When you think of a weight machine, you think of a big piece of metal with massive arms and a stack of weights you pull up and down. You can add or remove weight by moving the pin, and if you’re lucky you can do two, maybe three exercises on the same machine without adjusting too many things. Pretty standard. And what if you wanted to keep track of what you lifted? Simple – you’d just jot it down in a notebook!

There’s nothing simple about that.

Tonal is actually the simplest way to lift weights. Not only can you adjust the weight with the flick of a finger, but it automatically tracks your reps, sets, power, volume, and range of motion so you can instantly see your stats with a click of a button. Amazing, right? And it’s all possible thanks to digital weights.

Before digital weights, weight machines relied on big metal plates and gravity to work. The more plates you added, the heavier it felt. Tonal employs an electromagnetic resistance engine powered by advanced math to generate resistance up to 200 lbs. And it’s the form factor of a flat screen TV.

In addition to taking up zero floor space, digital weight can be manipulated easily and precisely.   Tonal can measure your progress, automatically set the ideal weight for you, or spot you when you’re struggling.

That might sound a bit like science fiction, but electromagnetics is the principle that propels the motors in electric cars and that levitates high speed trains in Japan. Tonal’s digital weights use the same principle, just in a more precise way.

Physically, our electromagnetic resistance engine is the combination of computer chips, coils that generate an electromagnetic field controlled by those chips, and magnets that allow you to fight that field as you pull on a cable. It operates on some of the same physical principles as a traditional motor, but is far more advanced.

Using a computer chip doing millions of calculations per second, our digital weight system can mathematically model the physics of a traditional weight stack and digitally manipulate that electromagnetic field to make it feel like a weight stack. This happens tens of thousands of times per second, all while measuring and responding to you.

Digital weights are measuring you continuously – speed, acceleration, force, power, and range of motion – and adjusting thousands of times per second to make each rep more efficient.

Digital weights enable incredible features like a Spotter that senses when you’re struggling and instantly dials the weight down. It even makes turning the weight on or off as simple as clicking  a button.

This technology makes it possible to replicate the feeling of chains or a heavy negative to work the muscles to failure more efficiently and effectively. Tonal is able to measure the strength-velocity curve of your muscle and from that recommend your ideal weight so you’re always being challenged, without being pushed past your edge. For the first time you’re able to experience a truly personalized and adaptive strength training workout.

It’s with digital weight that we can create a machine so smooth and precise, that in a blindfolded test you’d rate it as the highest quality weight machine without ever knowing it’s not really weights.

And the best part: it’s here today. Welcome to the future of connected strength training.