The Slim Gym™ started as an off-shoot of our extra rooms business, which still makes bespoke garden rooms, soundproofed music rooms etc..

Slim Gym™.

More and more people were telling us they wanted an extra room because they wanted to have a gym, they did not have any extra space or a free spare room to put one in. 

Fair enough, that made sense.

This kept repeating gently as the years went by, and in 2010 we started paying closer attention to this fact.

Could we design a comprehensive multi-gym which which does not take up the whole room and destroy the useful space as hitherto multi-gyms have always done?

If you had a room that doubled up as both a garden room and a garden office, then would that not be a better outcome? 

Should it fold up into a smaller ball, or a cube or rectangular shape? Trouble with that is it would still intrude into the room, you would still be walking around it somehow at some point.

How about designing it so that it was mega slim and was fixed to the wall into a very slim plane indeed, so it hardly intruded into the room at all?

How slim could we make it? The slimmer the better.

Hinges allow for anything to fold so we could design various types of hinges and we have done, but the weight plates are quite deep and need not be.

Most home gym equipment gets used for around 2-3 hours a week, the rest of the time the gym just sits there unused whilst filling a room.

Would it not make sense to design a more compact multi-gym that if possible, takes up only a very small amount of space.

The inventor of the linear motor, Dr Eric Laithwaite, broke the mould and re-designed a typical electric motor by unravelling it from circular to flat.

Could we do the same with a multi-gym and make it flat but fixed to a wall?

Would it work? 

After playing with many ideas and variables it was decided that simple was best. KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid. No springs or bungees, no magnets no coils

Weight stacks are as pure and simple as they can get, need more weight, add another plate, need less? Move the pin up. Consistant? You bet, gravity can be relied upon 100%.

Yes that has got to be the way to go, low tech for a change, not high tech with failure-prone electronics or other complications. 

Gravity never breaks down.

This would have to be the way, keep the actual standard weight per plate the same as before, but make the weights shallower but wider. To contribute to help it be slim, this is what all Slim Gyms™ now have.

It took us another 4 yrs to get this far and we were findinging the gym was becoming something special so we should try to get it patented before somebody else did.

Typical multi-gyms hadve multiple weight stacks, most have four, one stack for each exercise station/ take-off point. That is a lot of heavy weight stacks, not really practical for wooden floors, and we want a Slim Gym to go pretty much anywhare, not just in garages or on concrete floors.

Could we not configure the cable geometry so that we need less weight-stacks, by sharing just one stack amongst different work stations? Could we get it down to just one stack?

That is something we felt we should aim for at least, but it was a big ask.

So after some simple drawings of a first experimental cable circuit we finally devised, pulleys cables and steel was bought, and it was time to build our first prototype, this was in 2012.

This was going to be a product that could go anywhere, from professional/commercial gyms to home gyms too, some would be in bedrooms and lounges, others in hallways and landings, not just garages. 

So we broke with convention there and placed everything within a sturdy black painted timber frame, to see how it went.

First of all, no matter what we did, we encountered problems with the cables twisting, pulleys failing and bit by bit we ironed it all out but it took many prototypes and took us up to 2014 for the basic problems.

We purchased a pneumatic ram and set it up so that it could work the cable at max load for thousands of hours, to test everything, the cable types the cable coverings, the pulleys themselves and we learned a lot and little by little we ironed out the creases after many lessons but it was so worthwhile to test so thoroughly.

Now we were certain af which type of winding for the cables, what sort of covering, what the pulleys themselves must be made of, which bearings to use, which ones needed extended bearings etc etc, the lessons went on and on and taught us a lot. That was 2015.

We wanted to have more take-off points in order to offer more height positions to take exercises from, with take-off points ideally from floor to above your head, each therefore exercising different muscles.A proper versatile multi-gym.

Cutting a long story short, we found that if we had two main circuits rather than just one we could join them with a figure 8 pulley that duplicated the tension of one circuit to the other and did away with the need for a counterweight.

This was a huge advantage and so now we had no cables twisting, nor a need for a counterweight and we could have a pair of infinitely adjustable sliding take-off points from all heights angles and directions.

We were getting there. This is now so versatile and simple. When you look at a Slim Gym

before you use it regularly, you do not realise it at first, even I did not and I invented it!

