📝 Transcript

Title: Speediance Spotter Modes Explained: How to Safely Do Drop Sets & Avoid Injury
Date: 2025-09-20
Video ID: pMdn1a5EA1s
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMdn1a5EA1s
Source: auto-captions

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Welcome to Toby and Fitness Tech. Uh this is another video about the speed dance and specifically I'm going to be talking about spotter modes today. And this is because of a couple different things that happened. The first one was someone was mentioning that they do drop sets. And the way they do drop sets in particular is they go in and they customize the weight and then they specify uh as they're doing the set they turn the dial on the ring to get the specific weight that they want and then they bought the new Bluetooth handles and the Bluetooth handles obviously do not have the ability to turn the weight by hand. they just turn on and off. And so they were very disappointed in them because they can no longer do the drop sets that they do. And that inspired me to look at the spotter modes in particular in their spotter mode one and then their spotter mode two. And they interact differently and realize this is the second time I'm shooting this video. I actually when I do my workouts have spotter modes turned off. So I don't use them in my day-to-day workouts. But in this video, I'm going to show you what these spotter modes do and whether spotter mode 2 in particular can be used for drop sets. And spoiler, because I've done this once before, yes, it can. Uh, I don't do drop sets in my day-to-day workouts, so I don't ever plan on doing this again. And I'm really sore from the first time I went to shoot this video last night. full disclosure because drop sets are not something in my program and drop sets were actually something that Tonal introduced about six nine months ago something like six months ago maybe when they launched the tonal 2 and so I had drop sets for a little bit of time on the tonal before moving over to Spedience and I tried them out and realized they're just not for me they uh have a massive fatigue cost and caused me to be less inspired to do the workouts. And I think that's really important. They might give you a 5 to 10% hypertrophy gain, but if it's causing you to not want to do your workout, then it's not a net benefit to you. Sometimes you've got to make choices of uh optimal training versus optimizing for what you enjoy in your training. And so moving drop sets out for me as a general concept of not doing them was actually something that you know I made the decision pretty early on whenever it came to tonal that they are too too much of a struggle for me to want to do the workout with them in. And you'll see it whenever I go to actually do the drop set on the machine. You'll see why. Uh, the other thing that I wanted to talk about before I got into the drop sets themselves is the safety features on the machines. And this is because I also got into a little bit of a debate online with someone who said that free weights are safer. And then I realized that they had put so many caveats around their free weights that in their scenario, sure, free weights are safer. And and because I mentioned specifically how I hurt myself with free weights, one of the ways that I hurt myself at one point in time and realized that yes, this is dumb and yes, you should not do this, but I've do all of my workouts with no spotter, right? So, spotter mode one and spotter mode two for this machine is a spotter. In the way I train in general, I don't need the spotter modes on the machine. And I'll explain that when I when I go to actually do some of this on the machine, why I don't need the spotter modes in general with the way I work out. But this person was arguing that the the free weights are safer. And then whenever I said, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, the way I hurt myself or well I didn't hurt myself on this one but thankfully I destroyed a bar and I destroyed one of the um like the hooks that were on my So I have these I have these are the ones for the speeds but when you have a when you have a power rack you have a similar thing that slides into the rack and snaps in place. I forget the name on these things, but uh I actually destroyed this uh on the on on the on the on the on the power rack and had to replace it. So, what happened is I had 350 lbs on my back and I was doing like quarter squats with the weight because it was more about uh getting used to having that kind of weight on your back and less about the actual squats. But that is very very fatiguing just to carry around that weight. Uh I'm about 200 lb at the time. I was probably 220 230. So I was a little bigger and subsequently a little bit stronger in the ability to carry weight. Not necessarily in my ability to move weight, but in my ability to carry weight. And I had 350 lbs. No squatter or no no no spotter. No no no no no no one around in fact. So, it's literally just me on a weekend by myself in my basement with 350 lbs on my back. What What could ever go wrong, right? Not saying I always make the smartest decisions with free weights. Obviously, I didn't. But what ended up happening is I went to rerrackck the weight and my rack was up like about at this R0 point. So, I'd have to like kind of like lean forward and push in. And when I did that, I missed the left pin. And I missed it by just enough that I clipped the pin and then it got too much for me to handle. And thankfully, I'm strong enough and quick enough that I pushed the weight forward and backed up. And what happened is I also have safety catches. And the safety catch caught the weight, but the force of 350 lbs coming down snapped the bar because I was using like cheapish bars, right? Not really bars that could handle like 500, 600 lb, but they can't handle the force of it. It snapped, you know, hitting that and it actually broke the catch over here. Broke the It didn't break the one down here, but it it broke the bar itself and that. And thankfully my neck was nowhere near it. But but what I'm getting at here is my personal opinion is these machines are way way safer than ever lifting with no spotter. And this person had hurt themselves squatting. The reason why I bring up squatting in particular is this person hurt themselves squatting. And what they were doing is they were max weight squatting. So they had it on their back, right? They were max weight squatting. one, they didn't even have the ring or they didn't have any way to turn it off. So there's So you see I just turned on the ring. They had no way of turning this thing off. They had it on their back. They were going up and down with the max weight and then the machine did not turn off. I had no idea why the machine