Gold's Gym Stridetrainer 595 Elliptical Machine

So my wife and I purchased this about a week ago. The box this thing comes in is HUGE!! We bought it at our local walmart and amazing managed to get it in the trunk of our 2 door chevy cavalier. It stuck out about 1/3 of the way but it stayed in the trunk til we got home. Getting it up the stairs was a challenge. Once we got it inside the house it took me close to 3 hours to get it put together. Went together pretty smoothly until I had to connect the right pole that connects to the leg that connects to the pedal. It just wouldn't go in no matter how hard I tried. The left one connected perfectly so I'm guessing it was a defect in the metal ring but its been holding fine. I weigh just over 200 lbs and this thing doesn't move an inch when I'm going full bore on it. The weight loss workouts are brutal which leads me to believe that I may start shedding some pounds here soon. The fan is pitiful and puts out virtually no air at all. The mp3 speakers are pretty decent for what they are in. I did but some thread locker to make sure the bolts do not come loose. . . ever. It definatly should have come with a power chord. They aren't that expensive and could have easily been thrown in with it. Do yourself a favor and buy the power chord. Overall its a great machine and I recommend it to anyone looking for an inexpensive elliptical. It was clearanced down to $317.00 at my Walmart so check the stores first before you buy online.

Have just used it twice but so far so good. I get a great workout in 20-30 min and don't really see a difference from the ones I used to use at the gym. There's not a big screen so you give that up for the cheaper rate, but the Ipod doc is great and there are still about 20 programs to use. Also, Walmart was fantastic and gave me free assembly. HUGE.

The resistance did not seem to change during the first week of use. But having no experience with ellipticals at all I just thought that perhaps they were subtle changes I was not noticing. However on the 2nd week of use the resistance DID change and it was VERY noticeable. I could not pedal it above level 3. At level 6 the peddles were bogged down and took all my weight to make them move (my husband teased me that NOW the machine was working properly and I just had to "work up" to the higher levels). A few days after that the pedals did bog down completely with a horrible thumping sound and then a loud buzzing for some minutes after. After the buzzing sound the pedals were free again but quickly bogged down with the resistance changes. This series of events happened a few times until finally the resistance just quit altogether and the machine behaved as it had the first week...no resistance. It took three days to contact someone at CS and they had a service tech call me. He lived a couple of hours away and said it would be multiple trips: one to open the machine up to see what was wrong, order parts, and then return to make the repair (some other reviewers reported parts being backordered). We did not spend $500 on a machine to have it sit in pieces for who knows how long. No thank you. We returned it to Wal-Mart and they were very gracious with a refund. We will try something else...but now are nervous because ALL machines have *some* bad reviews. How do you choose? We got one of the "flukes" this time!

We purchased the stride trainer 595 before reading any reviews. And now that I'm reading through the reviews a few of them are making me chuckle. We purchased this for me because I have been trying to lose weight and when winter hit and we lost our primary babysitter for our son, my time outside at the track was completely eliminated. I love this thing! I can burn an easy 500 calories in 30 min. I feel like I'm dying after about 15 min because I push to stay in the 65rpm range....but with the reviews saying it is noisy I completely disagree...I am 220 pounds and it is very quiet and I don't play music or anything typically watch a tv show or read a book. the only complaint I would agree with is the screen. It is pretty cheapish...but the different options and the 12 resistance levels are awesome. This is defiantly worth the 450. If you are having issues with noise try greasing it really well...my husband did that as he was putting it together, he has even started using it as of last night! Yeay! lol

I bought this Golds 595 Elliptical two weeks ago, have used it for about 1.5 weeks and it is already broke. It took 2 hours to put together besides lugging it from the store, now what do I have to do to get it replaced? Take it apart, bring it back and hopefully get my money back! If not then I wait for another to come in, pick it up, bring it home, put it together and hope the first one was a fluke. I bought it because of the good reviews on here so I feel obligated to put my review on.