Imagine yourself in the strength section of your gym. You’ve walked up to your chosen machine, set down your towel and water bottle, and you’re ready to adjust the weight and prepare for your lift. You wrap your fingers around the pin inside the weight stack and pull, attempting to set the load to your desired resistance, but it jams and you’re forced to jiggle it back and forth in a feeble attempt to release the pin from the clutches of its iron prison. Once it finally gives, it’s time to repeat the process in reverse, wiggling the metal against the iron until it finally jams and you can push no further.
Welcome to the world of selectorized strength, where weight stack pins are few and far between, and if you can locate one, it probably won’t slide in on the first try. Selectorized strength is a critical portion of a weight room, offering gym members access to resistance training with proper biomechanics built in, and greater approachability than Olympic benches or free weights.
This family of gym equipment is a favorite for many members, but a unit missing a weight stack pin is a unit that is non-operational, and that is costing your business money. Nautilus knows that facility owners need innovation that drives their business forward and increases revenue, and that’s why the #1 Brand in Strength utilizes Lock N Load.
Lock N Load is a patented, inventively designed weight stack system that uses internal pins to engage and disengage weight selections. Externally, the user merely flips a switch on a universally color-coded weight stack from red to green, signifying that the pin is in place, and the machine is ready to use.
“One of the top concerns with selectorized strength equipment is down time – meaning equipment is out of order. It is hard to imagine that a traditional $6 weight stack selection pin can be the cause of an out of order sign and member inconvenience” says Core Health & Fitness Vice President of Product Management & Innovation Jeff Dilts. “Weight stack selection pins are the number one issue with traditional strength maintenance in the field often ranking as #1 for first 30 day, 90 day and 120 day strength service parts orders. Pins can be damaged, broken and or missing, all resulting in restricted use of the machine and often complete down time.”
The Lock N Load weight selection system effectively mitigates this issue. If a Lock N Load switch does become non-operational, the machine is still usable excepting the single broken selection – but with a one-year issue rate of 0.6%, it’s an unlikely scenario. With 17x the number of Lock N Load switches in a facility compared to weight pins, Nautilus is proud to offer three product lines with this groundbreaking technology to facility owners who know that higher end gyms choose Nautilus.
The Impact, Instinct, and Inspiration Strength lines all come equipped with Lock N Load and are a tremendous example of how Core Health & Fitness works with its customers on optimizing design to create a fantastic end-user experience. In any given year, gym owners can expect to need switch replacement on only one of every ten machines from these lines, a testament to why Nautilus is also the Top Brand for Reliable Products and for High Uptime of Equipment.
If your facility needs innovative technology to take its strength section to the next level, contact the experts at Core Health & Fitness to find out which line will work best for you.
