Buyer's Guide
There's a budget version and a serious version of nearly every piece of gym kit — a £200 treadmill and a £2,000 one, a flat-pack bench and a commercial one — and most of the people Motion Range is built for have already owned the budget version. The serious version isn't ten times better, but the gap on the things that actually matter (motor life, deck stability, frame gauge, weld quality, cable and bearing wear, warranty handling, parts availability after three years) is wider than the price suggests. This guide is about navigating that gap with confidence, by category, with the practical detail buyers actually need.
The range splits into three areas — cardio, strength, and functional — and the buying decision is genuinely different in each. Read the section that matches what you're buying.
Cardio
Treadmills, rowers, exercise bikes, cross trainers and steppers. A treadmill is the one most people agonise over, and it comes down to the motor.
Read the continuous horsepower, not the peak. Spec sheets quote two figures and they are not the same thing. Peak is the short burst a motor can hit; continuous — the lower number — is what it holds all day, under a heavy user, on the tenth session. That's the one that decides how long the machine lasts. Our Sprint LC runs a 3.5 HP continuous AC motor; the Encore lists 3 HP continuous against a 4.5 HP peak; the commercial M8e runs 4 HP continuous / 6 HP peak. If a cheaper treadmill advertises a big peak number and buries the continuous figure, that's telling you something.
Or skip the motor altogether. A self-powered curved treadmill — the Run Max 2.0 or the Curve 2.0 PLUS — has no motor to burn out and needs no plug. You set the pace with your stride, resistance runs 1–8 for sled-style pushes, and there's nothing electronic to fail. The trade-off is a different running feel and a higher price: roughly £3,200–£4,800, against about £2,400 for a motorised Sprint LC.
Deck size is a footprint decision as much as a comfort one. A wider, longer belt (the Encore is 152.5 × 51 cm, the Sprint LC 155 × 55 cm) means you stop thinking about your stride — but the machine's overall footprint runs 197–217 cm long and up to 94 cm wide, so measure the room before the belt. Check the maximum user weight while you're there: ours run 150–182 kg, and an honest spec sheet states it.
Rowers, bikes, cross trainers and steppers turn mostly on resistance type — air, magnetic or water — and, for anything going in an upstairs room, on noise. Each product page states what it is; if you're between two, call us.
Strength
Racks and rigs, benches, plate-loaded and selectorised machines, cable and functional trainers, and free weights. Two questions settle most of it.
Plate-loaded or weight-stack? Our strength machines are mostly plate-loaded — you add your own Olympic plates (the Elite Series Seated Calf Raise, for example, takes up to 100 kg). Plate-loaded is simpler, cheaper, and has no cable or pulley to wear out, which suits a home gym or single studio. Selectorised (pin-select weight-stack) machines are faster between sets and better where lots of people train through the day, but there's more inside them to maintain. Neither is "better" — it depends on who's using it and how hard.
What "commercial-grade" actually means here: check the steel. The phrase is meaningless unless the frame is specified. Look for a stated tube thickness — our Functional Storage Rack is built from 3 mm steel tubing — and use the frame weight as a sanity check: these machines run 50–80 kg because they're heavy-gauge, powder-coated steel built to take daily load, not flat-pack tube. A rack that weighs 20 kg is quietly telling you what it's made of.
Match it to your floor and ceiling. Strength kit is heavy and permanent-feeling. Note the footprint, and for anything with an overhead pull-up bar or rig, measure your ceiling height before you buy — it's the one dimension people forget.
Functional & Conditioning
Conditioning and functional kit — rig attachments, ab rollers and the like — plus the flooring underneath it. The flooring is the decision people get wrong, and it comes down to matching thickness to what actually hits the floor.
Match tile thickness to whether weights get dropped. A 20 mm wood-effect tile is built for cardio, studio and functional zones — and its own spec says plainly it is not for heavy free-weight or deadlift areas. For free weights and dropped loads you want a 30 mm rubber tile, which adds real shock absorption and around 28 dB of sound insulation — worth having if anything, or anyone, sits below or beside you. Put a thin studio tile under a dropped barbell and you'll be replacing the tile, and possibly the floor.
Finish the edges. Ramped edge strips turn a raised rubber floor into something nobody trips over — a small cost that earns its place in a room other people use.
How Motion Range chooses what to stock
We stock a broad range now, but every product still earns its place. Each item — cardio, strength or functional — is chosen for build quality, warranty terms, parts availability, and how it holds up after a year or two of real use, not for margin headroom. If a brand we trust changes the spec of a model in a way that weakens it, we drop it. Better a range we can defend than a longer one we can't.
Ready for the next step?
Read the section above that matches what you're buying, then go straight to that part of the range: cardio, strength, or functional. Or call us on 0333 880 7174 between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday if you'd rather talk it through first.