didn't turn off, but they ended their set and the machine didn't turn off. Now there is a bar tilt mode that would turn it off and they had to tilt very very far and they actually torqued you know something in their side as they were doing that because again at the max weight it can it can do that. Um but realize that they only had this massive of a problem. One they're facing uh like this direction. They're facing the camera and all of the videos and this confused my wife. All of the videos for how to do these exercises are facing this direction, right? For for some lifts, that makes sense where you're pulling away from the machine. So, I'm pulling away from the machine. Of course, it makes sense for me to be this direction. There's no other way to do those motions. But anything like a back squat and the move that I'm going to do today, these moves when you're actually doing them face the machine. And why? because you have a giant button to be able to click and turn the weight off anytime you need to. Uh the other thing that obviously the button itself can turn off the weight, right? Which I have no idea what happened in that their scenario. They didn't even mention. I'm assuming they didn't have the ring with a ring clip on it at all. So, they had no ability to turn it off that way and they were facing this direction. So, this could have been easily avoided by facing this direction. Um, and there is no there's no reason to face that direction on on a back squad. The reason why they do it in the video is they're using a one camera shoot. And that's what I realized because I was trying to figure out why why they show everything facing away from the machine when they can. And what what Tonal did? Well, Tonal did a a a three camera shoot when they were shooting all of their videos. And so in that three camera shoot, they would cut to behind, in front, and all different angles so that you can see the person in like a 3D view as they're doing the movement. And you're thinking, "Oh, well then why doesn't Spedians do that?" I could tell you why Spedience doesn't do that. because Tonal built a new studio in New York for millions and millions of dollars and raised everyone's membership uh membership price because they ran out of money because they built that new studio. So realize that their basically required membership to use the device they raised because they built a new studio and their studios cost millions of dollars and it's just an expense that is is not necessary because all you do is you take when they're facing this direction if you can face the machine face the machine. One other safety thing that I realized that when I when the person talked to me online that my response was the correct response and I wish this person had talked to me before doing this because yes this would get you hurt. So the last one my argument is that free weights are not safer. This person is setting up this illogical argument of having two spotters versus no spotter and then they didn't have spotter modes turned on on the machine. They didn't have the ring clip here. They were facing away from the like they did a lot of things wrong. This one they did one thing wrong but in a way that I could see my wife doing or I could see many people doing. So I wanted to cover it before I actually showed you the attempt at uh doing drop sets on the machine. So, this one I think is actually a very very important topic of how do we attach things into the machine. And let me make sure you can see my attachment points. So, you can't quite see them whenever they're on the ground. So, let me get you I will actually put the bench over here and I'll show you it on the bench because then you'll be able to see it. and and you'll get to see how I actually attach things on the bench. You notice right now I'm bending over in front of the machine and uh that is for a very specific reason. I'm not even on the lifting screen right now. So right now my machine is not even on the lifting screen and I am bending over in front of the machine. And anytime I'm touching this machine and touching these attachments, I am bringing myself to the attachment and not bringing the attachment to me. And that's where this person uh you know got injured and I can see what happened and I can tell them exactly what happened and uh it it could happen to you if you do what they did. So here's what happened. So, and the only time this could ever happen is if you have the bench, if you're doing what I'm about to tell you. And even with the bench, you'll see what I do. So, what they ended up doing, and I get nervous even doing this, is they brought the attachment up, and what they ended up doing with this attachment is they brought the attachment up to them and then started attaching their bar. And by the way, last time I was on the actual lifting screen whenever I did this and I was attaching it to the bar and I accidentally bumped this button which kicked the weight on. Thankfully, I was demoing not this version of it, but I was demoing the version that I actually do where I'm down with it down in its attachment spot. So, even if I'm doing this with the actual bar, what I'm going to do is I'm putting the bar here. I'm putting my knee on the bar, then I'm bringing this up and I'm clipping it in. Okay? So, what I'm going to do is knees on the bar and I'm clipping it in. And then I go to the other side. I hold here. I hold here. I slide this over, right? And then I clip in the other side. Why am I being so cautious about this? Right? And why am I not just lifting everything up to me as I'm doing it? Well, the answer to that is what happened to this person. So what ended up happening to them is they had their bar up here. They had they were on their lifting screen, right? So bars up here, they're on their lifting screen. They went picked this thing up, reached down here, had it right in front of their face. Actually, probably down here. Hit this. See where that button is? Like you see where this button is? And it's going to be even worse if it's on your finger. My button is actually right where my knee is. If I accidentally hit this button and I accidentally clip this in at the same time, this thing's coming up and smacking me in the face, which is going to do some serious damage if I have it at 260 lbs. So, that's a thing to be cautious of. And I could see someone doing that. But that's why anytime I do attachments, I bring myself to the machine and not the machine to me. So if I'm So I'm about to do this workout. So custom, we're going to do a shoulder press workout. And when I'm about to do this workout, because I have to attach it back, I have to attach my bar back in. I am going to kneel down. bring the attachment the whole way to the bar and clip it in. And you can see