I finally picked up a bowflex yesterday. I snagged an Xtreme2 off ebay for a song. Just got it home and set up last night. It has some wear on a few areas from use but its its great shape. Now I just need to figure out a good routine and start using it.
Anyone have any good but fairly short workouts they want to share?
Not sure if I want to go MWF and then try to do cardio on T/Th or just go 4 or 5 days of strength (and do cardio whenever) so that I can squeeze more stuff in.

With your build, I'd do cardio on tues/thurs and lift on mon/wed/fri.

How you split it up is up to you but what I would do is:

mon: Chest, biceps, abs

wed: Back, triceps, shoulders (delts and traps), forearms, abs

fri: Quads, glutes, hamstrings, and calves...and abs

you can swap bicep/tricep days in connection with back/chest depending on how you want to work the muscles. Chest also works tri's, so by splitting it this way I'm essentially hitting them twice in a week. Also, I'm not starting my tricep workout half pumpd, which helps me work them better. My habit is to omit some leg exercises because I build there easy; I get my leg work from cardio. Same with forearms, it's worked colaterally. In place of those exercises I'll focus on something that may have felt under-worked on the other days. Most people prefer to work shoulders on a chest day, but bench hurts my shoulder, so I try to spread it out. Definitely work traps on a back day.

Everybody's body responds differently, but this is what works for me.

After a month+, how are you liking this Brett?

Its great. I havent been hitting it really solid yet. The past couple weeks I've picked it up a bit. I cant bench a huge amount normally but I can bench all the weight on this thing. Its "210 lbs" which I dont think is quite accurate. I will eventually need to upgrade it to 310. The bench is the only one Im doing all of the rods on though. I also think that these rods are a bit worn since I got it used. You can really get some fantastic resistance on it though. I'm trying to kick my workout up a bit now that I'm getting the feel for the various movements/configurations. I can definitely recommend it if you are in the market for a do it all home gym. The Xtreme2 is cool in that it has a very small footprint too.

If you're trying to get lean while getting stronger then put the cardio (short 10-15 min
sessions) after your lifting.

Why?

1) That cardio will help deplete the last of your glucose/glycogen stores and you'll run mostly
on free-fatty acids (or ketones) afterwards

2) Taking the day _completely_ off from activity in between lifting days will help you recover
faster and make more progress gaining strength.

TJ

After using the bowflex for several months I decided that it wasn't quite what I wanted. I think it was a nice piece of equipment but I found that the rods really didn't give an even resistance thru the range of motion and it took some fiddling to get certain excercises set up so that I had adequate resistance at the start of the motion. I found myself using dumbells for several excercises and really liking it better. I think it would be perfect for someone who just wanted to get some excerise or to maintain some muscle tone but I was ready to try something else. The good thing about buying a used bowflex is that I was able to sell it for basically what I bought it for in 2 days.

I replaced it with a Marcy smith cage system that I'll post about in another thread.