Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer Review

Posted on | Schwinn

The schwinn A40 elliptical trainer is here and up for review. Schwinn is a long established American brand with a history of providing great products. This machine is no exception. Packing a bunch of features at an incredibly affordable price the schwinn A40 elliptical trainer is a quality machine. However, like any elliptical out there, its not without its downfalls. But does the small price tag and positive features make up for that? Lets take a look.

The Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer Design:

LCD

The Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer’s LCD screen controls and displays many feedback settings and features — which I go into more in the workout programs section. A negative worth mentioning is that it is not backlit and therefore cannot be read in the dark. However, it’s very user friendly and easy to use and manage provided you workout with at least some light.
Included are built in grip heart rate monitors on the handlebars for easy heart rate monitoring displayed through workout programs via the LCD.

Aesthetics

While it wont be winning any awards for its beauty, the schwinn A40 elliptical trainer is a decent looking machine. In no way bulky or ugly, the A40 plays it very safe with neutral colors. Mostly black, with just a touch of grey, this machine should be able to adapt to nearly any room, regardless of color scheme.

Functionality

The machine itself handles great through its 8 levels of smooth yet challenging electromagnetic resistance system.

It is very quiet and compact, perfect for small rooms, apartments, or corners. It is also fairly light and therefore easy to move around on its built in rolling wheels.

If you have any fear of tipping this cow, well you shouldn’t. As this machine will not rock or tip over on you due to its oversized levelers and stabilizers to provide a strong holding platform.

Ergonomics

Both handlebars on ethe schwinn a40 elliptical trainer take ergonomics to heart by being properly angled at different degrees to allow comfort for a wide variety of hand positions. Foot plates are articulating for added foot comfort when working out.

Assembly

The product itself is very easy to assemble for a single person. It should take you no more than 2 hours on average, or less if you’re good with parts.

Key Features of the Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer

Resistance Levels:

Basic in nature the Schwinn A40 elliptical trainer provides eight levels of varying resistance. While other more expensive machines have levels well into the twenties — we have found this to be more of a luxurious feature rather than a necessity. Having heard absolutely no complaints and only praises about the resistance — it is safe to say that this amount will be plenty for you.

Stride Length:

Stride lengths are a lot like shoe sizes — where height doesn’t necassarily determine foot size; and the same is true with ellipticals.

However, the Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer comes with a 17.5″ fixed stride length. This is a very middle ground stride length designed to be comfortable for the majority of people out there. At the end of the day its almost impossible to predict your exact “perfect” stride length.

However this is generally a good fit for users between 5’2 – 6’0

Workout Programs:

Okay now lets talk about the workout programs which have seen quite a lot of positive feedback. The Schwinn A40 Elliptical Trainer comes with a total of six workout programs, while this is not a lot, they do provide a lot of variety amongst them.

Each program allows you to set your preferred resistance levels and time. If you’re short on time and need a quick efficent session, this is a very handy feature.

Apart from that you are also able to set different desired terrain levels to mimic the feeling and intensity of if you were actually doing it outdoors. “Up hill climb” for example is one of the terrain settings that is known to be very challenging and realistic to if you were actually climbing a hill.

Last but not least all of this is recorded on the LCD monitor that will display how far you went, your speed per hour and how many calories you burnt in that session.

Now onto some of the negatives; there are not many but it needs to be mentioned that the machine does not allow you to include your age, weight or height into the workout programs. The only real drawback of this is the read out of total calories burnt may not be as accurate as other models that allow for this.

Personally, I couldn’t care less about this because I base my workouts on time, distance and intensity rather than any machines calculated calorie readout.

Extra Convenience:

We call these extra conveniences because they are not required to get a good workout but simply to enhance the overall experience.

The Schwinn A40 comes with built in speakers — while they are a nice touch for such a low price machine — they are not the greatest quality and you may prefer to just use a pair of headphones.

To my surprise however, the Schwinn A40 elliptical trainer does in fact additionally include a reading rack, water bottle holder, and a built in two speed fan to cool yourself down during the workout.

The Bottom Line:

Whether or not we’d recommend the Schwinn A40 elliptical trainer depends solely on what your expectations are. If you’re hard pressed on getting a lot of bells and whistles, then we probably would not recommend this machine. However, if you’re dead set on finding a quality machine at a very low price — you will be hard pressed to find a better elliptical than this.