it just turned itself on because I hit the button, right? Thankfully, I'm not even on the lift screen yet. But that's how this is getting done. Same with the handles. Even though there's less danger with the handles smacking you, same idea. I bring myself down and attach. So, I'm squatting down and I'm doing it that way. I know it sounds overly cautious, but whenever I saw that post of someone who smacked themselves in the face, I was thinking about why that's never happened to me because I've usually made every dumb mistake you can make with any kind of lifting apparatus. And I realized, oh, no, no, no, no. I bring myself to the machine and when I'm not bringing myself to the machine, I try to secure the barbell as much as possible, realizing that I could actually turn on that weight. And that is something that you have to be cognizant of especially with this ring being so sensitive. So now let's get into drop sets, right? This is this is kind of the fun part for me, right? So uh at least the the concept behind it. So this person was doing drop sets by taking this ring. So they were setting a start weight. They take the ring and they set the dials on this ring as they're going through. So, what's gonna end up happening is I have this ring, right? And then I'm dialing the the weight back and forth to adjust the So, so in this case, it'd be shoulder presses. And as I'm doing the shoulder presses, whenever I feel like I'm reaching failure, I start adjusting this ring. I think this is a massively inferior way of doing this lift to be blunt than to have the machine do it for you. Uh, Tonal had an algorithm to it and Speedian also has an algorithm to it with spotter mode too. So, by the way, I I still keep my ring clipped to the thing to the barbell. And the reason why I'm keeping this ring clipped to this barbell, even though, you know, I don't necessarily have to use it, I just like the ability to turn off the weight with as many modes as possible. That's where this the other user online that was squatting at max weight on the machine uh wasn't giving themselves as many options to turn off the weight as possible. I want to have every option to turn off the weight. I want to have bar tilt mode. I want to have the ability to press the button and I want always the ability to press the button on the screen. And actually, when I do these drop sets, the first time I went to do them, I face the camera so that you'd get a better view. And for something like a drop set, I really want to be looking at the screen. I just want to be able to look at it to see whenever it's lowering the weight. So realize this time I'm going to do it, I'm going to be facing the screen the whole time. And that is so that I can actually see the weight drop in real time when I'm using spotter mode 2. Okay, that's that's why I'm actually facing the screen is is so that spotter mode 2 will will give me that will give me what I what I want. So, right now, if I go in here and go edit on this right now, I have it all set up to do the drop sets, but I wanted to show you one that's not set up to do the drop sets and is set up to do my normal workout. So, this curl workout, these are just curls. What's what's happening here is I have the weight set to 20 and I have the training set to 13. And then the next set I have it set to 15 and 13. That means I've got 13 reps. So I'm doing 13 reps the whole time. And I'm doing the weight of 15 uh 15 one for my 15 reps for my one rep max on the work working set and 20 for the warm-up set. Right? So 20 for the warm-up set. Those are that's it's 20 and 13 for my warm-up and 15 and 13 for my working set. I have a bunch of my my um workouts actually moved over from the tonal now and this is working flawlessly for me and I really like it actually. It's it's just as good as what the tonal had with its warm-up sets and working sets. It's it's it's just as good. But when we go in here and go to do a drop set, what do I have to do here? So, drop sets are very different. And what if I'm going to still use the stamina setting? No, you can use any setting to do drop sets. It really really doesn't matter. It's just easier with stamina because it gives you a highest the highest amount of reps as your as your maximum reps. So, what I'm doing here is I'm setting it to 15 and I'm setting the reps to 20. That's always going to cause me to fail, especially on shoulder press, which is not my favorite exercise. I was actually dreading re-shooting this video because I don't like shoulder pressing. And it's one of the exercises before that when I was using free weights, I think was most likely to injure me because I would try to push more weight than I should on this particular exercise and lead to kind of shoulder impingements that then would, you know, go and affect me in jiu-jitsu and and have a lasting effect on me. So in in this scenario, I'm doing shoulder presses because it's an exercise that I don't like and it's 15 and 20 as so it's kind of flipped from the way I normally do it which is 20 and 15. It's actually the opposite way. Uh it's the opposite of my warm-up sets. And the goal is to create a guaranteed failure scenario which this will because there's no way I can do that. So that was the objective. create a guaranteed failure scenario and then let the machine take over when that happens. Okay. So, what I'm going to do is show you what this looks like in in actual real time. And this and show you with spotter mode two, show you with spotter mode one, but we're not going to go very far in spotter mode one. And I will show you why when we get there. So, we go here, we go back, we go start, and now we're getting here. And when I first shot the video, I shot it this way, but it's so much easier if I can see the screen. And I'll explain that while I'm going through and doing this. So, we're here bringing the weight up and my and my ring's connected. And now my weight's on. Now, one, see, he's showing the movement away from the machine, whereas I'm going towards the machine. There's no technical difference. The machine is fine with this, right? And I just now realized I have the spotter mode turned off. So, by default, the spotter mode is turned off. And I got five reps, right? One of the nice things about this machine is I can just turn the weight off. Like, you saw that I'm in the middle of a workout. I just turned the weight off. So that person who was max weight squatting didn't have a scenario where they could just hit the button either. So the machine didn't turn off the weights and they weren't in range of the button. And if if this button had failed me, I could have just tapped the screen. That's the beauty of this. I can tap the screen. I have multiple methods of getting this back there. And by the way, worst case