Ancore Pro

This is a nice unit and it works well. It is especially good for shoulder and bicep work as well a functional exercises. Ballistic work is also good because you can move much faster than with a weight stack. I cannot yet comment on durability, but the company gives great customer service and support. Some people knock these because they only go to 65 pounds when fully loaded, but when you know it going in you cannot complain. I like ANCORE!

I got this from Facebook marketplace. My units came from a CrossFit gym, so have seen a ton of use, but they're still going strong. I didn't want to jinx myself but it feels like these are simple enough mechanisms that they might work for many years to come. I probably wouldn't have paid full price for these, but "heavily used marketplace" price was acceptable. I keep these mounted on a rack with the darko rack mounts. Without that, fiddling with the Velcro straps world probably mean that I never used them. Weight feels reasonable. There is definitely a different feel from a weight stack. Not worse, just... Different. The biggest limitation with these is that they max out at 65 lbs. I double up my units for things like tri pushdowns, but also needed to keep a lat pulldown / low row machine for things where the combined weight isn't enough.

I won this in a give away from Luke's Garage GYM. I use it probably once a week with intention and mess around with it whenever I walk by. It works great as a single stack functional trainer in my opinion. I personally use it with 1 arm at a time so 55lb weight limit is only a problem with rows and lat pull downs, but i just use my lat pull down/low row for those. It is easy to move and changing weight is super simple, plus itll never break. I really cant tell you if its worth the price tag but it has served me well.

You have to take into account the intent and design of this to give it a fair review. This is meant to be a compact light portable cable option. In that space, this thing excels. It is very light and works extremely well as a cable option that requires no charge. It just works wherever you can strap or mount it onto. I bought this as a portable tool when traveling and it really exceeded my expectations. The cable action is incredibly responsive and there is plenty of length to get good ROM. With the Velcro strap or optional mounts (where you could screw them into a board that you could then ratchet strap to a larger object) you really could use this just about anywhere. The ease of adjustment and super portability of this thing makes it fantastic and I use it in addition to my functional trainer even in my home gym.

For a long time it was tough for me to get on board with something like this. We got this for a gym that did not have enough space for traditional cable machine. The resistance "feel" takes a little time to get used to. To me, it does feel a little different than a cable stack with a standard cable on pulleys. I like the versatility, we use ours attached to a power rack but you can really anchor this to anything solid and get a pump session going. I don't exactly care for the way that you adjust the resistance. It's fast enough as long as you have the right disc that you need and they are close by. I also was unsure at the beginning if there would be enough "weight". The good thing is unlike most cable stack systems these are a 1:1 ratio. These work well but I would not recommend them to everyone.