll just replace it for free. I mean, that's what any great company would do. It was between 60 and $80. This device cost Foxcon probably 30 cents to make. 30 and $60 to $80 for a device I'm paying monthly to use to get it to uh to work again. And the kicker was I'm like, I'm not paying that. And sure enough, a month later, I wait for an update. My device, by the way, anytime, this is Android under the hood, so anytime it gets an update, you're sitting there waiting for about 3 to five minutes for your workout. Like, and that's that's the case with the Speedance. as the case with this. That is going to be the case with all these smart home trainers. They're all running old versions of Android. Um, and then when they update, it takes forever. So, that's what happened. It it literally took it 3 to five minutes to do this update. All of a sudden, my bar control module started working again. And I called them, you know, put in a ticket. Obviously, they told me it was my fault and I need to pay them $60 to $80. I decide not to pay. And then a month later, it's fixed. And you'd think at least I would get an email saying, "Hey, thank you for your report. We're so sorry it was on our end." Nothing. Nothing from the company about that. And and this is pretty consistent with the way Tonal operates. They're just really a bad company. Um and in bad faith in my opinion. Um the next the next instance was Tonal's buyback program. So I do a lot of math. Um, and the math on that tonal buyback program, I I called it the tonal steelback program and and went on social media about it. Um, because it was that terrible of a program and and it's a direct insult. They were offering you $1,000 for the device to take it back. And that sounds great, except it's not you can't actually use it with any other promotion that's going on. And the day they launched it, they had $500 off the device on the website. So, meaning they were giving you $500 for a device you paid $5,000 for and you're paying $63 a month to use. Um, it's just absolutely maddening that they would do that to their customers. And they're B. Oh, and they don't even give you new um like new bar control module, new new anything. No, new new any new accessories. So, you have to keep your old ones, which sounds great, but any of us old users, like if I look at my uh my handles, I actually lift so heavy that one of my handles is actually like I don't know what the word for it is, but it's very squishy. It's not the same as the other handle. I literally broke the inards of this handle, like pulling on max strength, right? Um, now I can lift a lot of weight. I'm obviously one of the um one of the higher strength scores on the program. Whenever I was on the program, I was up 99%. Um, you know, and obviously I can max the thing on deadlifts. Uh, don't worry, you can't max it on back squats because they won't let you do that. Uh, which is another huge complaint. They they don't listen to their users when their users have specific features they want. Adjustable dead benches, back squats, anything like that. Nope. You can't have it because we decide what you get to do on your device. Unless you go into what I have right now because so there's this black piece of paper over this. That's because the only thing I can do on this screen. So I can look at my historical data. This is the data from before I turned off my membership. And if I go in and click on any of these things on the screen, oh, including the daily lift, which was new. I love the update. Let's click on the daily lift. Well, the buttons down here to actually start it. And then I'll pull this down so that you can see. Right. Okay. Replacement safety. Oh, look at that. I get a reactivate button. That's right. So, on that daily lift that they added, I get a reactivate my membership. I can go through all of these screens and I eventually get to an activate my membership screen. Anything on this screen is absolutely useless, hence the black tape. So, it's actually useless to click anything. I have to click custom and then I have to click on I can actually click on any of these. But what it does when you click on those is it gives you this screen. And by the way, this is where the controls used to be. So for almost three years, maybe even more than three years, I had the controls down here. When you don't pay for the membership, they move the controls up. And this is a giant ad to reactivate it, which is the most insulting thing ever. And I tried to post this in the official tonal community, like, is there any way to turn this off? My post got um rejected. It turns out the official tonal community is gated to only what they want their users to see. And they don't want their users to see what happens when you turn it off because it's so insulting that I paid over $5,000 to have a giant ad on my screen where the buttons normally are. Like this is how scammy this company is. This is a company that can't build software that makes their freaking control modules work all the time. But don't worry, they can invest time on if you deactivate it, making it very difficult to do your workouts the way you used to do them. That's what kind of company we're talking about here. They also have a total lie on their website right now where you get access to all your moves, right? That's one of the checkbox with without the membership. Notice I only have handles, bar, rope, and I have to manually adjust the weight. I have no eccentric. I have no nothing. That's what this device is like with it turned off. Paulclar posted a video and he had the nerve in his video to say uh because I was looking at buying a tonal 2 before I turned off the membership and actually his review plus just the way they handled the buyback program made me turn off the membership. That's when I said enough is enough. like that buyback program which I call the steelback program plus Paulclar's absolutely disgusting review of this tonal 2 where he had the nerve to say I can turn off the membership because I do all my own custom workouts. No, you can't, Paul. This is what you get. You don't get the ability to track movements. You don't get the ability to track your weights. You don't get the ability to track your sets and reps. You don't get anything. If you turn it off, Paul, you wouldn't know because your device was paid for and you don't even have the ability to turn off the membership on your device because they pay the membership for you, Paul, which is what they do for all these review units that go out. The memberships are paid for by Tonal. Why do you think they don't get terrible reviews across the board? But