Marcy Home Gym Workouts

Walter Marcyan, founder of the Marcy home gym equipment line, pioneered the concept of multi-station gyms with his 1959 All In One Gym. The Marcy line has since been acquired by Impex Fitness, but continues Marcyan's tradition with a variety of multi-station home gyms. Although the configuration, resistance type and specs vary between Marcy home gyms, they all include the standard attachments needed for a full-body workout: A lat tower, press arms, an upright bench, curl platform and leg developer.

All versions of the Marcy home gym come with a vertical support that suspends a high pulley overhead -- the lat tower. You clip a long handle to the cable coming through the pulley, then sit on the bench and pull the handle down toward the top of your chest.

Some Marcy home gyms also feature fixed pull-up bars. These work much like the lat pulldown, but instead of pulling the handle down to you, you pull your body up toward the bar. Imagine a cord that connects the top of your chest, pulling you up toward the bar. Both lat pulldowns and pull-ups work every major muscle in your back, plus your rear deltoids and the pulling muscles in your arms.

All Marcy home gyms have press arms, which allow you to duplicate the motion of a bench press. But instead of lying flat on your back and pressing a bar up above your chest, you sit in the upright bench and push the press arms away in front of you. This works your chest, triceps and shoulders.

On some Marcy models, the press arms double as butterfly arms. You sit in the upright bench but, instead of pushing the arms away in front of you, you bring them together in front of your chest. This exercise isolates your chest muscles.

The leg developer allows you to isolate your hamstrings and quads in a way that's almost impossible to perform with free weights. To do leg extensions for your quads, sit on the bench and place your knees over the upper pads of the leg developer. Tuck your shins behind the lower pads and straighten your legs against the developer's resistance.

To work your hamstrings with leg curls, stand facing the bench; you might need to remove the curl platform. Tuck your shins in front of the lower padding, knees behind the upper pad. Bend one leg at a time, curling the developer up against the weight resistance.