I had an air rower for a time but was a little dissapointed as there was not a lot of resistance, it was all comparitively light cardio, no consistent heavy resistance so we did not like that idea. Water rowers are ok but massive almost taking up a whole room themselves, certainly dominating it and space hungry.

A weight stack version though, if we could do it, would be infinitely adjustable and provide real and consistent resistance, good old gravity again and a bungee or spring version would be we felt horrendous.

We fiddled around for quite a while working out take-off points for a rower to start from but they did not have the travel to be useful. Then we realised we had a space on our cable run at the top of the machine whereby we could have a pulley in a carrier on the horizontal cable part the pulley and carrier could slide along sideways and work at right angles to the cables and derive its tension and resistance from that.

It worked well. That was in 2015 when we applied for a patent in the U.K. After that we applied for various patents worldwide and for most later patents we used the filing date of the U.K.patent.

Years ago, not being a natural gym rat, I found that to my surprise, fitness scientists say that if you run downhill, your thigh muscles build faster than they do when going uphill. 

This is very surprising to most people initially, it was to us.

Apparently, this is because when going downhill your thigh muscles are in more constant tension all the time, whereas not so much when going uphill.

Transfer this realisation to a weight stack rower. 

With a weight-stack rower, you never get a let off. You are in tension all the time. 

A conventional rower allows you to rest or only work minimally as you pull your feet to slide forwards on the rower seat ,and go back to the start position. 

However with a weight stack rower, you are fighting against a weight from dropping down all the time, most of your body is in continual tension,(90% of your main muscle groups are exercised with a rower) this is then when your muscles are in that constant tension resistance phase, which is the most beneficial for building muscles more quickly.

In other rowers, the return stroke is mostly a rest stroke but when you are having to act as a brake at all times to either lift it up or to slow the stack from falling, that constant muscle building tension remains virtually the whole time and literally all the time if you never let the stack hit the bottom.

This is why a Slim Gym rower or any weight stack rower, does not need velcro straps to be able to pull yourself forward on the carriage. Your feet are being pressed against the foot-bar all the time by the weight of the stack, so you have to fight against this force to slow the down stroke, this constant pressure whether the stack is going up or down is a huge benefit for muscle increase.

This applies exactly the same way for your back muscles when using a weight stack rower, because they too are in constant tension, whether the stack is going up as your thighs and back provide the power to raise the stack, or when they are slowing the stack from dropping quickly as your back muscles have to join in and act as a brake too.

This also applies to your forearms as the grip muscles too are under constant pressure to maintain your grip on that bar at all times to hold the stack.

Overall, weight stack rowers win hands down, for both growing muscle mass and stamina, as constant tension is the sweet spot for faster results. Bear this in mind whatever and whenever you do resistance exercises. Whenever using any weight stack machines, and even by hand lower them down slowly, keep that tension longer for quicker muscle growth, do not just let the stack drop down fast, make your muscles work and hit that sweet spot of continual tension for better muscle growth.

After all, it is supposed to be a”work out”..

So after many years of developing Slim Gyms we feel we have gone as far as we can, It has taken 15 yrs to perfect to this degree of versatility and make it as efficient as it is, both regarding being super-compact and also offering so many professional grade functions and exercises.

A Slim Gym™ unit plus the rower, only takes up less than 2 sq feet. The core unit alone,( as you can have a Slim Gym with or without the rower,) is less than just one measly square foot, plus of course that is just along a wall at the very edge of a room where space is not so crucial to the room.

Between 2012 to 2021 we made prototype after prototype and experimented with everything, then played around with various finishes and found we could actually do away with an actual frame altogether, and fix everything to the wall for support but it is not such a pretty thing to have in the rooms you live in. a frame finishes it off nicely and also allows you to have a roller blind that hides it away completely if you wish, but you can still have it frameless if you prefer.

The Slim Gym™ is over-engineered it is as good and durable we can possibly make it after all this time.

Enjoy the Slim Gym™,it is super compact, super durable and hugely versatile.

A Slim Gym™ is available whenever you want it, and out of the way when you do not, keep your space, and enjoy getting get fitter, stronger and healthier.

All the best, David Fowler, inventor of the Slim Gym™