...You make my Bowflex too damn hard to use.

I got a Bowflex about 8 months ago. I used it for a few months, then promptly through my back out (the fault of my massage chair, not the Bowflex (I think)).

I started using it again in December. It works. I've seen some changes. I've added five or ten pounds of muscle, and I've lost some fat as well. Here's the thing that's super frustrating though. I find it difficult to get consistent (or progressive) resistance out of the thing. The rods seem to me to be very sensitive to ambient temperature. The warmer the room gets, the less resistance each rod seems to provide. Tuesday, I was benching 270*, and it was too easy. Today, I was benching 260*, and I damn near popped an aneurism. That makes it very, very difficult to push yourself to keep doing more and more -- particularly when you're in a plateau which after 2 1/2 months I seem to be in.

Flexing the rods seems to put energy into them too, so that as the workout progresses, the resistance goes down as well. That's actually kind of nice since as the workout goes on, my muscles are fatiguing as well. Still...

And, don't let them tell you that you can't injure yourself with this machine. Today, one of the handles slipped out of my hand and shot back and whacked me a good one in the crook of my arm. It totally left a mark. Plus, even in the normal use of the machine, my arms are in the way of the cables (or the cables are in the way of my arms), so that I have a persistent bruise from where it keeps digging into me each workout. I guess it hurts to be beautiful. Some of the exercises feel pretty awkward too -- even if I back down to a negligible weight, and I'm never sure if I'm using proper form with them.

So, in short, it works, but the eletist snobs posters over in misc.fitness.weights are probably right. You might be better off getting a nice set of dumbbells and a bench and maybe a cage (assuming you have room - which I didn't).

*No, I don't believe for a second that I can do 3 sets of 10 at 250 much less 260 or 270. I just use those numbers Bowflex puts on their rods as an arbitrary, meaningless measure of resistance relative to itself (which as I say above isn't really true either).