scenario, if I was squatting, I would drop this thing. I'm not going to do it because now I'm out of the 30 days, but I would just drop this thing and let it break if it breaks. Uh I'm not going to risk injury to not break this machine. Like just fundamentally. I I'm I don't want to be injured and I would much rather have to deal with a a repair called Expedience to try to fix, you know, something that I broke on the attachments in general. So go in here and I turn assist two on. So now I've got assist two on. I'm at five reps already. And let's go from here. Okay. Okay. It's already getting heavy for me. So now I'm going to hold it here. Now it took it down to 90 lbs. And you can see it's bringing it back down to 90 lbs. Well, you can't see because I'm in front of it, but it's bringing it back down to 90 lbs each time. Now, I brought it down even further. Now, it's down to 58 lb. And this is a lot lighter for me. So, what happens is as I'm holding the weight, it brings it down. So, if I go here, it's holding it at 50. It's bringing it even lower to allow me to do these reps. Okay? So what's happening is each time I and then it's resetting it to that 50s something. So what's happening here is it's creating a true drop set. And this time last time I did it at maximum intensity. Uh this time I did it at about 50 to 70% of what I'm capable of. I learned from the last one that doing this at maximum intensity in a demo makes it so that I can't talk at all after doing it, which is uh suboptimal. And you'll see that with the speed trainers. If you look at what he's doing, can I actually movement demo? Yes. So, if you look at him, he's lifting seven pounds, right? Why is he lifting seven pounds? So, he can talk while he's doing it. So realize he's facing the wrong direction. He's lifting a tiny weight. No offense to him. And he's clearly jacked. He can lift more than seven pounds. But he's doing all of that. And by the way, I think tonal what they do with their instructors is instead of doing this, they have customized specialized machines that show weights that they're not actually lifting. So I I my theory is again Tonal spent more money on production than I don't know building something like an adjustable de bench or a bunch of amazing things like like even this ring clip for the ring like and the barbell that actually feels like a real barbell like tonal didn't do any of that stuff. I mean they didn't give us an adjustable bench after all these years. It's crazy you know they use the cheapest Amazon basics bench. It's mindboggling to me. But the speed dance guys are spending less money on production, more money on giving us the workouts we want, giving us the exercises we want, and adding more features to this machine, which is just awesome to me. I mean, that's where I want the money to be spent. And also not, you know, having a membership that is forcibly paid. So that's what but that's what this assist 2 does. Assist 2 will allow you to create drop sets and uh and and and it can do other things than just drop sets. You could use it as a spotter mode in general for all of your exercises, but what it's going to do is it's going to set your next rep to the weight setting of the prior rep. Okay? So if if the spotter kicks in, takes you down to 90. Say I was like I was at 106, then it took me down to 90. And then my next rep is going to start at 90. And I'm going to continue from there until I can't continue. Then I'm going to hold it. And the longer I hold it, the more it pulls the weight down. So I pulled it down to almost 50. And then I lifted some more. And then I held it for a little bit longer. Brought it down into the 40s and I lifted some more. So that's what it's doing. it's actually progressively dropping you down. I don't like drop sets and I explained it to the person online. Why do I not like these things outside of the fatigue factor, the the the frustration around them? Like in general, uh I feel like you're failing when when it drops the weight. So, like that mental anguish of it dropping the weight and you feeling like you're failing during the set, which is never when you want to feel like you're failing in my like just from my mental state. But the other reason why I don't like it is you can't track it. You couldn't track it on tonal. So, you can't track it on here. And I checked I checked the log at the end of the workout and you'll see it when the log comes up. You can't track when the drops happened, which is one of the biggest factors of how successful your set was. You just have the total volume. So, you don't know if you made it seven reps or 10 reps before it dropped without going in and actually writing that down. And, by the way, that's the same if you use the ring and you spun the ring. You don't know when the drops happen unless you were writing them down. And if you have time to write them down, then you're not doing a drop set anymore because you're taking so much time writing things down during the set. You're doing multiple sets with limited rest. That's that's what you're doing if you're writing it all down. So there isn't really a a there isn't there isn't as much tracking on the drop sets. And that was the case on tonal, too. That was the critique of tonal when they came out with drop sets is it just gives you the total volume for the set, which is not helpful. Is is not as useful as giving you the individual rep amounts and and what the weight was set to in each rep, which would be timeconuming to program and I get why neither company did it. But realize if you were going to use drop sets effectively, that's the data you need. And you usually don't have it. You might have it with free weights, but that's because someone else is writing it down. Again, to this person that was critiquing me for saying that this thing's safer than free weights. Yes, if I have a spotter who's writing everything down or a personal trainer who's writing everything down, free weights are safer. I used to have a personal trainer. I was gaining strength at the highest like the highest rate possible, but it a cost a small fortune and b got shut down with the pandemic that happened. So, I don't want to use the words because apparently they're still banned on YouTube after all these years. But when uh when that pandemic happened, my gym got shut down and I was left to build out my own home gym, which I had already started building, but I never used. And I just continued to build out that home gym. And then I started hurting myself over and over again because without that person watching my form, checking off the amount that I should be doing, telling me the amount of weight that I should be doing, I progressed too far too fast. and in ways that are unsafe, not doing the accessory movements that they