The Gold’s Gym Club Trainer 690 – The Least Appealing Model

The Gold’s Gym Club Trainer 690 is the kind of small treadmill for lightweight walkers that will unfortunately be bought by unsuspecting shoppers who haven’t done their homework.

The Machine

The Gold’s Gym Club Trainer 690 treadmill features an LCD window to track speed, time, distance, calories burned, and pulse. Programming includes 6 calorie-burn workouts and 6 performance workouts.

The specs include:

• 2.25 CHP G-Force 2™ Drive Motor
• 0-10 mph QuickSelect™ Speed
• 0 - 5% QuickSelect™ Incline
• 17" x 50" walking area
• 12 Workout Programs
• Dual-Grip PowerPulse™ Heart Rate Monitor
• StepTech™ Cushioning
• 250-lb. User Capacity
• Warranty: 15-year motor, 1-year parts & labor

The Buzz

UPDATE:  The Club Trainer 690 has been discontinued. You can take a look at all of the most popular models for sale here to compare specs and prices of current Gold's Gym treadmills.

This 185-lb Gold’s Gym treadmill has a few nice features but nothing outstanding other than the individual weight input that lets the user log in their weight so they can get more accurate calorie-burn calculations during the workout. (But is it accurate?)

The Club Trainer 690 has a small walking area of 17" x 50", a light user weight capacity, and an incline of 5%. For that small of a climb, it would have been better to save the money on the incline motor and go with a manual incline mechanism instead.

What’s up with Gold’s Gym? They have a competitive line-up of terrific budget treadmills including the CrossWalk 590, CrossWalk 650, and the Trainer 890. But the Gold’s Gym Club Trainer 690 at $799 is the least appealing model in the line.

It just doesn’t have the components and cool features of its sibling models at about the same price. Eventually, the 690 will be marked down to $599 or so, but even then, it won’t compare in value to the rest of the Gold’s Gym line.

What We Say

Gold’s Gym treadmills are big sellers in box stores like Wal-Mart and they are actually a good deal — at least most of them. The treadmill reviews on the Club Trainer 690 have been lukewarm since experts have been seeing consumer-pleasing low low prices on Gold’s Gym machines both on the internet and in stores.

The $799 price tag on this model is an immediate turn-off – we actually thought at first that it must be a pricing error. A big brother model, the Club Interactive 890, can be found on sale for $799 at Workout Warehouse and it has a stronger motor, and better cushioning system, warranty, programming, console features – the kind of “too good to pass up” deal you are looking for.

We recommend you skip the Gold’s Gym Club Trainer 690 and check out the 890, as well as the other two Crosswalk models.

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