AI Powered Smart Home Gym and Personal Trainer: AEKE Smart Home Gym K1 Review

Hey guys, this is Michael with the Jungle Gym Reviews. Today we're reviewing the Aeke Smart Home Gym K1. This differentiates itself from other smart home gym equipment and the fact that this is more geared towards AI integration. A personal coach at home, not just a workout machine. It's got a built-in camera, smart scale, track, your form, your posture, your progression, and it learns to you, your body, your metrics, the data you give it, how strong you are, the workouts you do, the frequency, the type, etc. But after using this for a while, there are some quirks about it.

I don't personally love from a strength training standpoint. I'd like to highlight this compared to some other options and discuss whether or not I think this is worth the price tag of about $3,800. So let's check it out. So the main part of the Ike Home Gym is going to be their TV slash smart mirror slash main interactive system here. This beautiful touchscreen, 43 inch, 4k, just as you would imagine, you know, using your iPhone or something like that.

It responds just as well. Super bright. I don't even have the brightness up all the way.

This is a studio with a lot of bright lights and everything, and I can see this just fine. There's two buttons on the side, one to turn it on. The other thing, there's an auto folding and unfolding footboard. That's part of what makes the profile of it so narrow when it's stored up. It does take about 15, 20, 30 seconds for this to come down, and you definitely want to make sure it's clear of anything here. It'll get stuck on stuff that's on the ground.

But it's really nice that I guess in today's day and age, you don't even have to do anything other than get out of the way and your home gym equipment sets itself up and ready to go. This is one of the things you got to be careful for. Make sure the handles are perfect example. They do sometimes get stuck underneath there.

You kind of got to make sure they're out of the way for it to come down and boom. The other thing about this besides the nice big bright touchscreen is it's not just a cable system. It is a cable system, which I'll show how to use in just a second. The whole point of this is meant to be more like personal coach-esque, personal trainer-esque, meaning that you tell it what to do, whether it's, I want to lose weight, I want to put on muscle, and it asks you for inputs, whether that's their smart scale that they include with this, where you can do like a body fat percentage, your weight, you tell it your height, your age, your fitness goal, lose weight, health boost, build muscle, how long you want to work out for, what groups you want to work, and basically you can select any combination and hit generate, and this intelligence or the AI will do something for you. As you go, the other cool thing besides the fact that programs your workouts, it'll learn your weight capacities, it'll learn how strong you are, it'll give you progression over time, it'll challenge you over time.

This other little thing down here is part of how the magic happens. It'll be really hard to see with the reflective surface, but this is actually a camera. It will tell you exactly what to do, it'll give you real-time feedback on your form, whether you're doing chest flies, where you're doing rows, so it's really nice in the fact that for people who maybe aren't super into working out or aren't really quite sure what they're doing, it is, again, that like hybrid between just doing it on your own and having a coach and personal assistant, which, by the way, can cost anywhere from like $200 to like $1,000 a month. This costs about $38- $3900 for everything included here, which obviously is the unit itself. It comes with wrist slash ankle cuffs, it comes with a heart rate monitor, it comes with this barbell, which will kind of show how it works in a second, where you can, instead of the two individual cable sides, you can connect everything together.

It also comes with the adjustable bench. Another thing we'll show here in just a moment, the main, how you interact with this are going to be these two cable handles. So unlike other options though, these are the only cable options here.

So these are the only cable exits, they only come from here on the ground. You can do one at a time. Each side is up to 110 pounds of resistance each. So 110 pounds here, 110 pounds here, that can total 220 pounds of resistance via a electronic servo motor. And you actually have to be on the foot plate, because if you're off it and the weight's too heavy, you'll kind of lift up here.

This foot plate is not like self-locking, let's say. Come off of the unit and try to lift 65 pounds. You know, it doesn't tell you this anywhere to like not do this off the side, but I'm telling you now, you have to physically stand on here for whatever you're doing, or have a bench on here that you're sitting on or something like that.

Otherwise, this thing's going to fall back. So as far as the screen itself and how you interact with it, right here in the middle, it shows you exactly how much weight you're lifting. Down here is how you actually adjust the weight. You have two different ways.

You can hit the plus a time which takes forever if you just keep hitting plus, or you can actually grab the little green dot and take that all the way around. Like I said, you can go all the way up to 110 pounds aside and you can choose different modes. This is another cool thing about software or electronic integrated weight machines, weight resistance like we have now. There's five different resistance modes. You have constant, which is normal cable, concentric, which is harder on the up from here. Eccentric, harder on the down from here.