forced me to do. There was a a mountain of errors that I was making. And it is on me, right? It was not the free weight. It was me. But this is far safer because it progresses the weights for me. And with with the way I'm doing these custom workouts, it progresses them in a way that is very slow and deliberate where I'm doing an extra rep to get the new PR that then goes back in and resets my warm-up weights and sets my working set weights. So, it's a slower progression, but it's a progression that's impactful and meaningful and over time obviously have has led to the physique I have today or helped lead to the physique I have today. So, now we're going to go into spotter mode one. And this is the part of the the demo that I'm the most uh concerned with. So, spotter mode one, and I'll tell you why I'm so concerned with it. because it did not behave how I expected it to. And I will show you real quickly. I'm still fatigued from the last set a little bit, but I will show you what it does and then we'll get into the use cases for this. Okay, so I'm done with that. I only got 10 of the 20 reps. And what spotter mode one is doing is it's just not progressing the weights down nearly at the speed of spotter mode two. And it's not using that hold as a time period for it to actually just continue adjusting it down. It only adjusts it down one increment at a time and then holds that increment and won't let itself adjust even further down. So, what that means is a massively more fatiguing exercise. And I would say if you're going to use spotter mode one, [Music] I don't even know. I don't see a use case for it to be honest with you. And I didn't see a use case for it when I did this demo the first time. And that's because it won't stagger down the weight as far as you would want it to. It's and and it's not giving you the kind of drops that you would expect for a drop set for sure. Like it it it will not give you drop set style dropping and it won't even be quite the safety feature that that mode two will be. Let me try one more thing with it just out of curiosity. What I'm trying gonna try to do is get to absolute failure and see if it'll turn off the weight for me. So, I'm just curious, will this actually turn the weight off? So, we go up No, not only will it never not only will it not turn the weight off, wouldn't even lower the weight for me there. So, if I go back to assist two for these last couple reps, watch the difference. That wouldn't even lower the weight for me. So, not only did it not turn the weight off, it did not lower the weight in any way because it had determined I hadn't done enough reps for it to lower the weight is my theory. Which means as a spotter, it's not it's not the spotter you'd want to use. This spotter spotter mode assist how this works. So, I'll guide you through it whenever it's going up. So, I'm here. I do a rep. Oh, I can't do another rep. It starts pulling it down. Pulled it down to 87. I get two reps. Can't do another rep. Ah, I'm struggling, right? Boom. It pulled it down to 59. And let's just say I can't get it. I'm at 19 and I can't do another rep alto together. I'm stuck here. I'm pinned. It's going down to 30. It's going down to 20. It's going down. It's going down. It's going down to 16. and it's going down to the minimum weight possible. That's the safety feature you want. Even if you're using it as a safety feature, you want spotter mode 2. Fundamentally, that is the spotter mode you're going to want. Spotter mode one I would not use as a safety feature, and I would not use it for drop sets. So, I would I would personally recommend spotter mode two for everything. If you're going to turn on the spotter, don't waste your time with one. I can't see of a use case. Uh, if someone knows one, let me know. But I would not be using spotter no mode one as a spotter, that's for sure, because it's not turning off the weight at all for me, which I would have expected whenever I held the bar for a period of time, I would have expected spotter mode one to turn it off and kill it, which is not what it did. it just held it at the max weight. So, in my opinion, if you're going to use spotter modes on this device, assist two. And if you want to do drop sets, assist two is the way to go. So, that would be this. Let me finish out this one last rep so that I can show you what happens after this. So, I go back in I do my final rep and then it turned off the weight automatically for me. Mine pauses before it turns off the weight and that's because of one of the other settings that's set that I recommend everyone use. So, we go in, we end this workout. End the workout. And we're in here. Shows us our max rate weight. See, it shows that I did 20 of 20 at 100 one, 1777 lbs. The next set I did 20 of 20 at 1,968 lb. Why is that? Well, that was because of the difference between spotter one and spotter 2. My first set, I had the spotter mode kick on and give me lower weights throughout the set. That way I could talk to you guys. And the second one, spotter mode one, was flat out not kicking on. And then when it did kick on, it only lowered it by 10. Not giving me enough spotter to even be able to continue the conversation with you. So, uh, in terms of safety and efficacy, if you're going to use spotter modes and you're going to rely on it to turn off the weights for you, spotter mode 2 is the way to go. If you want the maximum safety out of this machine, most likely spotter mode two plus again facing the machine. Whenever you're doing any exercise that you can face the machine, there are again a set of workouts that workouts and exercises you can't face the machine, but anything where you see the person looking this direction, they're looking this direction for the camera. if they're doing any kind of overhead or overhead press or anything like that, squats, overhead presses, they're facing the camera, so that it's easier to see what they're doing. And uh even in even in my demo, I was not comfortable doing these drop sets facing the camera a second time. That's my level of paranoia around the safety of these things. I want the ability to hit that button on the screen if something goes wrong. So, even though spotter mode two worked flawlessly for me, spotter mode one did not in my first demo and had me pretty concerned. And in the second demo, I explored it a little bit more. Has me even more concerned with the second exploration of it. I really feel like if you're going to use a spotter mode, spotter mode two is the way to go because it gives you that drop set style and it will turn the weight to zero if it or to minimum weight which is, you know, 16 pounds which is near zero if it needs to. So if you hold the bar for any length of time, it will stop whenever it's at its lowest weight, which is