WeGym Rally X3 Pro Smart Bands Review: A Solid Resistance Workout

If you’re an introvert like me, home workouts are your jam. You don’t have to pay for a gym membership or actually go to said gym to work out in front of other people. WeGym’s Rally X3 Pro Smart Bands delivered the full-body, reminiscent-of-the-gym home workout I’ve been waiting for.

While you can certainly get a great cardio exercise in at home, and maybe even strength training through weights or calisthenics, there’s something about that expensive gym equipment that you just can’t replicate at home. With WeGym’s Rally X3 Pro Bands, I can target specific muscle groups and get in both push and pull workouts. Plus, these bands connect to a mobile app via Bluetooth and provide useful statistics that help you constantly improve.

The Equipment: Everything That’s in the Box

The whole WeGym Rally X3 Pro system is easy to travel with, whether you keep the neat little box everything comes in or use the included travel bag. The two main pieces that are involved in every workout are the two resistance bands—one for your left hand or foot, and one for your right hand or foot. The resistance bands each come with a carabiner, a pulley, a resistance adjuster, a smart sensor, a power button, a Type-C charging port, and a built-in speaker. Then, only one resistance band comes with a display.

In addition to the two resistance bands, you’ll receive two hand grips, two wristbands, two ankle bands, a door anchor, an object anchor, and a charging cable (but no power brick). The hand grips work as handles to hold while performing exercises, or an exercise may have you attach the wrist or ankle bands instead.

The door anchor is essentially a strap with a cushion on the end that you place on the other side of the door before closing it. WeGym also includes a Do Not Disturb warning card for your door handle so no one bursts in while you’re working out and makes your resistance bands go flying. The object anchor is just a strap that lets you create an anchor out of practically anything in your home, as long as it’s heavy enough to pull on and thin enough to wrap the strap around.

The Setup: You Can Start Working Out in Minutes

In theory, the setup is incredibly easy. You take everything out of the box, and there’s no real “assembly” involved. All of the included pieces connect together with a carabiner and securing a resistance band to either the object anchor or the door anchor takes mere seconds. Then, you download the app, turn on your Rally X3 Pro bands, and pair them to the app via Bluetooth. Sounds easy, right?

Well, if the app and the equipment were intuitive to use, yes. The included instruction manual isn’t detailed enough, leaving you to learn a lot on your own, especially if you’re completely new to using resistance bands. I paired the bands with the app and set up all the equipment with no issues. But there were multiple questions that popped up throughout the rest of the process and I couldn’t find the answers in the manual or on the website.

For example, I had to go through a trial and error process to figure out why one band wasn’t registering my pulls despite pulling the same distance on both the left and right bands. Turns out, you have to press a power button on both bands and not just the one with the display. Even when I did this, there were still a few times that one band just didn’t seem to register as many pulls as the other band, and I couldn’t figure out why.

I had similar issues with turning off the bands (they’re supposed to turn off automatically after 15 minutes, but didn’t always), moving the resistance adjuster and understanding how much it increased by, and changing the language on the screen back to English after it somehow switched to Chinese.

Then, figuring out where in your home you can put the anchors on a regular basis is key to the setup process. Otherwise, you’ll be ready to work out and have no idea which door you can use or where you can affix the object anchor strap for a low anchor exercise. The door I was using initially worked great for high and middle anchor exercises, but the gap under the door kept allowing the door anchor to slip through, so I ended up wrapping the object anchor around the bottom of my bed frame.

The App: It Doesn’t Feel Fleshed Out

The WeGym app (Android/iOS) could use quite a bit of work. But before getting into what could be better, I want to praise the app for being completely free and not requiring any sort of subscription to access all of the app’s contents.

It’s easy to navigate the app, but there’s so much missed potential here. When you first download the app, it’ll have you enter your information—weight, height, how many times you workout per week, and your preferred days to workout—and then create a customized plan for you.

My plan consisted of Base Courses one through four, which were super short and meant to be introductory, but I could only do one per day. After I finished the first Base Course, the other three were locked. Later the next day, I opened the app, went to my plan, and saw that the second Base Course had a green “Let’s go!” symbol below it. The third and fourth courses were still locked. I could do other workouts in the app, but I couldn’t start the next course in my plan until the next day.

There’s not a lot going on in the app’s settings, either. You can change your password, use the Equipment tab to see the status of a paired device or add a new one, and clear the app’s cache. The Equipment Usage tab automatically starts playing an unboxing video for the Rally X—not the Rally X3 Pro, which is what I have—and the Help & Feedback tab only lets you send a quick message to WeGym, but doesn’t contain any FAQs.

There are customizable settings that the app doesn’t currently have, but it should. You can’t adjust the app’s volume, silence the voice giving instructions, or customize the waiting period between workout steps. You also can’t cast to a TV directly through the app, which stands out because most workout apps have this ability.

Plus, there’s a video on WeGym’s YouTube channel that shows a workout moving from an Android smartphone to a TV. This could be a feature in development, but it probably shouldn’t be advertised until it’s available or at least has an estimated release date.

The Workouts: There Are So Many Options, But They’re Not All Great

Every single workout I completed with the Rally X3 Pro and the WeGym app left me sweaty and sore. However, the overall workout experience left something to be desired—at least, with a large portion of the workouts available through the app.

When you’re searching the app for a workout, you’ll see two different backgrounds in the workout thumbnail. There are thumbnails that show a brick background, and these have been filmed in real-time with a trainer doing absolutely everything with you—personally, I prefer these. Then, there are thumbnails that show a white background, and these workouts have an entirely different format that I’m not a fan of.