Rowling like a slow drag. Elastic is then going to be bands. And again, you can change the weight of it the whole way up to 110 pounds each side. If you do crossbar, which is going to be this connected bar, it's together. So this way you should be able to do 220 pounds total. Now one thing I don't like about this weight selector is I like this little scroll feature here, but if you have the weight activated, you can't move this, you can't scroll down anymore. You're only stuck to minus. So it's like this is really annoying to be able to go.

Like if I want to drop any weight, I'm just here tapping this. I don't like that. That's something I wish they could change.

They could probably change it pretty easily. It might be like a safety feature that until you release the weight, then they give you the scroll wheel back again. I don't know. One thing I also didn't mention is there's these little smart handles while we're here that have a little button on them, which to be quite fair, I actually don't like the position of this button because I find myself accidentally hitting it while I'm gripping all the time. You tap this button and there it goes. It engages the weight. Now I don't have to interact with the screen, but you know, now you're doing 30 pounds. So it's cool on the screen too. It'll show you how much power you generate on each side. So you and even the exact like wave form of the strength curve itself, how much volume you lift. That's what's cool about like smart tech is you have a little more metrics. Do you need it? Absolutely not. But you can definitely see like, oh, if I go really hard here, I'll generate way more power output and you can see the frequency reps, all that fun stuff.

So there's just a lot more data and it takes all that into consideration when building all these programs and everything for you. So real quick, I will disengage the weight on the handles by clicking that and it slowly releases and now the, you know, the handles have the weight on them. I can put them back. So let's say you pick 65 pounds aside, hit the activate way here, you'll see the circle, it basically ramps in the weight from like zero to 65, that way you're not holding it, grabbing it, whatever. And then all of a sudden you're, you know, get dragged down.

So that's a nice little touch, little feature. The cables only come here at the bottom, they only move in one direction. That being said, they've done a really nice job of tailoring the entire system and all the exercises, everything to movements from here. I think there's like 320 different movements that they can show you how to do.

Like literally it'll show you how to walk through them on here. And at first I was like, okay, yeah, kind of gimmicky. But there's a lot that like I either didn't think of or I've seen and that I just don't really use in my training.

So I think that concept again, for more like beginners or people who aren't really sure quite what they want to do. So as far as how this gets changed out now, I'm done using the handles, come down here, there's just a button on either side. Now it has this little special bracket, square bracket here. This means you can't natively like use other attachments that have a carabiner, but I'm sure if you're creative, you can figure out a way to use your existing cable attachments as home. Maybe you can even take off this little bar attachment, hook a carabiner through there. For now I tried to use it exactly how they give it to you with the handles and the bars is again, press this button, release handles off to the side and they will fall asleep in a second.

So you don't waste battery. Now you have the connected bar, this is the barbell. These, it has a little release on it to where you can change where the cable actually attaches here.

It can, when you flip it upside down, it can go in any one of these grooves. Basically what this allows you to do is if it's in your way for a specific movement, let's say for like bicep curls or whatever it is, you wanna do bicep curls and you want your hands outside of that, you can do like that. Or same thing with like squatting, same thing with overhead press. You can move these little rings basically where the cables actually align and attach to the bar.

Either all the way to the center here or all the way to the outside here, just with these notches. The other cool thing about the bar they give here is this little smart button, which is the equivalent of that button on the handles where you press it and it engages or disengages the weight. That's really helpful, let's say for things like squatting, you wanna come here and squat, battery powered thing here, tap it, which I just did and now the weight is activating.

And then when I'm done, so that I'm not like struggling and trapped under the weight here, or if I, you know, start to get in the hole and I start to fail somewhere, then I can press this button and it'll relax itself. There's a couple of different modes on here. Again, there's the free workout mode, the assessments, which are see how good you are right now. My own workout mode, you can do the AI coach, which is like it'll actually learn for you and your training and progress you over time.

You can do the courses, which is just show up and pick what I feel like today, or the programs, which is kind of like an in-between of these where you don't really want the coach like making progressions and choices for you over time. But let's say the next month, I really wanna focus on growing my glutes. I wanna work out five days a week for the next two weeks. That's what I wanna focus on. What days do I wanna train?

What days do I wanna rest? There you go. So you have a bunch of different options basically. Looking at it holistically, I think this again is geared towards beginners. I think things like the speedy inch gym monster do a little bit better job at being a more like strength training oriented. They have things like the cables that can go up the sides. Here you're just limited because you only have one pulling point, which is down. Some other options like tonal that has arms, you can get like higher. So if you wanna go high to low, into out, you have a lot more options as far as the different cable slash pulling points. And I'll say the actual feel of the cable, especially on something like speedy inch or even the beyond power of ultra is a little more refined. I think this could be a little more smooth and let's say snappy.