what I would expect from a spotter. Again, spotter mode one. It just held it at the maximum weight and decided it was not going to kick on at all. That's my conclusion on the spotter modes. I think it's pretty fascinating. And one one thing from the beginning of the video, again, I would strongly recommend if you have these attachments, you know, if if you're attaching something into one of these, don't do this. Don't bring it up to you and then clip whatever it is in. Even with these handles, right? I don't ever do this. And I know this should be relatively safe, but I don't want this handle whipping me in the face either. And that could happen if I hit this button while this is on and this thing comes up and smacks me in the face. Like that could happen. And it's going to snap it out of my hand if I'm lifting something really heavy. If I'm doing something like uh a bench press, like this is gonna snap this out of my hand and rip up my fingers, it's it's never a good idea. I don't understand why someone thought it was a good idea, but I think 5 10 years ago when I was injuring myself, uh I would have been dumb enough to do the same thing. No offense to that person, but I I would have probably done the same thing where I picked it up and brought it to me instead of letting it on the ground and squatting down. It's probably 10 years of doing jiu-jitsu and knowing that it's very much safer when someone's planted on the ground and you're controlling their hips. It's the same concept here where I have the attachment planted on the ground. There's no there's no cable tension anywhere and I'm placing it in the attachment while it's while it's there. It can no longer hit me in the face. I know it's a little thing and it seems like it would be obvious, but that wasn't obvious to someone on the internet and they got smacked in the face with a barbell. And that didn't have to happen because even when I'm attaching this barbell, I'm doing the same thing where I'm attaching it here directly to the cable and the other side is already attached. So I'm not moving I'm moving the barbell to the cable, not the cable to the barbell. When I have the bench, I have it affixed as best as I can with my hand and with and with my knee sometimes depending on the situation. That was my video for today. I wanted to go over spotter. I wanted to go over safety. So, it's kind of like the spotter modes. The safety I figured these things are very important. And they're not something really discussed. And I actually didn't know the difference between the spotter modes until I tried this last night. And I found out that they are wildly different. I knew spotter mode 2 was designed for drop sets or in theory for drop sets because it would keep the progressive weight lower. What I didn't know is spotter one does progress the weight lower, but it just won't progress it at a rate that you would want it to for safety. And it it refused to progress the weight lower in certain circumstances. And it will not drop the weight to zero while you're just holding the bar. It it it makes you turn it off. So, it's not actually the kind of spotter I would want to use in the scenarios that I'm running into. I would I would if I'm going to turn on a spotter, I would turn on spotter mode two across the board. I'm not going to turn them off on for my workouts. And that's because of the way I progressively overload. So, if we go into my curls workout, first of all, everything has a warm-up before I get started. So, if I'm not feeling great that day, I'll do all my warm-ups. If we go into actually one of my one of my workouts, so I have all of these warm-ups. I'm doing a warm-up of every exercise I'm about to do. And that means a bunch of warm-ups in a row. And so, I'm doing all of these warm-ups and then I get into my true training sets. All the warm-ups are actually calculated by the machine and then I get into my working sets after that. So, if I'm not feeling great that day, I'll do all those warm-ups and then I'll call it there. So, I'm getting like 7 to 10,000 pounds of lifting from just those warm-ups. And then I'm calling the workout and saying, "Nope, we're not going to we're not going to work out today. Something doesn't feel quite right. I'm not feeling like I'm feeling particularly weak or I have like a nagging, you know, injur like not an injury but like, you know, like something's nagging me like my shoulder, my elbow, some something's bothering me in particular, I'll just call it and start back up the next day. Then whenever I'm into my working sets, everything is set up so that it's 13 and 15. And what that would mean if we go down here to one of these. So what that would mean is it's 1513, right? So what that means is I have to hit 15 reps and I'm setting it to 13 reps. So I'm setting it two away from failure. So everything's and before with the tonal it was one away from failure. So I setting everything to be away from failure. And what that means, if I want to progressively overload and gain and have all of this recalculate next time I come into a slightly higher weight, I have to hit 16 reps. So, this keeps me safe because I'm not progressively overloading every workout. I'm not manually setting the weights for everything. And I know I did get into a little bit of a debate with one of the admins about manually setting weights and they manually set weights for everything and then they still progressively overload and they go in and add weight. By the way, my response would be if I had to do that, the machine would get returned and I would have switched back to the tonal. Full disclosure, like I I would have returned the first uh speed that I got and went back to the tonal had I seen that I wouldn't be able to use this for progressive overloading in a way that's automatic. And I think a if you have time to do that, b if you have the cognition to to go in and up your warm-ups and your working weights when when you're progressively overloading. So, they have to go back into their custom workouts, enter in the new weights. Uh, if you have time and you have the capability and you want the granular control that they desire over every single movement, over every single exercise, then I do agree with them that that would be a way to go. One thing I found with the machine that's very simple is if I want it to progressively instead of progressively overload, progressively detract, right? This machine is actually very easy to get it to lower the weights for you moving forward. And all you have to do there is adjust the weight down manually and then lift the amount of reps. So in this case, I'm lifting 13 reps. If I adjust the weight on one of my working sets down, I never adjust the weight on my warm-up sets unless something has gone really wrong. And