I always get a chuckle when “new discoveries” emerge from elsewhere validating the things we have been doing for decades, like Time Under Tension (TUT), a term I coined back in 1989 when running experiments on my own personal training clients to develop the X Gym methods we have today.

Tonal brand exercise machines just revealed their own user data validating TUT effectiveness. In a recent 2021 newsletter issue (screenshot below), they claim to have “discovered” TUT as a key to better results.

They also discovered the more TUT the better – to a point – and past that creates diminishing returns, which we have also known for decades, hence the reason for our 21-minute workout limit.

Tonal found their sweet spot to be 30-40 minutes, but that’s because they are still doing traditional sets and reps, with offloads (i.e. rests – even as short as 1/4 second) and then more rests between those sets, which takes much longer than our style at the X Gym.

All that being said, their machines are pretty rad and we have online training members who own them, so we are familiar training on them, but with our methods, of course, giving even better results than Tonal’s methods.

If you would like to get a Tonal machine, I do recommend it, but just know their customer service is ATROCIOUS as I have been trying to contact them for the possibility of future discounts for X Gymers, with zero response, so if something goes wrong with your machine, you will probably be up a creek…