It's just okay. It's like better than obviously like a plate loaded cable machine, but it's definitely not as smooth as even like a nice weight stack. I personally think they could use a little like software motor tuning here.

It's definitely something they have control of. And that's the nice thing about software electronic tech and cable systems is they can actually do some sort of programming and performance upgrades to the servo drive, the motor itself without actually changing the hardware. For most people, it's not a really noticeable, I would say the cable feel smooth and this is like a six out of 10 here. And that's where I'm saying things like, you know, a normal mechanical weight stack feel actually, you know, very like you can see how just snappy that is.

And this is like, you know, a nine out of 10. So doing something like this, moving back to something like that, there's definitely a noticeable difference. It doesn't make this a not smooth or not good experience. It's just definitely something I know in my head that like, as a strength training person who comes from a cable type machine background, this could definitely be a little bit better. The other thing they include in this is this bench, adjustable bench. It looks super retro minimalist.

And I guess retro is coming back around. So obviously stores very narrow profile, which is nice. The whole goal of this is to be in your house and not be this like super obtrusive, huge weight system. It's got a couple of little latches for you to unlock the legs and a button release on the back. And it goes from, go all the way up to 90 degrees.

The seat itself does not go up. It's always flat, but it's got the angle increments here, 90, 85, 80 all the way down. So the lowest angle increment is 30.

The highest is 90. I appreciate that they include this, but it's not very comfortable. The fact I come from, more specific strength training oriented background. And again, I want to say my whole perspective on this is more like traditional home gym strength training.

No, like my bread and butter is home gym, gym equipment. This, there is like little to no padding here. I mean, we're talking like a quarter inch and then just the whatever plastic inside here. So it's not very comfortable when you're doing like, if you want to do like heavy bench press on here, just it's not comfortable. It's not made for that. I will say it's probably made for durability. So it's probably made so that you can stand on it. And it feels like a box. It's a little more, let's say utilitarian. It's not going to scratch, dense as easily and the best parts just folds up out of the way. So you put it back in the corner against the wall and the system itself and the bench, it'll fold up to pretty much take up no space at all. Now that's exactly why you would get this piece of equipment. First of all, you want to make sure it does not look like gym equipment. You don't want to walk into your living room and you're like, hey mom, welcome over to Thanksgiving dinner and boom, this is in your kitchen or your living room.

Now they're about the same cost in the grand scheme of things, but two very different profiles aesthetically. This fits into maybe like a foot and a half from the wall and just a couple feet wide, very, very, very minimal. Then you can fit this in a bedroom. Then it doesn't look so bad in a living room or in a shared living space. Same thing with the bench, you can store it in a closet easily. The whole point of these like smart home gym systems, either it's on a wall, either you can roll it out of the way, which it does have wheels.

So if you want to move it into a corner, you can turn it, roll it wherever you want to. You get this if you're a beginner and or someone who likes someone else to like coach them, but maybe you have a little more experience. You don't need someone to coach you from like day zero or you maybe rather than spend $200, $2,000 or whatever it is a month on personal training, you go this way, spend $3,800. I don't know that I'd recommend that first as your entry into fitness.

If you have no experience, I'd probably say go see a real person first in real life, couple hundred bucks for a couple of weeks, try a personal trainer, see if it fits your schedule rather than just jumping into this full on big financial commitment. But once you know you want to do that and maybe you are a little more sustainable, this is where something like this comes exactly into play. It gives you that hybrid of it's a little bit entertaining, but it also gives me feedback. So I'm not just left to my own to kind of figure out how to do health and fitness on my own. The fact it integrates with the scale, the fact it integrates with the built-in camera, and by the way, a phone app.

So you can have all this data and stopping your phone, you can get monthly assessments, you can get feedback. That's what this is for, is the interactive AI, more coached side, not just using it as a strict strength training machine. If you do want a strength training machine and it needs to look like this, I'd suggest maybe looking at something like the Tonal, which we had a review of here shortly, or the Speedian's Gym Monster. Even though some of those do have classes, I'll say those are a little more geared towards strength training, but specifically because of the different angles and everything. Here you are just limited because there's only two cable exits that come from the ground. Although they tell you 320 things you can do, it would be nice if your strength training focused to have the different height options as I am.

So guys, that's it for today's review of the Aeke Smart Home Gym K1. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below. I'll be happy to answer at least try. Thanks for tuning in to the Jungle Gym Reviews. We'll see you next time. Take it easy, peace.