by the way, if you adjust the weight on a warm-up because I did have to do it once where it set my weights at something crazy high because it was the first time I was doing the exercise. So first time that you're doing the exercise, it's guessing at the weight based upon your strength score calculated from the strength assessment, right? I'm saying strength score because that was a number that tonal sho showed. They don't show that score here, but I'm assuming they're building something in the background that is similar to a strength score and then applying that to each exercise before you go in and do an exercise. tonal was showing that number and people got up all up in arms about their number and when it would go down and when it would go up. I never cared about the number. Obviously, I was one of the top ones on the platform, top top 1%. Uh, which is not shocking, but it's and it's kind of cool to see it and see that you're top 1% because I didn't start at top 1%. And I started like everyone else at like 70 80% well like everyone else who's 6' tall 200 plus pounds I should say you know not everyone else but like everyone who's as big as me and has been grappling for almost you know nine years now something like that. So like yes of course I'm going to have a top 50 percentile score just coming onto the machine but to get the whole way up to 99 percentile was was amazing. Right. That I I thought that was really really cool. Especially because I don't do the big three. So, very rarely do I do those lifts. I don't do squat, deadlift, and uh well, I do do bench, but uh I usually bench with the handles when I'm benching. So, that limits the strength a little bit because it's a little bit of a different range of motion and I prefer it for my joints and connective tissue. feels a little better to lift with the handles instead of the barbell on that particular movement for me and that's a a truly individual thing. But this this methodology of training I wouldn't say is superior to their custom workout and entering everything by hand, but just realize that's a lot of tracking. I don't want to have to think about it. I want to walk up to the machine. I want to hit that start button. So what actually happens when I go to do one of these workouts? Uh, I want to exit without saving because I don't want to actually touch my workout. But I go up to it, I hit custom, I hit start, and I just start lifting. And I don't have to think about anything else until I'm done with the workout other than just trying to move the weight for the amount of reps that I have. Uh, one of the other things that I saw someone really focusing on is there's there's power meters that are on the screen. I do care about those, but I don't care about them. I care more about the progression of the weights and the max. So if I'm looking at this, the the 1 RM values here are are the thing that matter most. So these values for these individual exercises are the thing that matter most. And those power bars are just a guide for me to try to figure am I moving the weight concentrically fast enough. I want to move the weight very very fast on the concentric and very slow on the eentric. So, I do want those power bars to be fairly high. The the faster and with the the the faster and with the most force you can use on the concentric will get those power bars to be higher. And you want them to be somewhat even. It really matters if you're using the handles and the bars are all over the place, not even. Then I'm trying to adjust to get my weaker side to match my stronger side on the power bar. So th those bars are important, but they're just not that relevant as long as they're okayish. You know, also if they flag and they're way below 50% for multiple reps, which would happen on the tunnel has not happened on this yet, but I imagine it will eventually happen where I run into failure cases and I'm just not strong enough to lift the weight on that day. Uh what happens is if I'm getting sub 50% on those from multiple exercises in a row, I end the workout and call it like that's that's what ends up happening. If I'm unable to maintain a decent enough uh strength curve on the individual exercises, I just call the workout there. And that's just some of the tips for the way I do things. I'm not saying it's the best way. I'm saying it's the way that has kept me with no major industry in injuries for quite a period of time. I I after trying the the smart assists, I will say I see a lot of benefit in smart assist 2. I'm not turning it on and that's because it has to be turned on, I'm pretty sure, at a per exercise level. Actually, let me double check that if I turn this on. So, if I turn on assist 2 and I go in here, this should be easy enough to actually test. I only have to do one or two exercises. Let me try it for you real quick because I'm interested myself. I'm imagining it will actually stay on. Unlike the eentric mode where when I adjusted the eentric mode toggle, I had to adjust it per exercise. I imagine this is actually per workout. So, if I go in here, turn on assist two, and thankfully these are warm-up sets. So, I'm in my actual workout here. Hopefully, this does not adjust my 1 RM or anything like that. I don't think it will. It didn't look like it did before. Even though you're bailing in the middle of your reps, it's not adjusting your 1 RM down. The goal is to have it not adjust that down. So, if I go in here and I do [Music] I'm just going to try to do this as quickly as possible to get through it. So, there's no proper form on these. This is just to get through these and see if assist mode 2 stays on. I'm assuming it will. So, we're here. Go here. We hit skip. Cyst mode two stayed on there. I'm assuming it will stay on here, too. After this, I'm assuming it will stay on. So, it's per workout. So, we're going in here. We're doing another warm-up set. You can see this time they shot him from the side. Skip. Yes, assist mode two stayed on. Now, let me end this real quick. End the workout. And then I'm going to go back into the same workout. I know it sounds weird, but what I'm going to do is go back into this. And this was kneeling. Yes, this is the one with kneeling single arm. Hit start. And yes, the assist mode got turned back off. Meaning every time you go into one of these workouts, you have to turn it back on. It doesn't stay on. Unlike the eccentric, which stays at the setting that I kept it at, this actually turns itself back off. I don't know if there's a setting to actually have it always be on. I don't think there is. Let me see. would not be there. It would be training. No, it's not in here. Standby training. I do not see a setting for that. If anyone knows, they can leave a comment down below, but I do not think there is a setting. I