Opening a workout with a white background reveals all sorts of information that appears helpful, but it’s actually kind of confusing. You’ll see the workout’s estimated time, which location of your body is targeted, the anchor positions you’ll need throughout, which specific equipment you’ll need, and an overview of the workout content. Typically, the workout content is broken down into moves for the Warm Up, Training, and Stretch, and each section has a number of sets next to it.

This all sounds great on paper, but it doesn’t accurately translate. For example, one workout says that the Warm Up has five sets, Training has five sets, and Stretch has seven sets. To me, five sets implies that you’ll do all the moves listed for that section in a set for five times. I think the app is using sets to describe the number of unique moves in that section, but this doesn’t give you any indication for how many minutes the workout will truly take or how many times you’ll repeat certain moves.

On top of that, the workouts with a white background are structured so that every 30-second move is its own step, and it’s announced every single time. The example workout I referenced above has a total of 32 steps—which includes moves from the Warm Up, Training, and Stretch sections—and each step is announced with “Next Exercise is” and then the title of the move. Before the move starts, you’ll also hear “3, 2, 1. Go!” Every. Single. Time.

Then, instead of hearing all instructions for the move at the beginning, you’ll sometimes hear random instructional snippets throughout the move, even when the timer is almost up. That, combined with the high-pitched steady beeping every second and having to manually skip breaks, makes me not want to do any workout with a white background. Some breaks are good, but not a 20-second break after every single 30-second move.

I can understand how some people, especially beginners, might like some of these features to help them keep count, remember the title of a workout move, and give ample break time to catch their breath. I only wish that it was an option within the app’s settings to turn these features off if you want to play music instead of hearing high-pitched beeping and the text-to-speech speaker, or don’t want as many breaks in between workout moves.

After every workout, you’ll see an overall evaluation score that’s made up of your scores for Speed, Rhythm, Relax, Stable, and Peak. Each of these five workout metrics gives an in-app description and tips for how to improve if your score is lower than you’d like. Then, you can also see how many times you engaged the Left Band and the Right Band, your max and average resistance weight, and estimated calories burned.

There were a few times I noticed one of my bands wasn’t accurately counting even though I was pulling both of them equally and both were turned on. After trying to find an answer online, I came up with nothing. Then, one of my first workouts estimated that I burned one calorie and I’m 99% sure I burned way more than that. It’d be nice to see some sort of FAQ section on the WeGym website that’s specifically related to the app.

Health Improvement

This section is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the world of workouts, and I’ve tested other systems—like Liteboxer, FightCamp, and Liteboxer VR—as well as tried out my fair share of YouTube workout channels. In the Health Improvement section, there are workouts that specifically target the bad posture habits we’ve adopted in recent years, like rounded shoulders or too many internal movements from typing on our smartphones or keyboards.

Core

Anyone who’s ever worked out before knows that Core workouts largely target the abs. The WeGym app clarifies that exercises in this section train the muscles in your abdomen, pelvis, lower back, and hips to work in harmony. So although you’re likely going to have sore abs after a Core workout, it’s nice to know which other areas you’re targeting as well. Exercising your core leads to better balance and stability throughout your day, whether you’re playing a soccer game or doing laundry.

Shaping

Whereas the Strength section focuses on building muscle, the Shaping section works to tone the muscles you already have. The app explains that body shape training can increase your basal metabolic rate, helping you burn more calories and reduce fat. Shaping workouts can also help improve your body’s coordination and balance, relieve tension, and improve stress resistance.

Strength

The workouts in this section focus on strength training within all areas of the body. After opening the Strength section, WeGym gives a brief explainer on how exactly strength training can help you. The app explains that these types of workouts can increase strength and toughness in your bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, as well as improve joint function, metabolism, and heart function.

Free Style

Free Style is a great way to workout if you’re not really feeling like following someone else’s workout and you just want to jam out to your own music. You can still turn on the bands and connect to the app via Bluetooth to get all your workout data, but you don’t have to choose a workout through the app. When you select the Free Style tab in the app, it takes you to a screen where you can customize three aspects of your workout: Times, Intensity, and Duration.

There’s no clear explanation—in the app or on the website—for what exactly Times, Intensity, or Duration means, but here’s my best guess. Times appears to be the number of times you want to pull each resistance band, and the workout stops after you’ve reached the number you put in. Duration is the number of minutes you want to workout, and acts as a timer that stops your workout once you’ve reached your number. I have no clue what Intensity is for.

The max number you can type in Times, Intensity, and Duration is 9,999. No matter what number I put in for Intensity, the Free Style workout didn’t change. No extra effort was required to count a pull, and the only real way to change intensity is to physically move the resistance adjuster on the band. I also tested starting a Free Style workout with everything at zero, so if you don’t want to put any numbers in for Times, Intensity, or Duration, you can.

Verdict: A Great Full-Body Workout Option

I loved working out with WeGym’s Rally X3 Pro Smart Bands, but I didn’t enjoy every workout option available to me in the app. It’s fantastic that you can target specific areas or get a full-body workout, vary the level of resistance as you get stronger, and take it with you to work out literally anywhere. Even if you can’t attach the door anchor or the object anchor anywhere, you can use your own body as resistance with the bands stretched between your ankles and wrists.

All the workouts in the app are free and there’s so much variation, but only some of the workouts were palatable for me. A workout with constant beeping, out-of-place instructions, and long breaks you have to manually skip just isn’t it for me. That said, I think there are enough great workouts in the app—the ones filmed in front of a brick background—to make it a worthy investment.

Rating: 8/10

Price: $249.99

Here’s What We Like

• Adjustable resistance
• Has both full-body and targeted workouts
• Easy to travel with
• Long battery life

And What We Don’t

• Can’t directly cast workout videos to a TV
• Can’t customize volume and sound settings in the app
• Calorie tracking isn’t super accurate