yeah, that was my uh video on specifically the tonal. the tonal device. Again, it it helped change the way I lift. It's an amazing device, but it's really the fact that it is a cable machine that has a centric mode that has all of these m modes uh to make it, you know, to make it incredible and it's the first of its kind. So, realize that I bought this before the speeds and the other ones came out. So, just bear in mind that this is the first one and I will have have reviews of the Speedance and the Speedance 2S uh in in the coming future because that's actually this thing's coming off the wall, at least this wall. Um I don't feel comfortable selling it to anyone. People ask about selling it because they are getting 1,500 to $2,000. This thing has 9 million pounds listed on it. You know, I don't feel comfortable selling it. And uh my wife won't even use it anymore because my cord is frayed. I don't know if you can see that. Let me get over here and see if you can see it. So this So yeah, you can see it here. So my cord is frayed, right? And she is so scared to use this thing because of that cord being frayed. And Tona wants over $300 to replace this cord and it's not user replaceable. this was a speed, I'd just be able to replace the cord myself pretty easily. This thing is very complicated to do the cord replacement. Eventually, we will probably try to do it ourselves, a buddy of mine and me, because it'll be zero risk once this isn't my primary lifting device. Um, so, and it's not quite my primary lifting device even now. I have the original speeds, but till it comes off the wall uh and goes up on the new wall where we're going to move it to and but oh, the other thing is this thing was moved by ourselves to this house. So, we did move houses and we moved it ourselves. Why did we not move it ourselves? Because there's a YouTuber called Joey B who actually left Tonal because of the moving experience. He spent $600 to not have his tonal for over a month and have them install it wrong. So just realize like and it was a horrible experience and tonal actually made it worse. Like the tonal company made the experience worse by miscommunicating with him over and over again during it. Um when I went to turn off my membership, I was still 50/50 on turning it off. And I saw online where people went to turn off their membership and then Tonal um gave them the original price for the membership. And I'm like, you know, if they'll give me the original price for the membership for a year, I'll keep the thing. I call up, no original price. Yep. We'll turn it off today. Then I get a call 3 months later. and asking me to reup my membership and the person on the phone barely spoke English, which is kind of frustrating. It's in the middle of my workday and I'm getting this phone call offering me the price that they could have just offered me three months ago and I would have stayed. And and at that point in time, I'm like, "No, I have my spreadsheets. I set everything up. like you made me go through all this work to replace what you do with these spreadsheets and I'm not going to come back and pay $63 a month after creating like a PR system that's similar to what tonal actually does. I will say in terms of the quality of how they progressively overload you, it makes practical sense, it also is very beneficial for um not injuring you. And with the advent of their recovery mode workouts, um, adding warm-up sets to things, doing all of that calculation wise isn't that hard. But it did require a bunch of setup where I put my PR values, my one rep maxes into the spreadsheet. Then I have it adjust for a 12 rep set or 15 rep set, however many reps I want to do, and give me a number for what I should be lifting based on that PR. and then go back in and plug in the new PR when I'm progressively overloading and getting stronger, which is ideally the goal with lifting. It's just very sad to me that tonal the company is not trustworthy. And that's what I wanted to make a video about today. It's pretty much a rant on my experiences with Tonal, my experiences with both the device, which is phenomenal, and the company, which is dreadful and awful. And it's also a cautionary tale of when you're buying a device, you're also buying into the company behind it. And a lot of people were worried the company wouldn't be around. And I saw a lot of posts that were like, well, we're so glad they're raising our membership price because now they can stay around. And it's like, yeah, you could have not built a studio in New York City. That also would have caused you to stay around and not have to raise our membership prices. And I don't use any of that stuff either. I I've always done all my own custom workouts. I started with uh when I started losing all the weight, I should say. Before that, I was using their stuff. Um, and it is good. Like it's it's better than Speed's stuff. I I'll do a full review of AB comparison um in terms of their workouts and the pros, the cons, uh custom workouts, the things that are different between the two devices. I'll go over all that in the future, but in terms of the tonal itself, it's just very disappointing to me that they can build such a great product and deliver so poorly on customer support and customer retention. to the point of insulting someone who lifted 9 million pounds on the device and lost a massive amount of weight and transformed his body. If I can't support this company, I don't know how anyone can. And I question anyone who's not paid by the company to say how great they are because my experience has been pretty dreadful with the company. That's it for today. Leave any comments uh any questions you have about the device. I can answer them. If I get enough questions, I'll post a follow-up video on this device. It is It is a phenomenal device. It It definitely works as advertised, but if you ever plan on turning off the membership, never buy this thing. Like, if you have any thought that you might run out of money, anything like that, that you can't afford the membership at some point five years, seven down, seven years down the road, don't buy it. Don't buy it today. Buy something else. because it's that dreadful with the with the membership turned off. And there's so many better options that don't require the membership as part of the basic package of using the device to to even a portion of its capabilities. I mean, with a membership turned off, you only have 1 1,000th of what this thing can do. And that's so disappointing and really unacceptable, especially with the giant ad that goes right there. Okay, that's been it for today. Thank you.