go back in here and start this one. You know what? I bet it might be. Give me one more second. I h have a theory. If I go here, um, I'm trying to see if there's anything in the workout itself. Sequence will not give it to me. No, there's nothing in here to have it automatically turn that on from what I can see. So yeah, you would have to go in every time you start one of these and turn that back on. So this assist mode would have to be turned to assist two every time. Unlike the eentric mode where it keeps it and remembers it. So, just be aware. Oh, sorry. I was flipping the screen upside down. So, just be aware that if you're in here and you want assist mode two to be on, you're going to have to turn it on. And uh I don't think it's a bad thing to use assist mode two at least. I think it's an extra safety feature that could be beneficial. And if you want to do drop sets, for sure, assist mode 2 is the way to go. That is that is the vastly superior way to do drop sets on this machine to customizing the weight and using the dial on the ring. Uh it will be automatic. It seems to give me a pretty good workout, that's for sure, trying it last night and this morning. So yeah, that's my conclusion on that. In terms of safety features, this thing has so many. In my opinion, it's so much safer than free weights. But like anything, I mean, this is an exercise tool. Exercise is not without risks. You know, any exercise you could blow out your knee running. You can, you know, I've I've beaten my body up more running than Well, I don't know which one's worse, running or jiu-jitsu. Knees and ankles versus fingers and toes, right? But I don't know, you know, I guess in my opinion, I'd rather break a finger, which has happened a couple times. I've got three broken fingers now. Uh, three three pretty pretty severely damaged fingers that have the middle knuckle kind of uh permanently looking different than the other ones. But I would much rather have that than the knee repair that I had and the Achilles issues because it sucks whenever you're walking and hobbling. So, it's kind of like pick your poison in terms of injury risk. With with something like the Speedance or the Tonal, any of these digital weight machines, I feel like they're far safer than free weights, especially I mean, in the case where you don't have a spotter. Yes, if you have two spotters, then you are going to be safer with free weights than a digital cable machine because you have two additional you have four additional eyes on you at every given time. So, as long as your spotters are somewhat competent, yes, of course, you're going to be safer in that scenario because when I'm using this machine or when I was using free weights, I had no one. And in that case, this has so many additional safety features that I covered earlier on. Again, facing the machine so you can turn it off. Bringing you to the attachment, not the attachment to you. Um, making sure you have either the ring or the handles to where you can turn it off a second way. Obviously, I have it set so that unlimited mode is on. And so, these settings actually matter, right? So, go into training preferences. these matter. I have smart load for the load off method and then I have and then I have it set so that the unlimited set is set to on so that it gives me that extra second. So smart load's turning off the weight I believe when I'm at the end of my set, but I want it to give me a pause and give me time to try to eek out more reps. That's what the unlimited set is doing. So, I only have a couple seconds at the end of my set to hit those extra to start hitting those extra reps. So, what happens is I finish my set and that pause that would happen with the pause that would happen that caused the weight to drop in smart assist 2. That pause would cause it to turn it off. I would have to go with my next rep, which was the same way tonal is. Like tonal would actually turn it off in the middle of your set. If you get to 15 and you don't lift that weight, tonal just turns the thing off on you. It's like, nope, you got to 15, you only hit 15, and then it would lower your one rep max. It wouldn't give you the shot to hold it there for a period of time and try one more, one more rep later. So, that's my conclusion on this. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. Like and subscribe. It helps a lot. Uh, put a comment down below if there's anything else you'd like to see. I'm probably going to continue on videos on the speed dance for the near future because there's so many questions and I'm learning new things about the machine every day. By the way, I just completed the Canyon Quest, so I was pretty excited about that. Uh, I got gold on the canyon quest, which was actually a little bit of a struggle just because I was still moving this thing up into my office during the quest. So, it was still and and I'm I obviously train jiu-jitsu and I do a bunch of other things. Uh, so it was a little bit of a struggle to actually hit that, you know, 200,000 pounds, but I'm I'm I'm excited for these quests. I actually really like this. This is something Tonal didn't have where they did where they have challenges and prizes and that kind of thing. And to think a machine where they don't charge a membership to use the machine has more rewards for their members than the machine where you're paying over $60 a month for the ability to use the machine you already paid $5,000 for. $5,500, but let's not get technical with the amount that that thing costs. um that concept that they offer more free things and rewards and awards for people who use their device than the company who's charging you a massive amount of money is mind-boggling to me and I really appreciate it. So, I'm pretty excited to hit a million pounds on these devices. That's, you know, right now I'm at 200 267 uh,000,000 pounds. So, you know, I hope to hit a million pounds within a couple months. So, I don't set hard and fast like I have to hit it by this date. It's going to be based on my other training, based on how much time I can get on the machine, and based upon, you know, how life takes me. But I I've liked the switch over. I'm actually pleasantly surprised getting my getting my workouts moved over uh one by one and then starting to do them. Uh and also having access to more moves. So every now and then I'll I'll add a different move than was what was in my original workout because there's so many more options for movements. And I'm going to probably end up creating new workouts to explore some of the additional movements with the adjustable bench that weren't available on tonal. So, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Any any questions you have, uh, feel free to to put a comment down below and I'll try to answer them.