We Put the SYL Fitness Cable Pulley System to the Test

SYL Fitness Cable Pulley System

This is the SYL Fitness Lat Pulldown and Home Pulley System. For disclosure, SYL Fitness did give us this product in order to create this review. But like we’ve said before, just because they give us a free product, it doesn’t mean that we are going to hold back, in any way, on our review of the product. We’ve had this happen before where we get the product for free and it turns out it’s a piece of crap and you will see that we do say that in our reviews. We are not afraid to do that. 

Now I’ve been using this thing for several weeks now and the first thing, the biggest thing that comes to mind when you think about this home pulley system, the biggest advantage of using it is the very high weight capacity. It blows me away, honestly. A lot of the ones that you see on Amazon and some of the others I’ve reviewed, they can hold probably 60-80 lbs max, maybe even less if I remember correctly. This thing is a beast, though. I talked directly to what I assumed is the manufacturer or the owner of this SYL Fitness and he said it has a 340-pound weight capacity which is simply amazing for a home pulley system. With that type of weight capacity, it could really compete with some of the Lat pulldown machines that you see available online at places like Rogue Fitness, I think Rep Fitness has a lot of Lat pulldowns but this can actually compete with those.

Now, as you see here, I actually have it attached to my Icon Fitness Pull-up Bar and it’s actually in the house. Now the best way to use this is if you have a squat rack with a cross beam that you can hold on to it but you can put it on. Right now, of course, I am using Rogue Fitness Half Rack/Squat Stand and it doesn’t have that pull-up bar that you can kind of attach this to. That’s why I’m using it here but that’s definitely the ideal situation. It is to attach it to a beam of your rack or the pull-up bar of your rack and it’s going to be super stable. Although I will say, if you look here, this thing works remarkably well. It’s not coming off of here. It’s the great thing about the Icon Fitness Pull-up Bar, honestly. It’s very stable. But that’s not what we are talking about today. We’re talking about this home pulley system.

So yeah, the weight capacity is amazing. I haven’t tried a lot of weights to be honest. Right now, I’ve just got 5 lbs on it but it does seem very very stable, very heavy-duty. One thing the manufacturer wanted to iterate with me is the fact that the wire is nylon-coated. They said that originally, and you may see these on their reviews when you look at them on Amazon, they had a PVC-coated wire which was actually more flexible. As you can see this one is less flexible than some home system pulley wires. But what happened was it was a frame so the PVC coating was coming off the wire which was starting to be dangerous. This one, though, is nylon and apparently, it has a lot more durability because of that. 

And I’m not really going to show you using it. Everyone knows how to use a pulley system. I’ve mainly been using it for face pulls and then a few other small exercises that you can do at home. I have not been doing Lat pulldowns on it yet. Now that will change probably sometime in the next few weeks because I am getting a new rack that we’re going to be reviewing, several new ones actually and I will tell you then how it performs as a Lat pulldown. 

But yeah, it seems stable to me so far. I’ve got really no complaints about it. The actual pulley here seems very very heavy duty, it functions perfectly the way you just attach this around here and clip this in. So that’s how you attach it.

And next, I’m going to take the camera off the tripod and show you a few other things that I really really like about this pulley system. Now that I have the camera off of the tripod, let me show you something great about this. I haven’t seen this in those cheaper home pulley systems before. This thing, it ranges from anywhere between $30-$50 from what I’ve seen on Amazon and I haven't seen this feature in this home pulley system yet. So if we unclip this, I’m just going to leave it here so I’m going to keep holding it so this comes flying off. But if you look at this, you can use 1-inch weights or the 2-inch Olympic weights with this and there’s plenty of space there to add additional weights. And like I said, they claim it goes up to 340 lbs. I haven’t tried anywhere near that but so far, it does seem very sturdy. 

Finally, this is a small thing but I think it’s important to mention, and that is that they have detailed colorized instructions and you don’t see this attention to detail in a lot of, honestly, home gym products. So that is a very good sign and in fact, they’ve got their Instagram, their Facebook, email and their website kind of listed on there. Whoever, launched this product and then market has a great attention to detail. I haven’t seen it so I thought I’d mention it. 

Another fantastic thing is that they include everything you need to adjust this thing. So any instructions here, that’s what it is showing, is you’re adjusting the length of the nylon cable so you can make it shorter which I don’t know if you’d want to make it shorter. It seems the perfect length for me right now but they also include this chain so you can add more length with it and that’s fantastic. Another interesting thing, like I said they have great attention to detail, and you’ll notice that they even include a little wrench for you to use to get this off of here, put them back on and screw them in place. So that is a good sign to me. Oh and I realized I probably should be using this rubber piece so I have to find out exactly where that goes. 

Overall, and I hate to do this. In a way, I hate to rate it so highly because they did give us the product for free. But honestly, I’m going to have to give it a 5 out 5 because it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It does it well. The company stands by their product. Like I said, I talked to the guy, the manufacturer, over a Facebook messenger. They were very helpful providing information and stuff like that. Now they’re, of course, motivated to do so because we’re reviewing it but still you don’t see that type of attention to detail a lot. And one thing I also really like is he described to me how they kind of done it, what’s called in the software world, iterative development. So of course, they just don’t throw their product out there and keep it the same. They got feedback directly from their customers on Amazon and they made changes to the product making it better, like I said, with the nylon wire and few other things that I’m not remembering right now. And yes, I highly recommend it. It’s a fantastic product. I will update the review once I try it with a full size squat rack so I get the full experience but I’m loving it so far. 5 out of 5!